We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

  T h e awful revelation dawned that we were dealing with your childhood—an idealization of your childhood—that could prove, hke your fantasy United States, an awesome cudgel. There's no more d o o m e d a struggle than a battle with the imaginary.

  "But I love N e w York!" I sounded hke a b u m p e r sticker.

  "It's dirty and swimming in diseases, and a kid's i m m u n e system isn't fully developed until he's seven years old. A n d we could stand to move into a good school district."

  "This city has the best private schools in the country."

  " N e w York private schools are snobbish and cutthroat. Kids in this t o w n start worrying about getting into Harvard at the age of six."

  " W h a t about the tiny matter that your wife doesn't want to leave this city?"

  "You had twenty years to do whatever you wanted. I did, too.

  Besides, you said you yearned to spend our m o n e y on something worthwhile. Now's your chance. We should buy a house. W i t h land and a tire swing."

  " M y mother never made a single major decision based on what was good for me."

  "Your mother has locked herself in a closet for forty years.

  Your mother is insane.Your mother is hardly the parent to look to as a role model."

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  "I mean that w h e n I was a kid, parents called the shots. N o w I ' m a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can't believe this." I flounced onto the couch. "I want to go to Africa, and you want to go to New Jersey."

  "What's this about Africa? W h y do you keep bringing it up?"

  "We're going ahead with AFRIWAP. The Lonely Planet and TheRough Guide are starting to squeeze us badly in Europe."

  " W h a t does this edition have to do with you?"

  " T h e continent is huge. Someone has to do a preliminary canvass of countries."

  " S o m e o n e other than you. You still don't get it, do you? Maybe it was a mistake for you to think of m o t h e r h o o d as 'another country.'This is no overseas holiday. It's serious—"

  " We're talking about human lives, Jim!"

  You didn't even smile. " H o w would you feel if he lost a hand reaching through that elevator gate? If he got asthma from all this crap in the air? If some loser kidnapped him from your grocery cart?"

  " T h e truth is, you want a house," I charged." You want a yard.

  You have this dorky N o r m a n Rockwell vision of D a d d y d o m , and you want to coach Litde League."

  " G o t that right." You straightened victoriously at the changing table, Kevin in his blazing fresh Pampers on your hip. " A n d there are two of us, and one of you."

  It was a ratio I was destined to confront repeatedly.

  D E C E M B E R 2 5 , 2 0 0 0

  Dear Franklin,

  I agreed to visit my mother for Christmas, so I ' m writing from Racine. At the last m i n u t e — w h e n he f o u n d out I was c o m i n g —

  Giles decided that his family would spend the holiday with his in-laws instead. I could choose to feel injured, and I do miss my brother if only as someone with w h o m to m o c k my mother, but she's getting so frail n o w at seventy-eight that o u r patronizing despair on her behalf seems unfair. Besides, I understand. Around Giles and his kids, I never mention Kevin, Mary's lawsuit; a little traitorously, I never even mention you. But through benign discussion of the snow, whether to put pine nuts in the sarma, I still personify a horror that, in defiance of my mother's locked doors and sealed windows, has gotten inside.

  Giles resents my having co-opted the role of family tragic figure. He only moved as far as Milwaukee, and the child at closer hand is always chopped liver, while for decades I made a living from being as far away from R a c i n e as I could get. Like De Beers restricting the supply of diamonds, I made myself scarce, a cheap gambit in Giles's view for artificially manufacturing the precious.

  N o w I have stooped even lower, using my son to corner the market on pity. Having kept his head below the parapet working for Budweiser, he's in grudging awe of anyone who's been in the newspaper. I keep trying to find some way of telling him that this is the kind of dime-store fame that the most unremarkable parent

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  could w i n in the sixty seconds it takes an automatic assault rifle to fire a hundred bullets. I don't feel special.

  You know, there's a peculiar smell in this house that I used to find rank. R e m e m b e r h o w I used to insist that the air was thin?

  My mother rarely opens a door, m u c h less airs the place out, and I was convinced that the distinctive headache that always hit me on arrival was the beginnings of carbon dioxide poisoning. But n o w the close, clinging admixture of stale lamb grease, dust, and mildew sharpened with the medicinal reek of her colored inks comforts me somehow.

  For years I wrote off my mother as having no grasp of my life, but after Thursday I came to terms with the fact that I'd made no effort to understand hers. She and I had been distant for decades not because she was agoraphobic but because I'd been remote and unsparing. Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. D u r i n g my traveling days, I must have seemed uppity and superior, and my n e w desperation for safety has restored my status as a proper child. For my part, I have come to recognize—since any world is by definition self-enclosed and, to its inhabitants, all there is—that geography is relative. To my intrepid mother, the living r o o m could be Eastern Europe, my old bedroom Cameroon.

  Of course, the Internet is the best and worst thing that ever happened to her, and she is n o w able to order anything from support hose to grape leaves over the Web. Consequently, the multitude of errands I used to run for her whenever I was h o m e is already dispatched, and I feel a little useless. I suppose it's good that technology has granted her independence— if that's what it's called.

  My mother, by the way, doesn't avoid talking about Kevin at all. This m o r n i n g as we opened our few presents beside her spindly tree (ordered on-line), she noted that Kevin rarely misbehaved in the traditional sense, which always made her suspicious. All children misbehave, she said. You were better off w h e n they did so in plain view. And she recalled our visit w h e n

  — 1 3 0 —

  Kevin was about ten—old enough to k n o w better, she said. She'd just finished a stack of twenty-five one-of-a-kind Christmas cards commissioned by some wealthy Johnson Wax exec. While we were preparing khurabia with powdered sugar in the kitchen, he systematically snipped the cards into ragged paper snowflakes.

  (You said—a mantra—he was "just trying to help.") That boy had something missing, she pronounced, in the past tense, as if he were dead. She was trying to make me feel better, though I worried that what Kevin was missing was a m o t h e r like mine.

  In fact, I trace the flowering of my present filial grace to a gasping p h o n e call the night of Thursday itself. To w h o m else was I to turn but my mother? T h e primitiveness of the tie was sobering. For the life of me, I can't remember a single time that Kevin—distraught over a scraped knee, a falling-out with a playmate—has called me.

  I could tell from her collected, formal greeting, Hello, Sonya Khatchadourian speaking, that she hadn't seen the evening news.

  Mother? was all I could manage—plaintive, grade-school. T h e ensuing heavy breathing must have sounded like a crank call. I felt suddenly protective. If she lived in mortal dread of a trip to Walgreens, h o w would she confront the vastly m o r e appreciable terror of a murderous grandson? For pity's sake, I thought, she's seventy-six, and she already lives through a mail slot. After this, she'll never pull the covers off her head.

  But Armenians have a talent for sorrow.You know, she wasn't even surprised?. She was somber but remained composed, and for once, even at her advanced age, she acted and sounded like a real parent. I could depend on her, she assured me, an assertion that hitherto would have made me scoff. It was almost as if all that dread of hers finally redeemed itself; as if on some level she was
relieved that her whole batten-down-the-hatches gestalt hadn't proved baseless. After all, she'd been here before, where the rest of the world's tragedy lapped at her shore. She may have hardly left the house, but of everyone in our family, she most profoundly appreciated h o w the careless way adjacent people hve their lives

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  can threaten all you hold dear. Most of her extended family had been slaughtered, her very husband picked off by Japanese like skeet; Kevin's rampage fit right in. Indeed, the occasion seemed to liberate something in her, not only love but bravery, if they are not in many respects the same thing. Mindful that the police were b o u n d to expect me to remain on hand, I declined her invitation to Racine. Gravely, my shut-in mother offered to fly to me.

  It was shortly after Siobhan j u m p e d ship (she never did come back, and I had to post her last paycheck to A m E x in Amsterdam) that Kevin stopped screaming. Stopped cold. Maybe, his nanny dispatched, he felt his mission accomplished. Maybe he'd finally concluded that these high-decibel workouts did not reprieve him from the remorseless progress of life-in-a-room and so were not worth the energy. Or maybe he was hatching some n e w gambit n o w that Mother had grown inured to his wailing, as one does in the latter stages of a neglected car alarm.

  W h i l e I was hardly complaining, Kevin's silence had an oppressive quality. First off, it was truly silence—total, closed-mouth, cleansed of the coos and soft cries that most children emit w h e n exploring the infinitely fascinating three square feet of their nylon net playpen. Second, it was inert. Although he was n o w able to walk—which, like every skill to come, he learned in private—there didn't appear to be anywhere he especially wanted to go. So he would sit, in the playpen or on the floor, for hours, his unlit eyes stirring with an unfocused disaffection. I couldn't understand w h y he didn't at least c o m b up a little aimless fluff from our Armenian rugs, even if he refused to loop colored rings on their plastic spike or crank the noisemaker on his Busy Box. I would surround him with toys (there was hardly a day you didn't come h o m e with a n e w one), and he would stare at t h e m or kick one away. He did not play.

  You'd r e m e m b e r that period largely as the time we were fighting about w h e t h e r to move and w h e t h e r I w o u l d take that long trip to Africa. B u t I mostly r e m e m b e r staying h o m e

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  on those draggy days after we'd once again lost a nanny, and mysteriously they did n o t pass any faster than the ones during w h i c h Kevin bellowed.

  Previous to m o t h e r h o o d I had imagined having a small child at elbow as something like owning a bright, companionable dog, but our son exerted a m u c h denser presence than any pet.

  Every m o m e n t , I was hugely aware he was there. T h o u g h his n e w phlegmatism made it easier to edit copy at home, I felt watched and grew restive. I'd roll balls to Kevin's feet, and once I did entice h i m into rolling it back. Excited, ridiculously so, I rolled it back; he rolled it back. But once I rolled it between his legs a third time, that was that. W i t h a listless glance, he left the ball at his knee. I did begin to think, Franklin, that he was smart. In sixty seconds, he got it: Were we to pursue this "game," the ball would continue to roll back and forth along the same trajectory, an exercise that was overtly pointless. I was never able to engage h i m in it again.

  This impenetrable flatness of his, combined with a reticence extending well past the point that all your manuals forecast first attempts at speech, compelled me to consult our pediatrician.

  Dr. Foulke was reassuring, ready with the conventional parental sop that "normal" developmental behavior embraced a range of idiosyncratic stalls and leaps, though he did subject our son to a battery of simple tests. I'd expressed concern that Kevin's unresponsiveness was due to a hearing deficit; whenever I called his name, he turned with such an in-his-own-good-time deadpan that it was impossible to tell w h e t h e r he had heard me.

  Yet though he was not necessarily interested in anything I said, his ears worked fine, and my theory that the volume of his infantile screaming had damaged his vocal chords was not b o r n e out by medical science. I even voiced a w o r r y that Kevin's withdrawn quality might indicate early signs of autism, but apparently he did not display the telltale rocking and repetitive behavior of such unfortunates trapped in their o w n world; if Kevin was trapped, it was in the same world as yours and mine. In fact, the most I

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  wrested from Dr. Foulke was his musing that Kevin "was a floppy little boy, wasn't he?" in reference to a certain physical slackness.

  The doctor would lift our son's arm, let go, and the arm would drop hke a wet noodle.

  So insistent was I that Foulke pin a disability to our son, stamp a name-brand American syndrome on Kevin's forehead, that the pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers w h o craved distinction for her child but w h o in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction. And honestly, I did want him to find something wrong with Kevin. I yearned for our son to have some small disadvantage or flaw to kindle my sympathy. I was not made of stone, and whenever I espied a little boy with a piebald cheek or webbed fingers waiting patiently in the outer office, my heart went out to him, and I quivered to consider what tortures he would suffer at recess. I wanted to at least feel sorry for Kevin, which seemed a start. Did I truly wish our son to have webbed fingers? Well, yes, Franklin. If that's what it took.

  He was underweight, in consequence of which he never had those rounded, blunt features of the roly-poly toddler that can make even homely children adorable for that photogenic window between two and three. Instead his face had that ferret-like sharpness from his earliest years. If nothing else, I'd have liked to have been able to gaze later at photographs of a pudgy heartbreaker and wonder what went wrong. Instead, the snaps I have (and you took stacks) all document a sobersided wariness and disturbing self-possession. The narrow olive face is instantly familiar: recessed eyes, sheer straight nose with a wide bridge and slight hook, thin hps set in an obscure determination. Those pictures are recognizable not only for their resemblance to the class photograph that appeared in all the papers but for their resemblance to me.

  But I wanted him to look like you. His whole geometry was based on the triangle and yours on the square, and there is something cunning and insinuating about acute angles, stable

  — 1 3 4 —

  and trustworthy about the perpendicular. I didn't expect to have a litde Franklin Plaskett clone running around the house, but I wanted to glance at my son's profile and apprehend with a flash of lambent joy that he had your strong tall forehead— rather than one that shelved sharply over eyes that might begin as strikingly deep-set but were destined with age to look sunken. (I should know.) I was gratified that his appearance was noticeably Armenian, but I had hoped that your robust Anglo optimism would quicken the sluggish, grudge-bearing blood of my O t t o m a n heritage, brightening his sallow skin with ruddy hints of football games in fall, highlighting his sullen black hair with glints of Fourth of July fireworks. Moreover, the furtiveness of his gaze and the secrecy of his silence seemed to confront me with a miniature version of my o w n dissembling. He was watching me and I was watching me, and under this dual scrutiny I felt doubly self-conscious and false. If I found our son's visage too shrewd and contained, the same shifty mask of opacity stared back at me w h e n I brushed my teeth.

  I was averse to plunking Kevin in front of the television. I hated children's programming; the animation was hyperactive, the educational shows boppy, insincere, and condescending. But he seemed so understimulated. So one afternoon w h e n I had b u r n e d out on bubbling, It's time for our juice! I switched on the after-school cartoons.

  "I don like dat."

  I reeled away from the beans I was tailing for dinner, certain from the lifeless monotonic delivery that this line had not escaped from the A-Team. I rushed to turn the TV d o w n low and stooped to our
son. " W h a t did you say?"

  He repeated levelly, "I d o n like dat."

  W i t h more urgency than I may ever have applied to this foundering relationship, I took one of his shoulders in each hand.

  "Kevin? What do you like?"

  It was a question that he was not prepared to answer and that to this day at the age of seventeen he is still unable to answer to

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  his o w n satisfaction, m u c h less to mine. So I returned to what he didn't like, a subject that would soon prove inexhaustible.

  "Sweetheart? W h a t is it you want to stop?"

  He batted a hand against the television tube. "I don like dat.

  Turn id ov."

  I stood up and marveled. O h , I turned the cartoon off all right, thinking Christ, I have a toddler with good taste. As if myself the child, I was impelled to experiment with my riveting n e w toy, to poke at its buttons and see what lit up.

  "Kevin, do you want a cookie?"

  "I hate cookies."

  "Kevin, will you talk to Daddy w h e n he comes home?"

  " N o t if I don feew wike it."

  "Kevin, can you say ' M o m m y ' ? "

  I'd been queasy about what I wanted our son to call me.

  Mommy sounded babyish, Ma rube-ish, Mum servile. Mama was the stuff of battery-operated doll babies, Mom rang earnest and gee-whiz, Mother seemed formal for 1986. Looking back, I w o n d e r if I did not like being called any of the popular names for m o t h e r because I did not hke—well, because I was still ill at ease with being one. Little matter, since the predictable answer was, " N o . "

  W h e n you came home, Kevin refused to repeat his loquacious performance, but I recited it word for word. You were ecstatic.

  " C o m p l e t e sentences, right off the bat! I've read that what seem like late bloomers can be incredibly bright.They're perfectionists.