Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

I think he sensed my pleasure and resolved to deprive me of it in the future. He was already intuiting that attachment—if only to a squirt gun—made him vulnerable. Since whatever he wanted was also something I might deny him, the least desire was a liability. As if in tribute to this epiphany, he pitched the mask on the pickup floor, kicked it absently with his tennis shoe, and broke a few teeth. I don’t imagine he was such a precocious boy—such a monster—that he had conquered his every earthly appetite by the age of four and a half. He still wanted his squirt gun back. But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.

When we drove up, the house looked even more hideous than I’d remembered, and I wondered how I would make it through the night without starting to cry. I hopped out of the cab. Kevin could now unstrap himself, and he scorned assistance. He stood on the running board so that I couldn’t shut the door.

“Give me my gun back now.” This was no wear-Mom-down whine, but an ultimatum. I wouldn’t be given a second chance.

“You were a jerk, Kevin,” I said breezily, lifting him to the ground by his underarms. “No toys for jerks.” I thought, hey, I could come to enjoy being a parent. This is fun.

The squirt gun leaked, so I didn’t want to stash it back in my purse. As the movers began to unload, Kevin followed me to the kitchen. I hoisted myself onto the counter and slid his squirt gun with my fingertips on top of the cupboards.

I was busy directing what went where and may not have returned to the kitchen for twenty minutes.

“Hold it right there, mister,” I said. “ Freeze .”

Kevin had shoved one box next to a pile of two to create a stairway to the counter, onto which one of the movers had slid a box of dishes, making another step. But he had waited for the sound of my footsteps before climbing the cabinet shelves themselves. (In Kevin’s book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.) By the time I arrived, his tennis shoes were perched three shelves up. His left hand was gripping the top of the wavering cupboard door, while his right hand hovered two inches from his squirt gun. I needn’t have shouted Freeze! He was already posing as if for someone to snap a picture.

“Franklin!” I bellowed urgently. “Come here, please! Right away!” I wasn’t tall enough to lift him to the floor. As I stood below to catch him if he slipped, Kevin and I locked eyes. His pupils stirred with what might have been pride, or glee, or pity. My God, I thought. He’s only four, and he’s already winning.

“Hey, there, buster!” You laughed and lifted him down, though not before he’d snatched the gun. Franklin, you had such beautiful arms. “Little young to learn to fly!”

“Kevin’s been very, very bad!” I sputtered. “Now we’re going to have to take that gun away for a very, very, very long time!”

“Aw, he’s earned it, haven’t you, kiddo? Man, that climb took guts. Real little monkey, aren’t you?”

A shadow crossed his face. He may have thought you were talking down to him, but if so the condescension suited his purposes. “I’m the little monkey,” he said, deadpan. He strode out of the room, squirt gun swinging at his side with the arrogant nonchalance I associated with airplane hijackers.

“You just humiliated me.”

“Eva, moving’s hard enough on us, but for kids it’s traumatic. Cut him some slack. Listen, I’ve got some bad news about that rocker of yours…”

For our new home’s christening dinner the next night we bought steaks, and I wore my favorite caftan, a white-on-white brocade from Tel Aviv. That same evening Kevin learned to fill his squirt gun with concord grape juice. You thought it was funny.

That house resisted me every bit as much as I resisted it. Nothing fit. There were so few right angles that a simple chest of drawers slid into a corner always left an awkward triangle of unfilled space. My furniture, too, was beat-up, though in the Tribeca loft that battered handmade toy box, the tuneless baby grand, the comfortably slumping couch whose pillows leaked chicken feathers hit just the right offbeat note. Suddenly, in our slick new home the funk turned to junk. I felt sorry for those pieces, much as I’d pity unsophisticated but good-hearted high school buddies from Racine at a party milling with hip, sharp-tongued New Yorkers like Eileen and Belmont.

It was the same with the kitchenware: Cluttering sleek green marble counters, my 1940s mixer went from quaint to grungy. Later, you came home with a bullet-shaped KichenAid, and I took the ancient mixer to the Salvation Army as if at gunpoint. When I unpacked my dented pots and pans, their heavy-gauge aluminum encrusted, their crumbling handles duct-taped together, it looked as if some homeless person had nested in a household whose jet-set tenants were in Rio. The pans went, too; you found a matching set at Macy’s in fashionable red enamel. I’d never noticed how scummy that old cookware had become, though I’d kind of liked not noticing.

In all, I may have been borderline rich, but I’d never owned much, and aside from the silk hangings from Southeast Asia, a few carvings from West Africa, and the Armenian rugs from my uncle, we dispensed with most of the detritus of my old Tribeca life in frighteningly short order. Even the internationalia assumed an inauthentic aura, as if it hailed from an upmarket import outlet. Since our aesthetic reinvention coincided with my sabbatical from AWAP, I felt as if I were evaporating.

That’s why the project in the study was so important to me. I realize that for you that incident epitomizes my intolerance, my rigidity, my refusal to make allowances for children. But that’s not what it means to me.

For my study, I chose the one room in that house that didn’t have any trees growing through it, had only one skylight, and was almost rectangular—no doubt designed near the last, when thankfully our Dream Home couple was running out of bright ideas. Most people would consider papering fine wood an abomination, but we were swimming in teak, and I had an idea that might make me feel, in one room at least, at home: I would plaster the study with maps. I owned boxes and boxes: city maps of Oporto or Barcelona, with all the hostels and pensions I planned to list in IBERI-WAP circled in red; Geographical Survey maps of the Rhone Valley with the lazy squiggle of my train journey highlighted in yellow; whole continents jagged with ambitious airline itineraries in ruled ballpoint.

As you know, I’ve always had a passion for maps. I’ve sometimes supposed that, in the face of an imminent nuclear attack or invading army, the folks with all the power won’t be the white supremacists with guns or the Mormons with canned sardines, but the cartographically clued who know that this road leads to the mountains. Hence the very first thing I do on arrival in a new place is locate a map, and that is only when I couldn’t get to Rand McNally in midtown before hopping the plane. Without one, I feel easily victimized and at sea. As soon I have my map, I gain better command of a town than most of its residents, many of whom are totally lost outside a restrictive orbit of the patisserie, charcuterie, and Luisa’s house. I’ve long taken pride in my powers of navigation, for I’m better than the average bear at translating from two dimensions to three, and I’ve learned to use rivers, railroads, and the sun to find my bearings. (I’m sorry, but what else can I boast about now? I’m getting old, and I look it. I work for a travel agency, and my son is a killer.)

So I associated maps with mastery and may have hoped that, through the literal sense of direction they had always provided, I might figuratively orient myself in this alien life as a full-time suburban mother. I craved some physical emblem of my earlier self if only to remind me that I had deserted that life by choice and might return to it at will. I nursed some distant hope that as he got older, Kevin might grow curious, point to Majorca in the corner, and ask what it was like there. I was proud of my life, and while I told myself that through an accomplished mother Kevin might find pride in himself, I probably just wanted him to be proud of me. I still had no idea what a tall order for any parent that could turn out to be.