We Need to Talk About Kevin

  N o t me. I wasn't brave, but I was stubborn and prideful. Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it's not as pretty.

  So the first time my insides twisted as if r u n g like a wet sheet, my eyes bulged slighdy, the lids widening in surprise; my hps compressed. I impressed you with my calm. I meant to. We were lunching at the Beach House again, and I decided against finishing my chili. In a show of returning equanimity, you dispatched a piece of cornbread before retreating to the rest r o o m for a f o o t -

  high stack of freshly banded paper towels; my water had broken, gallons of it, or so it seemed, and I had drenched the bench. You paid the bill and even remembered to leave a tip before leading me by the hand back to our loft, checking your watch. We were not going to embarrass ourselves by turning up at Beth Israel hours before my cervix had begun to dilate.

  Later that afternoon, as you drove me across Canal Street in your baby-blue pickup, you mumbled that everything would be all right, though you had no way of knowing. At admissions, I was struck by the commonplace character of my condition; the nurse yawned, fortifying my resolve that I would prove an exemplary patient. I would astound Dr. Rhinestein with my gruff practicality. I k n e w this was a natural process, and I was not going to make a fuss. So w h e n another contraction doubled me as if I had just been caught unawares by a right hook, I merely exhaled a litde hoof.

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  It was all a ridiculous and perfecdy pointless act. There was no reason to try to amaze Dr. Rhinestein, w h o m I did not especially like. If I intended to do you proud, you were getting a son out of the bargain, sufficient payoff to put up with a little screaming and rudeness. It might even have done you good to recognize that the w o m a n you married was an ordinary mortal w h o adored comfort and hated suffering and so would opt sanely for anesthetic. Instead I made feeble jokes on my stretcher in the corridor, and I held your hand. That was the hand that you told me afterward I very nearly broke.

  O h , Franklin, there is no use pretending now. It was awful. I may be capable of toughness in respect to certain kinds of pain, but if so, my fortitude dwells in my calves or forearms but not between my legs. This was not a part of my body that I had ever associated with endurance, with anything so odious as exercise.

  And as the hours dragged on, I began to suspect that I was just too old for this, that I was too inelastic approaching forty to stretch to this n e w life. Dr. Rhinestein said, primly, that I was small, as if to indicate an inadequacy, and after about fifteen hours, she despaired sternly, Eva! You really must make an effort. So m u c h for earning her amazement.

  There were times after about twenty-four hours that a few tears would leak d o w n my temples, and I hastily wiped t h e m away, n o t wanting you to see. M o r e than once I was offered an epidural, and my determination to forgo its deliverance acquired a demented aspect. I seized on this refusal, as if passing this little test were the point, and not passing an infant son. So long as I declined the needle, I was winning.

  In the end it was the threat of a cesarean that did it; Dr.

  Rhinestein made no bones about the fact that she had other patients back at her office and that she was disgusted by my lackluster performance. I had an abnormal horror of being sliced open. I didn't want the scar; like Rita, I ' m ashamed to say, I feared for my stomach muscles; and the procedure was too reminiscent of all those horror films.

  So I made an effort, at w h i c h point I had to recognize that I'd been resisting the birth. W h e n e v e r the e n o r m o u s mass approached that tiny canal, I'd been sucking it back. Because it hurt. It hurt a whole lot. In that N e w School course, they d r u m m e d into you that the pain was good, you were supposed to go with it, push into the pain, and only on my back did I contemplate what retarded advice this was. Pain ,goodP. I was overcome with contempt. In fact, I never told you this before, but the emotion on which I fastened in order to push beyond a critical threshold was loathing. I despised being spread out like some farm exhibit with strangers gawking between my canted knees. I detested Dr.

  Rhinestein s pointed, ratlike little face and her brisk, censorious manner. I hated myself for ever having agreed to this humiliating theater, w h e n I was fine before and right at this m o m e n t I could have been in France. I repudiated all my female friends, w h o used to share their reservations about supply-side economics or at least halfheartedly ask after my last trip abroad, yet for months n o w had only nattered about stretch marks and remedies for constipation or gaily brandished horror stories about terminal preeclampsia and autistic offspring w h o would do nothing but rock back and forth all day and bite their hands. Your eternally hopeful, encouraging expression made me sick. All very easy for you to want to be a Daddy, to buy into all that stuffed-bunny schlock, w h e n I was the one w h o had to blow up like a sow, I was the one w h o had to turn into a goody-two-shoes teetotaler sucking d o w n vitamins, I was the one w h o had to watch her breasts get puffy and bloated and sore w h e n they used to be so neat and close, and I was the one w h o would be ripped to ribbons ramming a watermelon through a passage the size of a garden hose. I did, I hated you and your litde coos and mumbles, I wished you'd stop patting my brow with that damp washcloth as if it made the slightest bit of difference, and I think I k n e w I was hurting your hand. And yes, I even hated the baby—which so far had not brought me hope for the future and story and content and "a turn of the page" but unwieldiness and embarrassment

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  and a rumbling subterranean tremor quaking through the very ocean floor of w h o I thought I was.

  But pushing past that threshold I met such a red blaze of agony that I could no longer afford the expenditure of loathing. I screamed, and I didn't care. I'd have done anything in that instant to get it to stop: hocked my company, sold our child into slavery, committed my soul to hell. "Please—," I gasped, "give me—that epidural!"

  Dr. Rhinestein chided, "It's too late for that now, Eva, if you couldn't take it you should have said so earlier. The baby is crowning. For pity's sake don't let up now."

  And suddenly it was over. Later we'd joke about how long I held out and how I begged for relief only once it was withdrawn, but at the time it wasn't funny. In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations—with not only suffering, but defeat.

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  D E C E M B E R 1 3 , 2 0 0 0

  Dear Franklin,

  W h e n I walked into work this m o r n i n g I could tell immediately from a malignant Democratic sullenness that "Florida" was over.

  T h e sense of letdown in both camps feels postpartum.

  B u t if my coworkers of both stripes are disappointed that such an invigorating affray is finished, I feel a measure more disconsolate still, banished even from their shared, binding sense of loss. Multiplied by many times, this loneliness of mine must approximate my mother's experience of the end of the war, for my birthday of August 15 coincides with VJ-Day, w h e n Hirohito broadcast his surrender to the Japanese. Apparently the nurses were so ecstatic that it was hard to get them to attend to the timing of her contractions. Listening to champagne corks pop d o w n the hall, she must have felt so dolefully left out. M a n y of the nurses'

  husbands would be coming home, but my father would not. If the rest of the country had w o n the war, the Khatchadourians of Racine, Wisconsin, had lost.

  Later she must have felt similarly at odds with the sentiments embalmed by the commercial greeting card company for which she went to work (anything but Johnson Wax). H o w eerie, boxing other people's Happy Anniversary tributes and having no need to slip one in her purse w h e n the date came around in her own home. I ' m of two minds as to whether I should be glad that the j o b gave her the idea of starting her o w n handcrafted greeting-

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  card business, which allowed her to withdraw to Enderby Avenue in perpetuity. But I will say that the " O n the Birth ofYour First Baby" card that she made up especially for me—layered
with bled tissue in blues and greens—well, it was lovely.

  In fact, w h e n my head cleared in Beth Israel, I remembered my mother and felt ungrateful. My father had been unable to hold her hand as you held mine. Yet, offered the clasp of a living husband, I crushed it.

  Still, we all know that women in labor can grow abusive, so I'm tempted to admit to having gotten a little hostile in the thick of things, and to leave my confession at that. After all, I was immediately abashed and kissed you. This was before the days w h e n doctors slid a newborn right onto the mother's breast, gore and all, and we had a few minutes while they tied the cord and cleaned him up. I was excited, stroking and squeezing your arm, nesding my forehead into the soft inside of your elbow. I had never held our child.

  But I cannot let myself off the hook so lightly.

  Up until April 11, 1983, I had flattered myself that I was an exceptional person. But since Kevin's birth I have come to suppose that we are all profoundly normative. (For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.) We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations—beyond expectations; they are requirements. Some of these are small: If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous. If it does not seem too shocking, for the duration of our marriage I lived with one terror: that if something happened to you it would break me. But there was always

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  an odd shadow, an underfear, if you will, that it would not—that I would swing off blithely that afternoon to play squash.

  T h e fact that this underfear rarely becomes overweening proceeds from a crude trust. You have to keep faith that if the unthinkable does come to pass, despair will come crashing in of its o w n accord; that grief, for example, is n o t an experience you need s u m m o n or a skill you need practice, and the same goes for prescriptive joy.

  Thus even tragedy can be accompanied by a trace of relief.

  T h e discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity (though considering what people get up to, that's a queer word to equate with compassion, or even with emotional competence). By way of a ready example, take yesterday, Franklin. I was driving to work on R o u t e 9W w h e n a Fiesta turned right, cutting off a bicycle on the shoulder. T h e passenger door made a pretzel of the bike's front wheel, flipping the cyclist over the roof. He landed in a position that was subtly impossible, as if sketched by an unpromising art student. I'd already driven by, but in my rearview mirror, three other cars behind me pulled onto the shoulder to help.

  It seems perverse to find solace in such misfortune. Yet presumably n o n e of the drivers w h o descended to ring emergency services k n e w this cyclist personally or had any vested interest in his fate. Still, they cared enough to inconvenience themselves potentially to the point of having to testify in court. On my o w n account, the drama left me physically shaken—my hands trembled on the wheel, my m o u t h dropped and went dry. B u t I had acquitted myself well. I still blanch at the agony of strangers.

  Yet I do k n o w what it's like to get off-script. Surprise party?

  Funny I should have cited that. T h e week I was to turn ten I sensed something was up. There were whispers, a closet I was directed to avoid. If that weren't enough wink-and-nod, Giles crooned, "You're going to be surprised!"The second week of August I k n e w what signal day was approaching, and by the time it came around I was bursting.

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  Early afternoon of my birthday, I was ordered to the backyard.

  "Surprise! " W h e n I was invited back in, I discovered that five of my friends had been sneaked in the front while I'd been trying to peek through the drawn kitchen curtains. In our bunted living room, they surrounded a card table spread with a paper lace cloth and set with colorful paper plates, beside which my mother had placed matching seating cards inscribed with the fluid calligraphy of her professional work. There were also store-bought party favors: miniature bamboo umbrellas, noisemakers that tongued and honked. The cake, too, was from a bakery, and she had dyed the lemonade a vivid pink to make it seem more festive.

  Doubtless my mother saw my face fall. Children are so lousy at covering up. At the party, I was desultory, laconic. I opened and closed my umbrella and rapidly tired of it, which was odd; I had powerfully envied other girls w h o had gone to parties to which I hadn't been invited and returned to school with precisely these pink-and-blue parasols.Yet somehow it was revealed to me that they came in packets o f t e n in a plastic bag and could be purchased even by the likes of us, and that devalued the favors more than I could say. Two of the guests I did not much like; parents never get it right about your friends.The cake was sealed in fondant icing like a plastic puck, and flavorlessly sweet; my mother's baking was better. There were more presents than usual, but all I remember of them is that each was unaccountably disappointing. And I was visited by a prescient taste of adulthood, an unbracketed " N o Exit" sensation, which rarely plagues children: that we were sitting in a room and there was nothing to say or do. The minute it was over, the floor messy with crumbs and wrapping, I cried.

  I must sound spoiled, but I wasn't spoiled. Little had been made of my birthdays in the past. Looking back, I feel simply despicable, too. My mother had gone to so much trouble. Her business didn't make much money for the longest time; she would labor over one card for over an hour and then sell it for a quarter, a price at which her customers would still squawk. In terms of

  — 9 4 —

  our family's midget economy, the outlay had been considerable.

  She must have been bewildered; if she were a different sort of parent, she'd have spanked my ungrateful behind. Whatever had I contemplated that in comparison made my surprise party such a letdown?

  N o t h i n g . Or nothing in particular, nothing that I could f o r m concretely in my head.That was the problem. I had been awaiting something large and amorphous, a vast big thing so marvelous that I could not even imagine it. T h e party she threw was all too imaginable. For that matter, had she brought in a brass b a n d and magicians I'd have still been crestfallen.There was no extravagance that would not have fallen short, because it would be finite and fixed, one thing and not another. It would be only what it was.

  T h e point is, I don't k n o w what exactly I'd foreseen would happen to me w h e n Kevin was first hoisted to my breast. I hadn't foreseen anything exactly. I wanted what I could not imagine. I wanted to be transformed; I wanted to be transported. I wanted a door to open and a whole n e w vista to expand before me that I had never k n o w n was out there. I wanted nothing short of revelation, and revelation by its nature cannot be anticipated; it promises that to which we are not yet privy. But if I extracted one lesson from my tenth birthday party, it was that expectations are dangerous w h e n they are b o t h high and u n f o r m e d .

  I may have misrepresented myself here. Of course I had misgivings. But my expectations of m o t h e r h o o d were high, or I wouldn't have agreed to go through with it. I'd attended hungrily to accounts from friends: You have no idea what it's like until you have one of your own. Whenever I allowed that I was less than enamored of infants and small children, I was assured: I felt the same way! Couldn't stand other people's kids! But it's different—it's totally different—when they're yours. I loved that, the prospect of another country, a strange land in which insolent miscreants were miraculously alchemized into, as you had said yourself, an answer to the "Big Question." Indeed, I may even have misrepresented my feelings about foreign countries. Yes, I was suffering travel fatigue, and yes, I did always fight a hereditary dread before h o p -

  ping
a plane. But setting foot in Namibia, or H o n g Kong, even Luxembourg for the first time made me high as a kite.

  Wlrat I hadn't realized, Brian had confided, is that you fall in love with your own children. You don't just love them. You fall in love.

  And that moment, when you lay eyes on them for the first time—it's indescribable. I do wish he had described it anyway. I do wish he had given it a try.

  Dr. Rhinestein dangled the infant over my breast and rested the tiny creature d o w n w i t h — I was glad to see her evidence it at last—painstaking gentleness. Kevin was damp, and blood creased his neck, the crooks of his limbs. I put my hands diffidently around him. T h e expression on his twisted face was disgruntled.

  His body was inert; I could only interpret his lassitude as a lack of enthusiasm. Sucking is one of our few innate instincts, but with his m o u t h right at my enlarged brown nipple, his head lolled away in distaste.

  T h o u g h I'd been warned that I wouldn't lactate on demand like a cafeteria milk dispenser, I kept trying; he kept resisting; he liked the other nipple no better. And all the while I was waiting.

  My breath shallow, I was waiting. And I kept waiting. But everybody says—, I thought. And then, distinctly: Beware of ivhat "everybody says."

  Franklin, I felt—absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this n e w indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter h o w I ratded around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn't there.The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It's under the spatula, it's slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee—

  "He's beautiful," I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV

  " C a n I?" you asked shyly.