Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

What I hadn’t realized , Brian had confided, is that you fall in love with your own children. You don’t just love them. You fall in love. And that moment, when you lay eyes on them for the first time—it’s indescribable . I do wish he had described it anyway. I do wish he had given it a try.

Dr. Rhinestein dangled the infant over my breast and rested the tiny creature down with—I was glad to see her evidence it at last—painstaking gentleness. Kevin was damp, and blood creased his neck, the crooks of his limbs. I put my hands diffidently around him. The expression on his twisted face was disgruntled. His body was inert; I could only interpret his lassitude as a lack of enthusiasm. Sucking is one of our few innate instincts, but with his mouth right at my enlarged brown nipple, his head lolled away in distaste.

I kept trying; he kept resisting; he liked the other nipple no better. And all the while I was waiting. My breath shallow, I was waiting. And I kept waiting. But everybody says— , I thought. And then, distinctly: Beware of what “everybody says.”

Franklin, I felt—absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It’s under the spatula, it’s slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee—

“He’s beautiful,” I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.

“Can I?” you asked shyly.

I offered the baby up. Whereas newborn Kevin had squirmed miserably on my breast, he rested an arm around your neck, as if having found his real protector. When I looked at your face, eyes closed, cheek pressed against our infant son, I recognized, if this does not sound too flippant: There’s the potato peeler. It seemed so unfair. You were clearly choked up, filled to the back of your throat with a wonderment that defied expression. It was like watching you lick an ice cream cone that you refused to share.

I sat up, and you returned him reluctantly, at which point Kevin began to squall. Holding the baby, who still refused to suckle, I was revisited by that now-what sensation of my tenth birthday party: Here we were, in a room, and there seemed nothing to say or do. Minutes wore on, Kevin would yowl, rest limply, and jerk irritably from time to time; I felt the first stirrings of what, appallingly, I can only call boredom.

Oh, please don’t. I know what you’d say. I was exhausted. I’d had a thirty-seven-hour labor and it was ridiculous to think I’d be capable of feeling anything but weary and numb. And it had been absurd to imagine fireworks; a baby is a baby. You’d goad me to remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be obscurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeered. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around—well, it just didn’t seem that different. Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn’t count.

Besides, you would cajole, parenthood isn’t something that happens in an instant. The fact of a baby—when so recently there was none—is so disconcerting that I probably just hadn’t made the whole thing real to myself yet. I was dazed. That’s it, I was dazed. I wasn’t heartless or defective. Besides, sometimes when you’re watching yourself too hard, scrutinizing your own feelings, they flee, they elude capture. I was self-conscious, and I was trying too hard. I had worked myself up into a kind of emotional paralysis. Didn’t I just observe that these spontaneous outpourings of high passion are matters of faith? So my belief had flickered; I had allowed the underfear temporarily to get the best of me. I just needed to relax and let nature take its course. And for God’s sake, to get some rest. I know you’d say all these things, because I said them to myself. And they didn’t make a dent—in my sense that the whole thing was going wrong from the start, that I was not following the program, that I had dismally failed us and our newborn baby. That I was, frankly, a freak.

While they stitched up the tearing, you offered to take Kevin again, and I knew I should protest. I didn’t. At being relieved of him, my gratitude was soul-destroying. If you want to know the truth, I was angry. I was frightened, I was ashamed of myself, but I also felt cheated. I wanted my surprise party. I thought, if a woman can’t rely on herself to rise to an occasion like this, then she can’t count on anything; from this point onward the world was on its ear. Prostrate, with my legs agape, I made a vow: that while I might have learned to expose my “private” parts for all the world to see, I would never reveal to anyone on earth that childbirth had left me unmoved. You had your unspeakable—“Never, ever tell me that you regret our own kid”; now I had mine. Reminiscing in company about this moment later, I would reach for that word, indescribable . Brian was a splendid father. I would borrow my good friend’s tenderness for the day.

Dear Franklin,

Tonight was our office Christmas party, which isn’t easy to pull off with six people fresh from one another’s throats. We have little in common, but in general I am glad for their companionship—not so much for heart-to-hearts over a sandwich as for quotidian exchanges about package deals in the Bahamas. (I’m sometimes so grateful for the busywork of flights to book that I could weep.) Likewise, the simple adjacency of warm bodies supplies the deepest of animal comfort.

The manager was kind to take me into her employ. Thursday having wounded so many people in this area, Wanda did worry at first that folks might start to avoid her premises just to keep from thinking about it. Yet to be fair to our neighbors, it is often an exceptionally heartfelt-sounding season’s greetings that tips me off that a customer recognizes who I am. It’s the staff whom I’ve disappointed. They must have hoped that rubbing up against a celebrity of sorts would confer distinction on themselves and that I would furnish stirringly disturbing stories for my coworkers to dine out on. But the association is too tangential, and I doubt their friends are impressed. Most of my tales are ordinary. There is only one story they want to hear, really, and that one they knew backward and forward before I came on board.

A wide-hipped divorcée with a braying laugh, Wanda herself may have hoped that we would become fast friends. By the end of our first lunch, she had confided that her ex-husband got an erection watching her pee, that she had just had a hemorrhoid “tied off,” and that, until a near-miss with a Saks security guard at thirty-six, she’d been a compulsive shoplifter. I returned with the disclosure that after six months in my toy duplex I had finally gotten myself to buy curtains. You can see how she might have been a little put out that I’d got Manhattan while she got beads.

So tonight Wanda cornered me by the fax machine. She didn’t want to pry, but had I sought out “help”? I knew what she meant, of course. The entire student body of Gladstone High School was offered free counseling by the school board, and even some of this year’s intake, not even enrolled in 1999, has claimed to be traumatized and plunged to the couch. I didn’t want to seem hostile and so say honestly that I couldn’t see how the mere iteration of my troubles to a stranger would lessen them one iota, and that surely counseling was the logical refuge of those whose problems were ephemeral fancies and not matters of historical fact. So I demurred that my experience with the mental health profession had been rather sour, kindly omitting that the failures of my son’s psychiatric care had made headlines coast to coast. Moreover, it didn’t seem wise to confide that thus far I had found my only “help” in writing to you, Franklin. For somehow I feel certain that these letters are not on the list of prescribed therapies, since you are at the very heart of what I need to “get past” so that I might experience “closure.” And what a terrible prospect is that.