We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

December 18, 200

Dear Franklin,

Tonight was our office Christmas party, which isn't easy to pull off with six people fresh from one another's throats. We have little in common, but in general I am glad for their companionship—not so much for heart-to-hearts over a sandwich as for quotidian exchanges about package deals in the Bahamas. (I'm sometimes so grateful for the busywork of flights to book that I could weep.) Likewise, the simple adjacency of warm bodies supplies the deepest of animal comfort. The manager was kind to take me into her employ. Thursday having wounded so many people in this area, Wanda did worry at first that folks might start to avoid her premises just to keep from thinking about it. Yet to be fair to our neighbors, it is often an exceptionally heartfelt-sounding season's greetings that tips me off that a customer recognizes who I am. It's the staff whom I've disappointed. They must have hoped that rubbing up against a celebrity of sorts would confer distinction on themselves and that I would furnish stirringly disturbing stories for my coworkers to dine out on. But the association is too tangential, and I doubt their friends are impressed. Most of my tales are ordinary. There is only one story they want to hear, really, and that one they knew backward and forward before I came on board. A wide-hipped divorcée with a braying laugh, Wanda herself may have hoped that we would become fast friends. By the end of our first lunch, she had confided that her ex-husband got an erection watching her pee, that she had just had a hemorrhoid "tied off," and that, until a near-miss with a Saks security guard at thirty-six, she'd been a compulsive shoplifter. I returned with the disclosure that after six months in my toy duplex I had finally gotten myself to buy curtains. You can see how she might have been a little put out that I'd got Manhattan while she got beads. So tonight Wanda cornered me by the fax machine. She didn't want to pry, but had I sought out "help"? I knew what she meant, of course. The entire student body of Gladstone High School was offered free counseling by the school board, and even some of this year's intake, not even enrolled in 1999, has claimed to be traumatized and plunged to the couch. I didn't want to seem hostile and so say honestly that I couldn't see how the mere iteration of my troubles to a stranger would lessen them one iota, and that surely counseling was the logical refuge of those whose problems were ephemeral fancies and not matters of historical fact. So I demurred that my experience with the mental health profession had been rather sour, kindly omitting that the failures of my son's psychiatric care had made headlines coast to coast. Moreover, it didn't seem wise to confide that thus far I had found my only "help" in writing to you, Franklin. For somehow I feel certain that these letters are not on the list of prescribed therapies, since you are at the very heart of what I need to "get past" so that I might experience "closure." And what a terrible prospect is that.

Even back in 1983, I was bewildered why a standardized psychiatric label like postnatal depression was supposed to be consoling. Our compatriots seem to put much stock in slapping a tag on their ailments. Presumably a complaint common enough to have a name implies that you are not alone and dangles options like Internet chat rooms and community support groups for rhapsodic communal bellyaching. This compulsion to bandwagon has even infiltrated American small talk. I can't

remember the last time anyone told me that he "took a long time to wake up." Instead I'm informed that he's not a morning person. All those fellow travelers who require killer cups of coffee on waking must provide one's disinclination to hop out of bed for a ten-mile run some extra clout. I might have achieved a renewed appreciation for my own normative propensities, including a not unreasonable expectation that when bearing a child I will actually feel something, even something nice. But I hadn't changed that much. I'd never found solace in being just like everybody else. And though Dr. Rhinestein offered up postnatal depression like a present, as if simply being told that you are unhappy is supposed to cheer you up, I did not pay professionals to be plied with the obvious, with the merely descriptive. The term was less diagnostic than tautological: I was depressed after Kevin's birth because I was depressed after Kevin's birth. Thanks. Yet she also suggested that because Kevin's disinterest in my breast had persisted, I might be suffering feelings of rejection. I colored. It embarrassed me that I might take the opaque predilections of such a tiny, half-formed creature to heart. Of course she was right. At first I thought I was doing something wrong, not guiding his mouth. But no; I would place the nipple between his lips, where else could it go? He had sucked a time or two, but turned away, the bluish milk running down his chin. He'd cough, and, perhaps I imagined it, he even seemed to gag. When I went for an emergency appointment, Dr. Rhinestein informed me flatly that "sometimes this happens." My lord, Franklin, what you discover sometimes happens when you become a parent! I was distraught. In her office, I was surrounded by leaflets about building your baby's immune system. And I tried everything. I didn't drink. I eliminated dairy products. At tremendous sacrifice, I gave up onions, garlic, and chilies. I eliminated meat and fish. I installed a gluten-free regime, which left me with little more than a bowl of rice and an undressed salad. In the end I was starving, while Kevin continued to feed in his lackluster way on a bottle of microwaved formula that he would only accept from you. He wouldn't even take my milk from a bottle, writhing from it without a sip. He could smell it. He could smell me. Yet he didn't test positive for an allergy, at least in the medical sense. Meanwhile, my once diminutive breasts were taut, sore, and leaking. Rhinestein was adamant that I not let my milk dry up, since occasionally this aversion—that was the word she used, Franklin, aversion—would abate. It was so awkward and painful that I never did quite get the hang of the expressing pump, though it was sweet of you to go out and buy that hospital-grade Medela. I'm afraid I came to hate it, a chill plastic substitute for a warm suckling infant. I was aching to give him the very milk of human kindness, and he did not want it, or he did not want it from me. I shouldn't have taken it personally, but how could I not? It wasn't mother's milk he didn't want, it was Mother. In fact, I became convinced that our little bundle of joy had found me out. Infants have great intuition, because intuition's about all they've got. I felt certain that he could detect a telltale stiffening in my arms when I picked him up. I was confident that he could infer from a subtly exasperated quality in my voice when I burbled and cooed that burbling and cooing did not come naturally to me and that his precocious ear could isolate in that endless stream of placating blather an insidious, compulsive sarcasm. Moreover, since I had read—sorry, you had read—that it was important to smile at infants to try to elicit a smile in response, I smiled and smiled, I smiled until my face hurt, but when my face did hurt I was sure he could tell. Every time I forced myself to smile, he clearly knew that I didn't feel like smiling, because he never smiled back. He hadn't seen many smiles in his lifetime but he had seen yours, enough to recognize that in comparison there was