Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Oh, get out, Franklin. Not that long ago women worked in the fields right up until giving birth and then squatted between rows of vegetables. In the olden days, kids really did come from the cabbage patch—”

“In the olden days infant and maternal mortality were sky high!”

“What do you care about maternal mortality? So long as they scoop the kid out of my lifeless body while its heart is still beating you’ll be happy as a clam.”

“That’s a hideous thing to say.”

“I’m in the mood to be hideous,” I said blackly, plopping onto the couch. “Though before Papa Doc came home, I was in a great mood.”

“Two more months. Is it that big a sacrifice to take it easy for the well-being of a whole other person?”

Boy, was I already sick of having the well-being of a whole other person held over my head. “ My well-being, apparently, now counts for beans.”

“There’s no reason you can’t listen to music—although at a volume that doesn’t have John thumping his ceiling downstairs.” You replaced the needle at the beginning of the A side, turning it down so low that David Byrne sounded like Minnie Mouse. “But like a normal pregnant woman, you can sit there and tap your foot .”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “All the vibration—it might travel up to Little Lord Fauntleroy and trouble his beauty sleep. And aren’t we supposed to be listening to Mozart? Maybe Talking Heads isn’t in The Book. Maybe by playing ‘Psycho Killer’ we’re feeding him Bad Thoughts. Better look it up.”

You were the one powering through all those parental how-tos, about breathing and teething and weaning, while I read a history of Portugal.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Eva. I thought the whole idea of becoming parents was to grow up.”

“If I’d realized that’s what it meant to you, affecting some phony, killjoy adulthood, I’d have reconsidered the whole business.”

“Don’t you ever say that ,” you said, your face beet-red. “It’s too late for second thoughts. Never, ever tell me that you regret our own kid.”

That’s when I started to cry. When I had shared with you my most sordid sexual fantasies, in such disturbing violation of heterosexual norms that, without the assist of your own disgraceful mental smut shared in return, I’m too embarrassed to mention them here—since when was there anything that one of us was never, ever to say?

Baby what did you expect—Baby what did you expect—

The track had started to skip.

Dear Franklin,

Well, I had no desire to linger at the agency today. The staff has gone from good-hearted jousting to all-out war. Observing the showdowns in our small office without taking sides has lent these scenes the slightly comic, unaffecting quality of television with the sound off.

I’m a little at a loss as to how “Florida” has become a race issue, except in the way that sooner or later everything becomes a race issue in this country—sooner, as a rule. So the three other Democrats here have been throwing terms like “Jim Crow” at the two beleaguered Republicans, who huddle together in the back room and speak in low tones that the rest construe as the conspiratorial mutter of shared bigotry. Funny; before the election none of these people displayed the least interest in what was generally agreed to be a dreary contest.

Anyway, today some Supreme Court decision was due, and the radio was on all day. The staff’s recriminations flew so fast and furious that more than one customer, abandoned at the counter, simply walked out. At length I did the same. Whereas the two conservatives tend to argue nakedly for their side , the liberals are always weighing in on behalf of truth, justice, or humanity. Though once a staunch Democrat, I long ago gave up on defending humanity. It’s beyond me on most days to defend myself.

Then, while I do hope this correspondence hasn’t degenerated into shrill self-justification, I worry equally that I may seem to be laying the groundwork for claiming that Kevin is all my fault. I do indulge that sometimes, too, gulping down blame with a powerful thirst. But I did say indulge . There’s a self-aggrandizement in these wallowing mea culpas, a vanity. Blame confers an awesome power. And it’s simplifying, not only to onlookers and victims but to culprits most of all. It imposes order on slag. Blame conveys clear lessons in which others may take comfort: if only she hadn’t —, and by implication makes tragedy avoidable. There may even be a fragile peace to be found in the assumption of total responsibility, and I see that calm in Kevin on occasion. It is an aspect that his keepers confuse with remorselessness.

But for me this greedy gorging on fault never works. I am never able to get the full story inside me. It’s larger than I am. It has damaged too many people, aunts and cousins and best friends whom I will never know and would not recognize if we met. I cannot at once contain the suffering of so many family dinners with one empty chair. I haven’t anguished that the photo on the piano is forever tainted because that was the snapshot given to the newspapers or because sibling portraits on either side continue to mark occasions of greater maturity—college graduations, weddings—while the static high school yearbook photo loses color in the sun. I haven’t been privy to the month-by-month deterioration of marriages once robust; I haven’t sniffed the sickly sweet waft of gin off the breath of a formerly industrious realtor at advancingly earlier hours of the afternoon. I haven’t felt the weight of all those cartons dragged into a van after a neighborhood lush with oaks, bubbling with smooth-rocked creeks, and alive with the laughter of other people’s healthy children has suddenly become intolerable overnight. It seems as if for me to feel guilty in any meaningful way, I should have to suspend all these losses in my head. Yet like those car games in which you recite, I’m going on a trip, and I’m going to take an ambling aardvark, a babbling baby, a capering caterpillar… , I always blank on an element or two before the end of the alphabet. I start to juggle Mary’s unnaturally beautiful daughter, the Fergusons’ short-sighted computer whiz kid, the Corbitts’ gangling redhead who was always overacting in school plays, and then I throw in that uncannily gracious English teacher Dana Rocco and the balls fall on the floor.

Of course, just because I can’t manage to swallow all the blame doesn’t mean that others won’t heap it on me anyway, and I’d have been glad to provide a useful receptacle if I thought the heaping did them any good. I always come back to Mary Woolford, whose experience of injustice had hitherto run to a particularly inconvenient one-way street. I suppose I’d call her spoiled; she did stir up rather an excessive fuss when Laura didn’t make the track team, even though her daughter, however lovely, was physically languid and not the least athletic. But it may not be fair to call it a character flaw that someone’s life has always gone well with minimal impedance. Moreover, she was a restive woman, and like my Democratic coworkers given to indignation by nature. Previous to Thursday, she had been accustomed to venting this quantity, which I presume would otherwise build up in her at combustive levels, on campaigns to have the town council put in a pedestrian crossing or to ban homeless shelters from Gladstone; consequently, the denial of funds for such a crossing or the arrival of hairy riffraff on the outskirts of town had previously constituted her version of catastrophe. I’m not sure how such people manage to get their heads around proper disaster after having repeatedly exercised the full powers of their consternation on traffic.