The Karen Jones Phenomenon

In grade school and junior high I was friends with a girl named Karen Jones. She lived in my neighborhood and our mothers were friends. Karen was the only child and her mother was overprotective and overinvolved. Karen was kind of a big dork, but so was I. But Karen was also delicate, fragile and always seemed to be sick or injured. Some of her ailments might have been psychosomatic or mother-induced. She had thin blonde hair cut sensibly short and big bug eye glasses. I had the big glasses, too. I’m not sure if we were friends just because our mother were; or because as geeks we were friends by default, or if I liked her and we had fun. I seem to remember roller skating in her garage; and a Shaun Cassidy poster in her bedroom. We must have a good time now and then, at least.

Karen and I were in girl scouts together, but we didn’t go to school together until I transferred from my Catholic grade school to public junior high, just when the cruelty of children reaches its highest heights. The other kids called Karen “hypo” for hypochondriac, because she always seemed to be wearing a neck brace, carrying her arm in a sling, or hobbling around on crutches.

I know I publicly rejected her, although I don’t remember the details very well. It was probably the seventh or eighth grade. She was on crutches, I think we were in the band room at school. It might have been that she asked me to do something and I just said no. I never picked on her or made fun of her. I just refused to be associated with her gimpiness. It was instinctive, unpremeditated action. I surprised myself and her. I wasn’t quite sure at first what my words meant until I saw that I hurt her. Afterward I felt guilty but relieved. I thought I should call and apologize but then I would have to go back to being friends with her and I just couldn’t do it. She and I ignored each other from then on until we moved away not much later.

I know this strained my mother’s friendship with Mrs, Jones. My mother asked me about it, but she didn’t pry too much or give me a hard time about it.

Mrs. Jones is also part of a memory that should embarrass me but somehow doesn’t. I’ve never been the naturally spic and span type and during junior high I went through a spectacularly untidy phase. Also, despite my mother’s great uptightness about sexuality and womanly concerns, she never imprinted this on me. Instead, her shame caused her to pretty much leave me alone about all of it, ironically granting me freedom from shame. When I first started my period I was kind of fascinated by all of it, but the color and smell of my blood and its saturated patterns on the “sanitary napkin.” (It also makes me feel old to remember wearing pads without adhesive on them that needed a “belt” to hold them in place—but this is also instructive about my mother, since it was the early 80s when I hit puberty, and adhesive pads had been on the market for a decade by then.) Anyway, I remember Mrs. Jones coming into my room to talk to me (maybe about my betrayal of her daughter?) and I was embarrassed that my room was a wreck. Karen never would have been allowed to let things descend into such chaos. And, as we talked, I realized to my horror that a used, unwrapped, bloody sanitary napkin was sitting out on my record turntable. I think this cut the conversation short. I was sure my mother was going to have to have a talk with me about that, but either Mrs. Jones was too embarrassed to broach the subject with my mom, or she was too embarrassed to bring it up with me.

With both of these memories, I think maybe I should be ashamed of myself, but I’m not. If I were going to do a 12-steps style inventory and make amends to those I had wronged, would Karen Jones be someone I owed amends? Or was it a necessary act of self-preservation, which is what it felt like? Ditto my rejection of the Spicy Orange Guy, and a few other suitors who I instinctively and abruptly rejected as too needy, too clingy, too pathetic. Certainly, I’ve learned that once I develop that sort of contempt for a guy, there’s no point in trying to work it out and it’s less cruel to make the break quickly and definitely. And there’s no doubt that contempt is what I felt for Karen Jones, and for Spicy Orange Guy, and poor old Micro Dick, and even my attractive but clingy young Honduran suitor with the older woman fetish. They were all too needy, and the need felt too impersonal, as it always is when they’re head over heels right away.

But contempt is a cruel and unenlightened feeling; and the accompanying revulsion I feel makes me wonder just what about them scares me so much—or, actually, there’s nothing to wonder about, I fear being just that pathetic, as I know I have been on occasion.