We Need to Talk About Kevin

  M u c h less could I foresee the aching O. H e n r y irony that in lighting u p o n my consuming new topic of conversation, I would lose the man that I most wanted to talk to.

  — 28 —

  NOVEMBER. 2 8 , 2 0 0 0

  Dear Franklin,

  This carnival in Florida shows no signs of picking up stakes.

  T h e office is up in arms about some state official w h o wears a lot of makeup, and a number of my overwrought coworkers are predicting a "constitutional crisis." Although I haven't followed the details, I doubt that. W h a t strikes me as people in diners rail at each other at the counter w h e n before they ate in silence is not h o w imperiled they feel, but h o w safe. O n l y a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.

  But having come so close to extermination within living m e m o r y (I k n o w you're tired of hearing about it), few Armenian Americans share their compatriots' smug sense of security. T h e very numerics of my own life are apocalyptic. I was b o r n in August 1945, w h e n the spoors of two poisonous mushrooms gave us all a cautionary foretaste of hell. Kevin himself was b o r n during the anxious countdown to 1984—much feared, you'll recall; though I scoffed at folks w h o took George Orwell's arbitrary title to heart, those digits did usher in an era of tyranny for me. Thursday itself took place in 1999, a year widely m o o t e d beforehand as the end of the world. And wasn't it.

  Since I last wrote, I've been rooting around in my mental attic for my original reservations about motherhood. I do recall a tumult of fears, though all the w r o n g ones. Had I catalogued

  — 29 —

  the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:

  1. Hassle.

  2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.) 3. O t h e r people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. T h e kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.) 4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn't say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.) 5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I'm a pig.) 6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. N o t conclusion.) 7. D e m e n t i n g boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.)

  8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.)

  9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. O n c e I had a toddler in tow, every m a n I knew—-every woman, too, which is depressing—would take me less seriously.)

  10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But w h o wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, w h a t good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother could feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.)

  Those, as best I can recall, are the pygmy misgivings I weighed beforehand, and I've tried not to contaminate their dumbfounding naivete with what actually happened. Clearly, the reasons to remain barren—and what a devastating word—were all petty inconveniences and trifling sacrifices. They were selfish and mean and small-minded, so that anyone compiling such a catalogue w h o still chose to retain her tidy, airless, static, dead-end, desiccated family-free life was not only short-sighted but a terrible person.

  Yet as I contemplate that list n o w it strikes me that, however damning, the conventional reservations about parenthood are practical. After all, n o w that children don't till your fields or take you in w h e n you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all. By contrast, love, story, content, faith in the h u m a n " t h i n g " — t h e m o d e r n incentives are like dirigibles, immense, floating, and few; optimistic, large-hearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded.

  For years I'd been awaiting that overriding urge I'd always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless w o m e n ineluctably to strangers' strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach d o w n for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. ( With child: There's a lovely w a r m sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgment that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: " I ' m pregnant." I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table—pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend—forcing herself to blurt out her mother's deepest fear.)

  Whatever the trigger, it never entered my system, and that made me feel cheated. W h e n I hadn't gone into maternal heat by my mid-thirties, I worried that there was something w r o n g with me, something missing. By the time I gave birth to Kevin at thirty-seven, I had begun to anguish over whether, by not simply accepting this defect, I had amplified an incidental, perhaps merely chemical deficiency into a flaw of Shakespearean proportions.

  So what finally pulled me off the fence? You, for starters. For if we were happy, you weren't, not quite, and I must have known that. There was a hole in your life that I couldn't quite fill. You had work, and it suited you. Nosing into undiscovered stables and armories, searching out a field that had to be edged with a split-rail fence and sport a cherry-red silo and black-and-white cows (Kraft—whose cheese-food slices were made with "real milk"), you made your own hours, your own vista. You liked location scouting. But you didn't love it. Your passion was for people, Franklin. So w h e n I saw you playing with Brian's children, nuzzling them with monkey puppets and admiring their wash-off tattoos, I yearned to provide you opportunity for the ardor that I myself once found in A Wing and a Prayer—or, as you would say,AWAP.

  I remember once you tried to express, haltingly, what was not like you; not the sentiment, not the language. You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.You feared that too much examination could bruise the feelings, like the well-meaning but brutish handling of a salamander by big, clumsy hands.

  We were in bed, still in that vaultingTribeca loft whose creaky handworked elevator was forever breaking down. Cavernous, sifting with dust, undifferentiated into civilized cubicles with end tables, the loft always reminded me of the private hideout my brother and I had fashioned from corrugated iron in Racine.You and I had made love, and I was just swooning off into sleep when I sat bolt upright. I had to catch a plane for Madrid in ten hours'

  time and had forgotten to set the alarm. Once I'd adjusted the clock, I noticed you were on your back.Your eyes were open.

  "What is it?"

  You sighed. "I don't know how you do it." As I nestled back to bask in another paean to my amazing adventurousness and courage, you must have sensed my mistake, for you added hastily,

  "Leave. Leave all the time for so long. Leave me."

  — 3 2 —

  "But I don't like to."

  "I wonder."

  "Franklin, I didn't contrive my company to escape your clutches. Don't forget, it predates you."

  " O h , I could hardly forget that."

  "It's my job!"

  "It doesn't have to be."

  I sat up. "Are you—"

  " I ' m not."You pressed me gently back down; this was not going as you planned, and you had, I could tell, planned it.

  You rolled over to place your elbows on either side of me and touched your forehead, briefly, to mine. " I ' m not trying to take your series away. I know how much it means to you. That's the trouble. T h e other way around, I
couldn't do it. I couldn't get up tomorrow to fly to Madrid and try to discourage you from meeting me at the airport three weeks later. Maybe once or twice. N o t over and over."

  "You could if you had to."

  "Eva.You know and I know.You don't have to."

  I twisted.You were so close up; I felt hot, and, between your elbows, caged. "We've been through this—"

  " N o t often. Your travel guides are a runaway success. You could hire college students to do all the grubbing around in flophouses that you do yourself. They already do most of your research, don't they?"

  I was vexed; I'd been through this. "If I don't keep tabs on them, they cheat. They say they've confirmed that a listing is still good, and don't bother and go get slammed. Later it turns out the B&B has changed hands and is riddled with lice, or it's moved to a new location. I get complaints from cross-country cyclists w h o have ridden a hundred miles to find an insurance office instead of a hard-earned bed. They're furious, as they should be.

  And without the boss lady looking over their shoulder, some of those students will take kickbacks. AWAP's most valuable asset is its reputation—"

  — 3 3

  "You could hire someone else to do spot checks, too. So you're going to Madrid tomorrow because you want to.There's nothing awful about that except that I wouldn't, and I couldn't.You k n o w that w h e n you're gone I think about you all the time? On the h o u r I think about what you're eating, w h o you're m e e t i n g — "

  "But I think about you, too!"

  You laughed, and the chuckle was congenial; you weren't trying to pick a fight. You released me, rolling onto your back.

  "Horseshit, Eva.You think about whether the falafel stand on the corner will last through the next update, and h o w to describe the color of the sky. Fine. But in that case, you must feel differently about me than I do about you.That's all I ' m getting at."

  "Are you seriously claiming that I don't love you as much?"

  "You don't love me in the same way. It has nothing to do with degree. There's something—you save out," you groped. "Maybe I envy that. It's like a reserve tank or something.You walk out of here, and this other source kicks in.You putter around Europe, or Malaysia, until it finally runs low and you come home."

  Yet in truth what you had described was closer to my pre-Franklin self. I was once an efficient litde unit, like one of those travel toothbrushes that folds into a box. I k n o w I tend to over-romanticize those times, though in the early days especially I had a fire under me. I was a kid, really. I'd initially gotten the idea for A W i n g and a Prayer halfway through my own first trip to Europe, for which I'd brought way too little cash.This notion of a bohemian travel guide gave me a sense of purpose in what was otherwise disintegrating into one long cup of coffee, and from then on I went everywhere with a tattered notebook, recording rates for single rooms, whether they had hot water or the staff spoke any English or the toilets backed up.

  It's easy to forget, n o w that AWAP has attracted so m u c h competition, but in the mid-sixties globe-trotters were pretty m u c h at the mercy of The Blue Guide, whose target audience was middle-aged and middle class. In 1966, w h e n the first

  — 3 4 —

  edition of Western Europe on a Wing and a Prayer w e n t into a second printing almost overnight, I realized that I was onto something. I like to portray myself as shrewd, but we b o t h k n o w I was lucky. I couldn't have anticipated the backpacking craze, and I wasn't e n o u g h of an amateur d e m o g r a p h e r to have taken deliberate advantage of all those restless baby b o o m e r s c o m i n g of age at once, all on Daddy's dime in an era of prosperity, but all optimistic about h o w far a few h u n d r e d dollars w o u l d take t h e m in Italy and desperate for advice on h o w to make a trip D a d never wanted t h e m to take in the first place last as long as possible. I mostly reasoned that the next explorer after me w o u l d be scared, the way I was scared, and nervous of being taken, the way I was sometimes taken, and if I was willing to get the food poisoning first I could make sure that at least our novice wayfarer didn't stay up heaving on that first electric night overseas. I don't mean that I was benevolent, only that I w r o t e the guide that I wished I'd b e e n able to use myself.

  You're rolling your eyes.This lore is shopworn, and maybe it's inevitable that the very things that first attract you to someone are the same things with which you later grow irritated. Bear with me.

  You k n o w that I was always horrified by the prospect of turning out like my mother. Funny, Giles and I only learned the t e r m "agoraphobic" in our thirties, and I've always been perplexed by its strict definition, which I've looked up m o r e than once: "fear of open or public spaces." N o t , from what I could tell, an apt description of her complaint. My mother wasn't afraid of football stadiums, she was afraid to leave the house, and I got the impression she was just as panicked by enclosed spaces as by open ones, so long as the enclosed space did not happen to be 137 Enderby Avenue in Racine, Wisconsin. But there doesn't seem to be a word for that (Enderbyphilia?), and at least w h e n I refer to my m o t h e r as agoraphobic, people seem to understand that she orders in.

  Jesus that's ironic, I've heard more times than I can count. With

  — 35 —

  all the places you've been? O t h e r people savor the symmetry of apparent opposites.

  But let me be candid. I am m u c h like my mother. Maybe it's because as a child I was always running errands for which I was too young and that therefore daunted me; I was sent out to locate n e w gaskets for the kitchen sink w h e n I was eight years old. In pushing me to be her emissary while I was still so small, my mother managed to reproduce in me the same disproportionate anguish about m i n o r interactions with the outside world that she herself felt at thirty-two.

  I can't recall a single trip abroad that, up against it, I have truly wanted to take, that I haven't in some way dreaded and wanted desperately to get out of. I was repeatedly forced out the door by a conspiracy of previous commitments: the ticket purchased, the taxi ordered, a host of reservations confirmed, and just to box myself in a litde further I would always have talked up the j o u r n e y to friends, before florid farewells. Even on the plane, I'd have been blissfully content for the wide-body to penetrate the stratosphere for all eternity. Landing was agony, finding my first night's bed was agony, though the respite itself—my ad hoc replication of Enderby Avenue—was glorious. At length, I got hooked on this sequence of accelerating terrors culminating in a vertiginous plunge to my adoptive mattress. My whole life I have been making myself do things. I never went to Madrid, Franklin, out of appetite for paella, and every one of those research trips you imagined I used to slip the surly bonds of our domestic tranquillity was really a gauntlet I'd thrown down and compelled myself to pick up. If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.

  But over the years the aversion grew milder, and surmounting a mere annoyance is not so rich. O n c e I habituated to rising to my o w n challenge—to proving repeatedly that I was independent, competent, mobile, and grown-up—gradually the fear inverted: T h e one thing I dreaded more than another trip to Malaysia was staying home.

  So I wasn't only afraid of becoming my mother, but a mother.

  I was afraid of being the steadfast, stationary anchor w h o provides a j u m p i n g - o f f place for another young adventurer whose travels I might envy and whose future is still u n m o o r e d and unmapped.

  I was afraid of being that archetypal figure in the doorway—frowzy, a little p l u m p — w h o waves good-bye and blows kisses as a backpack is stashed in the trunk; w h o dabs her eyes with an apron ruffle in the fumes of departing exhaust; w h o turns forlornly to twist the latch and wash the too-few dishes by the sink as the silence in the room presses d o w n like a dropped ceiling. M o r e than of leaving, I had developed a horror of being left. H o w often I had done that to you, stranded you with the baguette crusts of our farewell dinner and swept off to my waiting taxi.

  I don't beli
eve I ever told you h o w sorry I was for putting you through all those little deaths of serial desertion, or c o m m e n d e d you on constraining expression of your quite justifiable sense of abandonment to the occasional quip.

  Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing—reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mouths—all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my o w n selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick, tarry powers of my o w n resentment. However intrigued by a " t u r n of the page," I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story. A n d I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to j u m p off. T h e very insurmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness, was in the end what attracted me to it.

  D E C E M B E R 3 9 , 2 0 0 0

  Dear Franklin,

  I've settled myself d o w n in a little coffee shop in Chatham, which is w h y this is handwritten; then, you were always able to decipher my spidery scrawl on postcards, since I gave you a terrible lot of practice.The couple at the next table is having a k n o c k d o w n drag-out over the application process for absentee ballots in Seminole C o u n t y — t h e kind of minutiae that seems to consume the whole country right now, since everyone around me has turned into a procedural pedant. All the same, I bask in their heatedness as before a woodstove. My o w n apathy is b o n e chilling.

  T h e Bagel Cafe is a h o m e y establishment, and I don't think the waitress will mind if I nurse a cup of coffee by my legal pad. Chatham, too, is homey, authentic—with the kind of Middle America quaintness that more well-to-do towns like Stockbridge and Lenox spend a great deal of m o n e y to feign. Its railroad station still receives trains. T h e commercial main drag sports the traditional lineup of secondhand bookstores (full of those Loren Estleman novels you devoured), bakeries with burnt-edged bran muffins, charity consignment shops, a cinema whose marquee says "theatre" on the parochial presumption that British spelling is m o r e sophisticated, and a liquor store that, along with Taylor magnums for the locals, stocks some surprisingly pricey California zinfandels for out-of-towners. Manhattan residents with second homes keep this disheveled hamlet alive n o w that most local