Trust Exercise (9781250309891) by Choi Susan

Author:Choi, Susan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

Trust Exercise

“KAREN” STOOD OUTSIDE the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Her old high school classmate, the author. Was it assuming too much, to say “friend”? Was it accepting too much, to say “Karen”? “Karen” is not “Karen’s” name, but “Karen” knew, when she read the name “Karen,” that it was she who was meant. Does it matter to anyone, apart from “Karen,” what “Karen’s” real name is? Not only does it not matter to anyone else, but the fact that it matters to “Karen” will probably reflect badly on “Karen” in the same way that so much about “Karen” reflects badly on “Karen.” So “Karen” won’t insist on providing her real name or anyone else’s, although she’d like to say, for the record, that she can see right through the choice of “Karen” for her designation. With apologies to actual Karens, “Karen” is an unsexy name. It’s too recent to have retro chic and not recent enough to feel fresh. It’s a name without snap. It gives you a plain feeling but not plain enough, like “Jane,” which is such a plain name that the phrase “Plain Jane,” in contradiction of its meaning, has snap, it rhymes and suggests a romantic plainness, the phrase “Plain Jane” makes people smile. “Karen” has no such associations. “Karen” isn’t pretty, or smart, or deceptively plain until she takes off her glasses. “Karen” is a yearbook name, filler, a girl with a hairstyle like everyone else’s and a face you’ve forgotten. My name isn’t and never was Karen, but I’ll be Karen. I’m not petty. See: I’ve taken off the quote marks.

Karen stood outside the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author.

She wasn’t petty, she has never been petty, has never had enough self-possession, or possessed enough self, to afford pettiness, because petty is a way people are who have something to spare. Still: she’d like to say for the record that the choice of her name, this name Karen to which she’s resigned, is not the only thing she can see through. She can see through a lot of the rest of it too, as easily as drawing a line from a column of things on the left to a column of things on the right, making crisscrosses like suture marks stitching the columns together. Remember, from when you were a kid? The column on the left might be pictures and the column on the right might be words but the matching pairs aren’t side by side, they’re mixed up, and you have to match them. It’s not hard. If you knew me—if you knew Karen—or any of them, you could do it. In fact, the scheme is almost too simple—out of respect for the “truth”? From a failure of imagination? Is it better or worse that the code is so easy to crack? Sarah and David are the people they must obviously be, only their names have been altered, and

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