We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

  limbs, anything to get something bright and liquid flowing again, out in the open and slippery between our fingers. That said, I feared what lay beneath. I feared that at bottom I hated my life and hated being a mother and even in moments hated being your wife, since you had done this to me, turned my days into an unending stream of shit and piss and cookies that Kevin didn't even like.

  Meanwhile, no amount of shouting was resolving the diaper crisis. In a rare inversion of our roles, you were apt to regard the problem as all very internally complicated, and I thought it was simple: We wanted him to use the toilet, so he wouldn't.

  Since we weren't about to stop wanting him to use the toilet, I was at a loss.

  You doubtless found my usage of the word war preposterous.

  But in corralling Kevin to the changing table—now small for the purpose; his legs dangled over its raised flap—I was often reminded of those scrappy guerrilla conflicts in which underequipped, ragtag rebel forces manage to inflict surprisingly serious losses on powerful armies of state. Lacking the vast if unwieldy arsenal of the establishment, the rebels fall back on cunning. Their attacks, while often slight, are frequent, and sustained aggravation can be more demoralizing over time than a few high-casualty spectaculars. At such an ordnance disadvantage, guerrillas use whatever lies at hand, sometimes finding in the material of the everyday a devastating dual purpose. I gather that you can make bombs, for example, out of methanating manure. For his part, Kevin, too, ran a seat-of-the-pants operation, and Kevin, too, had learned to form a weapon from shit.

  O h , he submitted to being changed placidly enough. He seemed to bask in the ritual and may have inferred from my growing briskness a gratifying embarrassment, for swabbing his tight little testicles w h e n he was nearly six was beginning to feel risque.

  If Kevin enjoyed our trysts, I did not. I have never been persuaded that even an infant's effluents smell precisely "sweet";

  — 2 2 3 —

  a kindergartner's feces benefit from no such reputation. Kevin's had grown firmer and stickier, and the nursery n o w exuded the sour fug of subway tunnels colonized by the homeless. I felt sheepish about the mounds of nonbiodegradable Pampers we contributed to the local landfill. Worst of all, some days Kevin seemed deliberately to hold his intestines in check for a second strike. If no Leonardo of the crayon world, he had a virtuoso's command of his sphincter.

  Mind, I'm setting the table here, but hardly excusing what happened that July. I don't expect you to be anything but horrified. I'm not even asking your forgiveness; it's late for that.

  But I badly need your understanding.

  Kevin graduated from kindergarten in June, and we were stuck with one another all summer. (Listen, I got on Kevin's nerves as much as he got on mine.) Despite Miss Fabricant s modest successes with Drano illustrations, the Montessori method was not working wonders in our home. Kevin had still not learned to play. Left to entertain himself, he would sit like a lump on the floor with a moody detachment that turned the atmosphere of the whole house oppressive. So I tried to involve him in projects, assembling yarn and buttons and glue and scraps of colorful fabric in the playroom for making sock puppets. I'd join him on the carpet and have a cracking good time myself, really, except in the end I would have made a nibbling rabbit with a red felt mouth and big floppy blue ears and drinking-straw whiskers, and Kevin's arm would sport a plain knee-high dipped in paste. I didn't expect our child to necessarily be a crafts wunderkind, but he could at least have made an effort.

  I also tried to give him a j u m p on first grade by tutoring him on the basics."Let's work on our numbers!" I'd propose.

  "What for."

  "So when you get to school you'll be better than anyone else at arithmetic."

  "What good is arithmetic."

  "Well, you remember yesterday, and M o m m e r paid the bills?

  — 2 2 4 —

  You have to be able to add and subtract to pay bills, and k n o w h o w m u c h money you have left."

  "You used a calculator."

  "Well, you have to k n o w arithmetic to be sure the calculator is right."

  " W h y would you use it at all if it doesn't always work."

  "It always works," I begrudge.

  "So you don't need arithmetic."

  "To use a calculator," I say, flustered, "you still have to k n o w what a five looks like, all right? Now, let's practice our counting.

  W h a t comes after three?"

  "Seven," says Kevin.

  We would proceed in this fashion, until once after one more random exchange ("What comes before nine?" "Fifty-three.") he looked me lifelessly in the eye and droned in a fast-forward m o n o t o n e , "Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleven-twelve...," pausing two or three times for a breath but otherwise making it flawlessly to a hundred. " N o w can we quit?" I certainly felt the fool.

  I roused no more enthusiasm for literacy. " D o n ' t tell me," I'd cut h i m off after raising the prospect of reading t i m e . " What for.

  What good is if. Well, I'll tell you. Sometimes you're going to be bored and there's nothing to do except you can always read a book. Even on the train or at a bus stop."

  " W h a t if the b o o k is boring."

  " T h e n you find a different one. T h e r e are more books in the world than you'll ever have time to read, so you'll never run out."

  " W h a t if they're all boring."

  "I don't think that would be possible, Kevin," I'd say crisply.

  "I think it's possible," he'd differ.

  "Besides, w h e n you grow up you'll need a job, and then you'll have to be able to read and write really well or no one will want to hire you." Privately, of course, I reflected that if this were true most of the country would be unemployed.

  - 2 2 5 - -

  " D a d doesn't write. He drives around and takes pictures."

  " T h e r e are other j o b s — "

  " W h a t if I don't want a job."

  " T h e n you'd have to go on welfare. T h e government would give you just a little money so you don't starve, but not enough to do anything fun."

  " W h a t if I don't want to do anything."

  "I bet you will. If you make your o w n money, you can go to movies and restaurants and even different countries, like M o m m e r used to." At used to, I winced.

  "I think I want to go on welfare." It was the kind of line I'd heard other parents repeat with a chortle at dinner parties, and I struggled to find it adorable.

  I don't k n o w h o w those home-schooling families pull it off.

  Kevin never seemed to be paying any attention, as if listening were an indignity. Yet somehow, behind my back, he picked up what he needed to know. He learned the way he ate—furtively, on the sly, shoveling information like a fisted cheese sandwich w h e n no one was watching. He hated to admit he didn't k n o w something already, and his blanket playing-dumb routine was cunningly crafted to cover any genuine gaps in his education.

  In Kevins mind, pretend-ignorance wasn't shameful, and I was never able to discriminate between his feigned stupidity and the real thing. H e n c e if at the dinner table I decried R o b i n Williams's role in Dead Poets Society as trite, I felt obliged to explain to Kevin that the word meant "like what lots of people have done already."

  But he'd receive this definition with a precocious uh-duh. H a d he learned the word trite at three, w h e n he was faking not being able to talk at all? You tell me.

  In any event, after belligerently botching his alphabet for weeks ("What comes after R ? " Elemenno), he interrupted one of my diatribes— about h o w he couldn't just sit there and expect learning to pour into his ear all by itself—by singing the alphabet song impeccably start to finish, albeit with an aggressive tunelessness that even for the tin-eared was improbable and tinged

  — 226 —

  with a minor key that made this bouncy children's p n e u m o n i c sound like kaddish. I suppose they'd taught it at Love-'n'-Learn, not that Kevin had le
t on. W h e n he finished mockingly, Now I've said my ABCs, tell me what you think of me, I snapped furiously,

  "I think you're a wicked little boy w h o enjoys wasting his mother's time!" and he smiled, extravagantly, with both sides of his m o u t h .

  He wasn't precisely disobedient, which is one detail that the Sunday magazine exposes often got wrong. Indeed, he could follow the letter of his assignments with chilling precision.

  After the obligatory period of aping incompetence—crippled, unclosed P's wilting below the line as if they'd been shot—he sat d o w n on c o m m a n d and wrote perfectly within the lines of his exercise book, "Look, Sally, look. Go. Go. Go. R u n . R u n . R u n .

  R u n , Sally, R u n . " I have no way of explaining w h y it was rather awful, except that he exposed to me the insidious nihilism of the grade-school primer. Even the way he f o r m e d those letters made me uneasy.They had no character. I mean, he didn't really develop handwriting as we understand it, connotatively the personal stamp on standardized script. From the point he admitted he k n e w how, his printing unerringly replicated the examples in his textbook, with no extra tails or squiggles;hisT's were crossed and Is dotted, and never before had the bloated interior of B s and O's and D's seemed to contain so much empty space.

  My point is that, however technically biddable, he was exasperating to teach. You could savor his remarkable progress w h e n you came home, but I was never treated to those Eureka!

  moments of sudden breakthrough that reward an adult's hours of patient coaxing and m i n d - n u m b i n g repetition. It is no more satisfying to teach a child w h o refuses to learn in plain view than it is to feed one by leaving a plate behind in the kitchen. He was clearly denying me satisfaction on purpose. He was determined that I should feel useless and unneeded. T h o u g h I may n o t have been as convinced as you were that o u r son was a genius, he was—well, I suppose he still is, if such things can be said of a boy w h o clings to an act of such crowning idiocy— very bright. But my day-to-day experience as his tutor was that of instructing an exceptional child only in the euphemistic tradition that seems to concoct an ever more dishonest name for moron every year. I would drill what-is-two-plus-three over and over and over, until once w h e n he staunchly, maliciously refused to say five one more time I sat him down, scrawled,

  12,387

  6,945

  138,964

  3,987,234

  scored a line under it and said, "There! Add that up then! A n d multiply it by 25 while you're at it, since you think you're so smart!"

  I missed you during the day, as I missed my old life w h e n I was t o o busy to miss you during the day. H e r e I had b e c o m e quite well versed in Portuguese history d o w n to the order of the monarchy and h o w many Jews were murdered during the Inquisition, and n o w I was reciting the alphabet. N o t the Cyrillic alphabet, n o r the H e b r e w one, the alphabet. Even if Kevin had proved an ardent pupil, for me the regime would doubtless have felt like a demotion of the precipitous sort c o m m o n l y constrained to dreams: Suddenly I ' m sitting in the back of the class, taking a test with a broken pencil and no pants. Nonetheless, I might have abided this h u m b l i n g role if it weren't for the additional humiliation of hving, for over six years now, up to my elbows in shit.

  O k a y — o u t with it.

  There came an afternoon in July that, per tradition, Kevin had soiled his diapers once and been cleaned up with the whole diaper cream and talcum routine, only to complete the evacuation of his bowels twenty minutes later.

  Or so I assumed. But this time he outdid himself. This was the

  — 2 2 8 —

  same afternoon that, after I had insisted he write a sentence that was meaningful about his life and not one more tauntingly inert line about Sally, he wrote in his exercise book, "In kendergarden evrybody says my mother looks rilly old." I'd turned beet-red, and that was w h e n I sniffed another telltale waft. After I'd just changed him twice. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I lifted h i m to a stand by the waist, pulling his Pampers open to make sure. I lost it. " H o w do you do it?" I shouted. "You hardly eat anything, where does it come from?"

  A rush of heat rippled up through my body, and I barely noticed that Kevin was n o w dangling with his feet off the carpet.

  He seemed to weigh nothing, as if that tight, dense little body stocked with such inexhaustible quantities of shit was packed instead with Styrofoam peanuts.There's no other way to say this.

  I threw him halfway across the nursery. He landed with a dull clang against the edge of the stainless steel changing table. His head at a quizzical tilt, as if he were finally interested in something, he slid, in seeming slow motion, to the floor.

  A

  JANUARY 1 9 , 2 0 0 1

  Dear Franklin,

  So n o w you know.

  I had rash hopes w h e n I first rushed over to h i m that he was all r i g h t — h e looked unmarked—until I rolled h i m over to reveal the arm he fell on. His forearm must have struck the edge of the changing table w h e n for the first time, as you once remarked in jest, our son had learned to fly. It was bleeding and a little crooked and bulging in the middle with something white poking out and I felt sick. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry! I whispered.Yet however weak with remorse, I was still intoxicated from a m o -

  m e n t that may p u t the he to my preening incomprehension of Thursday. On its far side, I was aghast. But the very center of the m o m e n t was bliss. Hurtling our little boy I-didn't-care-where-besides-away, I had heedlessly given over, like Violetta, to clawing a chronic, torturous itch.

  Before you c o n d e m n me utterly, I beg you to understand just h o w hard I'd been trying to be a good mother. But trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.

  Distrusting my every impulse from the instant he was laid on my breast, I'd followed a devout regime of hugging my little boy an average of three times a day, admiring something he did or said at least twice, and reciting I love you, kiddo or You know that your Daddy and I love you very much with the predictable uniformity of liturgical professions of faith. But too strictly observed, most sacraments grow hollow. Moreover, for six solid years I'd put my every utterance on the five-second delay of call-in radio shows, just to make sure I didn't broadcast anything obscene, slanderous, or contrary to company policy. T h e vigilance came at a cost. It made me remote, halting, and awkward.

  W h e n hoisting Kevin's body in that fluid adrenal lift, for once I'd felt graceful,because at last there was an unmediated confluence between what I felt and what I did. It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as m u c h as it makes life possible. A p o o r substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in c o m m o n with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness. For two seconds I'd felt whole, and like Kevin Khatchadourian's real mother. I felt close to him. I felt like myself—my true, unexpurgated self—and I felt we were finally communicating.

  As I swept a shock of hair from his moist forehead, the muscles of Kevin's face worked furiously; his eyes screwed up and his m o u t h grimaced into a near-smile. Even w h e n I ran to fetch that morning's New York Times and slipped it under his arm he did not cry. Holding the paper under the a r m — I still remember the headline by his elbow, " M o r e A u t o n o m y for Baltics Stirs Discomfort in M o s c o w " — I helped him to his feet, asking if anything else hurt and he shook his head. I started to pick h i m up, another shake; he would walk.Together we shuffled to the phone. It's possible that he wiped away the odd tear w h e n I wasn't looking, but Kevin would no m o r e suffer in plain view than he would learn to count.

  O u r local pediatrician Dr. Goldblatt m e t us at Nyack Hospital's tiny, crushingly intimate emergency room, where I felt certain that everyone could tell what I'd done. T h e notice for the " N e
w York Sheriff's Victim Hotline" beside the registration w i n d o w seemed posted specially for my son. I talked too m u c h and said too little; I babbled to the admissions nurse about what had

  — 2 3 2 —

  happened but not how. Meantime Kevin's unnatural self-control had mutated into the bearing of a martinet; he stood straight with his chin lifted, and turned at right angles. Having assumed responsibility for supporting his arm with the newspaper, he allowed Dr. Goldblatt to hold his shoulder as he marched d o w n the hall but shook off my hand. W h e n he entered the orthopedic surgeon's examining room, he about-faced in the doorway to announce briskly, "I can see the doctor by myself."

  " D o n ' t you want me to keep you company, in case it hurts?"

  "You can wait out there," he commanded, the muscles rippling in his clenched jaw the only indication that it hurt already.

  "That's quite a little man you've got there, Eva," said Dr.

  Goldblatt. "Sounds like you got your orders." To my horror, he closed the door.

  I did, I really did want to be there for Kevin. I was desperate to reestablish that I was a parent he could trust, not a monster w h o would hurl him about the r o o m at a moment's notice like a vengeful apparition from Poltergeist. But, yes, I was also in dread that Kevin would tell the surgeon or Benjamin Goldblatt what I'd done. They have laws about these things. I could be arrested; my case could be written up in the Rockland County Times in an appalled sidebar. I could, as I had so tastelessly joked that I would welcome, have Kevin taken away from me for real. At a m i n i m u m I might have to submit to mortifying monthly visits from some disapproving social worker sent to check my son for bruises.

  However m u c h I deserved rebuke, I still preferred the slow b u r n of private self-excoriation to the hot lash of public reproof.

  So as I stared glaze-eyed into the glassed-in case preserving gushy letters to the nursing staff from satisfied customers, I scrambled for soft-core rewrites. Oh, doctor, you know how boys exaggerate. Throw him? He was running headlong down the hall, and when I walked out of the bedroom I bumped into him, by accident...