A n d best of all," I took a breath, "he got away from me."
"Sounds like there's a silver lining, then." She held herself at an inch or two greater distance than w o m e n in earnest conversation are wont, eyeing me at an angle that departed from a straight line by about thirty degrees.These subde removals seemed almost scientific: I was a specimen. "Like, you get away from him, too."
I gestured helplessly at the waiting room. " N o t quite."
Glancing at her Swatch, she displayed a growing awareness that in what could prove a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, she had to w o r k in the one question she had always wanted to ask KICs actual mother before it was too late. I k n e w w h a t was coming: "You ever figure what it was drove him to—you ever figure out why?"
It's w h a t they all want to ask—my brother, your parents, my coworkers, the d o c u m e n t a r y makers, Kevin's psychiatric consult, the gladstone_carnage.com web-page designers, t h o u g h interestingly never my o w n mother. After I steeled myself to accept T h e l m a Corbitt's gracious invitation for coffee the week after her son's funeral (though she never asked aloud, and she spent most of our session reading me his poems and showing me w h a t seemed like hundreds of snapshots of D e n n y in school plays), it came off her in pulses, it clutched at my dress: a craving for comprehension that verged on hysteria. Like all those parents, she'd been wracked by the apprehension that the entire gory mess w h o s e sticky pieces we would b o t h be picking up for the rest of o u r lives was unnecessary. Quite. Thursday was an elective, hke printmaking, or Spanish. B u t this incessant badgering, this pleading refrain of why, why, why—it's so grossly unfair. Why, after all I have borne, am I held accountable for ordering their chaos? Isn't it e n o u g h that I suffer the b r u n t of the facts w i t h o u t shouldering this unreasonable responsibility for w h a t they mean? That young w o m a n at Claverack meant no h a r m I ' m sure, but her all-too-familiar question m a d e me bitter.
"I expect it's my fault," I said defiantly. "I wasn't a very good mother—cold, judgmental, selfish.Though you can't say I haven't paid the price."
"Well, then," she drawled, closing up that two inches and swiveling her gaze thirty degrees to look me in the eye. "You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it's the fault of somebody who's dead."
Stolid in my guilt, clutching it like a girl with a stuffed bunny, I failed to follow.
"Greenleaf?" shouted the guard. My companion tucked the candy into her pocketbook, then rose. I could see her calculating that she had just enough time to slip in one more quick question-and-answer or to deliver a parting thought. W i t h Sean Connery, that's always the quandary, isn't it: to siphon information, or to pour. S o m e h o w it impressed me that she chose the latter.
"It's always the mother's fault, ain't it?" she said softly, collecting her coat. "That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or a she a junkie. She let him r u n wild, she don't teach h i m right from wrong. She never h o m e w h e n he back from school. N o b o d y ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not h o m e after school.
A n d n o b o d y ever say they some kids just damned mean. Don't you believe that old guff. D o n ' t you let t h e m saddle you with all that killing."
"Loretta Greenleaf!"
"It hard to be a m o m m a . N o b o d y ever pass a law say 'fore you get pregnant you gotta be perfect. I ' m sure you try the best you could.You here, in this dump, on a nice Saturday afternoon? You still trying. N o w you take care of yourself, honey. A n d you don't be talking any more a that nonsense."
Loretta Greenleaf held my hand and squeezed it. My eyes
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sprang hot. I squeezed her hand back, so hard and so long that she must have feared I might never let go.
O h , dear, the coffee is cold.
A
(9 P.M.)
N o w returned to my duplex, I ' m ashamed of myself. I needn't have identified myself as Kevin's mother. Loretta Greenleaf and I might have simply talked about the Claverack food service: Who says saltpeter suppresses sex drive? or even, What the hell is "saltpeter,"
anyway?
I was about to write, "I don't k n o w what got into me," but I ' m afraid I do, Franklin. I was thirsty for companionship, and I felt her engagement with this garrulous white lady waning. I had the power to rivet her if I wished, and I reached for it.
Of course, in the immediate aftermath of Thursday I wanted n o t h i n g m o r e than to crawl d o w n a sewage drain and pull the lid. I longed for unobtrusiveness, like my brother, or oblivion, if that is not simply a synonym for wishing you were dead. T h e last thing in the world I was worried about was my sense of distinction. B u t the resilience of the spirit is appalling. As I said, I get h u n g r y now, and for more than chicken. W h a t I wouldn't give to go back to the days that I sat beside strangers and made a memorable impression because I had f o u n d e d a successful company or had traveled extensively in Laos. I wax nostalgic for the time that Siobhan clapped her hands and exclaimed admiringly that she'd used A Wing and a Prayer on her trips to the C o n t i n e n t . T h a t is the eminence that I chose for myself. But we are all resourceful, and we use w h a t falls to hand. Stripped of company, wealth, and handsome husband, I stoop to my one surefire shortcut to being somebody.
M o t h e r of the ignoble Kevin Khatchadourian is w h o I am now, an identity that amounts to one more of our son's little victories.
AWAP and our marriage have been demoted to footnotes, only
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interesting insofar as they illuminate my role as the mother of the kid everybody loves to hate. On the most private level, this fdial mugging of w h o I once was to myself may be what I most resent. For the first half of my life, I was my own creation. From a dour, closeted childhood, I had molded a vibrant, expansive adult w h o commanded a smattering of a dozen languages and could pioneer through the unfamiliar streets of any foreign town.
This notion that you are your own work of art is an American one, as you would hasten to point out. N o w my perspective is European: I am a bundle of other people's histories, a creature of circumstance. It is Kevin w h o has taken on this aggressive, optimistic Yankee task of making himself up.
I may be h o u n d e d by that why question, but I wonder h o w hard I've really tried to answer it. I ' m not sure that I want to understand Kevin, to find a well within myself so inky that from its depths what he did makes sense. Yet little by little, led kicking and screaming, I grasp the rationality of Thursday. Mark David Chapman n o w gets the fan mail that J o h n L e n n o n can't; Richard Ramirez, the " N i g h t Stalker," may have destroyed a dozen women's chances for connubial happiness but still receives numerous offers of marriage in prison himself. In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable. H e n c e I am no longer amazed by the frequency of public rampages with loaded automatics but by the fact that every ambitious citizen in America is not atop a shopping center looped with refills of ammunition. W h a t Kevin did Thursday and what I did in Claverack's waiting r o o m today depart only in scale.Yearning to feel special, I was determined to capture someone's attention, even if I had to use the murder of nine people to get it.
It's no mystery why Kevin is at h o m e at Claverack. If in high school he was disaffected, he had too m u c h competition; scores of other boys battled for the role of surly p u n k slumped in the back of the class. N o w he has carved himself a niche.
And he has colleagues, in Litdeton,Jonesboro, Springfield. As
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in most disciplines, rivalry vies with a more collegia! sense of c o m m o n purpose. Like many a luminary, he is severe with his contemporaries, calling t h e m to rigorous standards: He derides blubberers Hke Paducah's Michael Carneal w h o recant, w h o sully the purity of their gesture with a craven regret. He admires style—for instance, Evan Ramsey's crack as he took aim at his math class in Bethyl, Alaska, "This sur
e beats algebra, doesn't it?"
He appreciates capable planning: Carneal inserted gun-range earplugs before aiming his .22 Luger; Barry Loukaitis in Moses Lake had his mother take h i m shopping in seven different stores until he found just the right long black coat under which to hide his .30-caliber hunting rifle. Kevin has a refined sense of irony, too, treasuring the fact that the teacher Loukaitis shot had only recently written on the report card of this A-student,"A pleasure to have in the class." Like any professional, he has contempt for the kind of rank incompetence featured by J o h n Sirola, the fourteen-year-old in Redlands, California, w h o blasted his principal in the face in 1995, only to trip w h e n fleeing the scene and shoot himself dead. And in the way of most established experts, Kevin is suspicious of parvenus trying to elbow their way into his specialty with the slightest of qualifications—witness his resentment of that thirteen-year-old eviscerater. He is difficult to impress.
M u c h as J o h n U p d i k e dismisses T o m Wolfe as a hack, Kevin reserves a particular disdain for Luke W o o d h a m , "the cracker"
from Pearl, Mississippi. He approves of ideological focus but scorns p o m p o u s moralizing, as well as any School Shooting aspirant w h o can't keep his o w n counsel— and apparently before taking out his nominal once-girlfriend with a .30-.30 caliber shotgun, W o o d h a m couldn't stop himself f r o m passing a note to a friend in class that read (and you should hear your son's puling rendition):"I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society push us and we will push back."
Kevin decried W o o d h a m s sniveling while mucus drizzled onto his orange jumpsuit on Prime Time Live as totally uncool: " I ' m my o w n person! I ' m n o t a tyrant. I ' m n o t evil and I have a heart
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and I have feelings!"Woodham has admitted to warming up by clubbing his dog, Sparky, wrapping the pooch in a plastic bag, torching him with lighter fluid, and listening to him whimper before tossing him in a pond, and after studious consideration Kevin has concluded that animal torture is cliched. Lastly, he is especially condemnatory of the way this whiny creature tried to w o r m out of responsibility by blaming a satanic cult. T h e story itself showed panache, but Kevin regards a refusal to stand by one's own handiwork as not only undignified but as a betrayal of the tribe.
I know you, my dear, and you're impatient. Never mind the preliminaries, you want to hear about the visit itself—what his mood's like, how he's looking, what he said. All right, then. But by imputation, you asked for it.
He looks well enough. Though there is still a tinge too much blue in his complexion, fine veins at his temples convey a promising hint of vulnerability. If he has hacked his hair in uneven shocks, I take that as representation of healthy concern with his appearance. T h e perpetual half cock on the right corner of his mouth is starting to carve a permanent single quote into the cheek, remaining behind when he switches to a pursed-mouth scowl. There's no close quote on the left, and the asymmetry is disconcerting.
No more of those ubiquitous orange jumpsuits these days at Claverack. So Kevin is free to persist in the perplexing style of dress he developed at fourteen, arguably crafted in counterpoint to the prevailing fashion in clothing that's oversized—the jib of Harlem toughs, boxers catching sun, sauntering through moving traffic as the waistband of jeans that could rig a small sailboat shimmy toward their knees. But if Kevin's alternative look is pointed, I can only make wild guesses at what it means.
W h e n he first trotted out this fashion in eighth grade, I assumed that the T-shirts biting into his armpits and pleating across his chest were old favorites he was reluctant to let go, and I went out of my way to find duplicates in a larger size. He never
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touched them. N o w I understand that the dungarees whose zipper would not quite close were carefully selected. Likewise the windbreakers whose arms rode up the wrist, the ties that dangled three inches above the belt for when we forced him to look "nice," the shirts that gaped between popping buttons.
1 will say, the tiny-clothes thing did get a lot across. At first glance, he looked poverty-stricken, and I stopped myself more than once from commenting that "people will think" we don't earn enough to buy our growing boy n e w jeans; adolescents are so greedy for signals that their parents are consumed with social status. Besides, a closer inspection revealed that his shrunken getup was designer labeled, lending the pretense at hard luck a parodic wink. T h e suggestion of a wash load churned at an errantly high temperature connoted a comic ineptitude, and the binding of a child-sized jacket across the shoulders would sometimes pull his arms goofily out from his sides like a baboon's. (That's as close as he's come to fitting the mold of a conventional cutup; no one I've spoken to about our son has ever mentioned finding him funny.) T h e way the hems of his jeans stopped shy of his socks made a hayseedy impression, consonant with his fondness for playing dumb. There was more than a suggestion of Peter Pan about the style—a refusal to grow u p — t h o u g h I'm confused why he would cling so to being a kid w h e n throughout his childhood he seemed so lost in it, knocking around in those years much the way I was rattling around our enormous house.
Claverack's experimental policy of allowing inmates to wear street clothes has allowed Kevin to reiterate his fashion statement inside. While N e w York's corner boys flapping in outsized gear look like toddlers from a distance, Kevin's shrunken mode of dress has the opposite effect of making him look bigger—more adult, bursting. O n e of his psych consultants has accused me of finding the style unnerving for its aggressive sexuality: Kevin's crotch cuts revealingly into his testicles, and the painted-on T-shirts make his nipples protrude. Perhaps; certainly the tight sleeve hems, the taut
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collars, and the yanked-in waistbands strap his body in cords and remind me of bondage.
He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt.
Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin. Reading his suffocating attire as equivalent to a penitential hair shirt might seem a stretch, but the waistbands chafe, the collars score his neck. Discomfort begets discomfort in others, of course, and that, too, must be part of the plan. I often find that w h e n I'm with him I pull at my own clothes, discreetly prizing a seam from between my buttocks or releasing an extra button on my blouse.
Eyeing laconic interchanges at adjoining tables, I've detected that some of his fellow inmates have started to mimic Kevin's eccentric dress sense. I gather that T-shirts in unusually small sizes have become prized possessions, and Kevin himself has mentioned smugly that runts are being robbed of their clothes.
He may hold imitators up to ridicule, but he does seem gratified at having initiated his very own fad. Were he commensurately concerned with originality two years ago, the seven students he used for target practice would be preparing applications to the college of their choice by now.
Anyway, today? He lounged into the visiting room wearing what must have been one of the runts' sweatpants, since I didn't recognize them as ones I'd bought. T h e little plaid button-down he wore on top was only secured by the middle two buttons, exposing his midriff. N o w even his tennis shoes are too small, and he crushes their heels under his feet. He might not like to hear me say it, but he's graceful. There's a languor to his motions, as to the way he talks. And he always has that skew, too; he walks sideways, like a crab. Leading with his left hip gives him the subtle sidle of a supermodel on a catwalk. If he realized I saw traces of effeminacy in him, I doubt he'd be offended. He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing.
"What a surprise," he said smoothly, pulling out the chair; its back legs had lost their plastic feet and the raw aluminum shrieked across the cement, a fingernail-on-the-blackboard sound that Kevin drew out. He slid his elbow across the table, resting his temple on his fist, assuming that characteristic tilt, sardonic with his whole body. I've tried to stop myself, but whenever he sits
in front of me I rear back.
I do get irked that I ' m always the one w h o has to come up with something to talk about. He's old enough to carry a conversation. And since he has imprisoned me in my life every bit as m u c h as he's imprisoned himself in his, we suffer an equal poverty of fresh subject matter. O f t e n we run through the same script: " H o w are you?" I ask with brutal simplicity. "You want me to say fine?" "I want you to say something," I throw back.
"You're the one came to see me," he reminds me. A n d he can and will sit it out, the whole hour. As for w h i c h of us has the greater tolerance for nullity, there's no contest. He used to spend whole Saturdays propped theatrically in front of the Weather Channel.
So today I skipped even a perfunctory how's tricks, on the theory that folks w h o shun small talk are still dependent on its easing transitions but have learned to make other people do all the work. And I was still agitated by my exchange with Loretta Greenleaf. Maybe having tempted his o w n mother into boasting about her connection to his filthy atrocity would afford him some satisfaction. But apparently my messianic impulse to take responsibility for Thursday onto myself reads to Kevin as a f o r m of stealing.
"All right," I said, no-nonsense. "I need to know. Do you blame me? It's all right to say so, if that's what you think. Is that what you tell your psych consults, or they tell you? It all traces back to your mother."
He snapped," Why should you get all the credit?"
T h e conversation that I had expected to consume our whole h o u r was n o w over in ninety seconds. We sat.
" D o you remember your early childhood very well, Kevin?"
I had read somewhere that people with painful childhoods will often draw a blank.
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"What's to remember?"
We Need to Talk About Kevin Page 21