Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“I expect it’s my fault,” I said defiantly. “I wasn’t a very good mother—cold, judgmental, selfish. Though you can’t say I haven’t paid the price.”

“Well, then,” she drawled, closing up that two inches and swiveling her gaze thirty degrees to look me in the eye. “You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it’s the fault of somebody who’s dead.”

Stolid in my guilt, clutching it like a girl with a stuffed bunny, I failed to follow.

“Greenleaf?” shouted the guard. My companion tucked the candy into her pocketbook, then rose. I could see her calculating that she had just enough time to slip in one more quick question-and-answer or to deliver a parting thought. With Sean Connery, that’s always the quandary, isn’t it: to siphon information, or to pour. Somehow it impressed me that she chose the latter.

“It’s always the mother’s fault, ain’t it?” she said softly, collecting her coat. “That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or a she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don’t teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. Don’t you believe that old guff. Don’t you let them saddle you with all that killing.”

“ Loretta Greenleaf! ”

“It hard to be a momma. Nobody ever pass a law say ’fore you get pregnant you gotta be perfect. I’m sure you try the best you could. You here, in this dump, on a nice Saturday afternoon? You still trying. Now you take care of yourself, honey. And you don’t be talking any more a that nonsense.”

Loretta Greenleaf held my hand and squeezed it. My eyes sprang hot. I squeezed her hand back, so hard and so long that she must have feared I might never let go.

Oh, dear, the coffee is cold.

(9 P.M.)

Now returned to my duplex, I’m ashamed of myself. I needn’t have identified myself as Kevin’s mother. Loretta Greenleaf and I might have simply talked about the Claverack food service: Who says saltpeter suppresses sex drive ? or even, What the hell is “saltpeter,” anyway ?

I was about to write, “I don’t know what got into me,” but I’m afraid I do, Franklin. I was thirsty for companionship, and I felt her engagement with this garrulous white lady waning. I had the power to rivet her if I wished, and I reached for it.

Of course, in the immediate aftermath of Thursday I wanted nothing more than to crawl down a sewage drain and pull the lid. I longed for unobtrusiveness, like my brother, or oblivion, if that is not simply a synonym for wishing you were dead. The last thing in the world I was worried about was my sense of distinction. But the resilience of the spirit is appalling. As I said, I get hungry now, and for more than chicken. What I wouldn’t give to go back to the days that I sat beside strangers and made a memorable impression because I had founded a successful company or had traveled extensively in Laos. I wax nostalgic for the time that Siobhan clapped her hands and exclaimed admiringly that she’d used Wing and a Prayer on her trips to the Continent. That is the eminence that I chose for myself. But we are all resourceful, and we use what falls to hand. Stripped of company, wealth, and handsome husband, I stoop to my one surefire shortcut to being somebody .

Mother of the ignoble Kevin Khatchadourian is who I am now, an identity that amounts to one more of our son’s little victories. AWAP and our marriage have been demoted to footnotes, only interesting insofar as they illuminate my role as the mother of the kid everybody loves to hate. On the most private level, this filial mugging of who I once was to myself may be what I most resent. For the first half of my life, I was my own creation. From a dour, closeted childhood, I had molded a vibrant, expansive adult who commanded a smattering of a dozen languages and could pioneer through the unfamiliar streets of any foreign town. This notion that you are your own work of art is an American one, as you would hasten to point out. Now my perspective is European: I am a bundle of other people’s histories, a creature of circumstance. It is Kevin who has taken on this aggressive, optimistic Yankee task of making himself up.

I may be hounded by that why question, but I wonder how hard I’ve really tried to answer it. I’m not sure that I want to understand Kevin, to find a well within myself so inky that from its depths what he did makes sense. Yet little by little, led kicking and screaming, I grasp the rationality of Thursday . Mark David Chapman now gets the fan mail that John Lennon can’t; Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” may have destroyed a dozen women’s chances for connubial happiness but still receives numerous offers of marriage in prison himself. In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable. Hence I am no longer amazed by the frequency of public rampages with loaded automatics but by the fact that every ambitious citizen in America is not atop a shopping center looped with refills of ammunition. What Kevin did Thursday and what I did in Claverack’s waiting room today depart only in scale. Yearning to feel special , I was determined to capture someone’s attention, even if I had to use the murder of nine people to get it.

It’s no mystery why Kevin is at home at Claverack. If in high school he was disaffected, he had too much competition; scores of other boys battled for the role of surly punk slumped in the back of the class. Now he has carved himself a niche.

And he has colleagues, in Littleton, Jonesboro, Springfield. As in most disciplines, rivalry vies with a more collegial sense of common purpose. Like many a luminary, he is severe with his contemporaries, calling them to rigorous standards: He derides blubberers like Paducah’s Michael Carneal who recant, who sully the purity of their gesture with a craven regret. He admires style—for instance, Evan Ramsey’s crack as he took aim at his math class in Bethyl, Alaska, “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?” He appreciates capable planning: Carneal inserted gun-range earplugs before aiming his .22 Luger; Barry Loukaitis in Moses Lake had his mother take him shopping in seven different stores until he found just the right long black coat under which to hide his .30-caliber hunting rifle. Kevin has a refined sense of irony, too, treasuring the fact that the teacher Loukaitis shot had only recently written on the report card of this A-student, “A pleasure to have in the class.” Like any professional, he has contempt for the kind of rank incompetence featured by John Sirola, the fourteen-year-old in Redlands, California, who blasted his principal in the face in 1995, only to trip when fleeing the scene and shoot himself dead. And in the way of most established experts, Kevin is suspicious of parvenus trying to elbow their way into his specialty with the slightest of qualifications—witness his resentment of that thirteen-year-old eviscerater. He is difficult to impress.

Much as John Updike dismisses Tom Wolfe as a hack, Kevin reserves a particular disdain for Luke Woodham, “the cracker” from Pearl, Mississippi. He approves of ideological focus but scorns pompous moralizing, as well as any School Shooting aspirant who can’t keep his own counsel—and apparently before taking out his nominal once-girlfriend with a .30-.30 caliber shotgun, Woodham couldn’t stop himself from passing a note to a friend in class that read (and you should hear your son’s puling rendition): “I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society push us and we will push back.” Kevin decried Woodham’s sniveling while mucus drizzled onto his orange jumpsuit on Prime Time Live as totally uncool : “I’m my own person! I’m not a tyrant. I’m not evil and I have a heart and I have feelings!” Woodham has admitted to warming up by clubbing his dog, Sparky, wrapping the pooch in a plastic bag, torching him with lighter fluid, and listening to him whimper before tossing him in a pond, and after studious consideration Kevin has concluded that animal torture is clichéd. Lastly, he is especially condemnatory of the way this whiny creature tried to worm out responsibility by blaming a satanic cult. The story itself showed panache, but Kevin regards a refusal to stand by one’s own handiwork as not only undignified but as a betrayal of the tribe.