We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

December 9, 2000

Dear Franklin,

I know I wrote only yesterday, but I now depend on this correspondence to debrief from Chatham. Kevin was in a particularly combative humor. Right off the bat he charged, “You never wanted to have me, did you?”
Before being impounded like a pet that bites, Kevin wasn’t given to asking me about myself, and I actually took the question as promising. Oh, he reached for it in dull restiveness, pacing his cage, but there’s something to be said for being bored out of your mind. He must have previously recognized that I had a life, in order to go about ruining it with such a sense of purpose. But now he had further appreciated that I had volition: I’d chosen to have a child and had harbored other aspirations that his arrival might have thwarted. This intuition was at such odds with the therapists’ diagnosis of “empathic deficiency” that I felt he deserved an honest reply.
“I thought I did,” I said. “And your father, he wanted you—desperately.”
I looked away; Kevin’s expression of sleepy sarcasm was immediate. Perhaps I shouldn’t have cited, of all things, your desperation. Me, I loved your longing; I had personally profited from your insatiable loneliness. But children must find such hunger disquieting, and Kevin would routinely translate disquiet into contempt.
“You thought you did,” he said. “You changed your mind.”
“I thought I needed a change,” I said. “But no one needs a change for the worse.”
Kevin looked victorious. For years he has tempted me to be nasty. I remained factual. Presenting emotions as facts—which they are—affords a fragile defense.
“Motherhood was harder than I’d expected,” I explained. “I’d been used to airports, sea views, museums. Suddenly I was stuck in the same few rooms, with Lego.”
“But I went out of my way,” he said with a smile that lifted lifelessly as if by hooks, “to keep you entertained.”
“I’d anticipated mopping up vomit. Baking Christmas cookies. I couldn’t have expected—.” Kevin’s look dared me. “I couldn’t have expected that simply forming an attachment to you,” I phrased as diplomatically as I knew how, “would be so much work. I thought—.” I took a breath. “I thought that part came for free.”
“Free!” he jeered. “Waking up every morning isn’t free.”
“Not any more,” I conceded dolefully. Kevin’s and my experience of day-to-day life has converged. Time hangs off me like molting skin.
“Ever occur to you,” he said slyly, “maybe I didn’t want to have you?”
“You wouldn’t have liked any other couple better. Whatever they did for a living, you’d think it was stupid.”
“Cheapskate travel guides? Scouting another banked turn for a Jeep Cherokee ad? Gotta admit, that’s especially stupid.”
“See?” I exploded. “Honestly, Kevin—wouldyou want you? If there is any justice, you’ll wake up one day with yourself next to your bed in a crib!”
Rather than recoil or lash out, he went slack. This aspect of his, it’s more common to the elderly th an to children: the eyes glaze and drop, the musculature goes sloppy. It’s an apathy so absolute that it’s like a hole you might fall in.
You think I was mean to him, and that’s why he withdrew. I don’t think so. I think he wants me to be mean to him the way other people pinch themselves to make sure they’re awake, and if anything he slackened in disappointment that here I was finally pitching a few halfheartedly injurious remarks and he felt nothing. Besides, I expect it was the image of “waking up with yourself” that did it, since that’s just what he does do, and why his every morning feels so costly. Franklin, I have never met anyone— and you do meet your own children—who found his existence more of a burden or indignity. If you have any notion that I’ve brutalized our boy into low self-esteem, think again. I saw that same sullen expression in his eyes when he was one year old. If anything, he thinks very well of himself, especially since becoming such a celebrity. There is an enormous difference between disliking yourself and simply not wanting to be here.
In parting, I threw him a bone. “I did fight very hard to give you my last name.”
“Yeah, well, saved you trouble. The old K-h-a . . . ?” he slurred. “Thanks to me, now everybody in the country knows how to spell it.”
Did you know that Americans stare at pregnant women? In the low birthrate First World, gestation is a novelty, and in the days of T&A on every newsstand, real pornography—conjuring intrusively intimate visions of spread hams, incontinent seepage, that eely umbilical slither. Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman’s cunt. In my head, I used the crudest word I could, to bring home the point. Like the purpose of breasts, it’s one of those glaring facts we tend to suppress.
Still, I once turned heads with a short skirt, and the flickered glances from strangers in shops began to get on my nerves. Along with the fascination, even enchantment on their faces, I also spotted the incidental shiver of revulsion.
You think that’s too strong. I don’t. Ever notice how many films portray pregnancy as infestation, as colonization by stealth? Rosemary’s Baby was just the beginning. In Alien, a foul extraterrestrial claws its way out of John Hurt’s belly. In Mimic, a woman gives birth to a two-foot maggot. Later, the X-Files turned bug-eyed aliens bursting gorily from human midsections into a running theme. In horror and sci-fi, the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell.
I’m sorry, but I didn’t make these movies up, and any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader. Those nature films of female salmon battling upstream to lay their eggs only to disintegrate—eyes filming, scales dropping—made me mad. The whole time I was pregnant with Kevin I was battling the idea of Kevin, the notion that I had demoted myself from driver to vehicle, from householder to house.
Physically, the experience was easier than I expected. The greatest affront of the first trimester was a watery thickening that easily passed as a weakness for Mars bars. My face filled out, beveling my androgynously angular features into the softer contours of a girl. My face was younger but, I thought, dumber looking.
I don’t know what took me so long to notice that you were simply assuming that our baby would take your surname, and even on the Christian name we weren’t like-minded. You’d propose Leonard or Peter. When I countered withEngin or Garabet—or Selim, after my paternal grandfather—you assumed the same tolerant expression I wore when Brian’s girls showed me their Cabbage Patch Kids. Finally you said, “You cannot possibly be proposing that I name my son Garabet Plaskett.” “Nnoo,” I said. “Garabet Khatchadourian. Has more of a ring.” “It has the ring of a kid who’s not related to me.” “Funny, that’s exactly how Peter Plaskett sounds to me.” We were at the Beach House, that charming little bar around the corner on Beach Street, no longer extant I’m afraid, and rather wasted on my orange juice straight up, though they did serve a mean bowl of chili.
You drummed your fingers. “Can we at least nix Plaskett-Khatchadourian ? Because once the hyphenated start marrying each other, kids’ll be going by whole phone books. And since somebody’s gotta lose, it simplest to stick with tradition.”
“According to tradition, women couldn’t own property until, in some states, the 1970s. Traditionally in the Middle East we walk around in a black sack and traditionally in Africa we get our clitorises carved out like a hunk of gristle—”
You stuffed my mouth with cornbread. “Enough of the lecture, babe. We’re not talking about female circumcision but our kid’s last name.”
“Men have always gotten to name children after themselves, while not doing any of the work.” Cornbread crumbs were sailing from my mouth. “Time to turn the tables.”
“Why turn them on me? Jesus, you’d think American men were pussy-whipped enough. You’re the one who complains they’re all quicheeating faggots who go to crying workshops.”
I folded my arms and brought out the heavy artillery. “My father was born in Dier-ez-Zor concentration camp. The camps were riddled with disease and the Armenians had hardly any food or even water—it’s amazing the baby survived, because his three brothers didn’t. His father, Selim, was shot. Two-thirds of my mother’s extended family, the Serafians, was so neatly obliterated that not even their stories have survived. I’m sorry to pull rank. But Anglo-Saxons are hardly an endangered species. My forebears were systematically exterminated, and no one ever even talks about it, Franklin!”
“A million and a half people!” you chimed in, gesticulating wildly. “Do you realize it was what the Young Turks did to the Armenians in 1915 that gave Hitler the idea for the Holocaust?” I glared.
“Eva, your brother’s got two kids. There are a million Armenians in the U.S. alone. Nobody’s about to disappear.”
“But you care about your last name just because it’s yours. I care about mine—well, it seems more important.”
“My parents would have a cow. They’d think I was denying them. Or that I was under your thumb. They’d think I was an asshole.”
“I should get varicose veins for a Plaskett? It’s a gross name!” You looked stung. “You never said you didn’t like my name.” “That wide A, it’s kind of blaring and crass—” “Crass!”
“It’s just so awfully American. It reminds me of fat nasal tourists in Nice whose kids all want ice cream. Who shout, Honey, look at that ‘Pla-a-askett’ when it’s French and the word’s really pronounced plah-skay.”
’s not Plah-skay, you anti-American prig! It’s Plaskett, a small but old and respectable Scottish family, and a name I’d be proud to hand on to my kids! Now I know why you didn’t take it when we got married. You hated my name!”
“I’m sorry! Obviously I love your name in a way, if only because it’s your name—”
“Tell you what,” you proposed; in this country, the injured party enjoyed a big advantage. “If it’s a boy, it’s a Plaskett. A girl, and you can have your Khatchadourian.”
I pushed the bread basket aside and jabbed your chest. “So a girl doesn’t matter to you. If you were Iranian, she’d be kept home from school. If you were Indian, she’d be sold to a stranger for a cow. If you were Chinese, she’d be starved to death and buried in the backyard—”
You raised your hands. “If it’s a girl it’s a Plaskett, then! But on one condition: None of this Gara- souvlaki stuff for a boy’s first name. Something American. Deal?”
It was a deal. And in hindsight we made the right decision. In 1996, fourteen-year-old Barry Loukaitis killed a teacher and two students while taking a whole class hostage in Moses Lake, Washington. A year later, thirteen-year-old Tronneal Mangum shot dead a boy at his middle school who owed him $40. The next month, sixteen-year-old Evan Ramsey killed a student and his principal and wounded two others in Bethel, Alaska. That fall, sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham murdered his mother and two students, wounding seven, in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal shot dead three students and wounded five in Paducah, Kentucky. The next spring in 1998, thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson and eleven-year-old Andrew Golden opened fire on their high school, killing one teacher and four students, wounding ten, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. A month after that, fourteen-year-old Andrew Wurst killed a teacher and wounded three students in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. The following month in Springfield, Oregon, fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel massacred both his parents, proceeding to kill two more students and wounding twenty-five. In 1999, and a mere ten days after a certain Thursday , eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold planted bombs in their Littleton, Colorado, high school and went on a shooting rampage that killed one teacher and twelve students, while wounding twenty-three, after which they shot themselves. So young Kevin—your choice—has turned out as American as a Smith and Wesson.
As for his surname, our son has done more to keep the name Khatchadourian alive than anyone else in my family.
Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd—slavery, incest, a suicide—I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I’ve learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. I’d readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away.
The name? I think I just wanted to make the baby mine. I couldn’t shake the sensation of having been appropriated. Even when I got the sonogram and Dr. Rhinestein drew her finger around a shifting mass on the monitor, I thought, Who is that? Though right under my skin, swimming in another world, the form seemed far away. And did a fetus have feelings? I had no way of anticipating that I would still be asking that question about Kevin when he was fifteen.
I confess that when Dr. Rhinestein pointed out the blip between the legs, my heart sank. Although according to our “deal” I was now bearing a Khatchadourian, just getting my name on the title deeds wasn’t going to annex the kid for his mother. And if I enjoyed the company of men—I liked their down-to-earth quality, I was prone to mistake aggression for honesty, and I disdained daintiness—I
wasn’t at all sure about boys.
When I was eight or nine, and once more sent on some errand by my mother to fetch something
grown-up and complicated, I’d been set upon by a group of boys not much older than myself. Oh, I
wasn’t raped; they wrenched up my dress and pulled down my panties, threw a few dirt clods and ran
away. Still, I was frightened. Older, I continued to give wide berth to eleven-year-olds in parks—
pointed into bushes with their flies down, leering over their shoulders and sniggering. Even before I
had one myself, I was well and truly frightened by boys. And nowadays, well, I suppose I’m
frightened by just about everybody.
For all our squinting at the two sexes to blur them into duplicates, few hearts race when passing
gaggles of giggling schoolgirls. But any woman who passes a clump of testosterone-drunk punks
without picking up the pace, without avoiding the eye contact that might connote challenge or
invitation, without sighing inwardly with relief by the following block, is a zoological fool. A boy is
a dangerous animal.
Is it different for men? I never asked. Perhaps you can see through them, to their private anguish
about whether it’s normal to have a curved penis, the transparent way they show off for one another
(though that’s just what I’m afraid of). Certainly the news that you’d be harboring one of these holy
terrors in your own home so delighted you that you had to cover your enthusiasm a bit. And the sex of
our child made you feel that much more that the baby was yours, yours, yours.
Honestly, Franklin, your proprietary attitude was grating. If I ever cut it close crossing the street,
you weren’t concerned for my personal safety but were outraged at my irresponsibility. These “risks”
I took—and I regarded as going about my regular life—seemed in your mind to exhibit a cavalier
attitude toward one of your personal belongings. Every time I walked out the door, I swear you
glowered a little, as if I were bearing away one of your prized possessions without asking.
You wouldn’t even let me dance, Franklin! Really, there was one afternoon that my subtle but
unrelenting anxiety had mercifully lifted. I put on our Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues and began
buoyantly herky-jerkying around our underfurnished loft. The album was still on the first song,
“Burning Down the House,” and I’d barely worked up a sweat when the elevator clanked and in you
marched. When you lifted the needle preemptorily, you scratched a groove, so that forever after the
song would skip and keep repeating, Baby what did you expect and never make it to Gonna burst
into fla-ame without my depressing the cartridge gently with a forefinger.
“Hey!” I said. “What was that about?”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“For once I was having a good time. Is that illegal?”
You grabbed my upper arm. “Are you trying to have a miscarriage? Or do you just get a kick out of
tempting fate?”
I wrestled free. “Last time I read, pregnancy wasn’t a prison sentence.”
“Leaping around, throwing yourself all over the furniture—”
“Oh, get out, Franklin. Not that long ago women worked in the fields right up until giving birth and
then squatted between rows of vegetables. In the olden days, kids really did come from the cabbage
patch—”
“In the olden days infant and maternal mortality were sky high!”
“What do you care about maternal mortality? So long as they scoop the kid out of my lifeless body while its heart is still beating you’ll be happy as a clam.”
“That’s a hideous thing to say.”
“I’m in the mood to be hideous,” I said blackly, plopping onto the couch. “Though before Papa Doc
came home, I was in a great mood.”
“Two more months. Is it that big a sacrifice to take it easy for the well-being of a whole other
person?”
Boy, was I already sick of having the well-being of a whole other person held over my head. “My
well-being, apparently, now counts for beans.”
“There’s no reason you can’t listen to music—although at a volume that doesn’t have John
thumping his ceiling downstairs.” You replaced the needle at the beginning of the A side, turning it
down so low that David Byrne sounded like Minnie Mouse. “But like a normal pregnant woman, you
can sit there and tap your foot.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “All the vibration—it might travel up to Little Lord Fauntleroy
and trouble his beauty sleep. And aren’t we supposed to be listening to Mozart? Maybe Talking
Heads isn’t in The Book. Maybe by playing ‘Psycho Killer’ we’re feeding him Bad Thoughts. Better
look it up.”
You were the one powering through all those parental how-tos, about breathing and teething and
weaning, while I read a history of Portugal.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Eva. I thought the whole idea of becoming parents was to grow
up.”
“If I’d realized that’s what it meant to you, affecting some phony, killjoy adulthood, I’d have
reconsidered the whole business.”
“Don’t you ever say that,” you said, your face beet-red. “It’s too late for second thoughts. Never,
ever tell me that you regret our own kid.”
That’s when I started to cry. When I had shared with you my most sordid sexual fantasies, in such
disturbing violation of heterosexual norms that, without the assist of your own disgraceful mental smut
shared in return, I’m too embarrassed to mention them here—since when was there anything that one
of us was never, ever to say?
Baby what did you expect—Baby what did you expect—
The track had started to skip.

Eva