The Other Shoe by Matt Pavelich Page A

persecuted, she ate her lunch in an exclusive and especially ugly corner of the cafeteria with her hair tied in the tightest knot she could form with it. Her hair, she knew, could be like field-ripened grain, but she kept it in a knot on her neck. Her whole range of expression consisted of tilting the slash she made of her lips, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, and behind this blank display she’d be crowning herself High Priestess of the Half-Moon. Her imagination flourished, but it was only to preoccupy and gave no real satisfaction. She wanted something, anything, that was entirely hers and that might be touched. She wondered if she was ever to learn anything of love. The girls at school, those girls she could approach near enough to overhear, talked of loving each other, they talked of loving Brad and Wesley and Tim Flowers and Louie Natrone, they loved their moms and dads, and even sometimes their siblings, “soooo much,” and they loved colts and cats, rain in the spring, pretty blouses, and they draped “love” on every scrap of pleasure or longing that blew by them, and even if they were mistaken, even if they were working it way too hard, love, or their constant mention of it, seemed to keep them at a level of enthusiasm Karen could not sustain.
    She was not very interested in anyone of her acquaintance, and so, by default, by protracted accident, she fell a little in love with herself. She conquered the last of her girlish bashfulness about mirrors in less than half of one mild May upon discovering in them that she was good at any angle, in any light, but, as she had no prior reputation for beauty, it was hard at first to credit what she so furtively saw in the glass. She looked harder, longer, and still she liked what she saw, liked herself too much, probably, but at least now she had a better use for the extensive privacy that had always been her only privilege. Inprivate, she let her hair down, and, as it wasn’t customary there, she was fully aware of its whispering friction on her shoulders.
    Her face was taut as an apple, square but not mannishly so, and her color ran from bronze to khaki depending on the current warmth of her blood. Her skin was clear. Her breasts were successful, she thought, or should have been—ready little monuments to reproduction. She had a golden brow, a kitten nose. With high school came more excursions, and Karen found herself more often among strangers, shopping with Jean in other towns, swept up in field trips or field trials or whatever she was being forced to attend that day, and as she passed among strangers now she saw that she caused sudden, deep interest in them. The boys. The men. Everyone, really. And it was so very strange that in these strange places she’d got such power when at home and in those places where she was most familiar, where she had been so ordinary for so long, Karen was still nothing special. Her blooming passed unremarked and largely unnoticed there.
    Jean’s notion of her daughter, a notion she published to anyone unable to avoid her on the subject, was that her Karen was the guileless fawn, a creature so delicate of spirit she needed more than anything else to be left alone. “She’s out there talkin’ to the ravens, and that’s how she likes it. Girl’s half-wild herself. All she wants, all you ever got to give that Dad is a little toast and plenty of breathing room.” Of course Karen was not at all the feral nymph her mother wanted, the innocent chipmunk. She was just a girl too often alone, and like any such girl, she was bitter about it. Too often alone, too often cold, and she spent far too much time in that tiny tract of personal wilderness that could be lit by her parents’ yellow yard lights. After nightfall, she did not explore. She would stand out by the henhouse listening to the sage dialogue of nesting, dreaming hens, and wondering still, “What have I