I knew Karen in the first grade. Her parents were a constant disappointment to her.
She wanted a glossy plastic red ruler. Her mother bought the wooden kind and painted it with leftover semi-gloss from the local hardware store.

When her mother arrived to school, for parties or functions, she usually wore rollers in her hair. She wrapped her daughter’s sandwiches in foil and her Kool Aid was put into empty bottles of Sanka jars.

The kids roared with laughter when Karen’s  mother arrived to put on her new shoes–Why Karen? Why would your mother come to school to put on your new shoes? Didn’t you know she’d fuck that up too? They were loafers that looked like they were made of plastic, maybe even cardboard, the laces were dyed yellow and evidently the dye had not yet dried–her mother’s habit of painting things the way she wanted to be too, like the ruler.

Years later, while we were in our forties, when I happened to run into Karen in a grocery store in our home town–after being gone for so long, I asked her about those shoes.

She didn’t remember. She really didn’t. I realized all this time that I had lived that humiliation alone, without hers. I alone carried it. I didn’t try to force her to remember–for all I knew, the memory was just under the surface, right underneath like the pudding underneath the hard glaze of a creme brulee. A distant dessert of a memory. We ended up exchanging addresses. I looked forward to writing to her. For I also knew of some good memories of Karen. And those I would make her remember. No matter how many letters it took.