Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“What’s to remember?”

“Well, for example you wore diapers until you were six.”

“What about it.” If I had some idea of embarrassing him, I was misguided.

“It must have been unpleasant.”

“For you.”

“For you as well.”

“Why?” he asked mildly. “It was warm.”

“Not for long.”

“Didn’t sit in it for long. You were a good mumsey.”

“Didn’t other kindergartners make fun of you? I worried at the time.”

“Oh, I bet you couldn’t sleep.”

“I worried,” I said staunchly.

He shrugged with one shoulder. “Why should they? I was getting away with something and they weren’t.”

“I was just wondering if, at this late date, you could shed some light on why the delay. Your father gave enough demonstrations.”

“Kevvy-wevvy!” he cooed, falsetto. “ Honey sweetie! Look at Daddykins! See how he pee-pees in the pooper-dooper? Wouldn’t you like that, too, Kevvy-woopsie? Wouldn’t it be fun to be just like Dadda-boo, piddle your peenie-weenie over the toileywoiley? I was just hoisting you on your own retard.”

I was interested that he had allowed himself to be verbally clever; he’s generally careful not to let on that he’s got a brain. “All right,” I said. “You wouldn’t use the toilet for yourself, and you and I—you wouldn’t do it for me. But why not for your father?”

“You’re a big boy, now!” Kevin minced. “ You’re my big boy! You’re my little man! Christ. What an asshole.”

I stood up. “Don’t you ever say that . Don’t you ever, ever say that . Not once, not ever, not one more time!”

“Or what,” he said softly, eyes dancing.

I sat back down. I shouldn’t let him get to me like that. I usually don’t. Still any dig at you—.

Oh, maybe I should count myself lucky that he doesn’t press this button more often. Then, lately he is always pressing it, in a way. That is, for most of his childhood his narrow, angular features taunted me with my own reflection. But in the last year his face has started to fill out, and as it widens I begin to recognize your broader bones. While it’s true that I once searched Kevin’s face hungrily for resemblance to his father, now I keep fighting this nutty impression that he’s doing it on purpose, to make me suffer. I don’t want to see the resemblance. I don’t want to spot the same mannerisms, that signature downward flap of a hand when you dismissed something as insignificant, like the trifling matter of neighbor after neighbor refusing to let their kids play with your son. Seeing your strong chin wrenched in a pugnacious jut, your wide artless smile bent to a crafty grin, is like beholding my husband possessed.

“So what would you have done?” I said. “With a little boy who insisted on messing his pants until he was old enough for first grade?”

Kevin leaned further onto his elbow, his bicep flat on the table. “Know what they do with cats, don’t you. They do it in the house, and you shove their faces into their own shit. They don’t like it. They use the box.” He sat back, satisfied.

“That’s not that far from what I did, is it?” I said heavily. “Do you remember? What you drove me to? How I finally got you to use the bathroom?”

He traced a faint white scar on his forearm near the elbow with a note of tender possessiveness, as if stroking a pet worm. “Sure.” There was a different quality to this affirmation; I felt he truly remembered, whereas these other recollections were post hoc.

“I was proud of you,” he purred.

“You were proud of yourself,” I said. “As usual.”

“Hey,” he said, leaning forward. “Most honest thing you ever done.”

I stirred, collecting my bag. I may have craved his admiration once, but not for that; for anything but that.

“Hold on,” he said. “I answered your question. Got one for you.”

This was new. “ All right,” I said. “Shoot.”

“Those maps,” he said.

“What about them,” I said.

“Why’d you keep them on the walls?”

It’s only because I refused to tear those spattered maps from the study for years, or to allow you to paint over them as you were so anxious to, that Kevin “remembers” the incident at all. He was, as you observed repeatedly at the time, awfully young.

“I kept them up for my sanity,” I said. “I needed to see something you’d done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn’t all in my head.”

“Yeah,” he said, tickling the scar on his arm again. “Know what you mean.”

I promise to explain, Franklin, but right now I just can’t.

Dear Franklin,

I’m sorry to have left you dangling, and I’ve been dreading an explanation ever since. In fact, driving to work this morning, I had another trial flashback. Technically, I committed perjury. I just didn’t think I owed that beady-eyed judge (a congenital disorder I’d never seen before, inordinately small pupils, provided her the dazed, insensate look of a cartoon character who’s just been hit over the head with a frying pan) what for a decade I’d kept from my own husband.

“Ms. Khatchadourian, did you or your husband ever hit your son?” Mary’s attorney leaned threateningly into the witness stand.

“Violence only teaches a child that physical force is an acceptable method of getting your way,” I recited.

“The court can only agree, Ms. Khatchadourian, but it’s very important that we clarify in no uncertain terms for the record: Did you or your husband ever physically abuse Kevin while he was in your care?”

“Certainly not,” I said firmly, and then muttered again for good measure, “certainly not.” I rued the repetition. There’s something dodgy about any assertion one feels obliged to make twice.

As I left the stand, my foot caught on a floorboard nail, pulling the black rubber heel off my pump. I limped back to my chair, reflecting, better a broken shoe than a long wooden nose.

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never used to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator’s credo that one doesn’t so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship, it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

I realize that Kevin’s diapers embarrassed you, even if they confoundingly failed to embarrass the boy himself. We were already using the extra-large; much longer and we’d have to start mail-ordering the kind for medical incontinence. However many tolerant parenting manuals you’d devoured, you fostered an old-fashioned masculinity that I found surprisingly attractive. You didn’t want your son to be a sissy, to present an easy target for teasing peers, or to cling to a talisman of infancy quite so publicly glaring, since the bulge under his pants was unmistakable. “Jesus,” you’d grumble once Kevin was in bed, “why couldn’t he just suck his thumb?”

Yet you yourself had engaged in an ongoing childhood battle with your fastidious mother over flushing, because the toilet had overflowed once, and every time you pushed the handle thereafter you were terrified that lumps of excrement might begin disgorging endlessly onto the bathroom floor, like a scatological version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And I had agreed that it was tragic how kids can tie themselves into neurotic knots over pee and poop, and what a waste of angst it all was, so I went along with this new theory about letting toddlers choose to potty train when they were “ready.” Nevertheless, we were both getting desperate. You started drilling me about whether he saw me using the toilet during the day (we weren’t sure if he should or shouldn’t) or whether I might have said anything to frighten him away from this throne of civilized life, in comparison to which amenities like please and thank you were dispensable as doilies. You accused me by turns of making too much of the matter, and too little.