Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“I’d anticipated mopping up vomit. Baking Christmas cookies. I couldn’t have expected—.” Kevin’s look dared me. “I couldn’t have expected that simply forming an attachment to you,” I phrased as diplomatically as I knew how, “would be so much work. I thought—.” I took a breath. “I thought that part came for free.”

“Free!” he jeered. “Waking up every morning isn’t free.”

“Not any more,” I conceded dolefully. Kevin’s and my experience of day-to-day life has converged. Time hangs off me like molting skin.

“Ever occur to you,” he said slyly, “maybe I didn’t want to have you ?”

“You wouldn’t have liked any other couple better. Whatever they did for a living, you’d think it was stupid.”

“Cheapskate travel guides? Scouting another banked turn for a Jeep Cherokee ad? Gotta admit, that’s especially stupid.”

“See?” I exploded. “Honestly, Kevin—would you want you? If there is any justice, you’ll wake up one day with yourself next to your bed in a crib!”

Rather than recoil or lash out, he went slack. This aspect of his, it’s more common to the elderly than to children: the eyes glaze and drop, the musculature goes sloppy. It’s an apathy so absolute that it’s like a hole you might fall in.

You think I was mean to him, and that’s why he withdrew. I don’t think so. I think he wants me to be mean to him the way other people pinch themselves to make sure they’re awake, and if anything he slackened in disappointment that here I was finally pitching a few halfheartedly injurious remarks and he felt nothing. Besides, I expect it was the image of “waking up with yourself” that did it, since that’s just what he does do, and why his every morning feels so costly. Franklin, I have never met anyone—and you do meet your own children—who found his existence more of a burden or indignity. If you have any notion that I’ve brutalized our boy into low self-esteem , think again. I saw that same sullen expression in his eyes when he was one year old. If anything, he thinks very well of himself, especially since becoming such a celebrity. There is an enormous difference between disliking yourself and simply not wanting to be here.

In parting, I threw him a bone. “I did fight very hard to give you my last name.”

“Yeah, well, saved you trouble. The old K-h-a… ?” he slurred. “Thanks to me, now everybody in the country knows how to spell it.”

Did you know that Americans stare at pregnant women? In the low birthrate First World, gestation is a novelty, and in the days of T&A on every newsstand, real pornography —conjuring intrusively intimate visions of spread hams, incontinent seepage, that eely umbilical slither. Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman’s cunt. In my head, I used the crudest word I could, to bring home the point. Like the purpose of breasts, it’s one of those glaring facts we tend to suppress.

Still, I once turned heads with a short skirt, and the flickered glances from strangers in shops began to get on my nerves. Along with the fascination, even enchantment on their faces, I also spotted the incidental shiver of revulsion.

You think that’s too strong. I don’t. Ever notice how many films portray pregnancy as infestation, as colonization by stealth? Rosemary’s Baby was just the beginning. In Alien, a foul extraterrestrial claws its way out of John Hurt’s belly. In Mimic, a woman gives birth to a two-foot maggot. Later, the X-Files turned bug-eyed aliens bursting gorily from human midsections into a running theme. In horror and sci-fi, the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell.

I’m sorry, but I didn’t make these movies up, and any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader. Those nature films of female salmon battling upstream to lay their eggs only to disintegrate—eyes filming, scales dropping—made me mad. The whole time I was pregnant with Kevin I was battling the idea of Kevin, the notion that I had demoted myself from driver to vehicle, from householder to house.

Physically, the experience was easier than I expected. The greatest affront of the first trimester was a watery thickening that easily passed as a weakness for Mars bars. My face filled out, beveling my androgynously angular features into the softer contours of a girl. My face was younger but, I thought, dumber looking.

I don’t know what took me so long to notice that you were simply assuming that our baby would take your surname, and even on the Christian name we weren’t like-minded. You’d propose Leonard or Peter . When I countered with Engin or Garabet —or Selim , after my paternal grandfather—you assumed the same tolerant expression I wore when Brian’s girls showed me their Cabbage Patch Kids. Finally you said, “You cannot possibly be proposing that I name my son Garabet Plaskett .”

“Nnoo,” I said. “ Garabet Khatchadourian . Has more of a ring.”

“It has the ring of a kid who’s not related to me.”

“Funny, that’s exactly how Peter Plaskett sounds to me.”

We were at the Beach House, that charming little bar around the corner on Beach Street, no longer extant I’m afraid, and rather wasted on my orange juice straight up, though they did serve a mean bowl of chili.

You drummed your fingers. “Can we at least nix Plaskett-Khatchadourian ? Because once the hyphenated start marrying each other, kids’ll be going by whole phone books. And since somebody’s gotta lose, it simplest to stick with tradition.”

“According to tradition , women couldn’t own property until, in some states, the 1970s. Traditionally in the Middle East we walk around in a black sack and traditionally in Africa we get our clitorises carved out like a hunk of gristle—”

You stuffed my mouth with cornbread. “Enough of the lecture, babe. We’re not talking about female circumcision but our kid’s last name.”

“Men have always gotten to name children after themselves, while not doing any of the work .” Cornbread crumbs were sailing from my mouth. “Time to turn the tables.”

“Why turn them on me? Jesus, you’d think American men were pussy-whipped enough. You’re the one who complains they’re all quicheeating faggots who go to crying workshops.”

I folded my arms and brought out the heavy artillery. “My father was born in Dier-ez-Zor concentration camp. The camps were riddled with disease and the Armenians had hardly any food or even water—it’s amazing the baby survived, because his three brothers didn’t. His father, Selim, was shot. Two-thirds of my mother’s extended family, the Serafians, was so neatly obliterated that not even their stories have survived. I’m sorry to pull rank. But Anglo-Saxons are hardly an endangered species. My forebears were systematically exterminated, and no one ever even talks about it, Franklin!”

“A million and a half people!” you chimed in, gesticulating wildly. “Do you realize it was what the Young Turks did to the Armenians in 1915 that gave Hitler the idea for the Holocaust ?”

I glared.

“Eva, your brother’s got two kids. There are a million Armenians in the U.S. alone. Nobody’s about to disappear.”

“But you care about your last name just because it’s yours. I care about mine—well, it seems more important.”