Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

Which inevitably puts me in mind of that seminal May evening in 1982, when my expectation that you would walk into the kitchen anytime now was less unreasonable. You were location scouting in the pine barrens of southern New Jersey for a Ford advertisement and were due home about 7:00 P.M. I’d recently returned from a monthlong trip to update Greece on a Wing and a Prayer , and when you hadn’t shown up by 8:00, I reminded myself that my own plane had been six hours late, which had ruined your plans to sweep me from JFK to the Union Square Café.

Still, by 9:00 I was getting edgy, not to mention hungry. I chewed distractedly on a chunk of pistachio halvah from Athens. On an ethnic roll, I’d made a pan of moussaka, with which I planned to convince you that, nestled against ground lamb with loads of cinnamon, you did like eggplant after all.

By 9:30, the custard topping had started to brown and crust around the edges, even though I’d turned the oven down to 250˚. I took out the pan. Balanced on the fulcrum between anger and anguish, I indulged a fit of pique, banging the drawer when I went for the aluminum foil, grumbling about having fried up all those circles of eggplant, and now it was turning into a big, dry, charred mess ! I yanked my Greek salad out of the fridge and furiously pitted the calamatas, but then left it to wilt on the counter and the balance tipped. I couldn’t be mad anymore. I was petrified. I checked that both phones were on the hook. I confirmed that the elevator was working, though you could always take the stairs. Ten minutes later, I checked the phones again.

This is why people smoke, I thought.

When the phone did ring at around 10:20, I pounced. At my mother’s voice, my heart sank. I told her tersely that you were over three hours late, and I mustn’t tie up the line. She was sympathetic, a rare sentiment from my mother, who then tended to regard my life as one long accusation, as if the sole reason I ventured to yet another country was to rub her nose in the fact that for one more day she had not left her porch. I should have remembered that she, too, had been through this very experience at twenty-three, and not for hours but for weeks, until a slim envelope flipped through her front door slot from the War Department. Instead I was cruelly rude, and hung up.

Ten-forty. Southern New Jersey wasn’t perilous—timber and farmland, not like Newark. But there were cars like primed missiles, and drivers whose stupidity was murderous. Why didn’t you call?

That was before the advent of mobile phones, so I’m not blaming you. And I realize this experience is common as dirt: Your husband, your wife, your child is late, terribly late, and then they come home after all and there’s an explanation. For the most part, these brushes against a parallel universe in which they never do come home—for which there is an explanation, but one that will divide your whole life into before and after—vanish without a trace. The hours that had elongated into lifetimes suddenly collapse like a fan. So even though the salty terror in my gums tasted familiar, I couldn’t recall a specific instance when I had paced our loft before, head swimming with cataclysms: an aneurysm, an aggrieved postal worker with an automatic in Burger King.

By 11:00, I was making vows.

I gulped a glass of sauvignon blanc; it tasted like pickle juice. This was wine without you. The moussaka, its dry, dead hulk: This was food without you. Our loft, rich with the international booty of baskets and carvings, took on the tacky, cluttered aspect of an import outlet: This was our home without you. Objects had never seemed so inert, so pugnaciously incompensatory. Your remnants mocked me: the jump rope limp on its hook; the dirty socks, stiff, caricatured deflations of your size eleven feet.

Oh, Franklin, of course I knew that a child can’t substitute for a husband, because I had seen my brother stooped from the pressure to be the “little man of the house”; I had seen the way it tortured him that Mother was always searching his face for resemblances to that ageless photo on the mantle. It wasn’t fair. Giles couldn’t even remember our father, who died when he was three and who had long since transformed from a flesh-andblood Dad who dribbled soup on his tie into a tall, dark icon looming over the fireplace in his spotless army air corps uniform, an immaculate emblem of all that the boy was not. To this day Giles carries himself with a diffidence. When in the spring of 1999 he forced himself to visit me and there was nothing to say or do, he flushed with speechless resentment, because I was reviving in him the same sense of inadequacy that had permeated his childhood. Even more has he resented the public attention refracted off our son. Kevin and Thursday have routed him from his rabbit hole, and he’s furious with me for the exposure. His sole ambition is obscurity, because Giles associates any scrutiny with being found wanting.

Still I kicked myself that you and I had made love the night before and one more evening I had absently slipped that rubber hat around my cervix. What could I do with your jump rope, your dirty socks? Wasn’t there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi ? No offspring could replace you. But if I ever had to miss you, miss you forever, I wanted to have someone to miss you alongside, who would know you if only as a chasm in his life, as you were a chasm in mine.

When the phone rang again at nearly midnight, I hung back. It was late enough to be a reluctant emissary of a hospital, the police. I let it ring a second time, my hand on the receiver, warming the plastic like a magic lantern that might grant one last wish. My mother claims that in 1945 she left the envelope on the table for hours, brewing herself cup after cup of black, acid tea and letting them grow cold. Already pregnant with me from his last home leave, she took frequent trips to the toilet, closing the bathroom door and keeping the light off, as if hiding out. Haltingly, she had described to me an almost gladiatorial afternoon: facing down an adversary bigger and more ferocious than she, and knowing that she would lose.

You sounded exhausted, your voice so insubstantial that for one ugly moment I mistook it for my mother’s. You apologized for the worry. The pickup had broken down in the middle of nowhere. You’d walked twelve miles to find a phone.

There was no point in talking at length, but it was agony to end the call. When we said good-bye, my eyes welled in shame that I had ever declared, “I love you!” in that peck-at-the-door spirit that makes such a travesty of passion.

I was spared. In the hour it took a taxi to drive you to Manhattan, I was allowed the luxury of slipping back to my old world of worrying about casseroles, of seducing you into eggplant and nagging you to do the laundry. It was the same world in which I could put off the possibility of our having a child another night, because we had reservations, and there were many more nights.

But I refused to relax right away, to collapse into the casual heedlessness that makes everyday life possible, and without which we would all batten ourselves into our living rooms for eternity like my mother. In fact, for a few hours I had probably been treated to a taste of my mother’s whole postwar life, since what she lacks may not be courage so much as a necessary self-deceit. Her people slaughtered by Turks, her husband plucked from the sky by devious little yellow people, my mother sees chaos biting at her doorstep, while the rest of us inhabit a fabricated playscape whose benevolence is a collective delusion. In 1999, when I entered my mother’s universe for good—a place where anything could happen and often did—toward what Giles and I had always regarded as her neurosis I grew much kinder.