Girl Called Karen Read Online Free PDF Page A

forgetting me. I was a scrawny eleven-year-old. Normally I rode the school bus, but this particular day, I was supposed to wait for my mom to pick me up. All the other school kids had been picked up, and no one seemed to notice me sitting outside the school by myself. It got later and later, and I became more apprehensive, so I decided to walk the six miles home. I was mad. I rehearsed my angry attack. My mama was going to know how bad she was.
    When I got home, I found she was really sick. She seemed to have no concept of time and was devastated that she had forgotten me. That was only the first time.
    On another occasion, I got sick and asked to go to the one phone available to students. I called my mother and told her I was sick, but she failed to respond, and I soiled myself. It became a nightmarish pattern.
    As the days melted into weeks and months, I became aware that my clothes weren’t clean enough. I would hand-wash panties and socks and hang them in my room, but I couldn’t figure out how to clean my outerwear. There was no one to ask. The family infrastructure was disintegrating, my mother was dying, and no one seemed to notice.
     
    My father was more of an enigma to me than my mother. I thought he was incredibly handsome, which makes me a pretty normal little girl. As was the case inthe 1950s in this country, he was the disciplinarian. I know that he was consistently stricter with Larry than with his daughters, following the pattern of Grandpa John and the Old Cuss. We were all terrified of the razor strop, but Larry was really the only one to feel the lash. Girls got spanked, but not with the strop.
    We all felt that he favored Sandra, who went everywhere with him (except on his Lucile visits and sundry other adventures). Sandy was attractive, fearless, and precocious. I know that my parents had at least one heated talk about Sandra’s favored position. Still, I was invulnerable. I was the oldest.
    My father was committed to his veterinary practice. He preferred healing large animals to working in a small-animal clinic. He was the racetrack veterinarian, and he became the zoo doctor. I believe he had a reputation for being the best large-animal doctor in the county. He was respected for his very good work and high professional standards.
    We were considered community leaders because of his unique position as a professional and because my mother and her gregarious nature had established their social position earlier in their marriage.
    Sometimes my father took the older kids with him on his calls. I shudder to think what we looked like after my mother grew ill. We were ragtag, disheveled little urchins.
    I was with my father the night a local horse breeder wanted him to perform a late-term abortion on ahorse. I was too young to understand most of what transpired, but I know that my father was in a rage about something, and we were afraid.
    Later I learned that the breeder wanted a life-threatening operation performed on his mare to get rid of a fetus that he’d lose money on. His intent was to breed her again soon so she could produce a profitable foal for him, and he was willing to risk his horse’s life for that reason. For a veterinarian, the medical injunction about saving lives was nearly as strict as the Hippocratic oath. So my father was outraged.
    I remember the night my father came home from the zoo after working nonstop for three days in a futile effort to save a giraffe. He was devastated by the animal’s death, and he had fallen very sick with malaria. When he was stationed in the Philippines, he got malaria and amoebic dysentery, and he suffered ever afterward when his resistance went down.
    My father was wounded in World War II. I don’t know how he was injured, but among his uniforms and medals in the attic was what I believe to be a Purple Heart. He also brought back straw skirts and big straw hats. When I grew older, I got to take them to school for show and tell.
    Most of my memories of my