We Need to Talk About Kevin

  I offered the baby up. Whereas n e w b o r n Kevin had squirmed miserably on my breast, he rested an arm around your neck, as if having found his real protector. W h e n I looked at your face, eyes closed, cheek pressed against our infant son, I recognized, if this

  — 96 —

  does not sound too flippant: There's the potato peeler. It seemed so unfair. You were clearly choked up, filled to the back of your throat with a w o n d e r m e n t that defied expression. It was like watching you lick an ice cream cone that you refused to share.

  I sat up, and you returned him reluctandy, at which point Kevin began to squall. Holding the baby, w h o still refused to suckle, I was revisited by that n o w - w h a t sensation of my tenth birthday party: Here we were, in a room, and there seemed nothing to say or do. Minutes wore on, Kevin would yowl, rest limply, and jerk irritably from time to time; I felt the first stirrings of what, appallingly, I can only call boredom.

  O h , please don't. I k n o w what you'd say. I was exhausted.

  I'd had a thirty-seven-hour labor and it was ridiculous to think I'd be capable of feeling anything but weary and numb. A n d it had been absurd to imagine fireworks; a baby is a baby. You'd goad me to remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be o b -

  scurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeered. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around—well, it just didn't seem that different. Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized u p o n the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.

  Besides, you would cajole, parenthood isn't something that happens in an instant. T h e fact of a b a b y — w h e n so recently there was none—is so disconcerting that I probably just hadn't made the whole thing real to myself yet. I was dazed. That's it, I was dazed. I wasn't heartless or defective. Besides, sometimes w h e n you're watching yourself too hard, scrutinizing your o w n feelings, they flee, they elude capture. I was self-conscious, and I was trying too hard. I had worked myself up into a kind of emotional paralysis. Didn't I just observe that these spontaneous

  — 97 —

  outpourings of high passion are matters of faith? So my belief had flickered; I had allowed the underfear temporarily to get the best of me. I just needed to relax and let nature take its course. A n d for God's sake, to get some rest. I k n o w you'd say all these things, because I said t h e m to myself. A n d they didn't make a dent—in my sense that the whole thing was going w r o n g from the start, that I was not following the program, that I had dismally failed us and our n e w b o r n baby. That I was, frankly, a freak.

  While they stitched up the tearing, you offered to take Kevin again, and I k n e w I should protest. I didn't. At being relieved of him, my gratitude was soul-destroying. If you want to k n o w the truth, I was angry. I was frightened, I was ashamed of myself, but I also felt cheated. I wanted my surprise party. I thought, if a w o m a n can't rely on herself to rise to an occasion like this, then she can't count on anything; from this point onward the world was on its ear. Prostrate, with my legs agape, I made a vow: that while I might have learned to expose my "private" parts for all the world to see, I would never reveal to anyone on earth that childbirth had left me unmoved. You had your unspeakable—

  "Never, ever tell me that you regret our o w n kid"; n o w I had mine. Reminiscing in company about this m o m e n t later, I would reach for that word, indescribable. Brian was a splendid father. I would borrow my good friend's tenderness for the day.

  D E C E M B E R 1 8 , 2 0 0 0

  Dear Franklin,

  Tonight was our office Christmas party, which isn't easy to pull off with six people fresh from one another's throats. We have httle in c o m m o n , but in general I am glad for their companionship—not so m u c h for heart-to-hearts over a sandwich as for quotidian exchanges about package deals in the Bahamas. (I'm sometimes so grateful for the busywork of flights to b o o k that I could weep.) Likewise, the simple adjacency of w a r m bodies supphes the deepest of animal comfort.

  T h e manager was kind to take me into her employ. Thursday having w o u n d e d so many people in this area,Wanda did w o r r y at first that folks might start to avoid her premises just to keep from thinking about it. Yet to be fair to our neighbors, it is often an exceptionally heartfelt-sounding season's greetings that tips me off that a customer recognizes w h o I am. It's the staff w h o m I've disappointed. T h e y must have hoped that rubbing up against a celebrity of sorts would confer distinction on themselves and that I would furnish stirringly disturbing stories for my coworkers to dine out on. But the association is too tangential, and I doubt their friends are impressed. Most of my tales are ordinary. There is only one story they want to hear, really, and that one they k n e w backward and forward before I came on board.

  A wide-hipped divorcee with a braying laugh, Wanda herself may have h o p e d that we would b e c o m e fast friends. By the end of our first lunch, she had confided that her ex-husband got an erection watching her pee, that she had just had a h e m o r r h o i d

  "tied off," and that, until a near-miss with a Saks security guard at thirty-six, she'd been a compulsive shoplifter. I returned with the disclosure that after six months in my toy duplex I had finally gotten myself to buy curtains. You can see h o w she might have been a little put out that I'd got Manhattan while she got beads.

  So tonight Wanda cornered me by the fax machine. She didn't want to pry, but had I sought out "help"? I k n e w what she meant, of course.The entire student body of Gladstone High School was offered free counseling by the school board, and even some of this year's intake, n o t even enrolled in 1999, has claimed to be traumatized and plunged to the couch. I didn't want to seem hostile and so say honestly that I couldn't see h o w the mere iteration of my troubles to a stranger w o u l d lessen t h e m one iota, and that surely counseling was the logical refuge of those whose problems were ephemeral fancies and not matters of historical fact. So I demurred that my experience with the mental health profession had been rather sour, kindly omitting that the failures of my son's psychiatric care had made headlines coast to coast. Moreover, it didn't seem wise to confide that thus far I had f o u n d my only "help" in writing to you, Franklin.

  For s o m e h o w I feel certain that these letters are not on the list of prescribed therapies, since you are at the very heart of what I need to "get past" so that I might experience "closure." A n d what a terrible prospect is that.

  Even back in 1983, I was bewildered w h y a standardized psychiatric label like postnatal depression was supposed to be consoling. O u r compatriots seem to put m u c h stock in slapping a tag on their ailments. Presumably a complaint c o m m o n enough to have a name implies that you are not alone and dangles options like Internet chat rooms and community support groups for rhapsodic communal bellyaching.This compulsion to bandwagon has even infiltrated American small talk. I can't remember the last

  — 100 —

  time anyone told me that he " t o o k a long time to wake up."

  Instead I ' m informed that he's not a morning person. All those fellow travelers w h o require killer cups of coffee on waking must provide one's disinclination to hop out of bed for a ten-mile run some extra clout.

  I might have achieved a renewed appreciation for my o w n normative propensities, including a not unreasonable expectation that w h e n bearing a child I will actually feel something, even something nice. But I hadn't changed that much. I'd never f o u n d solace in being just like everybody else. A n d t h o u g h Dr.

  Rhinestein offered up postnatal depression like a present, as if simply being told that you are unhappy is supposed to cheer you up, I did not pay professionals to be plied with the o
bvious, with the merely descriptive. T h e t e r m was less diagnostic than tautological: I was depressed after Kevin's birth because I was depressed after Kevin's birth. Thanks.

  Yet she also suggested that because Kevin's disinterest in my breast had persisted, I might be suffering feelings of rejection.

  I colored. It embarrassed me that I might take the opaque predilections of such a tiny, half-formed creature to heart.

  Of course she was right.At first I thought I was doing something wrong, not guiding his m o u t h . But no; I would place the nipple between his lips, where else could it go? He had sucked a time or two, but turned away, the bluish milk running down his chin. He'd cough, and, perhaps I imagined it, he even seemed to gag. W h e n I went for an emergency appointment, Dr. Rhinestein informed me flatly that "sometimes this happens." My lord, Franklin, what you discover sometimes happens w h e n you become a parent! I was distraught. In her office, I was surrounded by leaflets about building your baby's i m m u n e system. A n d I tried everything. I didn't drink. I eliminated dairy products. At tremendous sacrifice, I gave up onions, garlic, and chilies. I eliminated meat and fish. I installed a gluten-free regime, which left me with little more than a bowl of rice and an undressed salad.

  In the end I was starving, while Kevin continued to feed in

  — 101 —

  his lackluster way on a bottle of microwaved formula that he would only accept from you. He wouldn't even take my milk from a bottle, writhing from it without a sip. He could smell it. He could smell me. Yet he didn't test positive for an allergy, at least in the medical sense. Meanwhile, my once diminutive breasts were taut, sore, and leaking. Rhinestein was adamant that I not let my milk dry up, since occasionally this aversion—that was the word she used, Franklin, aversion—would abate. It was so awkward and painful that I never did quite get the hang of the expressing pump, though it was sweet of you to go out and buy that hospital-grade Medela. I'm afraid I came to hate it, a chill plastic substitute for a warm suckling infant. I was aching to give him the very milk of human kindness, and he did not want it, or he did not want it from me.

  I shouldn't have taken it personally, but h o w could I not?

  It wasn't mother's milk he didn't want, it was Mother. In fact, I became convinced that our little bundle o f j o y had found me out.

  Infants have great intuition, because intuition's about all they've got. I felt certain that he could detect a telltale stiffening in my arms w h e n I picked him up. I was confident that he could infer from a subtly exasperated quality in my voice w h e n I burbled and cooed that burbling and cooing did not come naturally to me and that his precocious ear could isolate in that endless stream of placating blather an insidious, compulsive sarcasm. Moreover, since I had read—sorry, you had read—that it was important to smile at infants to try to elicit a smile in response, I smiled and smiled, I smiled until my face hurt, but w h e n my face did hurt I was sure he could tell. Every time I forced myself to smile, he clearly knew that I didn't feel like smiling, because he never smiled back. He hadn't seen many smiles in his lifetime but he had seen yours, enough to recognize that in comparison there was something wrong with Mother's. It curled up falsely; it evaporated with revelatory rapidity w h e n I turned from his crib.

  Is that where Kevin got it? In prison, that marionette smile, as if pulled up by strings.

  I k n o w you doubt me on this, but I did try very hard to f o r m a passionate attachment to my son. But I had never experienced my feeling for you, for example, as an exercise that I was obliged to rehearse like scales on the piano. T h e harder I tried, the more aware I became that my very effort was an abomination. Surely all this tenderness that in the end I simply aped should have come knocking at the door uninvited. H e n c e it was not just Kevin w h o depressed me, or the fact that your o w n affections were increasingly diverted; I depressed me. I was guilty of emotional malfeasance.

  B u t Kevin depressed me as well, and I do mean Kevin and not the baby. From the very beginning that child was particular to me, whereas you often asked How's the kid? or How's my boy?

  or Where's the baby? To me he was never "the baby." He was a singular, unusually cunning individual w h o had arrived to stay with us and just happened to be very small. For you he was " o u r son"—or, once you started to give up on me, "my son." There was a persistently generic character to your adoration that I ' m certain he sensed.

  Before you get your back up, I don't mean that as a criticism.

  It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to t h e m as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to t h e m w h e n as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort w h e n Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday.

  I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, w h i c h I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafted with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports— gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my c o m m i t -

  ments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific.

  By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the U n i t e d States so m u c h more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting.

  Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons t r i u m p h for eternity.

  Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.

  In the end, mastitis put an end to my desperate search for whatever foodstuff was putting Kevin off my milk. Poor nutrition may have made me susceptible. That and fumbling to get Kevin to take the breast, which could have lacerated the nipples enough to transmit infection from his m o u t h . Inimical to my sustenance, he could still introduce me to corruption, as if already at year zero the more worldly party of our pair.

  Since the first sign of mastitis is fatigue, it's little w o n d e r that the early symptoms went unobserved. He'd w o r n me out for weeks. I bet you still don't believe me about his fits of pique, t h o u g h a rage that lasts for six to eight hours seems less a fit than a natural state, from which the tranquil respites you witnessed were

  — 1 0 4 —

  bizarre departures. O u r son had fits of peace. And this may sound completely mad, but the consistency with which Kevin shrieked with precocious force of will the w h o l e time he and I were alone, and then with the abruptness of switching off a heavy-metal radio station desisted the m o m e n t you came home—well, it seemed deliberate. T h e silence still ringing for me, you'd bend over our slumbering angel w h o unbeknownst to you was just beginning to sleep off his Olympian exertions of the day. T h o u g h I'd never have wished on you my o w n pulsing headaches, I couldn't bear the subtle distrust that was building between us w h e n y
our experience of our son did not square with mine. I have sometimes entertained the retroactive delusion that even in his crib Kevin was learning to divide and conquer, scheming to present such contrasting temperaments that we were b o u n d to be set at odds. Kevin's features were unusually sharp for a baby, while my o w n still displayed that rounded Mario Thomas credulity, as if he had leeched my very shrewdness in utero.

  Childless, I'd perceived baby crying as a pretty undifferentiated affair. It was loud; it was n o t so loud. B u t in m o t h e r h o o d I developed an ear. There's the wail of inarticulate need, w h a t is effectively a child's first groping after language, for sounds that m e a n wet o r f o o d or pin! There's the shriek of terror—that no one is here and that there may never be anyone here again. There's that lassitudinous wah-wah, n o t unlike the call to mosque in the Middle East or improvisational song; this is creative crying, f u n crying, f r o m babies w h o , while not especially unhappy, have failed to register that we like to constrain weeping to conditions of distress. Perhaps saddest of all is the muted, habitual m e w l of a baby w h o may be perfectly miserable but w h o , w h e t h e r through neglect or prescience, no longer anticipates reprieve—w h o in infancy has already b e c o m e reconciled to the idea that to live is to suffer.

  O h , I imagine there are as many reasons that n e w b o r n babies cry as that grown ones do, but Kevin practiced n o n e of these standard lachrymal modes. Sure, after you got h o m e he'd

  — 105 —

  sometimes fuss a little like a normal baby that he wanted feeding or changing, and you'd take care of it and he'd stop; and then you'd look at me like, see? and I'd want to slug you.

  W i t h me, once you left, Kevin was not to be bought off with anything so petty and transitory as milk or dry diapers. If fear of abandonment contributed to a decibel level that rivaled an industrial buzz saw, his loneliness displayed an awesome existential purity; it wasn't about to be allayed by the hover of that haggard cow with her nauseating waft of white fluid. A n d I discerned no plaintive cry of appeal, no keen of despair, no gurgle of nameless dread. Rather, he hurled his voice like a weapon, howls smashing the walls of our loft like a baseball bat bashing a bus shelter. In concert, his fists sparred with the mobile over his crib, he kick-boxed his blanket, and there were times I stepped back after patting and stroking and changing and marveled at the sheer athleticism of the performance. It was unmistakable: Driving this remarkable combustion engine was the distilled and infinitely renewable fuel of outrage.