Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

In case I’ve sounded mean, I was really rather enchanted. Our little Isadora Duncan understudy was so uninhibited, so exuberant! I may even have envied her a little. Wistfully I remembered jigging around our Tribeca loft to Talking Heads when pregnant with Kevin, and it saddened me that I no longer did that. And though she was a good eight years older than Celia, something about this girl as she flounced and pirouetted from one end of the gym to the other reminded me of our daughter. An unlikely exhibitionist, she seemed to have taken to the floor simply because this was one of her favorite songs—that word again—and because the empty space made it easier to rush around the floor in a swoon. She probably emoted about her own living room to the same song and saw no reason not to dance in exactly the same flamboyant manner merely because 200 malicious adolescents were leering on the sidelines.

It always seems interminable, but “Stairway to Heaven” was almost over; he might have held off two more minutes. But no. I felt a peculiar stab of fear as Kevin peeled languidly off the cinder block and sauntered in an unerring straight line toward Alice, tracking her like a Patriot missile homing in on a Scud. Then he stopped, right under the mirror ball, having correctly calculated that Alice’s next pirouette would land her left ear exactly in line with his mouth. There. Contact. He leaned, just a little, and whispered.

I would never pretend to know what he said. But the image has informed all my subsequent mental reconstructions of Thursday . Alice froze. Her face infused with all the self-consciousness of which it had a moment before been so conspicuously absent. Her eyes darted left and right, unable to find a single resting place that afforded respite. Suddenly all too well aware of her audience, she seemed to register the obligations of the folly she’d begun; the song wasn’t quite finished, and she was compelled to keep up appearances by bobbing to a few more bars. For the next forty seconds or so, she floundered back and forth in a macabre slow-motion death dance, like Faye Dunaway at the end of Bonnie and Clyde.

The DJ having aptly segued to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” she clutched her tan-plaid skirt and bunched it between her legs. Hobbling toward a dark corner, Alice pressed her elbows tightly to her waist, as each hand fought for cover under the other. I sensed that, in some sickening fashion, over the course of the previous minute she had just grown up. Now she knew that her dress was geeky, that her chin was weak. That her mother had betrayed her. That she was uncool; that she would never be pretty. And most of all, she had learned to never, ever take to an empty dance floor—possibly any dance floor—for the rest of her life.

I wasn’t there, on Thursday . But two years before, I was witness to its harbinger in that same gym, when a lone graduate of Gladstone Middle School was assassinated.

Dear Franklin,

My colleague Ricky approached me at the end of the workday today, and his proposal was the closest he’s ever come to acknowledging the unmentionable: He invited me to attend his church. I was embarrassed, and thanked him, but said vaguely, “I don’t think so”; he didn’t let it go and asked why. What was I supposed to say, “Because it’s a load of crap”? I always feel a little condescending toward religious people, as they feel condescending toward me. So I said, I wish I could, that I could believe, and sometimes I try very hard to believe, but nothing about my last few years suggests that an entity with any kindness is watching over me. Ricky’s comeback about mysterious ways left neither of us very impressed. Mysterious, I said. Now you can say that again.

I’ve often returned to the remark you made in Riverside Park before we became parents, “At least a kid is an answer to the Big Question.” It perturbed me at the time that your life was posing this Big Question with such persistence. Our childless period must have had its shortfalls, but I recall charging in the same conversation that maybe we were “too happy,” a distinctly more agreeable excess than a surfeit of harrowing emptiness. Maybe I’m shallow, but you were enough for me. I loved scanning for your face outside Customs after those long trips that were so much harder on you than on me, and sleeping late the next morning in a hot, pectoral cocoon. It was enough. But our twosome was not, it seems, enough for you. While that may make you, between us, the more spiritually advanced, it hurt my feelings.

Yet if there’s no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children’s answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.

I raise this matter because I think that you did expect Kevin to answer your Big Question, and that he could sense that fantastic expectation from an early age. How? Small things. The aggressive heartiness in your voice, under which gasped a shy desperation. The ferocity of your embraces, which he may have found smothering. The resolve with which you cleared your decks every weekend to put yourself at his disposal; while I suspect that children want their parents to be busy, they don’t want to have to fill your schedule with their paltry needs. Children want to be assured that there are other things to do, important things; more important, on occasion, than they are.

I’m not commending neglect. But he was only a little boy, and he alone was supposed to answer a Big Question that had his grown father stymied. What a burden to place on the newly arrived! What’s worse, children, like adults, vary drastically in what I can only call their religious appetites. Celia was more like me: a hug, a crayon, and a cookie, and she was sated. Though Kevin seemed to want practically nothing, I now realize that he was spiritually ravenous.

Both of us were lapsed, so it made sense to raise our kids as neither Armenian Orthodox nor Presbyterian. Although I’m reluctant to inveigh that Youth Today just need to crack the Old Testament, it sobers me that, thanks to us, Kevin may never have seen the inside of a church. The fact that you and I were brought up with something to walk away from may have advantaged us, for we knew what lay behind us, and what we were not. So I wonder if Kevin, too, would have been better off had we spewed a lot of incense-waving hooey that he could have coughed back in our faces—those extravagant fancies about virgin births and commandments on mountaintops that really stick in a kid’s throat. I’m being impractical; I doubt we could have faked a faith for the children’s sake, and they’d have known we were posing. Nevertheless, repudiation of self-evident dross like travel guides and Oldsmobile ads must be so unsatisfying.

It was Kevin’s starvation that his teachers—with the exception of Dana Rocco—never detected, preferring to diagnose our little underachiever as one more fashionable victim of attention deficit disorder. They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him, because broken machines can be fixed. It was easier to minister to passive incapacity than to tackle the more frightening matter of fierce, crackling disinterest. Clearly Kevin’s powers of attention were substantial—witness his painstaking preparations for Thursday or his presently impeccable command of the malevolents’ Roll of Honor, right down to the population of Uyesugi’s pet fish. He left assignments unfinished not because he couldn’t finish them, but because he could.