Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

I know you, my dear, and you’re impatient. Never mind the preliminaries, you want to hear about the visit itself—what his mood’s like, how he’s looking, what he said. All right, then. But by imputation, you asked for it.

He looks well enough. Though there is still a tinge too much blue in his complexion, fine veins at his temples convey a promising hint of vulnerability. If he has hacked his hair in uneven shocks, I take that as representation of healthy concern with his appearance. The perpetual half cock on the right corner of his mouth is starting to carve a permanent single quote into the cheek, remaining behind when he switches to a pursedmouth scowl. There’s no close quote on the left, and the asymmetry is disconcerting.

No more of those ubiquitous orange jumpsuits these days at Claverack. So Kevin is free to persist in the perplexing style of dress he developed at fourteen, arguably crafted in counterpoint to the prevailing fashion in clothing that’s oversized—the jib of Harlem toughs, boxers catching sun, sauntering through moving traffic as the waistband of jeans that could rig a small sailboat shimmy toward their knees. But if Kevin’s alternative look is pointed, I can only make wild guesses at what it means.

When he first trotted out this fashion in eighth grade, I assumed that the T-shirts biting into his armpits and pleating across his chest were old favorites he was reluctant to let go, and I went out of my way to find duplicates in a larger size. He never touched them. Now I understand that the dungarees whose zipper would not quite close were carefully selected. Likewise the windbreakers whose arms rode up the wrist, the ties that dangled three inches above the belt for when we forced him to look “nice,” the shirts that gaped between popping buttons.

I will say, the tiny-clothes thing did get a lot across. At first glance, he looked poverty-stricken, and I stopped myself more than once from commenting that “people will think” we don’t earn enough to buy our growing boy new jeans; adolescents are so greedy for signals that their parents are consumed with social status. Besides, a closer inspection revealed that his shrunken getup was designer labeled, lending the pretense at hard luck a parodic wink. The suggestion of a wash load churned at an errantly high temperature connoted a comic ineptitude, and the binding of a child-sized jacket across the shoulders would sometimes pull his arms goofily out from his sides like a baboon’s. (That’s as close as he’s come to fitting the mold of a conventional cutup; no one I’ve spoken to about our son has ever mentioned finding him funny.) The way the hems of his jeans stopped shy of his socks made a hayseedy impression, consonant with his fondness for playing dumb. There was more than a suggestion of Peter Pan about the style—a refusal to grow up—though I’m confused why he would cling so to being a kid when throughout his childhood he seemed so lost in it, knocking around in those years much the way I was rattling around our enormous house.

Claverack’s experimental policy of allowing inmates to wear street clothes has allowed Kevin to reiterate his fashion statement inside. While New York’s corner boys flapping in outsized gear look like toddlers from a distance, Kevin’s shrunken mode of dress has the opposite effect of making him look bigger—more adult, bursting. One of his psych consultants has accused me of finding the style unnerving for its aggressive sexuality: Kevin’s crotch cuts revealingly into his testicles, and the painted-on T-shirts make his nipples protrude. Perhaps; certainly the tight sleeve hems, the taut collars, and the yanked-in waistbands strap his body in cords and remind me of bondage.

He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin. Reading his suffocating attire as equivalent to a penitential hair shirt might seem a stretch, but the waistbands chafe, the collars score his neck. Discomfort begets discomfort in others, of course, and that, too, must be part of the plan. I often find that when I’m with him I pull at my own clothes, discreetly prizing a seam from between my buttocks or releasing an extra button on my blouse.

Eyeing laconic interchanges at adjoining tables, I’ve detected that some of his fellow inmates have started to mimic Kevin’s eccentric dress sense. I gather that T-shirts in unusually small sizes have become prized possessions, and Kevin himself has mentioned smugly that runts are being robbed of their clothes. He may hold imitators up to ridicule, but he does seem gratified at having initiated his very own fad. Were he commensurately concerned with originality two years ago, the seven students he used for target practice would be preparing applications to the college of their choice by now.

Anyway, today? He lounged into the visiting room wearing what must have been one of the runts’ sweatpants, since I didn’t recognize them as ones I’d bought. The little plaid button-down he wore on top was only secured by the middle two buttons, exposing his midriff. Now even his tennis shoes are too small, and he crushes their heels under his feet. He might not like to hear me say it, but he’s graceful. There’s a languor to his motions, as to the way he talks. And he always has that skew, too; he walks sideways, like a crab. Leading with his left hip gives him the subtle sidle of a supermodel on a catwalk. If he realized I saw traces of effeminacy in him, I doubt he’d be offended. He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing.

“What a surprise,” he said smoothly, pulling out the chair; its back legs had lost their plastic feet and the raw aluminum shrieked across the cement, a fingernail-on-the-blackboard sound that Kevin drew out. He slid his elbow across the table, resting his temple on his fist, assuming that characteristic tilt, sardonic with his whole body. I’ve tried to stop myself, but whenever he sits in front of me I rear back.

I do get irked that I’m always the one who has to come up with something to talk about. He’s old enough to carry a conversation. And since he has imprisoned me in my life every bit as much as he’s imprisoned himself in his, we suffer an equal poverty of fresh subject matter. Often we run through the same script: “How are you?” I ask with brutal simplicity. “You want me to say fine ?” “I want you to say something,” I throw back. “You’re the one came to see me,” he reminds me. And he can and will sit it out, the whole hour. As for which of us has the greater tolerance for nullity, there’s no contest. He used to spend whole Saturdays propped theatrically in front of the Weather Channel.

So today I skipped even a perfunctory how’s tricks, on the theory that folks who shun small talk are still dependent on its easing transitions but have learned to make other people do all the work. And I was still agitated by my exchange with Loretta Greenleaf. Maybe having tempted his own mother into boasting about her connection to his filthy atrocity would afford him some satisfaction. But apparently my messianic impulse to take responsibility for Thursday onto myself reads to Kevin as a form of stealing.

“All right,” I said, no-nonsense. “I need to know. Do you blame me? It’s all right to say so, if that’s what you think. Is that what you tell your psych consults, or they tell you? It all traces back to your mother.”

He snapped, “ Why should you get all the credit? ”

The conversation that I had expected to consume our whole hour was now over in ninety seconds. We sat.

“Do you remember your early childhood very well, Kevin?” I had read somewhere that people with painful childhoods will often draw a blank.