Karen had lost a little weight and a little hair in the year and a quarter but otherwise the women appeared unchanged. They’re both about five foot six, but Karen has smaller bones (size 7 shoe compared to Alice’s 11) and carries about 30 more pounds. She always wears pants, always dresses modestly, walks and sits like a highway patrol officer, and spends more than it appears on her hair. It’s naturally quite wavy but almost nobody knows that. She has it colored and cut every three weeks, and pulls it straight with her blow dryer every morning. She looks like a gentle dyke and identifies herself as homosexual, but she’s usually unmated.

She didn’t go to college, and like the few others Alice has met, Karen talks about what she missed like it would have prevented her problems. If only she’d gone to college she would be (choose one): more authoritative, effective, confident. Alice knows that if you get nothing else from a post-high school course in the humanities, it’s the understanding that going-to-college doesn’t fix much.

The way Alice experienced it, life at the university didn’t make the paranoid less edgy, the obsessive less compulsive, the embarrassed less shy. It wasn’t any kind of magic feather – you flew or crashed even while at college – but that’s where Alice stopped looking outside herself for confidence. That’s where she saw that she had been rueful, when she reviewed her junior high behavior from the vantage point of high school and concluded that she’d been too hesitant. And that’s where she found herself replaying high school escapades and regretting, from her college perspective, that she’d held back as much as she had. So she developed her theory of prospective guilt. From then on she made decisions today based on how she imagined she’d feel about herself for it tomorrow.

Alice’s observations and theories are based on her memories. She has the ability to recall accurately, and this may be the biggest difference between her and Karen.

Someone once commented that Alice’s childhood must have been happy enough that she could afford to remember it correctly. Alice thought that was a profound observation, and she felt gratified at the same time that she disagreed. Because while she’d be the first to assert that she knew her parents loved her, she’d also be one of the most eloquent in describing a childhood that was boring, frustrating, and infuriating. Her privacy had been regularly invaded, and the incompatibilities between her and her mother led her mom to summarize and marginalize her. “Alice may be smart but she has no common sense” or “That Alice, with her hippie ideas and her Beatles . . .” when the facts were, Alice was just about the most sensible person you could find, she related to beatniks but never to hippies, and back in the formative 60s she liked the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones.

(continued next Wednesday)