O n c e in those early days (after he'd grown more talkative), I asked him: " H o w do they regard you, the other boys? Do they...
are they critical? Of what you did?" This was as close as I could come to asking, do they trip you in hallways or hawk in your soup. At first, you see, I was hesitant, deferential. He frightened me, physically frightened me, and I was desperate not to set him off. There were prison guards nearby, of course, but there had been security personnel in his high school, police in Gladstone, and what good had they been? I never feel protected anymore.
Kevin honked, that hard, joyless laugh forced through his nose. A n d said something like, "Are you kidding? They fucking worship me, Mumsey. There's not a juve in this joint w h o hasn't taken out fifty dickheads in his peer group before breakfast—in his head. I ' m the only one with the stones to do it in real life."
— 4 8 —
Whenever Kevin cites "real life," it is with the excessive firmness with which fundamentalists reference heaven or hell. It's as if he's trying to talk himself into something.
I had only his word, of course, that far from being shunned Kevin had achieved a status of mythic proportions among hoods w h o had merely hijacked cars or knifed rival drug dealers. But I have come to believe he must have once garnered some prestige, since, in his oblique fashion, just this afternoon he allowed that it had begun to ebb.
He said, "Tell you what, I'm fucking tired of telling that same fucking story"—from which I could infer that, rather, his fellow inmates were tired of hearing it. Over a year and a half is a long time for teenagers, and Kevin is already yesterday's news. He's getting old enough to appreciate, too, that one of the differences between a "perp," as they say in cop shows, and your average newspaper reader is that onlookers are allowed the luxury of getting "fucking tired of the same fucking story" and are free to move on. Culprits are stuck in what must be a tyrannical rehearsal of the same old tale. Kevin will be climbing the stairs to the aerobic-conditioning alcove of the Gladstone High gym for the rest of his life.
So he is resentful, and I don't blame him for being bored with his own atrocity already, or for envying others their capacity to abandon it. Today, he went on to grouse about some "pipsqueak"
new arrival at Claverack w h o was only thirteen. Kevin added for my benefit, "His cock's the size of aTootsie Roll. T h e little ones, you know?" Kevin wiggled his pinkie."Three for a quarter."With relish, Kevin explained the boy's claim to fame: An elderly couple in an adjacent apartment had complained about how loudly he played his CDs of the Monkees at three in the morning.The next weekend, the couple's daughter discovered her parents in their bed, slit from crotch to throat.
"That's appalling," I said. "I can't believe anyone still listens to the Monkees."
I earned a begrudging snort. He went on to explain that the police have never found the entrails, which is the detail on w h i c h the media, not to mention the boy's overnight Claverack fan club, has seized.
"Your friend's precocious," I said. " T h e missing entrails—didn't you teach me that to get noticed in this business you have to add a twist?"
You may be horrified, Franklin, but it has taken me the better part of two years to get this far with him, and our black, straight-faced banter passes for progress. B u t Kevin is still not comfortable with my gameliness. I usurp his lines. And I had made him jealous.
"I don't think he's so smart," said Kevin aloofly."Probably just looked d o w n at those guts and thought, Cool! Free sausages!"
Kevin shot me a furtive glance. My impassivity was clearly a disappointment.
"Everyone around here thinks that twerp's so tough," Kevin resumed. "All like, 'Man, you can play, like, "Sound of Music"
loud's you want, I ain't sayin' nuttin."' His African-American accent has become quite accomplished and has made inroads into his own. "But I'm not impressed. He's just a kid. Too litde to k n o w what he was doing."
" A n d you weren't?" I asked sharply.
Kevin folded his arms and looked satisfied; I had gone back to playing Mother. "I k n e w exactly what I was doing." He leaned onto his elbows. "And I'd do it again."
"I can see why," I said primly, gesturing to the windowless r o o m whose walls were paneled in vermilion and chartreuse; I have no idea why they decorate prisons like R o m p e r R o o m . "It's worked out so well for you."
"Just swapped one shithole for another." He waved his right hand with two extended fingers in a manner that betrayed he's taken up smoking. "Worked out swell."
Subject closed, as usual. Still I made a note of the fact that this thirteen-year-old parvenu's stealing the Claverack limelight aggrieved our son. It seems that you and I needn't have worried about his dearth of ambition.
As for my parting with him today, I had thought to leave it out. B u t it is just what I would like to withhold from you that I may need most to include.
T h e guard with a mud-spatter of facial moles had called time; for once we had used up the full h o u r without spending most of it staring at the clock. We were standing on either side of the table, and I was about to mumble some filler line like "I'll see you in two weeks," w h e n I realized Kevin had been staring straight at me, whereas his every other glance had been sidelong. That stopped me, unnerved me, and made me w o n d e r why I had ever wanted him to look me in the eye.
O n c e I was no longer fussing with my coat, he said, "You may be fooling the neighbors and the guards and Jesus and your gaga m o t h e r with these goody-goody visits of yours, but you're not fooling me. Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don't be dragging your ass back here on my account." T h e n he added,
"Because I hate you."
I k n o w that children say that all the time, in fits: I hate you, I hate you! eyes squeezed with tears. B u t Kevin is approaching eighteen, and his delivery was flat.
I had some idea of what I was supposed to say back: Now, I know you don't mean that, w h e n I k n e w that he did. Or, I love you anyway, young man, like it or not. But I had an inkling that it was following just these pat scripts that had helped to land me in a garish overheated r o o m that smelled like a bus toilet on an otherwise lovely, unusually clement D e c e m b e r afternoon. So I said instead, in the same informational tone, "I often hate you, too, Kevin," and turned heel.
So you can see why I needed a p i c k - m e - u p coffee. It was an effort to resist the bar.
Driving home, I was reflecting that however m u c h I might 51
wish to eschew a country whose citizens, when encouraged to do "pretty much what they want," eviscerate the elderly, it made perfect sense that I would marry another American. I had better reason than most to find foreigners passe, having penetrated their exoticism to the chopped liver they are to one another. Besides, by the time I was thirty-three I was tired, suffering the cumulative exhaustion of standing all day that you only register when you sit down. I was forever myself a foreigner, feverishly rehearsing phrase-book Italian for "basket of bread." Even in England, I had to remember to say "pavement" instead of "sidewalk." Conscious that I was an ambassador of sorts, I would defy a daily barrage of hostile preconceptions, taking care not to be arrogant, pushy, ignorant, presumptuous, crass, or loud in public.
But if I had arrogated to myself the whole planet as my personal backyard, this very effrontery marked me as hopelessly American, as did the fanciful notion that I could remake myself into a tropical internationalist hybrid from the horribly specific origins of Racine, Wisconsin. Even the carelessness with which I abandoned my native land was classically of a piece with our nosy, resdess, aggressive people, w h o all (save you) complacently assume that America is a permanent fixture. Europeans are better clued.
They know about the liveness, the contemporariness of history, its immediate rapacities, and will often rush back to tend their own perishable gardens to make sure that Denmark, say, is still there.
But to those of us for w h o m "invasion" is exclusively associated with outer space, our country is an unas
sailable bedrock that will wait indefinitely intact for our return. Indeed, I had explained my peripatetics more than once to foreigners as facilitated by my perception that "the United States doesn't need me."
It's embarrassing to pick your life partner according to what television shows he watched as a child, but in a way that's exactly what I did. I wanted to describe some wiry, ineffectual little man as a "Barney Fife" without having to tortuously append that Barney was a character in a warm, rarely exported serial called
— 52 —
The Andy Griffith Show, in w h i c h an incompetent deputy was always getting into trouble by dint of his o w n hubris. I wanted to be able to h u m the theme song to The Honeymooners and have you chime in w i t h , " H o w sweet it isF'And I wanted to be able to say "That came out of left field" and not kick myself that baseball images didn't necessarily scan abroad. I wanted to stop having to pretend I was a cultural freak with no customs of my own, to have a house that itself had rules about shoes to which its visitors must conform. You restored to me the concept of home.
Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me. My neighbors n o w regard me with the same suspicion they reserve for illegal immigrants.They grope for words and speak to me with exaggerated deliberation, as if to a w o m a n for w h o m English is a second language. A n d since I have been exiled to this rarefied class, the mother of one of those " C o l u m b i n e boys," I, too, grope for words, not sure h o w to translate my off-world thoughts into the language of two-for-the-price-of-one sales and parking tickets. Kevin has turned me into a foreigner again, in my o w n country. A n d maybe this helps to explain these biweekly Saturday visits, because it is only at Claverack Correctional that I need not translate my alien argot into the language of the suburban mundane. It is only at Claverack Correctional that we can make allusions without explanations, that we can take as understood a shared cultural past.
A
_ 5 3 _
D E C E M B E R 8 , 2 0 0 0
Dear Franklin,
I ' m the one at Travel R Us w h o volunteers to stay late and finish up, but most of the Christmas flights are booked, and this afternoon we were all encouraged as a "treat" to knock off early, it being Friday. Beginning another desolate marathon in this duplex at barely 5 P.M. makes me close to hysterical.
Propped before the tube, poking at chicken, filling in the easy answers in the Times crossword, I often have a nagging sensation of waiting for something. I don't mean that classic business of waiting for your life to begin, like some c h u m p on the starting line w h o hasn't heard the gun. N o , it's waiting for something in particular, for a knock on the door, and the sensation can grow quite insistent. Tonight it's returned in force. Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
W h i c h inevitably puts me in mind of that seminal May evening in 1982, w h e n my expectation that you would walk into the kitchen anytime n o w was less unreasonable. You were location scouting in the pine barrens of southern N e w Jersey for a Ford advertisement and were due h o m e about 7:00 P.M.I'd recendy returned from a monthlong trip to update Greece on a Wing and a Prayer, and w h e n you hadn't shown up by 8:00, I reminded myself that my own
— 129 —
plane had been six hours late, which had ruined your plans to sweep me from JFK to the U n i o n Square Cafe.
Still, by 9:00 I was getting edgy, not to mention hungry. I chewed distractedly on a chunk of pistachio halvah from Athens.
On an ethnic roll, I'd made a pan of moussaka, with which I planned to convince you that, nestled against ground lamb with loads of cinnamon, you did like eggplant after all.
By 9:30, the custard topping had started to brown and crust around the edges, even though I'd turned the oven d o w n to 250°.
I took out the pan. Balanced on the fulcrum between anger and anguish, I indulged a fit of pique, banging the drawer w h e n I w e n t for the aluminum foil, grumbling about having fried up all those circles of eggplant, and n o w it was turning into a big, dry, charred mess I yanked my Greek salad out of the fridge and furiously pitted the calamatas, but then left it to wilt on the counter and the balance tipped. I couldn't be mad anymore. I was petrified.
I checked that both phones were on the hook. I confirmed that the elevator was working, though you could always take the stairs.
Ten minutes later, I checked the phones again.
This is why people smoke, I thought.
W h e n the p h o n e did ring at around 10:20, I pounced. At my mother's voice, my heart sank. I told her tersely that you were over three hours late, and I mustn't tie up the line. She was sympathetic, a rare sentiment from my mother, w h o then tended to regard my life as one long accusation, as if the sole reason I ventured to yet another country was to r u b her nose in the fact that for one more day she had not left her porch. I should have remembered that she, too, had been through this very experience at twenty-three, and not for hours but for weeks, until a slim envelope flipped through her front door slot from the War Department. Instead I was cruelly rude, and h u n g up.
Ten-forty. Southern N e w Jersey wasn't perilous—timber and farmland, not like Newark. But there were cars like primed missiles, and drivers whose stupidity was murderous. Why didn't you call?
— 56 —
That was before the advent of mobile phones, so I'm not blaming you. And I realize this experience is common as dirt: Your husband, your wife, your child is late, terribly late, and then they come home after all and there's an explanation. For the most part, these brushes against a parallel universe in which they never do come home—for which there is an explanation, but one that will divide your whole life into before and after— vanish without a trace. The hours that had elongated into lifetimes suddenly collapse like a fan. So even though the salty terror in my gums tasted familiar, I couldn't recall a specific instance w h e n I had paced our loft before, head swimming with cataclysms: an aneurysm, an aggrieved postal worker with an automatic in Burger King.
By 11:00,1 was making vows.
I gulped a glass of sauvignon blanc; it tasted like pickle juice.
This was wine without you. T h e moussaka, its dry, dead hulk: This was food without you. O u r loft, rich with the international booty of baskets and carvings, took on the tacky, cluttered aspect of an import oudet: This was our home without you. Objects had never seemed so inert, so pugnaciously incompensatory.Your remnants mocked me: the j u m p rope limp on its hook; the dirty socks, stiff, caricatured deflations of your size eleven feet.
O h , Franklin, of course I knew that a child can't substitute for a husband, because I had seen my brother stooped from the pressure to be the "little man of the house"; I had seen the way it tortured him that Mother was always searching his face for resemblances to that ageless photo on the mantle. It wasn't fair.
Giles couldn't even remember our father, w h o died w h e n he was three and w h o had long since transformed from a flesh-and-blood Dad w h o dribbled soup on his tie into a tall, dark icon looming over the fireplace in his spotless army air corps uniform, an immaculate emblem of all that the boy was not. To this day Giles carries himself with a diffidence. W h e n in the spring of 1999 he forced himself to visit me and there was nothing to say or do, he flushed with speechless resentment, because I was reviving in h i m the same sense of inadequacy that had permeated his childhood. Even more has he resented the public attention re-fracted off our son. Kevin and Thursday have routed him from his rabbit hole, and he's furious with me for the exposure. His sole ambition is obscurity, because Giles associates any scrutiny with being found wanting.
Still I kicked myself that you and I had made love the night before and one more evening I had absently slipped that rubber hat around my cervix. W h a t could I do with your j u m p rope, your dirty socks? Wasn't there only one respectable m e m e n t o of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi? No offspring could replace you. But if I ever had to miss you,
miss you forever, I wanted to have someone to miss you alongside, w h o would k n o w you if only as a chasm in his life, as you were a chasm in mine.
W h e n the phone rang again at nearly midnight, I h u n g back. It was late enough to be a reluctant emissary of a hospital, the police.
I let it ring a second time, my hand on the receiver, warming the plastic like a magic lantern that might grant one last wish. My mother claims that in 1945 she left the envelope on the table for hours, brewing herself cup after cup of black, acid tea and letting them grow cold. Already pregnant with me from his last h o m e leave, she took frequent trips to the toilet, closing the bathroom door and keeping the light off, as if hiding out. Haltingly, she had described to me an almost gladiatorial afternoon: facing d o w n an adversary bigger and more ferocious than she, and knowing that she would lose.
You sounded exhausted, your voice so insubstantial that for one ugly m o m e n t I mistook it for my mother's. You apologized for the worry. T h e pickup had broken d o w n in the middle of nowhere.You'd walked twelve miles to find a phone.
There was no point in talking at length, but it was agony to end the call. W h e n we said good-bye, my eyes welled in shame that I had ever declared, "I love you!" in that peck-at-the-door spirit that makes such a travesty of passion.
— 58 —
I was spared. In the hour it took a taxi to drive you to Manhattan, I was allowed the luxury of shpping back to my old world of worrying about casseroles, of seducing you into eggplant and nagging you to do the laundry. It was the same world in which I could put off the possibility of our having a child another night, because we had reservations, and there were many more nights.
We Need to Talk About Kevin Page 6