Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Your friend’s precocious,” I said. “The missing entrails—didn’t you teach me that to get noticed in this business you have to add a twist?”

You may be horrified, Franklin, but it has taken me the better part of two years to get this far with him, and our black, straight-faced banter passes for progress. But Kevin is still not comfortable with my gameliness. I usurp his lines. And I had made him jealous.

“I don’t think he’s so smart,” said Kevin aloofly. “Probably just looked down at those guts and thought, Cool! Free sausages! ”

Kevin shot me a furtive glance. My impassivity was clearly a disappointment.

“Everyone around here thinks that twerp’s so tough,” Kevin resumed. “All like, ‘Man, you can play, like, “Sound of Music” loud’s you want, I ain’t sayin’ nuttin .’” His African-American accent has become quite accomplished and has made inroads into his own. “But I’m not impressed. He’s just a kid. Too little to know what he was doing.”

“And you weren’t?” I asked sharply.

Kevin folded his arms and looked satisfied; I had gone back to playing Mother. “I knew exactly what I was doing.” He leaned onto his elbows. “ And I’d do it again .”

“I can see why,” I said primly, gesturing to the windowless room whose walls were paneled in vermilion and chartreuse; I have no idea why they decorate prisons like Romper Room. “It’s worked out so well for you.”

“Just swapped one shithole for another.” He waved his right hand with two extended fingers in a manner that betrayed he’s taken up smoking. “Worked out swell.”

Subject closed, as usual. Still I made a note of the fact that this thirteen-year-old parvenu’s stealing the Claverack limelight aggrieved our son. It seems that you and I needn’t have worried about his dearth of ambition.

As for my parting with him today, I had thought to leave it out. But it is just what I would like to withhold from you that I may need most to include.

The guard with a mud-spatter of facial moles had called time; for once we had used up the full hour without spending most of it staring at the clock. We were standing on either side of the table, and I was about to mumble some filler line like “I’ll see you in two weeks,” when I realized Kevin had been staring straight at me, whereas his every other glance had been sidelong. That stopped me, unnerved me, and made me wonder why I had ever wanted him to look me in the eye.

Once I was no longer fussing with my coat, he said, “You may be fooling the neighbors and the guards and Jesus and your gaga mother with these goody-goody visits of yours, but you’re not fooling me. Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don’t be dragging your ass back here on my account.” Then he added, “Because I hate you.”

I know that children say that all the time, in fits: I hate you, I hate you! eyes squeezed with tears. But Kevin is approaching eighteen, and his delivery was flat.

I had some idea of what I was supposed to say back: Now, I know you don’t mean that , when I knew that he did. Or, I love you anyway, young man, like it or not. But I had an inkling that it was following just these pat scripts that had helped to land me in a garish overheated room that smelled like a bus toilet on an otherwise lovely, unusually clement December afternoon. So I said instead, in the same informational tone, “I often hate you, too, Kevin,” and turned heel.

So you can see why I needed a pick-me-up coffee. It was an effort to resist the bar.

Driving home, I was reflecting that however much I might wish to eschew a country whose citizens, when encouraged to do “pretty much what they want,” eviscerate the elderly, it made perfect sense that I would marry another American. I had better reason than most to find foreigners passé, having penetrated their exoticism to the chopped liver they are to one another. Besides, by the time I was thirty-three I was tired, suffering the cumulative exhaustion of standing all day that you only register when you sit down. I was forever myself a foreigner, feverishly rehearsing phrase-book Italian for “basket of bread.” Even in England, I had to remember to say “pavement” instead of “sidewalk.” Conscious that I was an ambassador of sorts, I would defy a daily barrage of hostile preconceptions, taking care not to be arrogant, pushy, ignorant, presumptuous, crass, or loud in public.

But if I had arrogated to myself the whole planet as my personal backyard, this very effrontery marked me as hopelessly American, as did the fanciful notion that I could remake myself into a tropical internationalist hybrid from the horribly specific origins of Racine, Wisconsin. Even the carelessness with which I abandoned my native land was classically of a piece with our nosy, restless, aggressive people, who all (save you) complacently assume that America is a permanent fixture. Europeans are better clued. They know about the liveness, the contemporariness of history, its immediate rapacities, and will often rush back to tend their own perishable gardens to make sure that Denmark, say, is still there. But to those of us for whom “invasion” is exclusively associated with outer space, our country is an unassailable bedrock that will wait indefinitely intact for our return. Indeed, I had explained my peripatetics more than once to foreigners as facilitated by my perception that “the United States doesn’t need me.”

It’s embarrassing to pick your life partner according to what television shows he watched as a child, but in a way that’s exactly what I did. I wanted to describe some wiry, ineffectual little man as a “Barney Fife” without having to tortuously append that Barney was a character in a warm, rarely exported serial called The Andy Griffith Show, in which an incompetent deputy was always getting into trouble by dint of his own hubris. I wanted to be able to hum the theme song to The Honeymooners and have you chime in with, “How sweet it is!” And I wanted to be able to say “That came out of left field” and not kick myself that baseball images didn’t necessarily scan abroad. I wanted to stop having to pretend I was a cultural freak with no customs of my own, to have a house that itself had rules about shoes to which its visitors must conform. You restored to me the concept of home.

Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me. My neighbors now regard me with the same suspicion they reserve for illegal immigrants. They grope for words and speak to me with exaggerated deliberation, as if to a woman for whom English is a second language. And since I have been exiled to this rarefied class, the mother of one of those “Columbine boys,” I, too, grope for words, not sure how to translate my off-world thoughts into the language of two-for-the-price-of-one sales and parking tickets. Kevin has turned me into a foreigner again, in my own country. And maybe this helps to explain these biweekly Saturday visits, because it is only at Claverack Correctional that I need not translate my alien argot into the language of the suburban mundane. It is only at Claverack Correctional that we can make allusions without explanations, that we can take as understood a shared cultural past.

Dear Franklin,

I’m the one at Travel R Us who volunteers to stay late and finish up, but most of the Christmas flights are booked, and this afternoon we were all encouraged as a “treat” to knock off early, it being Friday. Beginning another desolate marathon in this duplex at barely 5 P.M. makes me close to hysterical.

Propped before the tube, poking at chicken, filling in the easy answers in the Times crossword, I often have a nagging sensation of waiting for something. I don’t mean that classic business of waiting for your life to begin, like some chump on the starting line who hasn’t heard the gun. No, it’s waiting for something in particular, for a knock on the door, and the sensation can grow quite insistent. Tonight it’s returned in force. Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.