We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

  It is true that since then I have sometimes felt wistful about my corporate offspring, n o w fostered by strangers, but at the time I didn't care. I didn't care if I lost the case so long as in the process I was at least kept awake, I didn't care if I lost all my money, and I was positively praying to be forced to sell our eyesore house. I didn't care about anything. A n d there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on w h i c h you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

  As usual, I'd conducted my o w n cross for opposing counsel (they loved me; they'd have liked to call me as a witness for their side), so I was asked to step down. I paused halfway off the stand.

  " I ' m sorry, your honor, I just remembered something."

  "You wish to amend your testimony, for the record?"

  "We did let Kevin have one gun." (Harvey sighed.) "A squirt

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  gun, w h e n he was four. My husband loved squirt guns as a boy, so we made an exception."

  It was an exception to a rule I thought inane to begin with. Keep them away from replicas and kids will aim a stick at you, and I see no developmental distinction between wielding f o r m e d plastic that goes rat-a-tat-tat on battery power versus pointing a piece of w o o d and shouting "bang-bang-bang!" At least Kevin liked his squirt gun, since he discovered that it was annoying.

  All through the move from Tribeca, he'd soaked the flies of our movers and then accused them of having "peed their pants."

  I thought the accusation pretty rich from a little boy still refusing to pick up on o u r coy hints about learning to "go potty like M o m m e r and D a d d y " some two years after most kids were flushing to beat the band. He was wearing the w o o d e n mask I'd brought him from Kenya, with scraggy, electrified-looking sisal hair, tiny eyeholes surrounded by huge blank whites, and fierce three-inch teeth made from bird bones. E n o r m o u s on his scrawny body, it gave him the appearance of a voodoo doll in diapers. I don't k n o w what I was thinking w h e n I bought it.

  That boy hardly needed a mask w h e n his naked face was already impenetrable, and the gift's expression of raw retributive rage gave me the creeps.

  Schlepping boxes with a wet, itchy crotch couldn't have been a picnic. They were nice guys, too, uncomplaining and careful, so as soon as I noticed their faces begin to twitch I told Kevin to cut it out. At which point he swiveled his mask in my direction to confirm that I was watching, and water-cannoned the wiry black mover in the butt.

  "Kevin, I told you to stop it. Don't squirt these nice m e n w h o are only trying to help us one more time, and I mean it!' Naturally I only managed to imply that the first time I hadn't meant it. An intelligent child takes the calculus of this-time-I'm-serious-so-last-time-I-wasn't to its limit and concludes that all his mother's warnings are horseshit.

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  So we walk through our paces. Squish-squish-squish. Kevin, stop that this instant. Squish-squish-squish. Kevin, I'm not going to tell you again. And then (squish-squish-squish) the inevitable: Kevin, if you squirt anybody one more time I'm taking the squirt gun away, which earned m e , " N Y E H - n y e h ? Nyeh nyeh nyeh N Y E E -

  nyeh-nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeee, nyeh N Y E - n y e nye N Y E n y e nye-NYEEEEEEE."

  Franklin, what good were those parenting books of yours?

  N e x t thing I k n o w you're stooping beside our son and borrowing his dratted toy. I hear muffled giggling and something about Mommer and then you are squirting me.

  "Franklin, that's not cute. I told him to quit. You're not helping."

  " N Y E H - n y e h ? Nye nyeeh nyeeh. N y e h nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh.

  N y e h nyeeh nyeeh- nyeh!" Incredibly, this nyeh-nyeh minced from you, after which you shot me between the eyes. Kevin honked (you know, to this day he still hasn't learned h o w to laugh).When you gave the gun back, he drowned my face in a cascade.

  I snatched the gun.

  "Aw!" you cried. "Eva, moving's such a pain in the behind!"

  (Behind, that was the way we talked now.) "Can't we have a litde fun?"

  I had the squirt gun now, so one easy exit was to turn a tonal corner: to squirt you gleefully on the nose, and we could have this rambunctious family riot whereby you wrest the gun away and toss the squirt gun to Kevin...And we'd laugh and fall all over each other and we might even remember it years later, that mythic squirt-gun fight the day we moved to Gladstone. And then one of us would return the toy to Kevin and he'd go back to soaking the movers and I wouldn't have a leg to stand on to get h i m to quit because I'd been squirting people too. Alternatively, I could do the killjoy thing, which I did, and put the gun in my purse, which I did.

  " T h e movers peed their pants," you told Kevin,"but M o m m e r p o o p e d the party."

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  Of course I'd heard other parents talk about the unfair g o o d -

  c o p / b a d - c o p divide, h o w the good cop was always the kid's favorite while the bad cop did all the heavy lifting and I thought, what a fucking cliche, h o w did this happen to me? I ' m not even interested in this stuff.

  Kevin's v o o d o o alter ego marked the gun's location in my purse. Most boys would have started to cry. Instead he turned his bird-bone grimace mutely to his mother. From preschool, Kevin was a plotter. He k n e w h o w to bide his time.

  Since a child's feelings are bruisable, his privileges few, his chattel paltry even w h e n his parents are well-to-do, I'd been given to understand that punishing one's own child was terribly painful.

  Yet in truth, w h e n I commandeered Kevin's squirt gun, I felt a gush of savage joy. As we followed the moving van to Gladstone in the pickup, the continuing possession of Kevin's beloved toy engorged me with such pleasure that I withdrew it from my purse, forefinger on the trigger, riding shotgun. Strapped between us in the front seat, Kevin lifted his gaze from my lap to the dashboard with theatrical unconcern. Kevin's bearing was taciturn, his body slack, but the mask gave him away: Inside he was raging. He hated me with all his being, and I was happy as a clam.

  I think he sensed my pleasure and resolved to deprive me of it in the future. He was already intuiting that attachment—if only to a squirt g u n — m a d e h i m vulnerable. Since whatever he wanted was also something I might deny him, the least desire was a liability. As if in tribute to this epiphany, he pitched the mask on the pickup floor, kicked it absently with his tennis shoe, and broke a few teeth. I don't imagine he was such a precocious boy—such a monster—that he had conquered his every earthly appetite by the age of four and a half. He still wanted his squirt gun back. But indifference would ultimately c o m m e n d itself as a devastating weapon.

  W h e n we drove up, the house looked even more hideous than I'd remembered, and I wondered h o w I would make it through

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  the night without starting to cry. I hopped out of the cab. Kevin could n o w unstrap himself, and he scorned assistance. He stood on the running board so that I couldn't shut the door.

  "Give me my gun back now." This was no w e a r - M o m - d o w n whine, but an ultimatum. I wouldn't be given a second chance.

  "You were a jerk, Kevin," I said breezily, lifting him to the ground by his underarms. " N o toys for jerks." 1 thought, hey, I could c o m e to enjoy being a parent. This is fun.

  T h e squirt gun leaked, so I didn't want to stash it back in my purse. As the movers began to unload, Kevin followed me to the kitchen. I hoisted myself onto the counter and slid his squirt gun with my fingertips on top of the cupboards.

  I was busy directing what went where and may not have returned to the kitchen for twenty minutes.

  " H o l d it right there, mister," I said." Freeze."

  Kevin had shoved one box next to a pile of two to create a stairway to the counter, onto which one of the movers had slid a box of dishes, making another step. But he had waited for the sound of my footsteps before climbing the cabinet shelves themselves. (In Kevin's book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.) By the time I arrived, hi
s tennis shoes were perched three shelves up. His left hand was gripping the top of the wavering cupboard door, while his right hand hovered two inches from his squirt gun. I needn't have shouted Freeze! He was already posing as if for someone to snap a picture.

  "Franklin!" I bellowed urgendy. " C o m e here, please! R i g h t away!" I wasn't tall enough to lift h i m to the floor. As I stood below to catch him if he slipped, Kevin and I locked eyes. His pupils stirred with what might have been pride, or glee, or pity.

  My God, I thought. He's only four, and he's already winning.

  "Hey, there, buster!" You laughed and lifted him down, though not before he'd snatched the gun. Franklin, you had such beautiful arms. "Little young to learn to fly!"

  "Kevin's been very, very bad!" I s p u t t e r e d . " N o w we're going to have to take that gun away for a very, very, very long time!"

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  "Aw, he's earned it, haven't you, kiddo? Man, that climb took guts. Real little monkey, aren't you?"

  A shadow crossed his face. He may have thought you were talking down to him, but if so the condescension suited his purposes. "I'm the litde monkey," he said, deadpan. He strode out of the room, squirt gun swinging at his side with the arrogant nonchalance I associated with airplane hijackers.

  "You just humiliated me."

  "Eva, moving's hard enough on us, but for kids it's traumatic.

  Cut him some slack. Listen, I've got some bad news about that rocker of yours..."

  For our new home's christening dinner the next night we bought steaks, and I wore my favorite caftan, a white-on-white brocade from Tel Aviv. That same evening Kevin learned to fill his squirt gun with concord grape juice. You thought it was funny.

  That house resisted me every bit as much as I resisted it. Nothing fit. There were so few right angles that a simple chest of drawers slid into a corner always left an awkward triangle of unfilled space. My furniture, too, was beat-up, though in the Tribeca loft that battered handmade toy box, the tuneless baby grand, the comfortably slumping couch whose pillows leaked chicken feathers hit just the right offbeat note. Suddenly, in our slick new home the funk turned to junk. I felt sorry for those pieces, much as I'd pity unsophisticated but good-hearted high school buddies from Racine at a party milling with hip, sharp-tongued N e w Yorkers like Eileen and Belmont.

  It was the same with the kitchenware: Cluttering sleek green marble counters, my 1940s mixer went from quaint to grungy.

  Later, you came home with a bullet-shaped KichenAid, and I took the ancient mixer to the Salvation Army as if at gunpoint. W h e n I unpacked my dented pots and pans, their heavy-gauge aluminum encrusted, their crumbling handles duct-taped together, it looked as if some homeless person had nested in a household whose jet-set tenants were in Rio. The pans went, too; you found a

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  matching set at Macy s in fashionable red enamel. I'd never n o -

  ticed h o w scummy that old cookware had become, though I'd kind of liked not noticing.

  In all, I may have been borderline rich, but I'd never owned much, and aside from the silk hangings from Southeast Asia, a few carvings from West Africa, and the Armenian rugs from my uncle, we dispensed with most of the detritus of my old Tribeca life in frighteningly short order. Even the internationalia assumed an inauthentic aura, as if it hailed from an upmarket import outlet.

  Since our aesthetic reinvention coincided with my sabbatical from AWAP, I felt as if I were evaporating.

  That's why the project in the study was so important to me. I realize that for you that incident epitomizes my intolerance, my rigidity, my refusal to make allowances for children. But that's not what it means to me.

  For my study, I chose the one r o o m in that house that didn't have any trees growing through it, had only one skylight, and was almost rectangular—no doubt designed near the last, w h e n thankfully our Dream H o m e couple was running out of bright ideas. Most people would consider papering fine w o o d an abomination, but we were swimming in teak, and I had an idea that might make me feel, in one r o o m at least, at home: I would plaster the study with maps. I owned boxes and boxes: city maps of O p o r t o or Barcelona, with all the hostels and pensions I planned to hst in I B E R I W A P circled in red; Geographical Survey maps of the R h o n e Valley with the lazy squiggle of my train j o u r n e y highlighted in yellow; whole continents jagged with ambitious airline itineraries in ruled ballpoint.

  As you know, I've always had a passion for maps. I've sometimes supposed that, in the face of an imminent nuclear attack or invading army, the folks with all the power won't be the white supremacists with guns or the M o r m o n s with canned sardines, but the cartographically clued w h o k n o w that this road leads to the mountains. H e n c e the very first thing I do on arrival in a n e w place is locate a map, and that is only w h e n I couldn't get to R a n d McNally in midtown before hopping the plane.

  Without one, I feel easily victimized and at sea. As soon I have my map, I gain better command of a town than most of its residents, many of w h o m are totally lost outside a restrictive orbit of the patisserie, charcuterie, and Luisa s house. I've long taken pride in my powers of navigation, for I'm better than the average bear at translating from two dimensions to three, and I've learned to use rivers, railroads, and the sun to find my bearings. (I'm sorry, but what else can I boast about now? I'm getting old, and I look it. I work for a travel agency, and my son is a killer.)

  So I associated maps with mastery and may have hoped that, through the literal sense of direction they had always provided, I might figuratively orient myself in this alien life as a full-time suburban mother. I craved some physical emblem of my earlier self if only to remind me that I had deserted that life by choice and might return to it at will. I nursed some distant hope that as he got older, Kevin might grow curious, point to Majorca in the corner, and ask what it was like there. I was proud of my life, and while I told myself that through an accomplished mother Kevin might find pride in himself, I probably just wanted him to be proud of me. I still had no idea what a tall order for any parent that could turn out to be.

  Physically, the project was fiddly. T h e maps were all different sizes, and I had to design a pattern that was not symmetrical or systematic but still made a pleasing patchwork, with a balance of colors and a judicious mix of town centers and continents. I had to learn how to work with wallpaper paste, which was messy, and the older, tattier maps had to be ironed; paper readily browns.With so much else to attend to in a new house and constant hands-on consultation with Louis Role, my new managing editor at AWAP, I was papering my study over the course of several months.

  That's what I mean by biding his time. He followed the papering of that study and knew how much trouble it was; he had personally helped to make it more trouble, by tracking wallpaper paste all over the house. He may not have understood the countries the maps signified, but he did understand that they signified something to me.

  W h e n I brushed on the last rectangle by the window, a topographical map of Norway stitched with fjords, I climbed d o w n the ladder and surveyed the results with a twirl. It was gorgeous! Dynamic, quirky, lavishly sentimental. Interstitial train ticket stubs, museum floor plans, and hotel receipts gave the collage an additionally personal touch. I had forced one patch of this blank, witless house to mean something. I put on Joe Jackson's Big World, lidded the paste, furled the canvas covering my six-foot rolltop desk, rattled it open, and unpacked my last box, arranging my stand of antique cartridge pens and botdes of red and black ink, the Scotch tape, stapler, and tchotchkes for fidgeting—the miniature Swiss cowbell, the terra-cotta penitent from Spain.

  Meanwhile I was burbling to Kevin, something all very Virginia Woolf like, "Everyone needs a r o o m of their own. You k n o w h o w you have your room? Well, this is Mommer's room.

  And everyone likes to make their r o o m special. Mommer's been lots of different places, and all these maps remind me of the trips I've taken. You'll see, you may
want to make your r o o m special some day, and I'll help you if you w a n t — "

  " W h a t do you mean special'' he said, hugging one elbow. In his drooping free hand drizzled his squirt gun, whose leakage had worsened. Although he was still slight for his age, I'd rarely m e t anyone w h o took up more metaphysical space. A sulking gravity never let you forget he was there, and if he said little, he was always watching.

  "So it looks like your personality."

  " W h a t personality."

  I felt sure I'd explained the word before. I was continually feeding him vocabulary, or w h o was Shakespeare; educational chatter filled the void. I had a feeling he wished I'd shut up.There seemed no end to the information that he did not want.

  "Like your squirt gun, that's part of your personality." I

  — 1 8 2 —

  refrained from adding, like the way you ruined my favorite caftan, that's part of your personality. Or the way you're still shitting in diapers coming up on five years old, that's part of your personality, too. "Anyway, Kevin, you're being stubborn. I think you k n o w what I mean."

  "I have to put j u n k on the walls." He sounded p u t - u p o n .

  "Unless you'd rather not."

  "I'd rather not."

  "Great, we've found one more thing you don't want to do," I said. "You don't like to go to the park and you don't like to listen to music and you don't like to eat and you don't like to play with Lego. I bet you couldn't think of one m o r e thing you don't like if you tried."

  "All these squiggy squares of paper," he supplied prompdy.

  "They're dumb." After Idonlikedat, dumb was his favorite word.

  "That's the thing about your o w n room, Kevin. It's n o b o d y else's business. I don't care if you think my maps are dumb. I like them." I remember raising an umbrella of defiance: He wouldn't rain on this parade. My study looked terrific, it was all mine, I would sit at my desk and play grown-up, and I could not wait to screw on my crowning touch, a bolt on its door. Yes, I'd commissioned a local carpenter and had added a door.