At the end Kevin posed with his club hke a dapper gendeman, still silent but with a nou>-what? look, as if to say, okay, I did what you wanted and I hope you're satisfied.
"Well," I said grimly. "You won."
I insisted on driving h o m e to get his jacket, though reappearing back at the house so soon embarrassed me—you looked bemused—
— 3 1 8 —
and going up through Nyack to Gladstone and back to Nyack to shop introduced yet more awkwardness. Nevertheless, n o w that Kevin had made a hash of my one playful, offbeat idea for our afternoon—having turned it into a mechanical, bone-chilling farce—he seemed more contented. O n c e we parked (way d o w n Broadway, because the mid-December traffic was b u m p e r - t o -
b u m p e r and we were lucky to find the space we got), to my astonishment he volunteered a thought.
"I don't get w h y you celebrate Christmas w h e n you aren't a Christian!' He pronounced the Christ with a long I to emphasize the Jesus bit.
"Well," I said,"it's true that your father and I don't believe that some young man w h o was good at sound bites 2,000 years ago was the son of God. But it's nice to have holidays, isn't it? To make part of the year a litde different, something to look forward to. I learned studying anthropology at Green Bay is that it's important to observe cultural rituals."
"Just so long as they're totally empty," said Kevin breezily.
"You think we're hypocrites."
"Your word, not mine." He glided past the Runcible Spoon around the corner to Main Street, turning the heads of some older high school girls loitering across the way by the Long Island D r u m Center. Frankly I don't think his smoky Armenian looks drew their attention so much as the languid elegance of his manner, at such odds with his preposterous clothes: He moved levelly on the same plane, as if rolling on casters. T h e n , those fine exposed hipbones couldn't have hurt.
"So," Kevin summed up, weaving through pedestrians, "you want to keep the presents and the high-test eggnog, but chuck the prayers and the boring Christmas Eve service. To cash in on the good stuff without having to pay for it with the shit."
"You could say that," I agreed cautiously. "In a broad sense I've tried to do that all my life."
"Okay, long as you can get away with it," he said cryptically.
" N o t sure it's always possible." And he let the subject go.
— 319 —
Conversation once again ceased to flow, so w h e n one of t h e m almost ran me over, I supposed aloud that maybe we could buy Celia one of those superthin aluminum R a z o r scooters that had abrupdy b e c o m e so popular.
Kevin said, "You know, couple years ago, you give a kid some geeky scooter for Christmas and he'd have bawled his eyes out."
I lunged at the chance to be collegial. "You're right, that's one of the things that's w r o n g with this country, it's so faddish.
It was the same w i t h in-line skates, right? Overnight, a must-have. Still—" I bit my lip, watching yet another boy whiz past on o n e of those narrow silver frames. "I wouldn't want Celia to feel left out."
"Mumsey. Get real. Ceil would be scared shitless. You'd have to hold her litde hand everywhere she w e n t or you'd have to carry her, scooter and all.You ready? 'Cause count me out."
Okay. We didn't get the scooter.
In fact, we didn't buy anything. Kevin made me so self-conscious that everything I considered seemed to damn me. I looked at the scarves and hats through his eyes and they suddenly seemed stupid or unnecessary. We had scarves. We had hats. W h y bother.
T h o u g h I was sorry to lose our parking space, I was glad of the chance to act the proper mother for once and announced sternly that we would n o w go back to the house, where he would dress for dinner in normal-sized clothes—although his airy response, "Whatever you say," made me more aware of the limits to my authority than of its force. As we passed back in front of the Runcible Spoon on the way to the car, a corpulent w o m a n was sitting alone at a table by the window, and her hot fudge sundae was built on that lavish American scale that Europeans b o t h envy and disparage.
"Whenever I see fat people, they're eating," I ruminated safely out of the diner's earshot. " D o n ' t give me this it's glands or genes or a slow metabolism rubbish. It's food. They're fat because they eat the w r o n g food, too m u c h of it, and all the time."
— 3 2 0 —
T h e usual lack of pickup, not even mm-hmrn, or true. Finally, a block later: "You know, you can be kind of harsh."
I was taken aback and stopped walking. "You're one to talk."
"Yeah. I am.Wonder where I got it."
Driving home, then, every time I came up with something to say—about pushy SUV drivers (or, as I preferred to playfully misspeak, SRO drivers), garish Nyack Christmas lights—I realized it was whitding, and I'd swallow the remark. I was apparently one of those types who, should she follow that edict about if you can't say something nice, would say nothing at all. O u r raw silence in my Luna supplied a foretaste of the long periods of dead air that would pass in Claverack.
Back home, you and Celia had been working on h o m e m a d e tree ornaments all afternoon, and you'd helped her to weave tinsel in her hair. You were in the kitchen arranging frozen fish sticks on a tray w h e n I busded from the b e d r o o m and asked you to fasten the top button of my hot-pink silk dress. "Wow," you said, "you're not looking very maternal."
"I'd like to create a sense of occasion," I said. "I thought you liked this dress."
"I do. Still," you mumbled, buttoning, " T h a t slit up the thigh is cut pretty high.You don't want to make him uneasy."
" I ' m making someone uneasy, obviously."
I left to find some earrings and to splash on a little O p i u m , then returned to the kitchen to discover that Kevin had not, for once, merely followed the letter of my law, for I'd half expected to find h i m decked out in a "normal-sized" bunny suit. He was standing at the sink with his back to me, but even so I could see that his lush black rayon slacks rested gendy on his narrow hips and fell to his cordovans with a slight break. I hadn't bought him that white shirt; with its full sleeves and graceful drape, it may have been fencing garb.
I was touched, I really was, and I was about to exclaim about what a handsome figure he cut w h e n he didn't wear clothes designed for an eight-year-old w h e n he turned around. In his
— 321 —
hands was the carcass of a w h o l e cold chicken. Or it had been whole, before he clawed off b o t h breasts and a leg, the drumstick of which he was still devouring.
I probably turned white. " I ' m about to take you to dinner.Why are you eating the better part of a roast chicken before we go?"
Kevin wiped a little grease off the corner of his m o u t h with the heel of his hand, ill-concealing a smirk. "I was hungry." A rare enough admission that it could only be a ruse. "You k n o w —growing boy?"
"Put that away right now and get your coat."
So naturally once we were seated in Hudson House our growing boy had grown enough for the day, and he allowed that his appetite had waned. I would break bread with my son only in the most literal sense, for he refused to order an entree or even an appetizer, preferring to tear at the basket of hard rolls. T h o u g h he ripped the sourdough into ever smaller pieces, I don't think he ate any.
Defiandy, I ordered the mesclun salad, pigeon-breast appetizer, salmon, and a whole bottle of sauvignon blanc that I sensed I would finish.
"So," I began, battling discomfiture as I picked at greens under Kevin's ascetic eye; we were in a restaurant, why should I feel apologetic about eating? "How's school going?"
"It's going," he said. "Can't ask for m o r e than that."
"I can ask for a few more details."
"You want my course schedule?"
"No." I badly did not want to get annoyed. "Like, what's your favorite subject this semester?" I remembered too late that for Kevin the word favorite attached exclusively to the enthusiasms of others that he l
iked to despoil.
"You imply I like any."
"Well," I thrashed, having difficulty stabbing a forkful of arugula small enough that it wouldn't smear honey-mustard dressing on my chin. "Have you thought about joining any after-school clubs?"
— 3 2 2
He looked at me with the same incredulity that would later meet my inquiries about the cafeteria menus at Claverack. Maybe the fact that he wouldn't deign to answer this question at all made me lucky.
" W h a t about your, ah, teachers? Are any of them, you know, especially—"
"And what bands are you listening to these days?" he said earnesdy. " N e x t you can wheedle about whether there isn't some cute little cunt in the front row that's got me itchy. That way you can segue into h o w it's all up to me of course, but before balling the chick in the hallway I might decide to wait until I ' m ready.
R i g h t around dessert you can ask about dmuugs. Careful, like,
'cause you don't want to scare me into lying my head off, so you have to say h o w you experimented but that doesn't mean I should experiment too. Finally, once you've sucked up that whole bottle you can go gooey-eyed and say h o w great it is to spend quality time together and you can shift out of your chair and put an arm around my shoulder and give it a litde squeeze."
"All right, Mr. Snide." I abandoned my lettuce. " W h a t do you want to talk about?"
"This was your idea. I never said I wanted to talk about a fucking thing."
We squared off over my pigeon breast and red-currant confit, and I began to saw. Kevin had a way of turning pleasures into hard work. As for the turn he took after three or four minutes'
sdence, I can only conclude that he t o o k pity on me. Later in Claverack he would never be the one to blink first, but after all, in H u d s o n House he was only fourteen.
"Okay, I've got a topic" he proposed slyly,picking up a carmine crayon from the restaurant's complimentary glass of Crayolas, grown ubiquitous as scooters. "You're always griping about this country and wishing you were in Malaysia or something. What's your problem with the place. Really. American materialism?"
M u c h like Kevin w h e n I proposed this date, I suspected a trap, but I had an entree and two-thirds of a bottle to go, and I
— 3 2 3 —
didn't want to spend it drawing tic-tac-toes on the disposable tablecloth. " N o , I don't think that's it," I answered sincerely. "After all, as your grandfather would say—"
"Materials are everything. So what's your b e e f ? "
This is sure to d u m b f o u n d you, b u t in that m o m e n t I couldn't think of one thing w r o n g w i t h the U n i t e d States.
I ' m often stymied in this vein w h e n some stranger on a plane, making conversation w h e n I put d o w n my book, asks w h a t other novels I've enjoyed: I draw such a perfect blank that my seatmate might infer that the paperback stuffed in the magazine pocket is the first fiction I've read in my life. My leery outlook on the U n i t e d States was precious to m e — e v e n if, thanks to you, I had learned to give the country grudging credit for at least being a spirited, improvisational sort of place that, despite its veneer of conformity, cultivated an impressive profusion of outright lunatics. Abruptly incapable of citing a single feature of this country that drove me around the b e n d , I felt the b o t t o m fall o u t for a second and w o r r i e d that maybe I hadn't kept the U S . at arm's length from sophisticated cosmopohtanism, but rather f r o m petty prejudice.
Nevertheless, on airplanes it eventually comes to me that I adore Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky. T h e n I remember V.
S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, which always reminds me of Paul Theroux's delightful Girls at Play, and I ' m away, restored to literacy again.
"It's ugly," I submitted.
"What? T h e amber waves of grain?"
" T h e fast-food taka-taka. All that plastic. A n d it's spread all around the country Hke potato blight."
"You said you Hke the Chrysler Building."
"It's old. Most modern American architecture is horrendous."
"So this country's a dump.Why's anywhere else any better."
"You've hardly been anywhere else."
"Vietnam was a shithole. That lake in H a n o i stank."
"But didn't you think the people were gorgeous? Even just physically gorgeous."
"You took me to Asia for chink pussy? I could of booked one of those package holidays on the Web."
"Having fun?" I asked dryly.
"I've had better." He shot a ball of bread into the basket.
"'Sides.The guys all looked like girls to me."
"But I thought it was refreshing," I insisted, "along that lake—even if it does smell—the way the Vietnamese pay entrepreneurs with bathroom scales a few dong to weigh themselves, in the hopes that they've gained a few pounds. It's biologically sane."
"Put those gooks around a bottomless vat of French fries for long enough and they'll pork out wider than they are tall, just like mall rats in N e w Jersey. You think only Americans are greedy? I don't pay attention in European History too good, but I don't think so."
Served the salmon for which I n o w had litde appetite, I d r u m m e d my fingers.With the backdrop of the wallwide seascape at Hudson House, in that flashy white shirt with its billowing sleeves, raised collar, and a V-neck cut to the sternum, Kevin could have passed for Errol Flynn in Captain Blood.
" T h e accent," I said. "I hate it."
"It's your accent, too," he said. "Even if you do say tomahto."
"You think that's pretentious."
" D o n ' t you?"
I laughed, a litde. "Okay. It's pretentious."
Something was loosening up, and I thought, my, maybe this "outing" wasn't a bad idea after all. Maybe we're getting somewhere. I began to throw myself into the conversation in earnest. "Look, one of the things about this country I really can't stand? It's the lack of accountability. Everything w r o n g with an American's life is somebody else's fault. All these smokers raking in millions of dollars in damages from tobacco companies, w h e n , what, they've k n o w n the risks for forty years. Can't quit? Stick it
— 3 2 5 —
to Philip Morris. N e x t thing you know, fat people will be suing fast-food companies because they've eaten too many Big Macs!"
I paused, catching myself. "I realize you've heard this before."
Kevin was winding me up, of course, like a toy. He had the same intent, mischievous expression I'd seen recendy on a boy making his model race car hurtle off the rocks inTallman Park by remote control. " O n c e or twice," he allowed, repressing a smile.
"Power walkers," I said.
" W h a t about them."
" T h e y drive me insane." Of course, he'd heard this, too. B u t he hadn't heard this, because until then I hadn't quite put it together: "People around here can't just go for a walk, they have to be getting with some kind of program. A n d you know, this may be at the heart of it, what's my beef All those intangibles of life, the really good but really elusive stuff that makes life w o r t h living—
Americans seem to believe they can all be obtained by joining a group, or signing up to a subscription, or going on a special diet, or undergoing aroma therapy. It's not just that Americans think they can buy everything; they think that if you follow the instructions on the label, the product has to work. T h e n w h e n the product doesn't work and they're still unhappy even though the right to happiness is enshrined in the Constitution, they sue the bejesus out of each other."
" W h a t do you mean, intangibles," said Kevin.
"Whatever, as your friends would say. Love—joy—insight."
(To Kevin, I could as well have been talking about little green m e n on the moon.) "But you can't order t h e m on the Internet or learn t h e m in a course at the N e w School or look t h e m up in a How-To. It's not that easy, or maybe it is easy.. .so easy that trying, following the directions, gets in the way.. .1 don't know."
Kevin was doodling
furiously on the tablecloth with his crayon. "Anything else?"
" O f course there's anything else," I said, feeling the m o m e n t u m that gets rolling in those plane chats w h e n I finally get access to the library in my head, remembering Madame Bovary, and Jude the Obscure, and A Passage to India. "Americans are fat, inarticulate, and ignorant.They're demanding, imperious, and spoded. They're self-righteous and superior about their precious democracy, and condescending toward other nationalities because they think they've got it right—never m i n d that half the adult population doesn't vote. A n d they're boastful, too. Believe it or not, in Europe it isn't considered acceptable to foist on n e w acquaintances right off the bat that you went to Harvard and you o w n a big house and what it cost and which celebrities come to dinner.
A n d Americans never pick up, either, that in some places it's considered crass to share your taste for anal sex with someone at a cocktail party you've k n o w n for five minutes—since the whole concept of privacy here has fallen by the wayside. That's because Americans are trusting to a fault, innocent in a way that makes you stupid. Worst of all, they have no idea that the rest of the world can't stand them."
I was talking too loudly for such a small establishment and such abrasive sentiments, but I was strangely exhdarated.This was the first time that I'd been able to really talk to my son, and I h o p e d that we'd crossed the R u b i c o n . At last I was able to confide things that I well and truly beheved, and not just lecture—please don't pick the Corleys' prize-winning roses.
We Need to Talk About Kevin Page 34