Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“What for.”

“So when you get to school you’ll be better than anyone else at arithmetic.”

“What good is arithmetic.”

“Well, you remember yesterday, and Mommer paid the bills? You have to be able to add and subtract to pay bills, and know how much money you have left.”

“You used a calculator.”

“Well, you have to know arithmetic to be sure the calculator is right.”

“Why would you use it at all if it doesn’t always work.”

“It always works,” I begrudge.

“So you don’t need arithmetic.”

“To use a calculator,” I say, flustered, “you still have to know what a five looks like, all right? Now, let’s practice our counting. What comes after three?”

“Seven,” says Kevin.

We would proceed in this fashion, until once after one more random exchange (“What comes before nine?” “Fifty-three.”) he looked me lifelessly in the eye and droned in a fast-forward monotone, “Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve…,” pausing two or three times for a breath but otherwise making it flawlessly to a hundred. “Now can we quit?” I certainly felt the fool.

I roused no more enthusiasm for literacy. “Don’t tell me,” I’d cut him off after raising the prospect of reading time. “ What for. What good is it . Well, I’ll tell you. Sometimes you’re going to be bored and there’s nothing to do except you can always read a book. Even on the train or at a bus stop.”

“What if the book is boring.”

“Then you find a different one. There are more books in the world than you’ll ever have time to read, so you’ll never run out.”

“What if they’re all boring.”

“I don’t think that would be possible, Kevin,” I’d say crisply.

“I think it’s possible,” he’d differ.

“Besides, when you grow up you’ll need a job, and then you’ll have to be able to read and write really well or no one will want to hire you.” Privately, of course, I reflected that if this were true most of the country would be unemployed.

“Dad doesn’t write. He drives around and takes pictures.”

“There are other jobs—”

“What if I don’t want a job.”

“Then you’d have to go on welfare . The government would give you just a little money so you don’t starve, but not enough to do anything fun.”

“What if I don’t want to do anything.”

“I bet you will. If you make your own money, you can go to movies and restaurants and even different countries, like Mommer used to.” At used to , I winced.

“I think I want to go on welfare.” It was the kind of line I’d heard other parents repeat with a chortle at dinner parties, and I struggled to find it adorable.

I don’t know how those home-schooling families pull it off. Kevin never seemed to be paying any attention, as if listening were an indignity. Yet somehow, behind my back, he picked up what he needed to know. He learned the way he ate—furtively, on the sly, shoveling information like a fisted cheese sandwich when no one was watching. He hated to admit he didn’t know something already, and his blanket playing-dumb routine was cunningly crafted to cover any genuine gaps in his education. In Kevin’s mind, pretend-ignorance wasn’t shameful, and I was never able to discriminate between his feigned stupidity and the real thing. Hence, if at the dinner table I decried Robin Williams’s role in Dead Poets Society as trite , I felt obliged to explain to Kevin that the word meant “like what lots of people have done already.” But he’d receive this definition with a precocious uh-duh . Had he learned the word trite at three, when he was faking not being able to talk at all? You tell me.

In any event, after belligerently botching his alphabet for weeks (“What comes after R?” Elemenno ), he interrupted one of my diatribes—about how he couldn’t just sit there and expect learning to pour into his ear all by itself—by singing the alphabet song impeccably start to finish, albeit with an aggressive tunelessness that even for the tin-eared was improbable and tinged with a minor key that made this bouncy children’s pneumonic sound like kaddish. I suppose they’d taught it at Love-’n’-Learn, not that Kevin had let on. When he finished mockingly, Now I’ve said my ABCs, tell me what you think of me, I snapped furiously, “I think you’re a wicked little boy who enjoys wasting his mother’s time!” and he smiled, extravagantly, with both sides of his mouth.

He wasn’t precisely disobedient, which is one detail that the Sunday magazine exposés often got wrong. Indeed, he could follow the letter of his assignments with chilling precision. After the obligatory period of aping incompetence—crippled, unclosed P’s wilting below the line as if they’d been shot—he sat down on command and wrote perfectly within the lines of his exercise book, “Look, Sally, look. Go. Go. Go. Run. Run. Run. Run, Sally, Run.” I have no way of explaining why it was rather awful, except that he exposed to me the insidious nihilism of the grade-school primer. Even the way he formed those letters made me uneasy. They had no character. I mean, he didn’t really develop handwriting as we understand it, connotatively the personal stamp on standardized script. From the point he admitted he knew how, his printing unerringly replicated the examples in his textbook, with no extra tails or squiggles; his T’s were crossed and I’s dotted, and never before had the bloated interior of B’s and O’s and D’s seemed to contain so much empty space.

My point is that, however technically biddable, he was exasperating to teach. You could savor his remarkable progress when you came home, but I was never treated to those Eureka! moments of sudden breakthrough that reward an adult’s hours of patient coaxing and mind-numbing repetition. It is no more satisfying to teach a child who refuses to learn in plain view than it is to feed one by leaving a plate behind in the kitchen. He was clearly denying me satisfaction on purpose. He was determined that I should feel useless and unneeded. Though I may not have been as convinced as you were that our son was a genius, he was—well, I suppose he still is, if such things can be said of a boy who clings to an act of such crowning idiocy—very bright. But my day-to-day experience as his tutor was that of instructing an exceptional child only in the euphemistic tradition that seems to concoct an ever more dishonest name for moron every year. I would drill what-istwo-plus-three over and over and over , until once when he staunchly, maliciously refused to say five one more time I sat him down, scrawled,

12,387

6,945

138,964

3,987,234

scored a line under it and said, “There! Add that up then! And multiply it by 25 while you’re at it, since you think you’re so smart!”

I missed you during the day, as I missed my old life when I was too busy to miss you during the day. Here I had become quite well versed in Portuguese history down to the order of the monarchy and how many Jews were murdered during the Inquisition, and now I was reciting the alphabet. Not the Cyrillic alphabet, nor the Hebrew one, the alphabet . Even if Kevin had proved an ardent pupil, for me the regime would doubtless have felt like a demotion of the precipitous sort commonly constrained to dreams: Suddenly I’m sitting in the back of the class, taking a test with a broken pencil and no pants. Nonetheless, I might have abided this humbling role if it weren’t for the additional humiliation of living, for over six years now, up to my elbows in shit.

Okay—out with it.