Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

Physically, the project was fiddly. The maps were all different sizes, and I had to design a pattern that was not symmetrical or systematic but still made a pleasing patchwork, with a balance of colors and a judicious mix of town centers and continents. I had to learn how to work with wallpaper paste, which was messy, and the older, tattier maps had to be ironed; paper readily browns. With so much else to attend to in a new house and constant hands-on consultation with Louis Role, my new managing editor at AWAP, I was papering my study over the course of several months.

That’s what I mean by biding his time. He followed the papering of that study and knew how much trouble it was; he had personally helped to make it more trouble, by tracking wallpaper paste all over the house. He may not have understood the countries the maps signified, but he did understand that they signified something to me.

When I brushed on the last rectangle by the window, a topographical map of Norway stitched with fjords, I climbed down the ladder and surveyed the results with a twirl. It was gorgeous! Dynamic, quirky, lavishly sentimental. Interstitial train ticket stubs, museum floor plans, and hotel receipts gave the collage an additionally personal touch. I had forced one patch of this blank, witless house to mean something. I put on Joe Jackson’s Big World, lidded the paste, furled the canvas covering my six-foot rolltop desk, rattled it open, and unpacked my last box, arranging my stand of antique cartridge pens and bottles of red and black ink, the Scotch tape, stapler, and tchotchkes for fidgeting—the miniature Swiss cowbell, the terra-cotta penitent from Spain.

Meanwhile I was burbling to Kevin, something all very Virginia Woolf like, “Everyone needs a room of their own. You know how you have your room? Well, this is Mommer’s room. And everyone likes to make their room special. Mommer’s been lots of different places, and all these maps remind me of the trips I’ve taken. You’ll see, you may want to make your room special some day, and I’ll help you if you want—”

“What do you mean special ,” he said, hugging one elbow. In his drooping free hand drizzled his squirt gun, whose leakage had worsened. Although he was still slight for his age, I’d rarely met anyone who took up more metaphysical space. A sulking gravity never let you forget he was there, and if he said little, he was always watching.

“So it looks like your personality.”

“What personality.”

I felt sure I’d explained the word before. I was continually feeding him vocabulary, or who was Shakespeare; educational chatter filled the void. I had a feeling he wished I’d shut up. There seemed no end to the information that he did not want.

“Like your squirt gun, that’s part of your personality.” I refrained from adding, like the way you ruined my favorite caftan, that’s part of your personality. Or the way you’re still shitting in diapers coming up on five years old, that’s part of your personality, too. “Anyway, Kevin, you’re being stubborn. I think you know what I mean.”

“I have to put junk on the walls.” He sounded put-upon.

“Unless you’d rather not.”

“I’d rather not .”

“Great, we’ve found one more thing you don’t want to do,” I said. “You don’t like to go to the park and you don’t like to listen to music and you don’t like to eat and you don’t like to play with Lego. I bet you couldn’t think of one more thing you don’t like if you tried.”

“All these squiggy squares of paper,” he supplied promptly. “They’re dumb.” After Idonlikedat, dumb was his favorite word.

“That’s the thing about your own room, Kevin. It’s nobody else’s business. I don’t care if you think my maps are dumb. I like them.” I remember raising an umbrella of defiance: He wouldn’t rain on this parade. My study looked terrific, it was all mine, I would sit at my desk and play grown-up, and I could not wait to screw on my crowning touch, a bolt on its door. Yes, I’d commissioned a local carpenter and had added a door .

But Kevin wouldn’t let the matter drop. There was something he wanted to tell me. “I don’t get it. It was all gucky. And it took forever. Now everything looks dumb. What difference does it make. Why’d you bother.” He stamped his foot. “It’s dumb !”

Kevin had skipped the why phase that usually hits around three, at which point he was barely talking. Although the why phase may seem like an insatiable desire to comprehend cause and effect, I’d eavesdropped enough at playgrounds (It’s time to go make dinner, cookie! Why? Because we’re going to get hungry! Why? Because our bodies are telling us to eat! Why? ) to know better. Three-year-olds aren’t interested in the chemistry of digestion; they’ve simply hit on the magic word that always provokes a response. But Kevin had a real why phase . He thought my wallpaper an incomprehensible waste of time, as just about everything adults did also struck him as absurd. It didn’t simply perplex him but enraged him, and so far Kevin’s why phase has proved not a passing developmental stage but a permanent condition.

I knelt. I looked into his stormy, pinched-up face and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Because I love my new study. I love the maps. I love them.”

I could have been speaking Urdu. “They’re dumb,” he said stonily. I stood up. I dropped my hand. The phone was ringing.

The separate line for my study wasn’t installed yet, so I left to grab the phone in the kitchen. It was Louis, with another crisis regarding JAP-WAP, whose resolution took a fair amount of time. I did call to Kevin to come out where I could see him, more than once. But I still had a business to oversee, and have you any notion how fatiguing it is to keep an eye on a small child every single moment of every single day? I’m tremendously sympathetic with the sort of diligent mother who turns her back for an eye blink—who leaves a child in the bath to answer the door and sign for a package, to scurry back only to discover that her little girl has hit her head on the faucet and drowned in two inches of water. Two inches. Does anyone ever give the woman credit for the twenty-four-hours-minusthree-minutes a day that she has watched that child like a hawk? For the months, the years ’ worth of don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth-sweeties, of whoops!-we-almost-fell-downs? Oh, no. We prosecute these people, we call it “criminal parental negligence” and drag them to court through the snot and salty tears of their own grief. Because only the three minutes count, those three miserable minutes that were just enough.

I finally got off the phone. Down the hall, Kevin had discovered the pleasures of a room with a door: The study’s was shut. “Hey, kid,” I called, turning the knob, “when you’re this quiet you make me nervous—”

My wallpaper was spidery with red and black ink. The more absorbent papers had started to blotch. The ceiling, too, since I’d papered that as well; craning on the ladder had been murder on my back. Drips from overhead were staining one of my uncle’s most valuable Armenian carpets, our wedding present. The room was so whipped and wet that it looked as if a fire alarm had gone off and triggered a sprinkling system, only the nozzles had flung not water but motor oil, cherry Hawaiian punch, and mulberry sorbet.

From the transitional squirts of a sickly purple I might later conclude that he had used up the bottle of black India ink first before moving on to the crimson, but Kevin left nothing to my deduction: He was still draining the last of the red ink into the barrel of his squirt gun. Just as he’d posed in the process of retrieving the gun from the top of our kitchen cabinet, he seemed to have saved this last tablespoon for my arrival. He was standing on my study chair, bent in concentration; he did not even look up. The filling hole was small, and though he was pouring intently, my burnished oak desk was awash in spatter. His hands were drenched.