Then he, ah, of course he fell, hard, against—against the lamp stand...!
I sickened myself, and every whitewash I concocted sounded preposterous. I had plenty of time to stew in my o w n juices on
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one of those hard, sea-green metal chairs in the waiting room, too; a nurse informed me that our son had to undergo surgery to have his "bone ends cleansed," a procedure I was more than happy to have remain opaque.
But w h e n Kevin emerged three hours later with his blindingly white cast, Dr. Goldblatt patted our son on the back and admired what a brave young man I had raised, while the orthopedic surgeon impersonally detailed the nature of the break, the dangers of infection, the importance of keeping the cast dry, and the date Kevin should return for follow-up care. Both doctors were kind enough to omit mention of the fact that the staff had been obliged to change our son's dirty diapers; Kevin no longer smelled. My head bobbed dumbly up and down until I stole a quick glance at Kevin, w h o met my eyes with the clear, sparkling gaze of perfect complicity.
I owed him one. He k n e w I owed h i m one. And I would owe him one for a very long time.
Driving back home, I chattered ( What Mommer did was very, very wrong, and she is so, so sorry—though this distancing device of the third person must have cast my regrets in a dubious light, as if I were already blaming the incident on my imaginary friend).
Kevin said nothing. His expression aloof, almost haughty, the fingers of his plastered right arm tucked Napoleonically in his shirt, he sat upright in the front seat and surveyed the flashes of the Tappan Zee Bridge through the side window, for all the world Hke a triumphant general, w o u n d e d nobly in battle, n o w basking in the cheers of the crowd.
I enjoyed no such equipoise. I might have escaped the police and social services, but I was condemned to run one more gauntlet.
W h e t h e r up against the wall I might have contrived some cock-and-bull about bumping into Kevin for Dr. Goldblatt, I could not imagine locking eyes and flinging patent nonsense at you.
"Hi! W h e r e were you guys?" you shouted w h e n we walked into the kitchen.Your back was turned as you finished slathering peanut butter on a Ritz cracker.
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My heart was thumping, and I still had no idea what I was going to say. So far, I had never wittingly done anything that would imperil our marriage—or OUT family—but I was sure that if anything would push us to the brink, this was it.
"—-Jesus, Kev!" you exclaimed with a m o u t h covered in crumbs, swallowing hard without having chewed. " W h a t the heck happened to you?"
You brushed your hands hastily and plunged to your knees before Kevin. My skin prickled all over, as if someone had just switched on the voltage and I were an electric fence. I had that distinctive presentiment of I-have-one-more-second-or-two-after-which-nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again, the same limp apprehension of spotting an o n c o m i n g car in your lane w h e n it's too late to turn the wheel.
But headlong collision was averted at the last minute. Already accustomed to trusting your son's version of events over your wife's, you had gone straight to Kevin. This once you were mistaken. H a d you asked me, I promise—or at least I like to think—that, with bowed head, I'd have told you the truth.
"I broke my arm."
"I can see that. H o w ' d that happen?"
"I fell."
" W h e r e ' d you fall?"
"I had poopy pants. M o m m e r went to get more wipes. I fell off the changing table. O n — o n t o my Tonka d u m p truck.
M o m m e r took m e t o D o c t o r Goldbutt."
He was good. He was very, very good; you may n o t appreciate h o w good. He was s m o o t h — t h e story was ready.
N o n e of the details were inconsistent or gratuitous; he had spurned the extravagant fantasies with w h i c h most children his age w o u l d camouflage a spilled drink or broken mirror. He had learned w h a t all skilled liars register if they're ever to make a career of it: Always appropriate as m u c h of the truth as possible.
A well-constructed lie is assembled largely f r o m the alphabet blocks of fact, w h i c h will as easily make a pyramid as a platform.
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He did have p o o p y pants. He remembered, correctly, that the second time I changed h i m that afternoon I had finished the open b o x of Wet Wipes. He had, m o r e or less, fallen off the changing table. His Tonka d u m p truck was i n d e e d — I checked later that n i g h t — o n the nursery floor at the time. Furthermore, I marveled at his having intuited that simply falling three feet onto the floor w o u l d probably not be e n o u g h to break his arm; he w o u l d need to land haplessly on some hard metal object.
A n d however short, his tale was laced w i t h elegant touches: Using Mommer w h e n he had eschewed the cutesy sobriquet for m o n t h s lent his story a cuddly, affectionate cast that fantastically belied the real story; Doctor Goldbutt was playfully scatological, setting you at ease— your happy, healthy boy was already back to normal. Perhaps most impressive of all, he did not, as he had at the emergency room, allow himself the one collusive glance in my direction that might have given the game away.
"Gosh," you exclaimed. "That must have hurt!"
" T h e orthopedist says that for an open fracture," I said, "—it broke the skin—it was pretty clean, and should m e n d well." N o w Kevin and I did look at each other, just long enough to seal the pact. I had ransomed my soul to a six-year-old.
"Are you going to let me sign your cast?" you asked. "That's a tradition, you know. Your friends and family all sign their names and wish you to get well soon."
"Sure, Dad! But first I got to go to the bathroom." He sauntered off, his free hand swinging.
" D i d I hear that right?" you asked quiedy.
"Guess so." R i g i d for hours—fear is an isometric exercise—I was exhausted, and for once the last thing on my m i n d was our son's toilet training.
You put an arm around my shoulders. "Man, that must have given you a scare."
"It was all my fault," I said, squirming.
" N o mother can watch a kid every second."
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I wished you wouldn't be so understanding. "Yes, but I should have—"
"Sh-sh!" You raised a forefinger, and a delicate trickling emitted from the hall bathroom: music to the parental ear. " W h a t do you think did the trick, just the shock?" you whispered. " O r maybe he's scared of landing back on that changing table."
I shrugged. Despite appearances, I did not beheve that by flying into a rage at yet another soiled diaper I had terrorized our boy into using the toilet. O h , it had everything to do with our set-to in the nursery, all right. I was being rewarded.
"This calls for celebration. I ' m going to go in and congratulate that g u y — "
I put a hand on your arm. " D o n ' t push your luck. Let him do it quietly, don't make a big deal out of it. Kevin prefers his reversals off-camera."
That said, I k n e w better than to read pee-pee in the potty as admission of defeat. He had w o n the larger battle; acceding to the toilet was the kind of trifling concession that a magnanimous if condescending victor can afford to toss a vanquished adversary.
O u r six-year-old had successfully tempted me into violating my o w n rules of engagement. I had committed a war crime—for which, barring my son's clement silence, my very husband would extradite me to T h e Hague.
W h e n Kevin returned from the bathroom tugging up his pants with one hand, I proposed that we have big bowl of p o p c o r n for dinner, adding obsequiously, with lots and lots of salt! Drinking in the music of the normal life that I had minutes before kissed good-bye—your clamorous banging of pots, the clarion clang of our stainless steel bowl, the merry ratde of kernels—I'd a foreboding that this crawling-on-my-belly-like-a-reptile m o d e could endure almost indefinitely so long as Kevin kept his m o u t h shut.
W h y didn't he blab? By all appearances, he was protecting
his mother. All right. I'll allow for that. Nevertheless, a balance-sheet calculation may have entered in. Before a distant expiry date, a
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secret accrues interest by dint of having been kept; c o m p o u n d e d by lying, Know how I really broke my arm, Dad? might have even more explosive impact in a month's time. Too, so long as he retained the principle of his windfall in his account, he could continue to take out loans against it, whereas blowing his wad all at once would plunge his assets back to a six-year-old's allowance of $5 a week.
Further, after all my sanctimonious singsong lectures (How would you feel... ?), I had provided him with a rare opportunity to annex the moral high g r o u n d — w h o s e elevation would afford a few novel views, even if this was not, at length, a territory destined to suit his preferences in real estate. Mr. Divide-and-C o n q u e r may also have intuited that secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in on them. My chatter to you about Kevin's needing to opt for baths over showers to keep the cast dry was artificially bright and stilted; w h e n I asked Kevin whether he wanted parmesan on the popcorn, the question was rich with appeal, terror, and slavish gratitude.
For in one respect I was touched, and remain so: I think he had experienced a closeness to me that he was reluctant to let go. N o t only were we in this cover-up together, but during the very assault we were concealing, Kevin too may have felt whole, yanked to life by the awesome sisal strength of the umbilical tie. For once I'd k n o w n myself for his mother. So he may have k n o w n himself also, sailing amazedly across the nursery like Peter Pan, for my son.
T h e remainder of that summer defied all my narrative instincts.
Had I been scripting a TV movie about a violent harridan w h o flew into fits of blind dudgeon during w h i c h she was endowed with superhuman strength, I'd have had her young boy tiptoeing around the house, shooting her tremulous grins, offering up desperate gestures of appeasement, and just in general shuffling, cowering, and yes-massa-ing about the place, anything to keep
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from taking impromptu trips across whole rooms of their h o m e without his feet ever touching the floor.
So m u c h for the movies. I tiptoed. My grins quivered. I shuffled and cowered as if auditioning for a minstrel show.
Because let's talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I ' m not so sure. Children? T h e y can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born.
W h a t can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? W i t h what do we back up o u r prohibitions if the kid heads belligerendy for the door? T h e crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. A kid does w h a t we say—not to put too fine a point on it—because we can break his arm.
Yet Kevin's white cast became a blazing emblem, not of what I could do to him, but of what I could not. In resorting to the ultimate power, I had robbed myself of it. Since I could not be trusted to use force in moderation, I was stuck with an impotent arsenal, useless overkill, like a stockpile of nuclear weapons. He k n e w full well that I would never lay a hand on him again.
So in case you worry that in 1989 I became a convert to Neanderthal brutality, all that wholeness and realness and immediacy that I discovered in using Kevin for a shot put evaporated in a N e w York minute. I remember feeling physically shorter. My posture deteriorated. My voice went wispy.To Kevin, I couched my every request as an optional suggestion: Honey, would you like to get in the car? You wouldn't mind terribly if we went to the store? Maybe it would be a good idea if you didn't pick the crustfrom the middle of Mommer's freshly baked pie. As for the lessons he found such an insult, I returned to the Montessori method.
At first, he p u t me through a variety of paces, as if training a performing bear. He would demand something time-consuming for his lunch, like homemade pizza, and after I'd spent the
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m o r n i n g kneading dough and simmering sauce he'd pick two pieces of pepperoni off his slices and then fold the remains into a glutinous baseball to pitch to the sink. T h e n he tired of M o t h e r -
as-plaything as quickly as he did of his other toys, which I guess made me lucky.
In fact, as I foisted on the boy the very salt-laden cheesies and whizzies previously meted out in one-ounce rations, my solicitation soon got on his nerves. I had a tendency to hover, and Kevin would shoot me the kind of daggers you fire at a stranger w h o sits next to you on a train w h e n the car is practically empty.
I was proving an unworthy adversary, and any further victories over a guardian already reduced to such a cringing, submissive condition were b o u n d to feel cheap.
Although it was tricky with a sling, he n o w took baths on his own, and if I stooped to wrap him in a fresh towel, he shied, then swaddled himself. In fact, on the heels of having docilely submitted to diaper changing and testicle swabbing, he developed a stern modesty, and by August, I was banished from the bathroom. He dressed in private. Aside from that remarkable two weeks during which he got so sick w h e n he was ten, he would not allow me to see h i m naked again until the age of fourteen—at which point I'd gladly have forfeited the privilege.
As for my incontinent outpouring of tenderness, it was tainted with apology, and Kevin was having n o n e of it. W h e n I kissed his forehead, he wiped it off. W h e n I combed his hair, he batted me away and rumpled his locks. W h e n I hugged him, he objected coldly that I was hurting his arm. And w h e n I averred,
"I love you, k i d d o " — n o longer recited with the solemnity of the Apostle's Creed but rather with the feverish, mindless supplication of a Hail Mary—he'd assume a caustic expression from which that permanent left-hand cock of his m o u t h was enduringly to emerge. O n e day w h e n I avowed yet again I love you, kiddo, Kevin shot back, Nyeh NYEE nyeh, nyeh-nyeeeeh! and I gave it a rest.
He clearly believed that he had f o u n d me out. He had glimpsed behind the curtain, and no a m o u n t of cooing and snack
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food w o u l d erase a vision at least as indelible as a first encounter with parental sex. Yet w h a t surprised me was h o w m u c h this revelation of his mother's true colors— her viciousness, her violence—seemed to please him. If he had my number, it was one that intrigued h i m far m o r e than the twos and threes of o u r dreary arithmetic drills before his "accident," and he side-eyed his m o t h e r with a brand n e w — I wouldn't call it quite respect— interest. Yes.
As for you and me, until that summer I'd b e c o m e accustomed to concealing things from you, but mostly thought crimes—my atrocious blankness at Kevin's birth, my aversion to our house. While to some extent we all shelter one another from the cacophony of horrors in our heads, even these intangible unsaids made me mournful. B u t it was one thing to keep my own counsel about the dread that had descended on me whenever it was time to fetch our son from kindergarten, quite another to neglect to tell you that, oh, by the way, I broke his arm. However wicked, thoughts didn't seem to take up space in my body, w h d e keeping a three-dimensional secret was like having swallowed a cannonball.
You seemed so far away. I'd gaze at you as you undressed at night with a spectral nostalgia, half expecting that w h e n I crossed to brush my teeth you'd step through my body as easdy as through moonlight. Watching you in the backyard teaching Kevin to cup a baseball in a catcher's mitt with his good right h a n d — t h o u g h in truth he seemed more gifted with pizza—I'd press my palm against a sun-warmed windowpane as if against a spiritual barrier, stabbed by the same vertiginous well-wishing and aching sense of exclusion that would have tortured me had I been dead. Even w h e n I put my hand on your chest, I couldn't seem to quite touch you, as if every time you shed your clothes there were, like Bartholomew's hats, another L. L. Bean w o r k s
hirt underneath.
Meantime, you and I never went out just the two of us anymore—to catch Crimes and Misdemeanors, grab a bite at the River Club in N y a c k , m u c h less to indulge ourselves at the U n i o n
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Square Cafe in the city. It's true that we had trouble with sitters, but you acquiesced to our housebound nights readily enough, prizing the light summer evenings for coaching Kevin on fourth downs, three-pointer field goals, and the infield-fly rule. Your blindness to the fact that Kevin displayed neither interest nor aptitude in any of these sports nagged me a bit, but I was mosdy disappointed that you didn't ever covet the same quality time with your wife.
There's no purpose to talking around it. I was jealous. A n d I was lonely.
It was toward the end of August w h e n our next-door neighbor leaned on our doorbell with censorious insistence. I heard you answer it from the kitchen.
"You tell your kid it's not funny!" R o g e r Corley exclaimed.
" W h o a , s l o w down,Rog!"said you."Criticize anybody's sense of humor, gotta tell the j o k e first." Despite your jocular cadence, you did not invite him in, and w h e n I peered out to the foyer I noticed that you had only opened the door halfway.
"Trent just rode his bike d o w n that big hill on Palisades Parade, lost control, and landed in the bushes! He's knocked up pretty bad!"
I'd tried to stay on amicable terms with the Corleys, whose son was a year or two older than Kevin. T h o u g h Moira Corley's initial enthusiasm for arranging play dates had waned without explanation, she'd once displayed a gracious interest in my Armenian background, and I'd stopped by only the day before to give her a loaf of freshly baked katah—do you ever miss it?—that slightly sweet, obscenely buttery layered bread my mother taught me to make. Being on congenial terms with your neighbors was one of the few appeals of suburban life, and I feared that your narrowing our front door was beginning to appear unfriendly.
We Need to Talk About Kevin Page 25