We Need to Talk About Kevin (13 page)
Read We Need to Talk About Kevin Online
Authors: Lionel Shriver
Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Teenage Boys, #Epistolary Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Massacres, #School Shootings, #High Schools, #New York (State)
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
.
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 effort
. So much for earning her amazement.
Eva! You really must make an effort
. 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 effort
, 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 was
good
, 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.
made an effort
, 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 was
good
, 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
.”
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
December 13, 2000
Dear Franklin,
When I walked into work this morning I could tell immediately from a malignant Democratic sullenness that “Florida” was over. The sense of letdown in both camps feels postpartum.
But if my coworkers of both stripes are disappointed that such an invigorating affray is finished, I feel a measure more disconsolate still, banished even from their shared, binding sense of loss. Multiplied by many times, this loneliness of mine must approximate my mother’s experience of the end of the war, for my birthday of August 15 coincides with VJ-Day, when Hirohito broadcast his surrender to the Japanese. Apparently the nurses were so ecstatic that it was hard to get them to attend to the timing of her contractions. Listening to champagne corks pop down the hall, she must have felt so dolefully left out. Many of the nurses’ husbands would be coming home, but my father would not. If the rest of the country had won the war, the Khatchadourians of Racine, Wisconsin, had lost.
Later she must have felt similarly at odds with the sentiments embalmed by the commercial greeting card company for which she went to work (anything but Johnson Wax). How eerie, boxing other people’s Happy Anniversary tributes and having no need to slip one in her purse when the date came around in her own home. I’m of two minds as to whether I should be glad that the job gave her the idea of starting her own handcrafted greeting-card business, which allowed her to withdraw to Enderby Avenue in perpetuity. But I will say that the “On the Birth of Your First Baby” card that she made up especially for me—layered with bled tissue in blues and greens—well, it was lovely.
In fact, when my head cleared in Beth Israel, I remembered my mother and felt ungrateful. My father had been unable to hold her hand as you held mine. Yet, offered the clasp of a living husband, I crushed it.
Still, we all know that women in labor can grow abusive, so I’m tempted to admit to having gotten a little hostile in the thick of things, and to leave my confession at that. After all, I was immediately abashed and kissed you. This was before the days when doctors slid a newborn right onto the mother’s breast, gore and all, and we had a few minutes while they tied the cord and cleaned him up. I was excited, stroking and squeezing your arm, nestling my forehead into the soft inside of your elbow. I had never held our child.
But I cannot let myself off the hook so lightly.
Up until April 11, 1983, I had flattered myself that I was an exceptional person. But since Kevin’s birth I have come to suppose that we are all profoundly normative. (For that matter, thinking of one’s self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.) We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations—beyond expectations; they are requirements. Some of these are small: If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous. If it does not seem too shocking, for the duration of our marriage I lived with one terror: that if something happened to you it would break me. But there was always an odd shadow, an underfear, if you will, that it would not—that I would swing off blithely that afternoon to play squash.
The fact that this
underfear
rarely becomes overweening proceeds from a crude trust. You have to keep faith that if the unthinkable does come to pass, despair will come crashing in of its own accord; that grief, for example, is not an experience you need summon or a skill you need practice, and the same goes for prescriptive joy.
underfear
rarely becomes overweening proceeds from a crude trust. You have to keep faith that if the unthinkable does come to pass, despair will come crashing in of its own accord; that grief, for example, is not an experience you need summon or a skill you need practice, and the same goes for prescriptive joy.
Thus even tragedy can be accompanied by a trace of relief. The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity (though considering what people get up to, that’s a queer word to equate with compassion, or even with emotional competence). By way of a ready example, take yesterday, Franklin. I was driving to work on Route 9W when a Fiesta turned right, cutting off a bicycle on the shoulder. The passenger door made a pretzel of the bike’s front wheel, flipping the cyclist over the roof. He landed in a position that was subtly impossible, as if sketched by an unpromising art student. I’d already driven by, but in my rearview mirror, three other cars behind me pulled onto the shoulder to help.
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