We Need to Talk About Kevin

  tinue to mark occasions of greater maturity—college graduations, weddings—while the static high school yearbook p h o t o loses color in the sun. I haven't been privy to the m o n t h - b y - m o n t h deterioration of marriages once robust; I haven't sniffed the sickly sweet waft of gin off the breath of a formerly industrious realtor at advancingly earlier hours of the afternoon. I haven't felt the weight of all those cartons dragged into a van after a neighborhood lush with oaks, bubbling with smooth-rocked creeks, and alive with the laughter of other people's healthy children has suddenly become intolerable overnight. It seems as if for me to feel guilty in any meaningful way, I should have to suspend all these losses in my head. Yet like those car games in w h i c h you recite, I'm going on a trip, and I'm going to take an ambling aardvark, a babbling baby, a capering caterpillar..., I always blank on an element or two

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  before the end of the alphabet. I start to juggle Mary's unnaturally beautiful daughter, the Fergusons' short-sighted computer whiz kid, the Corbitts' gangling redhead w h o was always overacting in school plays, and then I throw in that uncannily gracious English teacher Dana R o c c o and the balls fall on the floor.

  Of course, just because I can't manage to swallow all the blame doesn't mean that others won't heap it on me anyway, and I'd have been glad to provide a useful receptacle if I thought the heaping did them any good. I always c o m e back to Mary Woolford, whose experience of injustice had hitherto r u n to a particularly inconvenient one-way street. I suppose I'd call her spoiled; she did stir up rather an excessive fuss w h e n Laura didn't make the track team, even though her daughter, however lovely, was physically languid and not the least athletic. B u t it may not be fair to call it a character flaw that someone's life has always gone weE with minimal impedance. Moreover, she was a restive woman, and like my Democratic coworkers given to indignation by nature. Previous to Thursday, she had been accustomed to venting this quantity, which I presume would otherwise build up in her at combustive levels, on campaigns to have the town council put in a pedestrian crossing or to ban homeless shelters from Gladstone; consequently, the denial of funds for such a crossing or the arrival of hairy riffraff on the outskirts of town had previously constituted her version of catastrophe. I ' m not sure h o w such people manage to get their heads around proper disaster after having repeatedly exercised the full powers of their consternation on traffic.

  So I can see h o w a w o m a n w h o ' d long slept restlessly on peas might have difficulty lying on an anvil. Nevertheless, it's a pity that she couldn't remain within the still, serene well of sheer incomprehension. O h , I realize you can't stay bewildered—the need to understand or at least to pretend you do is too great—but I myself have found wide white mystification a place in my mind that is blessedly quiet. And I fear that Mary's alternative outrage, her evangelical fever to bring the guilty to book, is a clamorous place that creates the illusion of a journey, a goal to be achieved, only so long as that goal remains out of reach. Honestly, I had to fight the impulse at the civil trial to take her aside and charge gently, "You can't imagine that you'll feel better if you win, do you?" In fact, I became convinced that she would find more consolation in having what proved a surprisingly slight parental negligence case dismissed, because then she'd be able to nurture this theoretical alternative universe in which she had successfully unloaded her agony onto a callous, indifferent m o t h e r w h o deserved it. Somehow Mary seemed confused as to what the problem was. T h e problem was not w h o was punished for what. T h e problem was that her daughter was dead. Although I couldn't have been more sympathetic, it was not subject to unloading onto anyone else.

  Besides, I might be more kindly disposed to this ultra-secular notion that whenever bad things happen someone must be held accountable if a curious little halo of blamelessness did not seem to surround those very people w h o perceive themselves as bordered on every side by agents of wickedness. That is, it seems to be the same folks w h o are inclined to sue builders w h o did not perfecdy protect them from the depredations of an earthquake w h o will be the first to claim that their son failed his math test because of attention deficit disorder, and not because he spent the night before at a video arcade instead of studying complex fractions. Further, if underlying this huffy relationship to cataclysm—the hallmark of the American middle class—were a powerful conviction that bad things simply shouldn't happen, period, I might find the naivete disarming. B u t the core conviction of these incensed sorts—who greedily rubberneck interstate pileups—seems rather that bad things shouldn't happen to them. Lastly, though you k n o w I've never been especially religious after having all that O r t h o d o x guff forced on me as a child (though luckily by the time I was eleven, my mother could no longer brave the church a whole four blocks away and held halfhearted "services" at home), I still wonder at a race grown so anthrocentric that all events from

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  volcanoes to global temperature shift have become matters for which its individual members are answerable. T h e species itself is an act, for lack of a better word, of God. Personally, I would argue that the births of single dangerous children are acts of God as well, but therein lay our court case.

  Harvey thought from the start that I should settle. You remember Harvey Landsdown;you thought he was self-important.

  He is, but he told such marvelous stories. N o w he goes to other people s dinner parties and tells stories about me.

  Harvey did rattle me a bit, since he's a get-to-the-point type.

  In his office, I stumbled and digressed; he messed with papers, implying that I was wasting his time or my money—same thing.

  We were at odds on our understanding of what constitutes truth.

  He wanted gist. Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile.

  Maybe that's what I'm attempting here, Franklin, because though I tried to answer his questions directly, whenever I made simple, exculpatory statements like,"Of course I love my son," I felt that I was lying and that any judge or jury would be able to tell.

  Harvey didn't care. He's one of those attorneys w h o think of the law as a game, not as a morality play. I'm told that's the kind you want. Harvey is fond of declaiming that being in the right never won anyone's case, and he even left me with the unfocused sense that having justice on your side is a faint disadvantage.

  Of course, I was not at all sure that justice was on my side, and Harvey found my hand-wringing tedious. He commanded me to stop dithering about h o w it looked, accepting a reputation as a Bad Mother, and he clearly couldn't have cared less about whether I really was a bad mother. (And Franklin, I was. I was terrible at it. I wonder if you can ever forgive me.) His reasoning was straightforward economics, and I gather this is how many suits are decided. He advised that we could probably pay off the parents out of court for a great deal less than a sentimental j u r y might award. Crucially, there was no guarantee that we'd

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  be compensated for court costs even if we won. So that means, I sorted out slowly, that in this country where you're "innocent until proven guilty" someone can accuse me of whatever he wants and I could be out hundreds of thousands even if I prove the accusation groundless? Welcome to the U.S. of A., he said gaily. I miss you to rail to. Harvey wasn't interested in my exasperation. He found these legal ironies amusing, because it was not his company started from a single discount plane ticket that was on the line.

  Looking back, Harvey was absolutely right—about the money, that is. And I have reflected since on what drove me to make Mary take her case against me to trial in defiance of sound legal counsel. I must have been angry. If I had done anything wrong, it seemed to me that I had already been punished roundly. No court could have sentenced me to anything worse than this arid life in my poky duplex, with my chicken breast and cabbage, my tremulous halogen bulbs, my robotic
biweekly visits to Chatham—or perhaps even worse, to nearly sixteen years of living with a son who, as he asserted, did not want me as a mother and w h o gave me almost daily good reason to not want him as a son. All the same, I really ought to have worked out for myself that if a jury's damning verdict would never assuage Mary's grief, a more kindly judgment would never temper my own sense of complicity, either. I'm sad to say that I must have been motivated in some not inconsiderable part by a desperation to be publicly exonerated.

  Alas, it was not public exoneration that I truly craved, which may be why I sit here night after night and try to record every incriminating detail. Look at this sorry specimen: As a mature, happily married woman of nearly thirty-seven, she is informed of her first pregnancy and almost faints in horror, a response she disguises from her delighted husband with a pert gingham sundress. Blessed with the miracle of new life, she chooses to dwell instead on a forgone glass of wine and the veins in her legs. She throws herself about her living room to the tune of tawdry popular music with no thought of her u n b o r n child. At a time that she ought best to be learning in her very gut the true meaning of ours, she chooses instead to fret about whether the forthcoming baby is hers. Even beyond the point at which she should have more than learned her lesson, she is still banging on about a movie in which h u m a n birth is confused with the expulsion of an oversized maggot. A n d she's a hypocrite who's impossible to please: After admitting that flitting about the globe is not the magical mystery tour she once pretended it was—that these superficial peripatetics have in fact b e c o m e trying and m o n o t o n o u s — t h e m o m e n t this gadding about is imperiled by the needs of someone else, she starts swooning over the halcyon life she once led w h e n jotting d o w n w h e t h e r Yorkshire youth hostels provide kitchen facilities. Worst of all, before her hapless son has even managed to survive the inhospitable climate of her clenched, reluctant womb, she has committed what you yourself, Franklin, deemed the officially unspeakable: She has capriciously changed her mind, as if children are merely little outfits you can try on back h o m e and—after turning critically before the mirror to conclude, no, sorry, it's a pity but this really just doesn't quite suit—cart back to the store.

  I recognize that the portrait I'm painting here is not attractive, and for that matter I can't remember the last time I felt attractive, to myself or anyone else. In fact, years before I got pregnant myself I met a young w o m a n at the W h i t e Horse in the Village with w h o m I'd gone to college in Green Bay. T h o u g h we hadn't spoken since then, she had recently given birth to her o w n first child, and I needed only to say hi for her to begin spewing her despair. Compact, with unusually broad shoulders and close curly black hair, Rita was an attractive w o m a n — i n the physical sense. W i t h no solicitation on my part she regaled me with the irreproachable state of her physique before she conceived.

  Apparently she'd been using the Nautilus every day, and her definition had never been so sharp, her fat-to-muscle ratio was unreal, her aerobic conditioning topping the charts.

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  T h e n pregnancy, well it was terriblel T h e Nautilus just didn't feel good any more and she'd had to stop—. Now, now, she was a mess, she could hardly do a sit-up, m u c h less three sets of proper crunches, she was starting from scratch or worse—! This w o m a n was fuming, Franklin; she clearly muttered about her abdominal muscles w h e n she seethed down the street. Yet at no point did she mention the name of her child, its sex, its age, or its father. I remember stepping back, excusing myself to the bar, and slipping away without telling Rita good-bye. W h a t had most mortified me, what I had to flee, was that she sounded not only unfeeling and narcissistic but just like me.

  I ' m no longer sure whether I rued our first child before he was even born. It's hard for me to reconstruct that period without contaminating the memories with the outsized regret of later years, a regret that bursts the constraints of time and gushes into the period w h e n Kevin wasn't there yet to wish away. But the last thing I've wanted is to whitewash my o w n part in this terrible story. That said, I ' m determined to accept due responsibility for every wayward thought, every petulance, every selfish m o m e n t , not in order to gather all the blame to myself but to admit this is my fault and that is my fault but there, there, precisely there is where I draw a line and on the other side, that, that, Franklin, that is not.

  Yet to draw that line I fear I must advance to its very edge.

  By the last month, the pregnancy was almost fun. I was so ungainly that the condition had a goofy novelty, and for a w o m a n w h o had always been so conscientiously trim there was a relief to be found in becoming a cow. H o w the other half lives, if you will—more than half, I gather, as of 1998, the first year in which more people in the U.S. were officially fat than not.

  Kevin was two weeks late. Looking back, I am superstitiously convinced that he was foot-dragging even in the womb—-that he was hiding. Perhaps I was n o t the only party to this experiment w h o had reservations.

  W h y were you never tortured with our foreboding? I had

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  to discourage you from buying so many bunnies and buggies and Huggy Snuggy afghans before the birth. What if, I noted, something goes wrong? Couldn't you be setting yourself up for a fall? You pished that to plan on disaster was to court it. (Hence, in contemplating a darker twin of the dazzlingly hale and happy boy you were counting on, I allowed the changeling into the world.) I was the over-thirty-five mother keen on getting the fetus tested for Downs; you were adamantly opposed. All they can give you is a percentage chance, you argued. Are you going to tell me that if it's one in 500 you'll go ahead, but one in fifty and it's flush and start again? Of course not, I said. O n e in ten, then. O n e in three. What's the cutoff? W h y force yourself to make that kind of choice?

  Your arguments were convincing, though I wonder if

  behind them didn't lurk a poorly thought out romance with the handicapped child: one of those clumsy but sweet-tempered emissaries of God w h o teaches his parents that there's so much more to life than smarts, a guileless soul w h o is smothered in the same hair-tousling affection lavished on a family pet. Thirsty to quaff whatever funky genetic cocktail our D N A served up, you must have flirted with the prospect of all those bonus points for self-sacrifice: Your patience w h e n it takes our darling dunderhead six months of daily lessons to tie his shoes proves superhuman.

  Unstinting and fiercely protective, you discover in yourself a seemingly bottomless well of generosity on which your I'm-leaving-for-Guyana-tomorrow wife never draws, and at length you abandon location scouting, the better to devote yourself full-time to our five-foot-something three-year-old. T h e neighbors all extol your make-the-best-of-it resignation to the hand Life has dealt, the roll-with-the-punches maturity with which you face what others in our race and class would find a crippling body blow. You were just desperate to throw yourself into this parenting business, weren't you? To plunge from a cliff, to pitch yourself on a pyre. Was our life together that unbearable to you, that bleak?

  I never told you, but I got the test behind your back. T h e optimism of its result (about one in 100) allowed me to once more elude the enormity of our differences. Me, I was picky.

  My approach to parenthood was conditional, and the conditions were strict. I did not want to mother an imbecile or a paraplegic; whenever I saw fatigued women wheeling their stick-limbed progeny with muscular dystrophy for water therapy at Nyack Hospital, my heart didn't melt, it sank. Indeed, an honest list of all that I did not want to nurture, from the garden-variety moron to the grotesquely overweight, might run damningly to a second page. In retrospect, however, my mistake was not that I got the test in secret but that I found reassurance in its result. Dr.

  Rhinestein did not test for malice, for spiteful indifference, or for congenital meanness. If they could, I wonder how many fish we might throw back.

  As for the birth itself, I had always played up a macho attitude t
oward pain that merely betrayed that I'd never suffered from a debilitating illness, broken a single bone, or emerged from a four-car pileup. Honestly, Franklin, I don't know where I got this idea of myself as so tough. I was the Mary Woolford of the physical world. My concept of pain derived from stubbed toes, skinned elbows, and menstrual cramps. I knew what it was like to feel a litde achy after the first day of a squash season; I had no idea what it was like to lose a hand to industrial machinery or to have a leg run over by the Seventh Avenue IRT. Nevertheless, how eagerly we buy into one another's mythologies, no matter how farfetched. You accepted my blase response to cut fingers in the kitchen—a transparent bid for your admiration, my dear—as sufficient evidence that I would force a form the size of a standing rib roast through an orifice that had previously accommodated nothing larger than a bratwurst with equal stoicism. It simply went without saying that I would shun anesthetics.

  I cannot for the life of me understand what we were trying to prove. For your part, maybe that I was the heroic larger-than-life that you wanted to have married. For my part, I may

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  have got sucked into that litde competition b e t w e e n w o m e n about childbirth. Even Brian's demure wife Louise a n n o u n c e d that she had managed a twenty-six-hour labor w i t h Kiley while soothed only by "raspberry leaf tea," a treasured family factoid that she repeated on three separate occasions. It was encounters of this variety that swelled the ranks of the natural childbirth course I t o o k at the N e w School, t h o u g h I wager that m a n y of those students w h o talked this "I w a n t to k n o w what it feels like" game broke d o w n and begged for an epidural at the first contraction.