We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

December 8, 2000

Dear Franklin,

I’m the one at Travel R Us who volunteers to stay late and finish up, but most of the Christmas flights
are booked, and this afternoon we were all encouraged as a “treat” to knock off early, it being Friday.
Beginning another desolate marathon in this duplex at barely 5 P.M. makes me close to hysterical.
Propped before the tube, poking at chicken, filling in the easy answers in the Times crossword, I
often have a nagging sensation of waiting for something. I don’t mean that classic business of waiting
for your life to begin, like some chump on the starting line who hasn’t heard the gun. No, it’s waiting
for something in particular, for a knock on the door, and the sensation can grow quite insistent.
Tonight it’s returned in force. Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting
for you to come home.
Which inevitably puts me in mind of that seminal May evening in 1982, when my expectation that you
would walk into the kitchen anytime now was less unreasonable. You were location scouting in the
pine barrens of southern New Jersey for a Ford advertisement and were due home about 7:00 P.M.
I’d recently returned from a monthlong trip to update Greece on a Wing and a Prayer, and when you
hadn’t shown up by 8:00, I reminded myself that my own plane had been six hours late, which had
ruined your plans to sweep me from JFK to the Union Square Café.
Still, by 9:00 I was getting edgy, not to mention hungry. I chewed distractedly on a chunk of
pistachio halvah fromAthens. On an ethnic roll, I’d made a pan of moussaka, with which I planned to
convince you that, nestled against ground lamb with loads of cinnamon, you did like eggplant after all.
By 9:30, the custard topping had started to brown and crust around the edges, even though I’d
turned the oven down to 250˚. I took out the pan. Balanced on the fulcrum between anger and anguish,
I indulged a fit of pique, banging the drawer when I went for the aluminum foil, grumbling about
having fried up all those circles of eggplant, and now it was turning into a big, dry, charred mess! I
yanked my Greek salad out of the fridge and furiously pitted the calamatas, but then left it to wilt on
the counter and the balance tipped. I couldn’t be mad anymore. I was petrified. I checked that both
phones were on the hook. I confirmed that the elevator was working, though you could always take the
stairs. Ten minutes later, I checked the phones again.
This is why people smoke, I thought.
When the phone did ring at around 10:20, I pounced. At my mother’s voice, my heart sank. I told
her tersely that you were over three hours late, and I mustn’t tie up the line. She was sympathetic, a
rare sentiment from my mother, who then tended to regard my life as one long accusation, as if the
sole reason I ventured to yet another country was to rub her nose in the fact that for one more day she
had not left her porch. I should have remembered that she, too, had been through this very experience
at twenty-three, and not for hours but for weeks, until a slim envelope flipped through her front door
slot from the War Department. Instead I was cruelly rude, and hung up.
Ten-forty. Southern New Jersey wasn’t perilous—timber and farmland, not like Newark. But there
were cars like primed missiles, and drivers whose stupidity was murderous. Why didn’t you call?
That was before the advent of mobile phones, so I’m not blaming you. And I realize this experience is common as dirt: Your husband, your wife, your child is late, terribly late, and then they come home
after all and there’s an explanation. For the most part, these brushes against a parallel universe in
which they never do come home—for which there is an explanation, but one that will divide your
whole life into before and after—vanish without a trace. The hours that had elongated into lifetimes
suddenly collapse like a fan. So even though the salty terror in my gums tasted familiar, I couldn’t
recall a specific instance when I had paced our loft before, head swimming with cataclysms: an
aneurysm, an aggrieved postal worker with an automatic in Burger King.
By 11:00, I was making vows.
I gulped a glass of sauvignon blanc; it tasted like pickle juice. This was wine without you. The
moussaka, its dry, dead hulk: This was food without you. Our loft, rich with the international booty of
baskets and carvings, took on the tacky, cluttered aspect of an import outlet: This was our home
without you. Objects had never seemed so inert, so pugnaciously incompensatory. Your remnants
mocked me: the jump rope limp on its hook; the dirty socks, stiff, caricatured deflations of your size
eleven feet.
Oh, Franklin, of course I knew that a child can’t substitute for a husband, because I had seen my
brother stooped from the pressure to be the “little man of the house”; I had seen the way it tortured
him that Mother was always searching his face for resemblances to that ageless photo on the mantle. It
wasn’t fair. Giles couldn’t even remember our father, who died when he was three and who had long
since transformed from a flesh-andblood Dad who dribbled soup on his tie into a tall, dark icon
looming over the fireplace in his spotless army air corps uniform, an immaculate emblem of all that
the boy was not. To this day Giles carries himself with a diffidence. When in the spring of 1999 he
forced himself to visit me and there was nothing to say or do, he flushed with speechless resentment,
because I was reviving in him the same sense of inadequacy that had permeated his childhood. Even
more has he resented the public attention refracted off our son. Kevin and Thursday have routed him
from his rabbit hole, and he’s furious with me for the exposure. His sole ambition is obscurity,
because Giles associates any scrutiny with being found wanting.
Still I kicked myself that you and I had made love the night before and one more evening I had
absently slipped that rubber hat around my cervix. What could I do with your jump rope, your dirty
socks? Wasn’t there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws
Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi? No offspring could replace you. But if I ever had to miss
you, miss you forever, I wanted to have someone to miss you alongside, who would know you if only
as a chasm in his life, as you were a chasm in mine.
When the phone rang again at nearly midnight, I hung back. It was late enough to be a reluctant
emissary of a hospital, the police. I let it ring a second time, my hand on the receiver, warming the
plastic like a magic lantern that might grant one last wish. My mother claims that in 1945 she left the
envelope on the table for hours, brewing herself cup after cup of black, acid tea and letting them grow
cold. Already pregnant with me from his last home leave, she took frequent trips to the toilet, closing
the bathroom door and keeping the light off, as if hiding out. Haltingly, she had described to me an
almost gladiatorial afternoon: facing down an adversary bigger and more ferocious than she, and
knowing that she would lose.
You sounded exhausted, your voice so insubstantial that for one ugly moment I mistook it for my
mother’s. You apologized for the worry. The pickup had broken down in the middle of nowhere.
You’d walked twelve miles to find a phone.
There was no point in talking at length, but it was agony to end the call. When we said good-bye,
my eyes welled in shame that I had ever declared, “I love you!” in that peck-at-the-door spirit that
makes such a travesty of passion.
I was spared. In the hour it took a taxi to drive you to Manhattan, I was allowed the luxury of
slipping back to my old world of worrying about casseroles, of seducing you into eggplant and
nagging you to do the laundry. It was the same world in which I could put off the possibility of our
having a child another night, because we had reservations, and there were many more nights.
But I refused to relax right away, to collapse into the casual heedlessness that makes everyday life
possible, and without which we would all batten ourselves into our living rooms for eternity like my
mother. In fact, for a few hours I had probably been treated to a taste of my mother’s whole postwar
life, since what she lacks may not be courage so much as a necessary self-deceit. Her people
slaughtered by Turks, her husband plucked from the sky by devious little yellow people, my mother
sees chaos biting at her doorstep, while the rest of us inhabit a fabricated playscape whose
benevolence is a collective delusion. In 1999, when I entered my mother’s universe for good—a
place where anything could happen and often did—toward what Giles and I had always regarded as
her neurosis I grew much kinder.
You would indeed come home—this once. But when I put the phone down, it registered with a
whispered click: There could yet come a day when you did not.
Thus instead of going slack and infinite, time still felt frantically short. When you walked in you
were so tired you could hardly speak. I let you skip dinner, but I would not let you sleep. I have
experienced my share of burning sexual desire, and I can assure you that this was an urgency of
another order. I wanted to arrange a backup, for you and for us, like slipping a carbon in my IBM
Selectric. I wanted to make sure that if anything happened to either of us there would be something
left beside socks. Just that night I wanted a baby stuffed in every cranny like money in jars, like
hidden bottles of vodka for weak-willed alcoholics.
“I didn’t put in my diaphragm,” I mumbled when we were through.
You stirred. “Is it dangerous?”
“It’s very dangerous,” I said. Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months
later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.
The next morning, you said while we dressed, “Last night—you didn’t just forget?” I shook my head,
pleased with myself. “Are you sure about this?”
“Franklin, we’re never going to be sure. We have no idea what it’s like to have a kid. And there’s
only one way to find out.”
You reached under my arms and lifted me overhead, and I recognized your lit-up expression from
when you’d played “airplane” with Brian’s daughters. “Fantastic!”
I had sounded so confident, but when you brought me in for a landing I started to panic.
Complacency has a way of restoring itself of its own accord, and I’d already stopped worrying
whether you would live through the week. What had I done? When later that month I got my period, I
told you I was disappointed. That was my first lie, and it was a whopper.
During the following six weeks you applied yourself nightly. You liked having a job to do and
bedded me with the same boisterous ifyou’re-going-to-do-anything-do-it-right with which you had
knocked up our bookshelves. Myself, I wasn’t so sure about this yeomanlike fucking. I had always fancied the frivolousness of sex, and I liked it down and dirty. The fact that even the Armenian
Orthodox Church would now look on with hearty approval could put me right out of the mood.
Meanwhile, I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little
mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on
cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even
women forget what breasts are for.
The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or
achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end,
but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and
not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion
overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species’ heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once
got at the dentist.
Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find
me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement. I don’t want to
pretend that I’m the first woman to discover the birds and the bees. But all this was new to me. And
frankly, I wasn’t so sure about it. I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological
project that I didn’t initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I
felt used.
I’m sure you remember those fights about booze. According to you, I shouldn’t have been drinking
at all. I balked. As soon as I discovered I was pregnant—I was pregnant, I didn’t go in for this we
stuff—I’d go cold turkey. But conception could take years, during which I was not prepared to killjoy
my every evening with glasses of milk. Multiple generations of women had tippled cheerfully through
their pregnancies and what, did they all give birth to retards?
You sulked. You went quiet if I poured myself a second glass of wine, and your disapproving
glances despoiled the pleasure (as they were meant to). Sullenly, you’d grumble that in my place
you’d stop drinking, and yes, for years if necessary, about which I had no doubt. I would let
parenthood influence our behavior; you would have parenthood dictate our behavior. If that seems a
subtle distinction, it is night and day.
I was deprived that clichéd cinematic tip-off of heaving over the toilet, but it doesn’t appear to be in
moviemakers’ interests to accept that some women don’t get morning sickness. Although you offered
to accompany me with my urine sample, I dissuaded you: “It’s not as if I’m getting tested for cancer
or something.” I remember the remark. Much like what they say in jest, it’s telling what people claim
something is not.
At the gynecologist’s, I delivered my marinated artichoke jar, a briskness covering the intrinsic
embarrassment of handing off smelly effluents to strangers, and waited in the office. Dr. Rhinestein—
a cold young woman for her profession, with an aloof, clinical temperament that would have suited
her better for pharmaceutical trials with rats—swept in ten minutes later and leaned over her desk to
jot. “It’s positive,” she said crisply.
When she looked up, she did a double take. “Are you all right? You’ve turned white.”
I did feel strangely cold.
“Eva, I thought you were trying to get pregnant. This should be good news.” She said this severely,
with reproach. I got the impression that if I wasn’t going to be happy about it, she would take my baby and give it to someone who’d got their mind right—who would hop up and down like a game-show
contestant who’d won the car.
“Drop your head between your legs.” It seems I had begun to weave.
Once I had forced myself to sit up, if only because she seemed so bored, Dr. Rhinestein went
through a long list of what I couldn’t do, what I couldn’t eat and drink, when Iwould—never mind my
plans to update “WEEWAP,” as the office now called our Western European edition, thanks to you—
return for my next appointment. This was my introduction to the way in which, crossing the threshold
of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That
coy expression “you’re eating for two now, dear,” is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no
longer a private affair; indeed, as the land of the free has grown increasingly coercive, the inference
seems to run that “you’re eating for us now,” for 200-some million meddlers, any one of whose
prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the mood for a jelly donut and not a full meal with
whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five major food groups. The right to boss pregnant
women around was surely on its way into the Constitution.
Dr. Rhinestein itemized recommended brands of vitamins and lectured on the dangers of continuing
to play squash.
I had the afternoon to assemble myself into the glowing mother-to-be. Instinctively, I chose a plain
cotton sundress more pert than sexy, then gathered the ingredients for a meal that was aggressively
nutritious (the sautéed sea trout would be unbreaded, the salad would sport sprouts). In the meantime,
I tried on different approaches to a shopworn scene: coy, delayed; bemused, artificially offhand;
gushing—oh, darling! None of them seemed to suit. As I whisked about the loft twisting fresh candles
into holders, I made a brave attempt at humming but could only think of show tunes from big-budget
musicals like Hello, Dolly!
I hate musicals.
Ordinarily, the finishing touch on a festive occasion was choosing the wine. I stared dolefully at
our ample rack, bound to gather dust. Some celebration.
When the elevator clanked at our floor, I kept my back turned and arranged my face. With one
glance at the tortured collection of conflicting twitches we make when we “arrange” our faces, you
spared me the announcement. “You’re pregnant.”
I shrugged. “Looks that way.”
You kissed me, chastely, no tongue. “So when you found out—how’d you feel?”
“A bit faint, actually.”
Delicately, you touched my hair. “Welcome to your new life.”
Since my mother was as terrified of alcohol as she was of the next street over, a glass of wine had
never lost for me its tantalizing quality of the illicit. Although I didn’t think I had a problem, a long
draught of rich red at day’s end had long been emblematic to me of adulthood, that vaunted American
Holy Grail of liberty. But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different
from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.
So I poured myself a flute of cranberry juice and toasted, brightly. “La chaim!”
Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon—the smallest of compromises, the little
roundings off or slight recastings of one emotion as another that is a tad nicer or more flattering. I did
not care so much about being deprived of a glass of wine per se. But like that legendary journey that begins with a single step, I had already embarked upon my first resentment.
A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress. For
that matter, that is the nature of resentment, the objection we cannot express. It is silence more than
the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic, like poisons the body won’t pee away. Hence,
hard as I tried to be a grown-up about my cranberry juice, chosen carefully for its resemblance to a
young Beaujolais, deep down inside I was a brat. While you came up with names (for boys), I
wracked my brain for what in all this—the diapers, the sleepless nights, the rides to soccer practice
—I was meant to be looking forward to.
Eager to participate, you had volunteered to give up booze for my pregnancy, though our baby
would be no more bouncing should you forgo your predinner microbrew. So you began festively
knocking back cranberry juice to beat the band. You seemed to relish the opportunity to prove how
little drinking meant to you. I was annoyed.
Then, you were always captivated by self-sacrifice. However admirable, your eagerness to give
your life over to another person may have been due in some measure to the fact that when your life
was wholly in your lap you didn’t know what to do with it. Self-sacrifice was an easy way out. I
know that sounds unkind. But I do believe that this desperation of yours—to rid yourself of yourself,
if that is not too abstract—burdened our son hugely.
You remember that evening? We should have had so much to talk about, but we were awkward,
halting. We were no longer Eva and Franklin, but Mommy and Daddy; this was our first meal as a
family, a word and a concept about which I had always been uneasy. And I was short-tempered,
discarding all the names you came up with, Steve and George and Mark, as “way too ordinary,” and
you were hurt.
I couldn’t talk to you. I felt pent up, clogged. I wanted to say: Franklin, I’m not sure this is a good
idea. You know in your third trimester they won’t even let you onto a plane? And I hate this whole
rectitudinous thing, the keeping to a good diet and setting a good example and finding a good school .
. .
It was too late. We were supposed to be celebrating and I was supposed to be elated.
Frantic to recreate the longing for a “backup” that had got me into this, I roused the memory of the
night you were stranded in the pine barrens—barren, had that set me off? But that May evening’s rash
decision had been an illusion. I had made up my mind all right, but long before, back when I fell so
hard and irrevocably for your guileless American smile, your heartbreaking faith in picnics. However
weary I might have grown with writing up new countries, over time it is inevitable that food, drink,
color, and trees—the very state of being alive is no longer fresh. If its shine had tarnished, this was
still a life I loved, and one into which children didn’t readily fit. The single thing I loved more was
Franklin Plaskett. You coveted so little; there was only one big-ticket item you wanted that was in my
power to provide. How could I have denied you the light in your face when you lifted Brian’s
squealing little girls?
With no bottle over which to linger, we went to bed on the early side. You were nervous about
whether we were “supposed” to have sex, if it would hurt the baby, and I grew a little exasperated. I
was already victimized, like some princess, by an organism the size of a pea. Me, I really wanted to
have sex for the first time in weeks, since we could finally fuck because we wanted to get laid and not
to do our bit for the race. You acquiesced. But you were depressingly tender.
Though I expected that my ambivalence would evanesce, this conflicted sensation grew only sharper, and therefore more secret. At last I should come clean. I think the ambivalence didn’t go
away because it wasn’t what it seemed. It is not true that I was “ambivalent” about motherhood. You
wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but
though we were a superlative couple, we were not the same person. I never did get you to like
eggplant.

Eva