But I refused to relax right away, to collapse into the casual heedlessness that makes everyday life possible, and without which we would all batten ourselves into our living rooms for eternity like my mother. In fact, for a few hours I had probably been treated to a taste of my mother's whole postwar life, since what she lacks may not be courage so much as a necessary self-deceit.
Her people slaughtered by Turks, her husband plucked from the sky by devious httle yellow people, my mother sees chaos biting at her doorstep, while the rest of us inhabit a fabricated playscape whose benevolence is a collective delusion. In 1999, w h e n I entered my mother's universe for good—a place where anything could happen and often did—toward what Giles and I had always regarded as her neurosis I grew much kinder.
You would indeed come home—this once. But w h e n I put the phone down, it registered with a whispered click:There could yet come a day when you did not.
Thus instead of going slack and infinite, time still felt frantically short. W h e n you walked in you were so tired you could hardly speak. I let you skip dinner, but I would not let you sleep. I have experienced my share of burning sexual desire, and I can assure you that this was an urgency of another order. I wanted to arrange a backup, for you and for us, like slipping a carbon in my IBM
Selectric. I wanted to make sure that if anything happened to either of us there would be something left beside socks. Just that night I wanted a baby stuffed in every cranny like money in jars, like hidden bottles of vodka for weak-willed alcoholics.
"I didn't put in my diaphragm," I mumbled w h e n we were through.
You stirred. "Is it dangerous?"
"It's very dangerous," I said. Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.
T h e next morning, you said while we dressed, "Last night—you didn't just forget?" I shook my head, pleased with myself. "Are you sure about this?"
"Franklin, we're never going to be sure. We have no idea what it's like to have a kid. And there's only one way to find out."
You reached under my arms and lifted me overhead, and I recognized your lit-up expression from w h e n you'd played
"airplane" with Brian's daughters. "Fantastic!"
I had sounded so confident, but w h e n you brought me in for a landing I started to panic. Complacency has a way of restoring itself of its own accord, and I'd already stopped worrying whether you would live through the week. What had I done? W h e n later that m o n t h I got my period, I told you I was disappointed. That was my first lie, and it was a whopper.
D u r i n g the following six weeks you applied yourself nighdy.
You liked having a j o b to do and bedded me with the same boisterous if-you're-going-to-do-anything-do-it-right with which you had knocked up our bookshelves. Myself, I wasn't so sure about this yeomanlike fucking. I had always fancied the frivolousness of sex, and I liked it down and dirty. T h e fact that even the Armenian O r t h o d o x Church would n o w look on with hearty approval could put me right out of the m o o d .
Meanwhile, I came to regard my body in a n e w light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny h o w even w o m e n forget what breasts are for.
T h e cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity
— 6 0 —
of a different sort. T h e flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. T h e passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. T h e twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species' heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist.
Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that m e n find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its o w n replacement.
I don't want to pretend that I ' m the first w o m a n to discover the birds and the bees. But all this was new to me. And frankly, I wasn't so sure about it. I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn't initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used.
I ' m sure you remember those fights about booze. According to you, I shouldn't have been drinking at all. I balked. As soon as I discovered I was pregnant—I was pregnant, I didn't go in for this we stuff—I'd go cold turkey. But conception could take years, during which I was not prepared to killjoy my every evening with glasses of milk. Multiple generations of w o m e n had tippled cheerfully through their pregnancies and what, did they all give birth to retards?
You sulked. You went quiet if I poured myself a second glass of wine, and your disapproving glances despoiled the pleasure (as they were meant to). Sullenly, you'd grumble that in my place you'd stop drinking, and yes, for years if necessary, about which I had no doubt. I would let parenthood influence our behavior; you would have parenthood dictate our behavior. If that seems a subtle distinction, it is night and day.
I was deprived that cliched cinematic tip-off of heaving over the toilet, but it doesn't appear to be in moviemakers' interests to accept that some w o m e n don't get m o r n i n g sickness. Although you offered to accompany me with my urine sample, I dissuaded
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you: "It's not as if I ' m getting tested for cancer or something." I remember the remark. M u c h like what they say in jest, it's telling what people claim something is not.
At the gynecologist's, I delivered my marinated artichoke jar, a briskness covering the intrinsic embarrassment of handing off smelly effluents to strangers, and waited in the office. Dr.
Rhinestein——a cold young w o m a n for her profession, with an aloof, clinical temperament that would have suited her better for pharmaceutical trials with rats—swept in ten minutes later and leaned over her desk to jot. "It's positive," she said crisply.
W h e n she looked up, she did a double take. "Are you all right?
You've turned white."
I did feel strangely cold.
"Eva, I thought you were trying to get pregnant. This should be good news." She said this severely, with reproach. I got the impression that if I wasn't going to be happy about it, she would take my baby and give it to someone w h o ' d got their m i n d r i g h t — w h o would hop up and d o w n like a game-show contestant who'd w o n the car.
" D r o p your head between your legs." It seems I had begun to weave.
O n c e I had forced myself to sit up, if only because she seemed so bored, Dr. Rhinestein went through a long list of what I couldn't do, what I couldn't eat and drink, w h e n I would—
never mind my plans to update "WEEWAP," as the office n o w called our Western European edition, thanks to you—return for my next appointment. This was my introduction to the way in which, crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you b e c o m e social property, the animate equivalent of a public park.
That coy expression "you're eating for two now, dear," is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair; indeed, as the land of the free has grown increasingly coercive, the inference seems to r u n that "you're eating for us now," for 200-some million meddlers, any one of whose prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the m o o d for a jelly donut and not
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a full meal with whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five major food groups. T h e right to boss pregnant w o m e n around was surely on its way into the Constitution.
Dr. Rhinestein itemized recommended brands of vitamins and lectured on the dangers of continuing to play squash.
I had the afternoon to assemble myself into the glowing m o t h e r -
to-be. Instinctively, I chose a plain cotton s
undress more pert than sexy, then gathered the ingredients for a meal that was aggressively nutritious (the sauteed sea trout would be unbreaded, the salad would sport sprouts). In the meantime, I tried on different approaches to a shopworn scene: coy, delayed;bemused, artificially offhand; gushing— oh, darling! N o n e of t h e m seemed to suit. As I whisked about the loft twisting fresh candles into holders, I made a brave attempt at h u m m i n g but could only think of show tunes from big-budget musicals like Hello, Dolly!
I hate musicals.
Ordinarily, the finishing touch on a festive occasion was choosing the wine. I stared dolefully at our ample rack, b o u n d to gather dust. Some celebration.
W h e n the elevator clanked at our floor, I kept my back turned and arranged my face. W i t h one glance at the tortured collection of conflicting twitches we make w h e n we "arrange" our faces, you spared me the announcement. "You're pregnant."
I shrugged. "Looks that way."
You kissed me, chastely, no tongue. "So w h e n you found o u t — h o w ' d you feel?"
"A bit faint, actually."
Delicately, you touched my hair. "Welcome to your new life."
Since my m o t h e r was as terrified of alcohol as she was of the next street over, a glass of wine had never lost for me its tantalizing quality of the illicit. Although I didn't think I had a problem, a long draught of rich red at day's end had long been emblematic to me of adulthood, that vaunted American Holy Grail of liberty. But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very 6 3 - -
different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.
So I poured myself a flute of cranberry juice and toasted, brightly. "La chaim!"
Funny h o w you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon—the smallest of compromises, the little roundings off or slight recastings of one emotion as another that is a tad nicer or more flattering. I did not care so m u c h about being deprived of a glass of w i n e per se. But like that legendary j o u r n e y that begins with a single step, I had already embarked u p o n my first resentment.
A petty one, but most resentments are. A n d one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress. For that matter, that is the nature of resentment, the objection we cannot express. It is silence more than the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic, like poisons the body won't pee away. Hence, hard as I tried to be a grown-up about my cranberry juice, chosen carefully for its resemblance to a young Beaujolais, deep d o w n inside I was a brat.
While you came up with names (for boys), I wracked my brain for what in all this—the diapers, the sleepless nights, the rides to soccer practice—I was meant to be looking forward to.
Eager to participate, you had volunteered to give up booze for my pregnancy, though our baby would be no more bouncing should you forgo your predinner microbrew. So you began festively knocking back cranberry juice to beat the band. You seemed to relish the opportunity to prove h o w little drinking meant to you. I was annoyed.
T h e n , you were always captivated by self-sacrifice. However admirable, your eagerness to give your life over to another person may have been due in some measure to the fact that w h e n your life was wholly in your lap you didn't k n o w what to do with it.
Self-sacrifice was an easy way out. I k n o w that sounds unkind.
But I do believe that this desperation of yours—to rid yourself of yourself, if that is not too abstract—burdened our son hugely.
You remember that evening? We should have had so m u c h to talk about, but we were awkward, halting. We were no longer
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Eva and Franklin, but M o m m y and Daddy; this was our first meal as a family, a word and a concept about w h i c h I had always been uneasy And I was short-tempered, discarding all the names you came up with, Steve and George and Mark, as "way too ordinary,"
and you were hurt.
I couldn't talk to you. I felt pent up, clogged. I wanted to say: Franklin, I ' m not sure this is a good idea.You k n o w in your third trimester they won't even let you onto a plane? A n d I hate this whole rectitudinous thing, the keeping to a good diet and setting a good example and finding a good school...
It was too late. We were supposed to be celebrating and I was supposed to be elated.
Frantic to recreate the longing for a "backup" that had got me into this, I roused the m e m o r y of the night you were stranded in the pine barrens— barren, had that set me off? But that May evening's rash decision had been an illusion. I had made up my m i n d all right, but long before, back w h e n I fell so hard and irrevocably for your guileless American smile, your heartbreaking faith in picnics. However weary I might have grown with writing up n e w countries, over time it is inevitable that food, drink, color, and trees—the very state of being alive—is no longer fresh. If its shine had tarnished, this was still a life I loved, and one into which children didn't readily fit. T h e single thing I loved more was Franklin Plaskett.You coveted so little; there was only one big-ticket item you wanted that was in my power to provide.
H o w could I have denied you the light in your face w h e n you lifted Brian's squealing litde girls?
W i t h no bottle over w h i c h to linger, we went to b e d on the early side. You were nervous about w h e t h e r we were
"supposed" to have sex, if it would h u r t the baby, and I grew a little exasperated. I was already victimized, like some princess, by an organism the size of a pea. Me, I really wanted to have sex for the first time in weeks, since we could finally fuck because we wanted to get laid and not to do our bit for the race. You acquiesced. But you were depressingly tender.
Though I expected that my ambivalence would evanesce, this conflicted sensation grew only sharper, and therefore more secret.
At last I should come clean. I think the ambivalence didn't go away because it wasn't what it seemed. It is not true that I was
"ambivalent" about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple, we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.
A
D E C E M B E R 9 , 2 0 0 0
Dear Franklin,
I k n o w I wrote only yesterday, but I n o w depend on this correspondence to debrief from Chatham. Kevin was in a particularly combative humor. R i g h t off the bat he charged, "You never wanted to have me, did you?"
Before being impounded like a pet that bites, Kevin wasn't given to asking me about myself, and I actually took the question as promising. O h , he reached for it in dull restiveness, pacing his cage, but there's something to be said for being bored out of your mind. He must have previously recognized that I had a life, in order to go about ruining it with such a sense of purpose. B u t n o w he had further appreciated that I had volition: I'd chosen to have a child and had harbored other aspirations that his arrival might have thwarted. This intuition was at such odds with the therapists' diagnosis of "empathic deficiency" that I felt he deserved an honest reply.
"I thought I did," I said. "And your father, he wanted y o u —desperately."
I looked away; Kevin's expression of sleepy sarcasm was immediate. Perhaps I shouldn't have cited, of all things, your desperation. Me, I loved your longing; I had personally profited from your insatiable loneliness. But children must find such hunger disquieting, and Kevin would routinely translate disquiet into contempt.
"You thought you did" he said. "You changed your mind."
"I thought I needed a change," I said. "But no one needs a change for the worse."
Kevin looked victorious. For years he has tempted me to be nasty. I remained factual. Presenting emotions as facts—which they are—affords a fragile defense.
" M o t h e r h o o d was harder than I'd expected," I explained. "I'd been used to airports, sea views, museums. Suddenly I was stuck in the same few rooms, with Lego."
"But I went o u t of my way," he said with a smile t
hat lifted lifelessly as if by hooks, "to keep you entertained."
"I'd anticipated mopping up vomit. Baking Christmas cookies.
I couldn't have expected—" Kevin's look dared me. "I couldn't have expected that simply forming an attachment to you," I phrased as diplomatically as I k n e w how, "would be so m u c h work. I t h o u g h t — " I took a breath. "I thought that part came for free."
"Free!" he jeered. "Waking up every m o r n i n g isn't free."
" N o t any more," I conceded dolefully. Kevin's and my experience of day-to-day life has converged. T i m e hangs off me like molting skin.
"Ever occur to you," he said slyly, "maybe I didn't want to have you?"
"You wouldn't have liked any other couple better. Whatever they did for a living, you'd think it was stupid."
"Cheapskate travel guides? Scouting another banked turn for a Jeep Cherokee ad? Gotta admit, that's especially stupid."
"See?" I exploded. "Honestly, Kevin—would you want you?
If there is any justice, you'll wake up one day with yourself next to your bed in a crib!"
R a t h e r than recoil or lash out, he went slack. This aspect of his, it's more c o m m o n to the elderly than to children: the eyes glaze and drop, the musculature goes sloppy. It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.
You think I was mean to him, and that's w h y he withdrew.
I don't think so. I think he wants me to be mean to h i m the
— 6 8 —
way other people pinch themselves to make sure they're awake, and if anything he slackened in disappointment that here I was finally pitching a few halfheartedly injurious remarks and he felt nothing. Besides, I expect it was the image of "waking up with yourself " that did it, since that's just what he does do, and w h y his every m o r n i n g feels so cosdy. Franklin, I have never met anyone—and you do meet your own children—who found his existence more of a burden or indignity. If you have any notion that I've brutalized our boy into low self-esteem, think again. I saw that same sullen expression in his eyes w h e n he was one year old. If anything, he thinks very well of himself, especially since becoming such a celebrity. There is an enormous difference between disliking yourself and simply not wanting to be here.
We Need to Talk About Kevin Page 7