"Well, for example you wore diapers until you were six."
" W h a t about it." If I had some idea of embarrassing him, I was misguided.
"It must have been unpleasant."
" F o r you."
"For you as well."
" W h y ? " he asked mildly. "It was warm."
" N o t for long."
"Didn't sit in it for long.You were a good mumsey."
"Didn't other kindergartners make f u n of you? I worried at the time."
" O h , I bet you couldn't sleep."
"I worried," I said staunchly.
He shrugged with one shoulder. " W h y should they? I was getting away with something and they weren't."
"I was just wondering if, at this late date, you could shed some light on why the delay. Your father gave enough demonstrations."
"Kevvy-wevvy!" he cooed, falsetto. "Honey sweetie! Look at Daddy kins! See how he pee-pees in the pooper-dooper? Wouldn't you like that, too, Kevvy-woopsie? Wouldn't it he fun to be just like Dadda-boo, piddle your peenie-weenie over the toileywoiley? I was just hoisting you on your o w n retard."
I was interested that he had allowed himself to be verbally clever; he's generally careful not to let on that he's got a brain. "All right," I said. "You wouldn't use the toilet for yourself, and you and I—you wouldn't do it for me. But why not for your father?"
"You're a big boy, now!" Kevin minced. "You're my big boy!You're my little man! Christ.What an asshole."
I stood up. " D o n ' t you ever say that. D o n ' t you ever, ever say that.
N o t once, not ever, not one more time!"
" O r what," he said softly, eyes dancing.
I sat back down. I shouldn't let h i m get to me like that. I usually don't. Still any dig at you—.
— 2 0 3 —
O h , maybe I should count myself lucky that he doesn't press this button more often. Then, lately he is always pressing it, in a way.That is, for most of his childhood his narrow, angular features taunted me with my own reflection. But in the last year his face has started to fill out, and as it widens I begin to recognize your broader bones. While it's true that I once searched Kevin's face hungrily for resemblance to his father, n o w I keep fighting this nutty impression that he's doing it on purpose, to make me suffer.
I don't want to see the resemblance. I don't want to spot the same mannerisms, that signature downward flap of a hand when you dismissed something as insignificant, like the trifling matter of neighbor after neighbor refusing to let their kids play with your son. Seeing your strong chin wrenched in a pugnacious jut, your wide artless smile bent to a crafty grin, is like beholding my husband possessed.
"So what would you have done?" I said. "With a little boy w h o insisted on messing his pants until he was old enough for first grade?"
Kevin leaned further onto his elbow, his bicep flat on the table."Know what they do with cats, don't you.They do it in the house, and you shove their faces into their own shit. They don't like it. They use the box." He sat back, satisfied.
"That's not that far from what I did, is it?" I said heavily. " D o you remember? What you drove me to? H o w I finally got you to use the bathroom?"
He traced a faint white scar on his forearm near the elbow with a note of tender possessiveness, as if stroking a pet worm.
"Sure." There was a different quality to this affirmation; I felt he truly remembered, whereas these other recollections were post hoc.
"I was proud of you," he purred.
"You were proud of yourself," I said. "As usual."
"Hey," he said, leaning forward. "Most honest thing you ever done."
I stirred, collecting my bag. I may have craved his admiration once, but not for that; for anything but that.
" H o l d on," he said. "I answered your question. Got one for you."
This was new. "All right," I said. "Shoot."
"Those maps," he said.
" W h a t about them," I said.
"Why'd you keep them on the walls?"
It's only because I refused to tear those spattered maps from the study for years, or to allow you to paint over them as you were so anxious to, that Kevin "remembers" the incident at all.
He was, as you observed repeatedly at the time, awfully young.
"I kept them up for my sanity," I said. "I needed to see something you'd done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn't all in my head."
"Yeah," he said, tickling the scar on his arm again. " K n o w what you mean."
I promise to explain, Franklin, but right n o w I just can't.
JANUARY 1 7 , 2 0 0 1
Dear Franklin,
I ' m sorry to have left you dangling, and I've been dreading an explanation ever since. In fact, driving to work this morning, I had another trial flashback. Technically, I committed peijury.
I just didn't think I owed that beady-eyed j u d g e (a congenital disorder I'd never seen before, inordinately small pupils, provided her the dazed, insensate look of a cartoon character who's just been hit over the head with a frying pan) what for a decade I'd kept from my o w n husband.
"Ms. Khatchadourian, did you or your husband ever hit your son?" Mary's attorney leaned threateningly into the witness stand.
"Violence only teaches a child that physical force is an acceptable m e t h o d of getting your way," I recited.
" T h e court can only agree, Ms. Khatchadourian, but it's very important that we clarify in no uncertain terms for the record: D i d you or your husband ever physically abuse Kevin while he was in your care?"
"Certainly not," I said firmly, and then muttered again for good measure, "certainly not." I rued the repetition. There's something dodgy about any assertion one feels obliged to make twice.
As I left the stand, my foot caught on a floorboard nail, pulling
— 2 0 7 —
the black rubber heel off my pump. I limped back to my chair, reflecting, better a broken shoe than a long w o o d e n nose.
But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never used to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so m u c h fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship, it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as m u c h as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.
I realize that Kevin's diapers embarrassed you, even if they confoundingly failed to embarrass the boy himself. We were already using the extra-large; much longer and we'd have to start mail-ordering the kind for medical incontinence. However many tolerant parenting manuals you'd devoured, you fostered an old-fashioned masculinity that I found surprisingly attractive. You didn't want your son to be a sissy, to present an easy target for teasing peers, or to cling to a talisman of infancy quite so publicly glaring, since the bulge under his pants was unmistakable. "Jesus,"
you'd grumble once Kevin was in b e d , " w h y couldn't he just suck his t h u m b ? "
Yet you yourself had engaged in an ongoing childhood battle with your fastidious mother over flushing, because the toilet had overflowed once, and every time you pushed the handle thereafter you were terrified that lumps of excrement might begin disgorging endlessly onto the bathroom floor, like a scatological version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. A n d I had agreed that it was tragic h o w kids can tie themselves into neurotic knots over pee and poop, and w h a t a waste of angst it all was, so I went along with this n e w theory about letting toddlers choose to potty train w h e n they were "ready." Nevertheless, we were b o t h getting desperate.
You started drilling me about whether he saw me using the toilet during the day (we weren't sure if he should or shouldn't) or
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whether I might have said anything to frighten h i m away from this throne of ci
vilized life, in comparison to which amenities like please and thank you were dispensable as doilies. You accused me by turns of making too much of the matter, and too litde.
It was impossible that I made too little of it, since this one developmental stage that our son seemed to have skipped was tyrannizing my life. You will recall that it was only thanks to the n e w educational ethos of pathological neutrality (there s-no-such-thing-as-worse-or-better-but-only-different) as well as paralytic fear of suit (in horror of w h i c h Americans are increasingly reluctant to do anything from giving drowning victims m o u t h -
t o - m o u t h to firing slack-jawed incompetents from their employ) that Kevin wasn't turned away from that pricey Nyack kindergarten until he, well, got his shit together. All the same, the teacher was not about to change a five-year-old boy, claiming that she'd be laying herself open to charges of sexual abuse. (In fact, w h e n I quietly informed Carol Fabricant of Kevin's little eccentricity, she looked at me askance and announced witheringly that this kind of nonconforming behavior was sometimes a cry for help. She didn't spell it out, but for the next week I lived in fear of a knock on the door and a flashing blue light in our windows.) So no sooner had I dropped him off at Love-'n'-Learn at 9 A.M. and driven back h o m e than I was obliged to return around 11:30 A.M. with my n o w rather careworn diaper bag.
If he was dry, I'd engage in a bit of pretextual hair tousling and ask to see what he was drawing, t h o u g h with enough of his
"artwork" stuck on the fridge, I'd already have a pretty good idea. (While the other children had graduated to fat-headed stick figures and landscapes with a litde strip of blue sky at the top, Kevin was still scrawling formless, jagged scrabble in black and purple crayon.) Yet all too often a midday reprieve meant return to a ringing phone: Miss Fabricant, informing me that Kevin was n o w drenched and the other kids were complaining because he smelled. Would I please—? I could hardly say no. Thus after picking h i m up at 2 P.M., I'd have made four trips to Love-'n'-
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Learn in a day. So m u c h for having plenty of time to myself once Kevin started school, as well as for the fantasy I had improbably kept alive that I might soon be able to resume the directorship ofAWAP.
Were Kevin a pliant, eager boy w h o happened to have this one unpleasant problem, she might have felt sorry for him. But Miss Fabricant's relationship with our son was not thriving for other reasons.
We may have made a mistake in sending him to a Montessori kindergarten, whose philosophy of h u m a n nature was, at the least, optimistic. Its supervised but unstructured education—kids were placed in a "stimulating" environment, with play stations including alphabet blocks, counting beads, and pea plants—presumed that children were inborn autodidacts. Yet in my experience, w h e n left to their o w n devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.
An initial report of Kevin's "progress" that N o v e m b e r mentioned that he was "somewhat undersocialized" and "may need assistance with initiating behaviors." Miss Fabricant was loath to criticize her charges, so it was pulling teeth to get her to translate that Kevin had spent his first two months sitting slack on a stool in the middle of the room, gazing dully at his puttering classmates. I knew that look, a precociously geriatric, glaucous-eyed glare sparked only by a sporadic glint of scornful incredulity.
W h e n pressed to play with the other boys and girls, he rephed that whatever they were doing was "dumb," speaking with the effortful weariness that in junior high school would convince his history teacher that he was drunk. However she persuaded him to craft those dark, furious drawings I will never know.
For me, these crayon mangles were a constant strain to admire.
I rapidly ran out of compliments (That has so much energy, Kevin!) and imaginative interpretations (Is that a storm, honey? Or maybe a picture of the hair and soap we pull out of a bathtub drain!). Hard-pressed to keep cooing over his exciting choice of colors w h e n he drew exclusively in black, brown, and violet, I couldn't help
— 2 1 0 —
but suggest timidly that abstract expressionism having hit such a dead-end in the fifties, maybe he should try approximating a bird or a tree. B u t for Miss Fabricant, Kevin's clogged-drain still lifes were proof positive that the Montessori m e t h o d could work wonders with a doorstop.
Nonetheless, even Kevin, w h o has such a gift for it, can sustain stasis for only so long w i t h o u t doing something to make life a little interesting, as he demonstrated so conclusively on Thursday. By the school year's end Miss Fabricant must have waxed nostalgic for the days w h e n Kevin Khatchadourian did absolutely nothing.
Maybe it goes without saying that the pea plants died, as did the sprouting avocado that replaced them, while at the same time I noticed idly that I was missing a bottle of bleach. There were mysteries: Subsequent to a particular day in January, the m o m e n t I led Kevin by the hand into the classroom, a little girl with Shirley Temple curls began to cry, and her wading worsened until at some point in February she never came back. Another boy, aggressive and rambunctious in September, one of those biffy sorts always boxing your leg and pushing other kids in the sandbox, suddenly became silent and inward, developing at once a severe case of asthma and an inexplicable terror of the coat closet, within five feet of which he would begin to wheeze. W h a t did that have to do with Kevin? I couldn't say; perhaps nothing.
And some of the incidents were pretty harmless, like the time little Jason stuck his feet in his bright red galoshes, only to find t h e m filled with squares of apple-spice cake leftover from snack time. Child's play—if real child's play—we'd agree.
W h a t most aggrieved Miss Fabricant, of course, was the fact that one after the other of her other charges started to regress in the potty department. She and I had concurred hopefully at the start of the year that Kevin might be inspired by the example of his peers on bathroom breaks, but I fear that quite the opposite took place, and by the time he graduated there was not just one six-year-old in diapers, but three or four.
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I was more unsettled by a couple of passing incidents.
O n e m o r n i n g some delicate slip of a thing nicknamed M u f f e t brought a tea set for show-and-tell. It wasn't any ordinary tea set, b u t an ornate, m a n y - c u p p e d affair w h o s e elements each fit into the formfitted cubbies of a velvet-lined mahogany box.
H e r m o t h e r later huffed that it was a family heirloom that M u f f e t was only allowed to bring out on special occasions. No d o u b t the set should never have been taken to a kindergarten, but the little girl was proud of the many matching pieces and had learned to handle t h e m with care, painstakingly laying out the cups in their saucers w i t h china spoons before a dozen of her classmates as they sat at their knee-high tables. After she'd p o u r e d a r o u n d of "tea" (the ubiquitous pineapple-grapefruit juice), Kevin hoisted his cup by its tiny handle in a salutary toast—and dropped it on the floor.
In rapid succession all eleven of his fellow tea-sippers followed suit. Before Miss Fabricant could get hold of the situation, the saucers and spoons quickly suffered the same tinkling fate, in consequence of which w h e n Muffet's mother retrieved her sobbing daughter that afternoon, nothing remained of the treasured tea set but the pot.
If I had ever nursed the hope that my son might t u r n out to display leadership qualities, this is n o t what I had in mind.
Yet w h e n I made a remark to this effect, Miss Fabricant was in no m o o d for drollery. I felt that in general her early twenties exhilaration at molding all those receptive little moppets into multiculturally aware, environmentally responsible vegetarians driven to rectify inequities in the Third World was beginning to fray around the edges. This was her first year of flaking poster paint from her eyebrows, going to sleep at night with the salty taste of paste in her gums, and exiling so many children at a shot for a " t i m e - o u t " that there was no longer any activity to take a time out from. After all, she had ann
ounced at o u r introduction in September that she "simply loves children," a declaration of which I am eternally dubious. From young w o m e n like Miss
— 212 —
Fabricant, with a blunt snub of a nose like a Charlotte potato and hips like Idahos, the infeasible assertion seems to decode, "I want to get married." Myself, after having n o t a child but this particular one, I couldn't see h o w anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiendy sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, D o n Rickles, and an upstairs neighbor w h o does 2,000 j u m p i n g jacks at three in the morning.
After relating her terrible tale in a breathless stage whisper, she clearly expected me to leap to cover the cost of the tea set.
Financially of course I could afford to, whatever it was worth, but I could not afford the attendant assumption of total blame. Face it, Franklin, you'd have had a fit. You were touchy about your son's being singled out, or as you would say, persecuted. Technically he had only broken the one setting, and covering one-twelfth of the loss was the most compensation you would countenance.
I also offered to speak to Kevin about "respecting the property of others," though Miss Fabricant was underwhelmed by this assurance. Maybe she intuited that these set lectures of mine had begun to hit with the swinging, mocking cadence of the one-potato, two-potato rhymes to which girls skip rope.
"That wasn't very nice, Kevin," I said in the car. "Breaking Muffet's teacup." I've no idea w h y we parents persist in believing that our kids yearn to be thought of as nice, since w h e n we ourselves commend acquaintances as very nice we usually mean they're dull.
"She has a stupid name."
" T h a t doesn't mean she deserves—"
"It slipped," he said lamely.
"That's not what Miss Fabricant said."
" H o w would she know." He yawned.
" H o w would you feel, kiddo, if you had something that you cared about more than anything, and you brought it to show to the class, and then someone smashed it?"
We Need to Talk About Kevin Page 22