We Need to Talk About Kevin

DECEMBER 18, 2000

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 something wrong with Mother’s. It curled up falsely; it evaporated with revelatory rapidity when I turned from his crib. Is that where Kevin got it? In prison, that marionette smile, as if pulled up by strings.

I know you doubt me on this, but I did try very hard to form a passionate attachment to my son. But I had never experienced my feeling for you, for example, as an exercise that I was obliged to rehearse like scales on the piano. The harder I tried, the more aware I became that my very effort was an abomination. Surely all this tenderness that in the end I simply aped should have come knocking at the door uninvited. Hence it was not just Kevin who depressed me, or the fact that your own affections were increasingly diverted; I depressed me. I was guilty of emotional malfeasance.

But Kevin depressed me as well, and I do mean Kevin and not the baby. From the very beginning that child was particular to me, whereas you often asked How’s the kid? or How’s my boy? or Where’s the baby? To me he was never “the baby.” He was a singular, unusually cunning individual who had arrived to stay with us and just happened to be very small. For you he was “our son”—or, once you started to give up on me, “my son.” There was a persistently generic character to your adoration that I’m certain he sensed.

Before you get your back up, I don’t mean that as a criticism. It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one’s children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn’t vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I’d place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafted with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports—gemütlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific.

By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.

In the end, mastitis put an end to my desperate search for whatever foodstuff was putting Kevin off my milk. Poor nutrition may have made me susceptible. That and fumbling to get Kevin to take the breast, which could have lacerated the nipples enough to transmit infection from his mouth. Inimical to my sustenance, he could still introduce me to corruption, as if already at year zero the more worldly party of our pair.

Since the first sign of mastitis is fatigue, it’s little wonder that the early symptoms went unobserved. He’d worn me out for weeks. I bet you still don’t believe me about his fits of pique, though a rage that lasts for six to eight hours seems less a fit than a natural state, from which the tranquil respites you witnessed were bizarre departures. Our son had fits of peace. And this may sound completely mad, but the consistency with which Kevin shrieked with precocious force of will the whole time he and I were alone, and then with the abruptness of switching off a heavy-metal radio station desisted the moment you came home—well, it seemed deliberate. The silence still ringing for me, you’d bend over our slumbering angel who unbeknownst to you was just beginning to sleep off his Olympian exertions of the day. Though I’d never have wished on you my own pulsing headaches, I couldn’t bear the subtle distrust that was building between us when your experience of our son did not square with mine. I have sometimes entertained the retroactive delusion that even in his crib Kevin was learning to divide and conquer, scheming to present such contrasting temperaments that we were bound to be set at odds. Kevin’s features were unusually sharp for a baby, while my own still displayed that rounded Marlo Thomas credulity, as if he had leeched my very shrewdness in utero.

Childless, I’d perceived baby crying as a pretty undifferentiated affair. It was loud; it was not so loud. But in motherhood I developed an ear. There’s the wail of inarticulate need, what is effectively a child’s first groping after language, for sounds that mean wet or food or pin. There’s the shriek of terror—that no one is here and that there may never be anyone here again. There’s that lassitudinous wah-wah, not unlike the call to mosque in the Middle East or improvisational song; this is creative crying, fun crying, from babies who, while not especially unhappy, have failed to register that we like to constrain weeping to conditions of distress. Perhaps saddest of all is the muted, habitual mewl of a baby who may be perfectly miserable but who, whether through neglect or prescience, no longer anticipates reprieve—who in infancy has already become reconciled to the idea that to live is to suffer.

Oh, I imagine there are as many reasons that newborn babies cry as that grown ones do, but Kevin practiced none of these standard lachrymal modes. Sure, after you got home he’d sometimes fuss a little like a normal baby that he wanted feeding or changing, and you’d take care of it and he’d stop; and then you’d look at me like, see? and I’d want to slug you.

With me, once you left, Kevin was not to be bought off with anything so petty and transitory as milk or dry diapers. If fear of abandonment contributed to a decibel level that rivaled an industrial buzz saw, his loneliness displayed an awesome existential purity; it wasn’t about to be allayed by the hover of that haggard cow with her nauseating waft of white fluid. And I discerned no plaintive cry of appeal, no keen of despair, no gurgle of nameless dread. Rather, he hurled his voice like a weapon, howls smashing the walls of our loft like a baseball bat bashing a bus shelter. In concert, his fists sparred with the mobile over his crib, he kick-boxed his blanket, and there were times I stepped back after patting and stroking and changing and marveled at the sheer athleticism of the performance. It was unmistakable: Driving this remarkable combustion engine was the distilled and infinitely renewable fuel of outrage.

About what? you might well ask.

He was dry, he was fed, he had slept. I would have tried blanket on, blanket off; he was neither hot nor cold. He’d been burped, and I have a gut instinct that he didn’t have colic; Kevin’s was not a cry of pain but of wrath. He had toys dangling overhead, rubber blocks in his bed. His mother had taken six months off from work to spend every day by his side, and I picked him up so often that my arms ached; you could not say he lacked for attention. As the papers would be so fond of observing sixteen years later, Kevin had everything.

I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive. I think Kevin hated it. I think Kevin was off the scale, he hated being here so much. He may even have retained some trace spiritual memory from before conception, and glorious nullity was far more what he missed than my womb. Kevin seemed incensed that no one had ever consulted him about turning up in a crib with time going on and on, when nothing whatsoever interested him in that crib. He was the least curious little boy I’ve ever encountered, with a few exceptions to that rule that I shudder to contemplate.

One afternoon I started to feel draggier than usual, at times a bit light-headed. For days I’d been unable to keep warm, and it was late May; outside, New Yorkers were in shorts. Kevin had pulled off a virtuosic recital. Huddled on the couch in a blanket, I reflected crankily on the fact that you’d stacked up more work than ever. Fair enough, as a freelancer you didn’t want your long-term clients to find an alternative scout, whereas my own company could be trusted to underlings and wouldn’t just go away. But somehow this meant that I was stuck all day with hell in a handbasket while you tooled merrily off in your baby-blue pickup to window-shop for fields with the right-colored cows. I suspected that if our situation were reversed—you headed a thriving company while I was a lone freelance location scout—Eva would be expected to drop the scouting altogether like a hot brick.

When the elevator clanked and shuddered, I was just noticing that a small patch under my right breast had turned bright red, tender, and strangely stiff, mirroring the much larger such patch on the left. You opened the lattice gate and went straight to the crib. I was glad you were turning into such an attentive father, but of the two other inhabitants of our loft it was only your wife who appreciated the meaning of the word hello.

“Please don’t wake him up,” I whispered. “He’s only been down twenty minutes and he’s outdone himself today. I doubt he ever goes to sleep. He passes out.”

“Well, has he been fed?” Deaf to my imprecations, you had laid him on your shoulder and were poking at his conked-out face. He looked deceptively content. Dreams of oblivion, perhaps.

“Yes, Franklin,” I said with immoderate control. “After four or five hours of listening to little Kevin bring the house down, I thought of that. —Why are you using the stove?”

“Microwaving kills nutrients.” Over lunch at McDonald’s, you read baby books.

“It isn’t so simple as figuring out what he wants and can’t ask for. Most of the time he has no idea what he wants.” I caught it: Your eyes flicked toward the ceiling like, oh-brother-not-this-again. “You think I’m exaggerating.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You think he’s ‘crabby.’ He’s ‘fussy’ sometimes, because he’s hungry—”

“Listen, Eva, I’m sure he gets a little ill-tempered—”

“See? A little ill-tempered.” I waddled to the kitchen in my blanket. “You don’t believe me!” I had broken out in a cold sweat and must either have been flushed or pale. Walking hurt the soles of my feet and sent pains shivering down my left arm.

“I believe you’re being straight up about your perception of how hard it is. But what did you expect, a walk in the park?”

“Not a carefree stroll, but this is like being mugged in the park!”

“Look, he’s my son, too. I see him, too, every day. Sometimes he cries a little. So what. I’d worry if he didn’t.”

Apparently my testimony was tainted. I would have to bring in other witnesses. “You realize that John, downstairs, is threatening to move out?”

“John’s a fag, and they don’t like babies. This whole country’s antichild, I’m only just starting to notice.” The severity wasn’t like you, except that for once you were talking about the real country and not the starspangled Valhalla in your head. “See?” Kevin had roused on your shoulder, then took the bottle peaceably without opening his eyes. “I’m sorry, but most of the time he seems pretty good-natured to me.”

“He’s not good-natured right now, he’s exhausted! And so am I. I know I’m run down, but I don’t feel right. Dizzy. Chills. I wonder if I’m running a fever.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” you said formally. “Get some rest, then. I’ll make dinner.”

I stared. This coldness was so unlike you! I was supposed to belittle my own infirmities, you to make a to-do over them. Forcing you to go through the motions of your old solicitation, I took the bottle and plastered your hand to my forehead.

“Touch warm,” you said, withdrawing the hand right away.

I’m afraid that I couldn’t stand up anymore, and my skin hurt wherever the blanket touched it. So I staggered back to the couch, as if reeling from my revelation: You were angry at me. Fatherhood hadn’t disappointed you; I had. You thought you’d married a trooper. Instead your wife was proving a whiner, the very peevish sort she decried amid America’s malcontented overfed, for whom a commonplace travail like missing a FedEx delivery three times in a row and having to go to the depot constitutes intolerable “stress,” the stuff of costly therapies and pharmaceutical redress. Even for Kevin’s refusal to take my breast you held me dimly accountable. I had denied you the maternal tableau, that luscious Sunday-morning loll amid the sheets with buttered toast: son suckling, wife aglow, breasts spilling their bounty over the pillow, until you are forced out of bed for the camera.

Here I thought that I’d brilliantly disguised my true feelings about motherhood thus far, to the point of dereliction; so much lying in marriage is merely a matter of keeping quiet. I had refrained from throwing that self-evident diagnosis of postnatal depression down on our coffee table like a trophy but had kept this formal accreditation to myself. Meanwhile, I’d brought home loads of editing work but had only got through a few pages; I was eating badly and sleeping badly and showering at most every three days; I saw no one and rarely got out because Kevin’s rages, in public, were not socially acceptable; and daily, I faced a purple churn of insatiable fury while rehearsing to myself with dull incomprehension, I’m supposed to love this.

“If you’re having trouble coping, we don’t lack for resources.” You towered over my couch with your son, like one of those mighty peasant icons of dedication to family and motherland in Soviet murals. “We could hire a girl.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I mumbled. “I had a conference call with the office. We’re researching demand for an African edition. AFRIWAP. Thought it had a ring.”

“I did not mean,” you stooped, your voice deep and hot in my ear, “that someone else could raise our son while you go python-hunting in the Belgian Congo.”

“Zaire,” I said.

“We’re in this together, Eva.”

“Then why do you always take his side?”

“He’s only seven weeks old! He’s not big enough to have a side!”

I wrenched myself to a stand. You may have mistaken me for tearful, but my eyes were watering of their own accord. When I lumbered into the bathroom, it was less to get the thermometer than to underscore the fact that you had failed to fetch it for me. When I returned with the tube poking from my mouth, was I imagining it, or were your eyes once more rolling toward the ceiling?

I scrutinized the mercury under a lamp. “Here—you read it. Everything’s a bit blurry.”

Absently you held the tube to the light. “Eva, you screwed it up. You must have put it near the bulb or something.” You shook the mercury down, poked the end in my mouth, and left to change Kevin’s diaper.

I shuffled to the changing table and made my offering. You checked the reading and stabbed me with a black glance. “It’s not funny, Eva.”

“What are you talking about?” This time they were tears.

“Heating the thermometer. It’s a shitty joke.”

“I’m not heating the thermometer. I just put the bulb under my tongue—”

“Crap, Eva, it reads practically 104°.”

“Oh.”

You looked at me. You looked at Kevin, for once torn between loyalties. Hastily you scooped him from the table, then bedded him with such perfunctoriness that he forgot his strict theatrical schedule and cranked up his daytime I-hate-the-whole-world shriek. With that manliness I’d always adored, you ignored him.

“I’m so sorry!” In one swoop you lifted me off the floor and swept me back to the couch. “You’re really sick. We’ve got to call Rhinestein, get you to a hospital—”

I was sleepy, fading. But I do remember thinking that it had taken too much. Wondering if I would have a cool cloth on my forehead, ice water and three aspirin at my side, and Dr. Rhinestein on the telephone if the thermometer had read only 101°.