KARA

KARA

Kara Rittenhauer was a short slightly pudgy woman.  She had curly blond hair and blue eyes and a pleasant face with milky white skin and blushing cheeks.  The Rittenhauers were a large Roman Catholic family with many branches whose roots stretched back to the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century.  There were seven brothers who came to South Dakota from Prussia with their parents and grandparents, their mother determined to save them from Bismarck’s wars.  They were a large but intimate tribe, the brothers having become men and able to provide the muscle necessary to sink roots.  In time all the brothers took land, each striking out for himself and marrying and, as was common in those days, having many children.  The name had become so widespread that by the first decade of the Twenty-first Century many people who bore it no longer regarded all those who shared the name as relatives. 

     In those pioneering days a hundred and thirty years ago, Kara Rittenhauer would have been thought desirable by any young man looking for the signs of health and vigor in a prospective bride.  In addition, her sharp intelligence would have added to her sexual attractiveness, so that this Kara would have been courted by many, and the competition would have heightened her senses and honed her native sharpness to a keener edge. 

     However, these attributes that would have made her desirable then made her today exactly the opposite, for masculine tastes, following the fashions and styles of glamour in the always present and vivid media, preferred the figure of emaciation in women to that of pudginess, preferred undistinctiveness of face to apple-cheeked beauty, and tended to shudder, except, perhaps, in sophisticated urban circles, at the combination of femaleness and intelligence.  Young men, growing up on football and basketball and barely knowing how to spell, preferred women of emotional rather than intellectual depth—providing that emotional depth radiated more of sexual heat than of acquisitiveness and status.

     Kara Rittenhauer was an unhappy young woman.  For all that she tried in high school to mix with the boys and belong to those circles of girls the boys pursued, she couldn’t repress the vivacity of her mind, and, although she graduated valedictorian of her class, the honor was no substitute for her friendlessness.  The more lonely she was, the more she applied herself to her high school studies, and the more she achieved scholastically, the more she was shunned.  She hoped that things would be different in college.  But by then, attitudes and feelings about herself and others had become habitual, and the boys, now young men, had themselves not changed.  College had not enlarged their horizons or deepened their sensitivities.  Most of their waking moments were still devoted to football and basketball, and the spell checks on their computers helped them pass their freshman courses. 

     Kara Rittenhauer was as lonely in college as she was in high school.  The difference, however, was the greater challenge of her college studies.  These genuinely absorbed her, and so she was able to fend off her feelings of isolation and alienation.  But these feelings had shaped the inward texture of her life, and she became, by her junior year, something of an ironist, a hard-nosed analyst of the incompetencies and stupidities of her classmates, all of whom saw her as a superior being—unapproachable, standoffish, self-sufficient, successful.

     She was still pudgy, never having bothered to put herself to the discipline necessary to acquire the look of concavity the boys preferred.  This look was the life project of the sophisticated girls, who ate so little and exercised so much that they stopped menstruating.  Kara’s blushing cheeks were the visible sign of her standoffishness, her rejection of her peers and their values.  She could be heard from time to time commenting on contemporary feminism: “It casts no shadow on the world and leaves no footprints”; “The well being of women in our times is dependent on vitamin supplements”; “Women prefer blue jeans because they’re stiff and help them conserve energy while standing.”

    

By the time she had completed her junior year, Kara had become something of a legend at her college, one of those small Midwestern liberal arts schools that educated the youth from the farming communities and small towns on the Great Plains.  These schools tended to specialize in educating teachers for the public schools and nurses for the local hospitals and clinics, and also provided for the business community their share of accountants and managers.  Their religion departments trained those few who were called for the rigors of the seminary; and their art departments, suffering, as almost all did, the Protestant rejection of the sensualism inherent in the tradition of Western art, concentrated on abstract design, ceramics, and model building—the human form having no opportunity to inspire, under the rigid scrutiny of deans and presidents, the aesthetic imagination.

     Kara was studying to be none of these professionals.  She was not interested in teaching in the public schools, those places of frustration and grief.  Nor was she interested in the kind of service nurses or ministers were called to.  The world of business bored her, and the arts, which in another setting might have aroused capacities latent and curious in her, only left her hungering for something they could not satisfy.  What called to her, beginning in her sophomore year, was the intense, provoking study of literature, where she became a standout figure, and the hope of her professors.  In the classroom, where nine out of ten students either could not or would not do the readings, Kara not only dominated discussion, but drove it to extremes.  Her professors did all they could to mask their glee, both for her sake, so as not to egotize her, and for the sake of the rest of the students, who would resent their favoritism and, perhaps, make Kara’s life even more intolerable on campus. They did not want to risk losing her.

     And so Kara finished her junior year, her head full of Dostoevsky and Flaubert, Hemingway and Borges.  Heady!  Thrilling!  Even more heady and thrilling since there was not another person on campus, outside her teachers, with whom she could share her excitement.  

     It was in the summer after her junior year that Kara came of age, entering, as she did, all aflush, the fullness of her womanhood.

     All through her teenage years Kara knew her virginity was not an expression of her virtue nor a symptom of her failures; it was a symbol of her status among her peers—those classmates who had never accepted her as one of them, even though they acknowledged her superiority.  Incapable of self-delusion, she was not, however, immune to the delusory strains of a handsome, self-gratifying manhood wooing sex from whomever it could get it.

     Kara wore no jewelry, and the only parts of her body she had pierced were the lobes of her ears.  Unlike many a young woman, also, she wore no tattoos.  She dressed tastefully, choosing not to wear jeans of any kind.  Mostly, she donned khaki slacks and light-colored blouses and for comfort shod herself in New Balance sneakers.  The appearance of womanhood she projected tended to keep away those young men who wore their jeans low on their hips, their zippers hanging between their knees.  And those, too, who turned their athletic caps backward on their heads and wore tee-shirts or sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off advertising Old Navy or Abernathy or one or another football team.

     What also kept these young men away was the look of disdain Kara could express when she had no choice but to share close quarters with them.  She could and did speak in whole, polished sentences, a habit that by itself was enough to make these men cringe and step aside to breathe.  There were few young men on campus who did not share these characteristics, and both of them were spoken for.

     But one day, after the spring semester concluded and Kara had begun her summer job, she met a man.  He was not a college student.  Nor had he ever been one.  Neither was he a local, having just come to town to see what there was to see and do what there was to do before moving on.  What attracted Kara to him when she saw him at the shop where she worked was his elegance; he wore well-shined penny loafers which actually had pennies in their slots, dark brown cotton slacks, and a white short-sleeved silk shirt.  He had black hair cut short and parted on the side.  He had no facial hair and did not wear glasses.  His clear skin beamed as he approached her.  Mesmerized, Kara stared at him and had already begun to dream. 

     He noticed.  As he neared, he spoke to her.

     “Hello,” he said, and paused, looking into those astonished blue eyes.  Encouraged, he continued, “I don’t need any help, not sales help, anyway.  You do live in town, don’t you?”

     Smiling at her as he gave her time to come to and reply, he stood as close to her as the counter behind which she stood permitted.

     “Yes,” Kara finally found herself saying.  “I live only a couple of blocks from here.”

     The counter behind which she stood was lighted by an internal lamp and contained trinkets and souvenirs for tourists.  The young man pretended to glance down at them, but then looked up again directly into her eyes.

     “I just got into town.  I’m parked at the Holiday Inn Express.  I expect I’ll be here for a few days.  Maybe more,” he hinted, with a breath of yearning in his voice that induced a flash of interest in her eyes, and this heartened him.  “Want to play host and show me around?  Go to dinner with me tonight?  What’s to do in this town, anyway?”

     It was midafternoon, and Kara had three hours to go on her shift.  She couldn’t just walk away with this man, even though there were other salesgirls in the shop.  She had, after all, a reputation for reliability and a responsibility both to the other girls, who were teens, and the shop owner, which she was too dutiful to shirk, though she did have to suppress an impulse to run away with this man.  So she told him when she would be free and said if he returned then, she would be glad to go to dinner with him and show him around after that.

     His smile was so winsome that she kept it as an image in her mind all the rest of the afternoon.  She kept replaying, also, his voice saying, “Want to play host?”  He looked so young, no older than her, no older than any of the young men she disdained in her classes on campus, yet his “Want to play host?” had so much a note of worldliness, of maturity in it, that it thrilled her.

     The evening proved to be mild and lovely, one of those early summer evenings when the slanting sun seems more than normally golden, and the air is fresh and soft.  She had taken him to the lake and found a place between the cottonwoods and elms where he could park and they could get out and walk.  Now they were standing shoulder to shoulder on the bank, looking westward at the declining sun.  At first they talked about boats, about jetskiing and waterskiing, and about the Fourth of July fireworks that would soon take place there.  But soon, the evening being so right for it, he led the conversation round to dreamy things.  He told her of the many places he had been in the world and what he looked forward to in the coming years.  He built up in her mind a glamorous fantasy of other countries, of their great cities and the people who lived in them, and then he drew her into dreams of his ambitions and implied that she could share them with him, that only a failure of nerve could keep her from it.

     When he placed his arm around her, she slid into him, and when he turned into her, she let him, and she lifted her face to look into his.  His lips came down on her so swiftly, and so softly, she could no more repel them than she could breathe.  She was as lost a soul in that moment as any dreamer in the hands of such a man—pure clay, warmed up and ready for modeling.  

     Kara recalled that night, when she picked twigs and leaves from her hair for the first time in her life, sometimes wistfully, sometimes ruefully, and sometimes guiltily, for it was for her both a time of self-discovery and an exquisite joy.  But mostly, the memory served only to cut her to the quick, because the young man, whose name she refused to repeat, left town the very next morning, leaving her waiting for him after contriving to get the day off from the shop.  Callous, cold, and indifferent is how she thought of him now, a user, and of herself as the used.  The contrast between the hotly delicious, sensuous, wholly alive experience of the evening before with the empty coldness of the next day added a new tincture to her disdain for men, and she knew her life ahead would not be easy.