We Need to Talk About Kevin

  B u t Kevin wouldn't let the matter drop.There was something he wanted to tell me. "I don't get it. It was all gucky.And it took forever. N o w everything looks dumb. W h a t difference does it make. W h y ' d you bother." He stamped his foot. "It's dumb"

  Kevin had skipped the why phase that usually hits around three, at which point he was barely talking. Although the why phase may seem like an insatiable desire to comprehend cause and effect, I'd eavesdropped enough at playgrounds (It's time to go make dinner, cookie! Why? Because we're going to get hungry! Why? Because our bodies are telling us to eat! Why?) to k n o w better. Three-year-olds aren't interested in the chemistry of digestion; they've simply hit on the magic word that always provokes a response. But Kevin had a real why phase. He thought

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  my wallpaper an incomprehensible waste of time, as just about everything adults did also struck him as absurd. It didn't simply perplex him but enraged him, and so far Kevin's why phase has proved not a passing developmental stage but a permanent condition.

  I knelt. I looked into his stormy, pinched-up face and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Because I love my n e w study. I love the maps. I love them."

  I could have been speaking U r d u . "They're dumb," he said stonily. I stood up. I dropped my hand. T h e p h o n e was ringing.

  T h e separate line for my study wasn't installed yet, so I left to grab the p h o n e in the kitchen. It was Louis, with another crisis regarding JAPWAP, whose resolution took a fair amount of time. I did call to Kevin to come out where I could see him, more than once. But I still had a business to oversee, and have you any notion h o w fatiguing it is to keep an eye on a small child every single m o m e n t of every single day? I ' m tremendously sympathetic with the sort of diligent m o t h e r w h o turns her back for an eye b l i n k — w h o leaves a child in the bath to answer the door and sign for a package, to scurry back only to discover that her httle girl has hit her head on the faucet and drowned in two inches of water. Two inches. Does anyone ever give the w o m a n credit for the twenty-four-hours-minus-three-minutes a day that she has watched that child like a hawk? For the months, the years'

  worth of don't-put-that-in-your-mouth-sweeties, of whoops!-we-almost-fell-downs? O h , no. We prosecute these people, we call it "criminal parental negligence" and drag t h e m to court through the snot and salty tears of their o w n grief. Because only the three minutes count, those three miserable minutes that were just enough.

  I finally got off the phone. D o w n the hall, Kevin had discovered the pleasures of a r o o m with a door: T h e study's was shut. "Hey, kid," I called, turning the knob, " w h e n you're this quiet you make me nervous—"

  My wallpaper was spidery with red and black ink. T h e more

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  absorbent papers had started to blotch.The ceiling, too, since I'd papered that as well; craning on the ladder had been murder on my back. Drips from overhead were staining one of my uncle's most valuable Armenian carpets, our wedding present. T h e r o o m was so whipped and wet that it looked as if a fire alarm had gone off and triggered a sprinkling system, only the nozzles had flung not water but motor oil, cherry Hawaiian punch, and mulberry sorbet.

  From the transitional squirts of a sickly purple I might later conclude that he had used up the botde of black India ink first before moving on to the crimson, but Kevin left nothing to my deduction: He was still draining the last of the red ink into the barrel of his squirt gun. Just as he'd posed in the process of retrieving the gun from the top of our kitchen cabinet, he seemed to have saved this last tablespoon for my arrival. He was standing on my study chair, bent in concentration; he did not even look up. T h e filling hole was small, and though he was pouring intently, my burnished oak desk was awash in spatter. His hands were drenched.

  "Now," he announced quietly, "it's special."

  I snatched the gun, flung it on the floor, and stamped it to bits. I was wearing pretty yellow Italian pumps. T h e ink ruined my shoes.

  4

  JANUARY 1 3 , 2 0 0 1

  Dear Franklin,

  Yes, second Saturday of the month, and I ' m debriefing in the Bagel Cafe again. I ' m haunted by the image of that guard with the mud-spatter of facial m oles, w h o looked at me today with his routine mixture of sorrow and distaste. I feel m u c h the same way about his face. T h e moles are large and puffy, like feeding ticks, mottled and gelatinous, widening toadstool-like from a narrower base so that some of them have started to droop. I've wondered if he obsesses over his lesions, doing overtime at Claverack to save for their removal, or has developed a perverse fondness for them.

  People seem able to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.

  In fact, I read recently that a neural operation has been developed that can virtually cure some Parkinson's patients. So successful is the surgery that it has moved more than one of its beneficiaries to kill themselves. Yes, you read correcdy: to kill themselves. No more trembling, no more spastic arm swings in restaurants that knock over the wine. But also, no more aching sympathy from doe-eyed strangers, no more spontaneous outpourings of tenderness from psychotically forgiving spouses.

  T h e recovered get depressed, reclusive.They can't handle it: being just like everybody else.

  Between ourselves, I've started to worry that in some backhanded way I've b e c o m e attached to the disfigurement

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  of my o w n life. These days it is solely through notoriety that I understand w h o I am and what part I play in the dramas of others. I ' m the mother of " o n e of those Columbine kids" (and h o w it grieves Kevin that Littleton has w o n the generic tag over Gladstone). N o t h i n g I do or say will ever outweigh that fact, and it is tempting to stop fighting and give over. That must explain w h y some mothers of my ilk have abandoned any attempt to recoup the lives they led before, as marketing directors or architects, and have gone on the lecture circuit or spearheaded the Million M o m March instead. Perhaps this is what Siobhan meant by being "called."

  Indeed, I've developed a healthy respect for fact itself, its awesome dominance over rendition. No interpretation I slather over events in this appeal to you has a chance of overwhelming the sheer actuality of Thursday, and maybe it was the miracle of fact itself that Kevin discovered that afternoon. I can c o m m e n t until I ' m blue, but what happened simply sits there, triumphing like three dimensions over two. No matter h o w m u c h enamel those vandals threw at our windowpanes, the house remained a house, and Thursday has the same immutable feel about it, like an object I can paint but whose physical enormity will persist in shape, regardless of hue.

  Franklin, I ' m afraid I caught myself giving over in the Claverack visitors' waiting r o o m today. A n d by the way, I'd be the last to complain about the facilities overall. N e w l y constructed to supply a burgeoning market sector, the institution is not yet overcrowded.

  Its roofs don't leak, its toilets flush; Juvenile Detention on a Wing and a Prayer (JUVIEWAP) would give the joint an enthusiastic listing. Claverack's classrooms may provide a better meat-and-potatoes education than trendy suburban high schools whose curricula are padded with courses in Inuit Literature and Sexual Harassment Awareness Training. But aside from the incongruous R o m p e r R o o m primary colors of the visiting area, Claverack is aesthetically harsh—laying bare, once you take away the frippery of life, h o w terrifyingly litde is left. Cinder-block walls a stark

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  white, the pea-green linoleum unpatterned, the visitors' waiting room is cruelly lacking in distractions—a harmless travel poster for Behze, a single copy of Glamour—as if to deliberately quash self-deceit. It is a room that does not wish to be confused with anything so anodyne as an airline ticket-purchasing office or a dental waiting room. That lone poster for AIDS prevention doesn't qualify as decor, but as an accusation.

  Today a slight, serene black w o m a n sat next to me, a generation younger but doubdess a mother. I kept
shooting fascinated glances at her hair, plaited in a complex spiral that disappeared into infinity at the crown, my admiration fighting a prissy middle-class foreboding about h o w long the braids went unwashed. H e r restful resignation was characteristic of the black relatives w h o frequent that room; I've made a study of it.

  White mothers of delinquents, a statistically rarer breed, tend to jitter, or if they are still, they are ramrod rigid, jaws clenched, heads held stiffly as if fixed in place for a CAT-scan. Should low-enough attendance allow, white moms always assume a chair with at least two empty plastic seats on either side. They often bring newspapers. They discourage conversation. T h e implication is bald: Something has violated the space-time continuum. T h e y do not belong here. I often detect a Mary Woolford brand of outrage, as if these mothers are looking fiercely around the r o o m for someone to sue. Alternatively, I will get a sharp reading of this-cannot-be-happening—an incredulity so belligerent that it can generate a holographic presence in the waiting room of an ongoing parallel universe in which Johnny or Billy came h o m e at the same time he always did after school that day, another ordinary afternoon on which he had his milk and H o - H o s and did his homework. We white folks cling to such an abiding sense of entidement that w h e n things go amiss, we cannot let go of this torturously sunny, idiotically cheerful doppelganger of a world that we deserve in which life is swell.

  By contrast, black mothers will sit next to one another, even if the r o o m is practically empty. They may not always talk, but there

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  is an assumption of fellowship in their proximity, an esprit de corps reminiscent of a b o o k club whose members are all plowing through the same arduously long classic. T h e y never seem angry, or resentful, or surprised to find themselves here. They sit in the same universe in which they've always sat. A n d black people seem to have a m u c h more sophisticated grasp of the nature of events in time. Parallel universes are science fiction, and J o h n n y — o r Jamille—didn't come h o m e that afternoon, did he? E n d of story.

  All the same, there's a tacit understanding among the whole of our circle that you do not fish for details about the misconduct that landed your seatmate's young m a n here. Although the transgression in question is in many cases the family's most public manifestation, in that r o o m we collude in the seemly view that the stuff of the Times Metro Section, the Post front page, is a private affair. O h , a few mothers from time to time will b e n d a neighbor's ear about h o w Tyrone never stole that Discman or he was only holding a kilo for a friend, but then the other mothers catch one another's eyes with bent smiles and pretty soon little Miss We Gonna Appeal This Injustice puts a lid on it. (Kevin informs me that inside, no one claims to be innocent. Instead they confabulate heinous crimes for which they were never caught. "If half these jerk-offs were telling the truth," he slurred wearily last month, "most of the country would be dead." In fact, Kevin has more than once claimed Thursday and newbies haven't believed him: " A n d I'm Sidney Poitier, dude." Apparently he dragged one such skeptic to the library by the hair to confirm his credentials in an old copy of Newsweek.)

  So I was struck by this young woman's repose. R a t h e r than clean her nails or cull old receipts from her pocketbook, she sat upright, hands at rest in her lap. She stared straight ahead, reading the AIDS awareness poster for perhaps the hundredth time. I hope this doesn't sound racist— these days I never k n o w what will give offense—but black people seem terribly g o o d at waiting, as if they inherited the gene for patience along with the one for sickle-cell. I noticed that in Africa as well: dozens of Africans sitting or standing by the side of the road, waiting for the bus or, even harder, waiting for nothing in particular, and they never appeared restive or annoyed. They didn't pull grass and chew the tender ends with their front teeth; they didn't draw aimless pictures with the toes of their plastic sandals in the dry red clay. They were still, and present. T h e capacity is existential, that ability to just be, with a profundity that I have seen elude some very well educated people.

  At one point she crossed to the candy machine in the corner.

  The exact-change light must have been on, because she returned and asked if I had change of a dollar. I fell over myself checking every coat pocket, every cranny of my purse, so that by the time I scrounged the coins together she may have wished she'd never asked. I contend with strangers so infrequently now—I still prefer booking flights in the back room at Travel R Us—that during small transactions I panic. Maybe I was desperate to have a positive effect on someone else's life, if only by providing the means to a Mars Bar. At least this awkward exchange broke the ice, and, to pay me back for what I made seem so much trouble, she spoke when she resumed her seat.

  "I ought to bring him fruit, I guess." She glanced apologetically at the M&M's in her lap. "But Lord, you know he'd never eat it."

  We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids w h o commit grown-up crimes still have their litde-boy sweet tooth.

  " M y son claims Claverack food is 'hog slop,'" I volunteered.

  " O h , my Marlon do nothing but complain, too. Say it ain't 'fit for human consumption.'And you hear they bake saltpeter in the bread rolls?" (This rusty summer-camp rumor is surely sourced in adolescent vanity: that a teenager's lavish libidinous urges are so seditious as to demand dampening by underhanded means.)

  "No, 'hog slop' was all I could get out of him," I said. "But Kevin's never been interested in food. W h e n he was little I was afraid he would starve, until I figured out that he would eat as long as I wasn't watching. He didn't like to be seen needing it—as if hunger were a sign of weakness. So I'd leave a sandwich where he was sure to find it, and walk away. It was like feeding a dog. From around the corner I'd see him cram it in his mouth in two or three bites, looking around, making sure nobody saw. He caught me peeking once, and spat it out. He took the half-chewed bread and cheddar and mashed it onto the plate glass door. It stuck. I left it there for the longest time. I'm not sure why."

  My companion's eyes, previously alert, had filmed. She had no reason to be interested in my son's dietary proclivities and now looked as if she regretted having started a conversation. I'm sorry, Franklin—it's just that I go for days barely speaking, and then if I do start to talk it spews in a stream, like vomit.

  "At any rate," I continued with a bit more calculation, "I've warned Kevin that once he's transferred to an adult facility the food is bound to be far worse."

  T h e woman's eyes narrowed. "Your boy don't get out at eighteen? Ain't that a shame." Skirting the waiting room's taboo subject, she meant: He must have done something bad.

  " N e w York is pretty lenient with juveniles under sixteen," I said. "But even in this state, kids have to do a five-year minimum for murder—especially when it's seven high school students and an English teacher." I added as her face rearranged, " O h , and a cafeteria worker. Maybe Kevin has stronger feelings about food than I thought."

  She whispered, "KK!'

  I could hear the reels in her head rewinding, as she grasped frantically after everything I'd said to which she'd only half listened. Now she had reason to be interested in my son's secretive appetite—and in his "musical" preference for tuneless cacophony randomly generated by computer, in the ingenious little game he used to play composing school essays entirely with three-letter words.What I had just done, it was a kind of party trick. Suddenly she was at a loss for what to say, not because I bored her, but because she was bashful. If she could scavenge a hasty bushel of

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  bruised and mealy details from my conversational drop-fruit, she would present it to her sister over the phone the next day like a Christmas basket.

  " N o n e other," I said. "Funny how 'KK' used to mean 'Krispy Kreme.'"

  "That must b e . . . " She faltered. I was reminded of the time I got a free upgrade to first class, where I sat right next to Sean Connery. Tongue-tied, I couldn't think of a thing to say besides,

>   "You're Sean Connery," of which presumably he was aware.

  "That must be a m-mighty cross to bear," she stammered.

  "Yes," I said. I was no longer driven to get her attention; I had it. I could control the upchuck of chatter that had embarrassed me minutes before. I experienced a seated sensation, literalized in an improbable physical comfort in my form-fitted orange chair.

  Any obligation to express interest in the plight of this young woman's own son seemed to vanish. N o w I was the serene party, and the one to be courted. I felt almost queenly.

  "Your boy," she scrambled. " H e holding up okay?"

  " O h , Kevin loves it here."

  " H o w come? Marlon curse this place up one side, down the other."

  "Kevin has few interests," I said, giving our son the benefit of the doubt that he had any. "He's never known what to do with himself. After-school hours and weekends hung off him in big drooping folds like an oversized car coat. Bingo, his day is agreeably regimented from breakfast to lights-out. And now he lives in a world where being pissed off all day long is totally normal. I think he even feels a sense of community," I allowed. "Maybe not with the other inmates themselves. But their prevailing humors—disgust, hostility, derision—are like old friends."

  Other visitors were clearly eavesdropping, since they flicked averted eyes at our chairs with the swift, voracious motion of a lizard's tongue. I might have lowered my voice, but I was enjoying the audience.

  " H e look back on what he done, he feel any, you k n o w — "

  " R e m o r s e ? " I provided dryly. " W h a t could he conceivably regret? N o w he's somebody, isn't he? A n d he's found himself, as they said in my day. N o w he doesn't have to w o r r y about w h e t h e r he's a freak or a geek, a grind or a j o c k or a nerd. He doesn't have to w o r r y if he's gay. He's a murderer. It's marvelously unambiguous.