We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

December 12, 2000

Dear Franklin,

Well, I had no desire to linger at the agency today. The staff has gone from good-hearted jousting to
all-out war. Observing the showdowns in our small office without taking sides has lent these scenes
the slightly comic, unaffecting quality of television with the sound off.
I’m a little at a loss as to how “Florida” has become a race issue, except in the way that sooner or
later everything becomes a race issue in this country—sooner, as a rule. So the three other Democrats
here have been throwing terms like “Jim Crow” at the two beleaguered Republicans, who huddle
together in the back room and speak in low tones that the rest construe as the conspiratorial mutter of
shared bigotry. Funny; before the election none of these people displayed the least interest in what
was generally agreed to be a dreary contest.
Anyway, today some Supreme Court decision was due, and the radio was on all day. The staff’s
recriminations flew so fast and furious that more than one customer, abandoned at the counter, simply
walked out. At length I did the same. Whereas the two conservatives tend to argue nakedly for their
side, the liberals are always weighing in on behalf of truth, justice, or humanity. Though once a
staunch Democrat, I long ago gave up on defending humanity. It’s beyond me on most days to defend
myself.
Then, while I do hope this correspondence hasn’t degenerated into shrill self-justification, I worry
equally that I may seem to be laying the groundwork for claiming that Kevin is all my fault. I do
indulge that sometimes, too, gulping down blame with a powerful thirst. But I did sayindulge.
There’s a self-aggrandizement in these wallowing mea culpas, a vanity. Blame confers an awesome
power. And it’s simplifying, not only to onlookers and victims but to culprits most of all. It imposes
order on slag. Blame conveys clear lessons in which others may take comfort: if only she hadn’t—,
and by implication makes tragedy avoidable. There may even be a fragile peace to be found in the
assumption of total responsibility, and I see that calm in Kevin on occasion. It is an aspect that his
keepers confuse with remorselessness.
But for me this greedy gorging on fault never works. I am never able to get the full story inside me.
It’s larger than I am. It has damaged too many people, aunts and cousins and best friends whom I will
never know and would not recognize if we met. I cannot at once contain the suffering of so many
family dinners with one empty chair. I haven’t anguished that the photo on the piano is forever tainted
because that was the snapshot given to the newspapers or because sibling portraits on either side
continue to mark occasions of greater maturity—college graduations, weddings—while the static high
school yearbook photo loses color in the sun. I haven’t been privy to the month-by-month
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 which 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 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
who was always overacting in school plays, and then I throw in that uncannily gracious English
teacher Dana Rocco 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 come back to Mary Woolford, whose experience of injustice had hitherto
run to a particularly inconvenient one-way street. I suppose I’d call her spoiled; she did stir up rather
an excessive fuss when Laura didn’t make the track team, even though her daughter, however lovely,
was physically languid and not the least athletic. But it may not be fair to call it a character flaw that
someone’s life has always gone well 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 how 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 how a woman who’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. Oh, 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 mother who deserved it.
Somehow Mary seemed confused as to what the problem was. The problem was not who was
punished for what. The 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 who perceive themselves as bordered on every side by agents of
wickedness. That is, it seems to be the same folks who are inclined to sue builders who did not
perfectly protect them from the depredations of an earthquake who 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 naïveté disarming. But 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 know I’ve never been especially religious after having all that Orthodox 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 volcanoes to global temperature
shift have become matters for which its individual members are answerable. The 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. Now 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 who 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 how 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 jury might award.
Crucially, there was no guarantee that we’d 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 who 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 unborn 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
human birth is confused with the expulsion of an oversized maggot. And 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 become trying and monotonous
—the moment this gadding about is imperiled by the needs of someone else, she starts swooning over
the halcyon life she once led when jotting down whether 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 home 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 notattractive, 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 woman at the White Horse in the Village with whom I’d gone to college in Green Bay.
Though we hadn’t spoken since then, she had recently given birth to her own 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 woman—in the physical sense. With 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
fatto-muscle ratio was unreal, her aerobic conditioning topping the charts. Then pregnancy, well it
was terrible! The Nautilus just didn’tfeel good any more and she’d had to stop—. Now, now, she
was a mess, she could hardly do a sit-up, much less three sets of proper crunches, she was starting
from scratch or worse—! This woman was fuming, Franklin; she clearly muttered about her
abdominal muscles when 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. What 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 when Kevin wasn’t there yet to
wish away. But the last thing I’ve wanted is to whitewash my own part in this terrible story. That
said, I’m determined to accept due responsibility for every wayward thought, every petulance, every
selfish moment, 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 woman who had always been so conscientiously trim there was a relief to be found
in becoming a cow. How 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 not the only party to this experiment who had
reservations.
Why were you never tortured with our foreboding? I had 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. One in ten, then. One in three. What’s the cutoff? Why 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 who
teaches his parents that there’s so much more to life than smarts, a guileless soul who is smothered in
the same hair-tousling affection lavished on a family pet. Thirsty to quaff whatever funky genetic
cocktail our DNA served up, you must have flirted with the prospect of all those bonus points for
self-sacrifice: Your patience when 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. The 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. The 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 toward 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 little 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 blasé 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 have got sucked into
that little competition between women about childbirth. Even Brian’s demure wife Louise announced
that she had managed a twenty-six-hour labor with 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 took at the New School, though I
wager that many of those students who talked this “I want to know what it feels like” game broke
down and begged for an epidural at the first contraction.
Not me. I wasn’t brave, but I was stubborn and prideful. Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than
courage, though it’s not as pretty.
So the first time my insides twisted as if rung like a wet sheet, my eyes bulged slightly, the lids
widening in surprise; my lips compressed. I impressed you with my calm. I meant to. We were
lunching at the Beach House again, and I decided against finishing my chili. In a show of returning
equanimity, you dispatched a piece of cornbread before retreating to the rest room for a foot-high
stack of freshly banded paper towels; my water had broken, gallons of it, or so it seemed, and I had
drenched the bench. You paid the bill and even remembered to leave a tip before leading me by the
hand back to our loft, checking your watch. We were not going to embarrass ourselves by turning up
at Beth Israel hours before my cervix had begun to dilate.
Later that afternoon, as you drove me across Canal Street in your baby-blue pickup, you mumbled
that everything would be all right, though you had no way of knowing. At admissions, I was struck by
the commonplace character of my condition; the nurse yawned, fortifying my resolve that I would
prove an exemplary patient. I would astound Dr. Rhinestein with my gruff practicality. I knew this
was a natural process, and I was not going to make a fuss. So when another contraction doubled me as
if I had just been caught unawares by a right hook, I merely exhaled a little hoof.
It was all a ridiculous and perfectly pointless act. There was no reason to try to amaze Dr.
Rhinestein, whom I did not especially like. If I intended to do you proud, you were getting a son out of
the bargain, sufficient payoff to put up with a little screaming and rudeness. It might even have done
you good to recognize that the woman you married was an ordinary mortal who adored comfort and
hated suffering and so would opt sanely for anesthetic. Instead I made feeble jokes on my stretcher in
the corridor, and I held your hand. That was the hand that you told me afterward I very nearly broke.
Oh, Franklin, there is no use pretending now. It was awful. I may be capable of toughness in
respect to certain kinds of pain, but if so, my fortitude dwells in my calves or forearms but not
between my legs. This was not a part of my body that I had ever associated with endurance, with anything so odious as exercise. And as the hours dragged on, I began to suspect that I was just too old
for this, that I was too inelastic approaching forty to stretch to this new life. Dr. Rhinestein said,
primly, that I was small, as if to indicate an inadequacy, and after about fifteen hours, she despaired
sternly, Eva! You really must make an ef ort. So much for earning her amazement.
There were times after about twenty-four hours that a few tears would leak down my temples, and I
hastily wiped them away, not wanting you to see. More than once I was offered an epidural, and my
determination to forgo its deliverance acquired a demented aspect. I seized on this refusal, as if
passing this little test were the point, and not passing an infant son. So long as I declined the needle, I
was winning.
In the end it was the threat of a cesarean that did it; Dr. Rhinestein made no bones about the fact
that she had other patients back at her office and that she was disgusted by my lackluster performance.
I had an abnormal horror of being sliced open. I didn’t want the scar; like Rita, I’m ashamed to say, I
feared for my stomach muscles; and the procedure was too reminiscent of all those horror films.
So I made an ef ort, at which point I had to recognize that I’d been resisting the birth. Whenever
the enormous mass approached that tiny canal, I’d been sucking it back. Because it hurt. It hurt a
whole lot. In that New School course, they drummed into you that the pain wasgood, you were
supposed to go with it, push into the pain, and only on my back did I contemplate what retarded
advice this was. Pain, good? I was overcome with contempt. In fact, I never told you this before, but
the emotion on which I fastened in order to push beyond a critical threshold was loathing. I despised
being spread out like some farm exhibit with strangers gawking between my canted knees. I detested
Dr. Rhinestein’s pointed, ratlike little face and her brisk, censorious manner. I hated myself for ever
having agreed to this humiliating theater, when I was fine before and right at this moment I could have
been in France. I repudiated all my female friends, who used to share their reservations about
supply-side economics or at least halfheartedly ask after my last trip abroad, yet for months now had
only nattered about stretch marks and remedies for constipation or gaily brandished horror stories
about terminal preeclampsia and autistic offspring who would do nothing but rock back and forth all
day and bite their hands. Your eternally hopeful, encouraging expression made me sick. All very easy
for you to want to be a Daddy, to buy into all that stuffedbunny schlock, when I was the one who had
to blow up like a sow, I was the one who had to turn into a goody-two-shoes teetotaler sucking down
vitamins, I was the one who had to watch her breasts get puffy and bloated and sore when they used to
be so neat and close, and I was the one who would be ripped to ribbons ramming a watermelon
through a passage the size of a garden hose. I did, I hated you and your little coos and mumbles, I
wished you’d stop patting my brow with that damp washcloth as if it made the slightest bit of
difference, and I think I knew I was hurting your hand. And yes, I even hated the baby—which so far
had not brought me hope for the future and story and content and “a turn of the page” but unwieldiness
and embarrassment and a rumbling subterranean tremor quaking through the very ocean floor of who I
thought I was.
But pushing past that threshold I met such a red blaze of agony that I could no longer afford the
expenditure of loathing. I screamed, and I didn’t care. I’d have done anything in that instant to get it to
stop: hocked my company, sold our child into slavery, committed my soul to hell. “Please—,” I
gasped, “give me—that epidural!”
Dr. Rhinestein chided, “It’s too late for that now, Eva, if you couldn’t take it you should have said
so earlier. The baby is crowning. For pity’s sake don’t let up now.”
And suddenly it was over. Later we’d joke about how long I held out and how I begged for relief
only once it was withdrawn, but at the time it wasn’t funny. In the very instant of his birth, I
associated Kevin with my own limitations—with not only suffering, but defeat.

Eva