Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Hey, Mister Plastic,” Kevin offered. “Want one?” You demurred.

“I didn’t know you liked lychees,” I said tightly once he’d started on a second one.

“Yeah, well,” he said, stripping the fruit bare and rolling the pulpy globe around the table with one forefinger. It was the ghostly, milky color of a cataract.

“It’s just, they’re very delicate,” I said, fretting.

He tore into the lychee with his front teeth. “Yeah, whadda you call it.” He slurped. “An acquired taste .”

He was clearly planning to go through the whole bag. I rushed from the room, and he laughed.

On the days that I took the early afternoon visiting hours, I worked from home; Kevin’s school bus would often drop him off at the same time as I returned from the hospital. The first time I passed him as he sauntered languidly across Palisades Parade, I pulled over in my Luna and offered him a ride up our steep drive. You’d think that just being alone with your own son in a car was a pretty ordinary affair, especially for two minutes. But Kevin and I rarely put ourselves in such stifling proximity, and I remember babbling associatively all the way up. The street was lined with several other vehicles waiting to rescue children from having to walk as much as ten feet on their own steam, and I remarked on the fact that every single car was an SRO . It was out of my mouth before I remembered that Kevin hated my teasing malapropism for SUV—one more pretend-gaffe to service the myth that I didn’t really live here.

“You know, those things are a metaphor for this whole country,” I went on. I had been put on notice that this sort of talk drove my son insane, but maybe that’s why I pursued it, much as I would later bring up Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris in Claverack just to goad him. “They sit up on the road higher and mightier than anyone else, and they have more power than anyone knows what to do with. Even the profile they cut—they always remind me of fat shoppers, waddling down the mall in squarecut Bermuda shorts and giant padded sneakers, stuffing their faces with cinnamon buns.”

“Yeah, well, ever ride in one?” (I admitted I hadn’t.) “So what do you know?”

“I know they piggy up too much of the road, guzzle gas, sometimes roll over—”

“Why do you care if they roll over? You hate these people anyway.”

“I don’t hate—”

“Single-room occupancy!” Shaking his head, he slammed the VW door behind him. The next time I offered him a lift up the hill, he waved me off.

There was even something strangely unbearable about those couple of hours he and I sometimes shared the house before your 4x4 plowed into the garage. You’d think it would be easy enough, in that vast splay of teak, but no matter where each of us settled I never lost an awareness of his presence, nor he, I suspect, of mine. Lacking you and Celia as a buffer, just the two of us in the same residence felt—the word naked comes to mind. We barely spoke. If he headed for his room, I didn’t ask about his homework; if Lenny stopped by, I didn’t ask what they were doing; and if Kevin left the house, I didn’t ask where he was headed. I told myself that a parent should respect an adolescent’s privacy, but I also knew that I was a coward.

This sensation of nakedness was assisted by the real thing. I know that fourteen-year-old boys are brimming with hormones, all that. I know that masturbation is a normal, vital relief, a harmless and enjoyable pastime that shouldn’t be slandered as a vice. But I also thought that for teenagers—let’s be serious, for everyone—this entertainment is covert. We all do it (or I used to—yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn’t customary to say, “Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I’m going to go masturbate.”

It had to happen more than once for me to finally mention it, because after our set-to in the hospital parking lot I had blown my tattling allowance for several months.

“He leaves the bathroom door open,” I reported reluctantly in our bedroom late one night, at which point you began to brush the hairs from your electric shaver intently. “And you can see the toilet from the hallway.”

“So he forgets to close the door.” You were clipped.

“He doesn’t forget. He waits until I go to the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee, so I’ll see him on my way back to my study. It’s very deliberate. And he’s, ah—loud.”

“At his age, I probably jerked off three times a day.”

“In front of your mother?”

“Around the corner, behind the door. I thought I kept it secret, but I’m sure she knew.”

“Behind the door,” I noted. “The door. It’s important.” My, that shaver was really clogged with stubble tonight. “Knowing I can see—I think it excites him.”

“Well, no matter how healthy you try to be about it, everybody’s a little weird in this department.”

“You’re not, um—getting it. I know he’s going to do it, I don’t have a problem with his doing it, but I’d rather not be included. It’s inappropriate.” That word took heavy duty during this era. The Monica Lewinsky scandal had broken the month before, and President Clinton would later put a napkin over the specifics by deeming their relations inappropriate.

“So why don’t you say something?” You got tired of intercession, I suppose.

“What if Celia were masturbating in front of you? Would you talk to her about it or prefer that I did?”

“So what do you want me to say?” you asked wearily.

“That he’s making me uncomfortable.”

“That’s a new one.”

I flounced onto the bed and grabbed a book I’d be unable to read. “Just tell him to keep the goddamned door shut.”

I shouldn’t have bothered. Yes, you reported that you’d done as you were told. I pictured you poking your head into his room and saying something jovial and collusive about “growing a little hair on the palm,” a dated expression he probably didn’t get, and then I bet you tossed off, supercasual, “Just remember it’s private, okay sport?” and said good-night. But even if you instead had a long, earnest, stern discussion, you’d have tipped him off that he’d gotten to me, and with Kevin that’s always a mistake.

So the very next afternoon after your “talk,” I’m heading to the study with my cup of coffee and I can hear a telltale grunting down the hall. I’m praying that he’s gotten the message and there will at least be a thin but blessed wooden barrier between me and my son’s budding manhood. I think: Aside from closets, there are only about four, five doors in the whole bloody house, and we should really be getting our money’s worth out of them. But as I advance another step or two the noise level belies this most minimal attempt at propriety.

I press my warm coffee cup between my eyes to soothe a nascent headache. I’ve been married for nineteen years and I know how men work and there’s no reason to be afraid of a glorified spigot. But subjected to the urgent little moans down the hall, I’m ten years old again, sent on errands across town for my shut-in mother, having to cut through the park, eyes trained straight ahead while older boys snicker in the bushes with their flies down. I feel stalked, in my own house, nervous, hounded, and mocked, and I don’t mind telling you I’m pretty pissed off about it.

So I dare myself, the way I always got home in the old days, when I would discipline myself not to run and so give chase. I march rather than tiptoe down the hall, heels hitting the floorboards, clop-clop. I get to the kids’ bathroom, door agape, and there is our firstborn in all his pubescent splendor, down to a rash of fiery pimples on his backside. Feet planted wide and back arched, he has pivoted his stance at an angle to the toilet so that I can see his handiwork—purple and gleaming with what I first assume is K-Y jelly, but which the silver wrapper on the floor suggests is my Land O’Lakes unsalted butter—and this is my introduction to the fact that my son has now grown fine, uncommonly straight pubic hair. Though most males conduct this exercise with their eyes closed, Kevin has cracked his open, the better to shoot his mother a sly, sleepy glance over the shoulder. In return, I glare squarely at his cock—doubtless what I should have done in the park instead of averting my gaze, since the appendage is so unimpressive when confronted head-on that it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. I reach in and pull the door shut, hard.