The feature of Karen’s that gave her the most trouble (perhaps “feature” isn’t the right word) was her bladder, which was badly scarred. There was a good chance that once she was middle-aged, Karen would become incontinent. But the visible feature that caused her pain (pain of a different register than her bladder) were her large hands, which her brother Mickey made fun of, calling “mitts.” In fact, he called Karen “Mitts,” and in company Karen often concealed her hands.
Her eyes were close together, but an attractive light blue color. One night, she and her mother rented a movie called The Sandpiper, and Karen’s mother pointed out that Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes were the same color as Karen’s. “But everyone called Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes violet,” her mother said.
Karen closely examined Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes. They were light blue, like her own. But Elizabeth Taylor often wore purple—most of her wardrobe in The Sandpiper was purple—and sometimes purple eyeshadow. Also, Elizabeth Taylor’s beauty threw ancillary glamor over her eyes, making the color seem more remarkable than it was. But there was no way, Karen felt, that Elizabeth Taylor’s driver’s license would describe her eyes as “violet.”
This discovery (Karen was fifteen when she and her mother watched The Sandpiper) made Karen interested in pursuing a career in advertising or marketing. She liked the idea of first identifying a product’s features, and then rendering them remarkable. Some slogans made no sense. A product could not be, logically, both “new” and “improved.” But that didn’t seem to matter, and Karen liked how the features of a thing could be untethered from reality. Her own large hands could be “powerful” or “a pianist’s.”
Karen did indeed pursue such a career, working at Dample & Dample, where she designed a famous ad campaign about artificial butter. She never forgot her revelation regarding Elizabeth Taylor. When Karen’s daughter was born (me), she named me Violet, though my eyes, like my father’s, were an ordinary brown. In fact, my brother Elliot called them “dirt brown,” after which my mother would pat my head and say reassuringly, as if casting a spell, “Chocolate hazelnut. Espresso bean.”
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection Don't Take This the Wrong Way (2025), co-authored with Michelle Ross, published by EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I've Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf's Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com