We Need to Talk About Kevin

DECEMBER 21, 2000

Dear Franklin,

I’m a bit rattled, since the phone just rang and I have no idea how this Jack Marlin person got my unlisted number. He claimed to be a documentary maker from NBC. I suppose the droll working title of his project, “Extracurricular Activities,” sounds authentic enough, and at least he was quick to distance himself from “Anguish at Gladstone High,” that hasty Fox show that Giles informed me was mostly on-camera weeping and prayer services. Still I asked Marlin why he imagined that I would want to participate in one more sensationalist postmortem of the day my life as I understood it came to an end, and he said I might want to tell “my side of the story.”

“What side would that be?” I was on record as assuming the opposition when Kevin was seven weeks old.

“For example, wasn’t your son the victim of sexual abuse?” Marlin plied.

“A victim? Are we talking about the same boy?”

“What about this Prozac business?” The sympathetic purr could only have been put on. “That was his defense at the trial, and it was pretty well supported.”

“That was his lawyer’s idea,” I said faintly.

“Just generally—maybe you think Kevin was misunderstood?”

I’m sorry Franklin, I know I should have hung up, but I speak to so few people outside the office…. What did I say? Something like, “I’m afraid I understand my son all too well.” And I said, “For that matter, Kevin must be one of the best-understood young men in the country. Actions speak louder than words, don’t they? Seems to me he got across his personal worldview better than most. Seems to me that you should be interviewing children who are a great deal less accomplished at self-expression.”

“What do you think he was trying to say?” asked Marlin, excited at having snagged a real live specimen of what has become a remote parental elite, whose members are strangely uneager for their fifteen minutes on TV.

I’m sure the call was recorded, and I should have watched my tongue. Instead I blurted, “Whatever his message was, Mr. Marlin, it was clearly disagreeable. Why on earth would you like to provide him one more forum for propounding it?”

When my caller launched into some nonsense about insight into disturbed boys being vital so that next time “we can see it coming,” I cut him off.

“I saw it coming for nearly sixteen years, Mr. Marlin,” I snapped. “A fat lot of good that did.” And I hung up.

I know he was only doing his job, but I don’t like his job. I’m sick of newshounds snuffling at my door like dogs that smell meat. I am tired of being made a meal of.

I was gratified when Dr. Rhinestein, having lectured that it was practically unheard of, was forced to concede that I had indeed contracted mastitis in both breasts. Those five days in Beth Israel on an antibiotic drip were painful, but I was coming to treasure physical pain as a form of suffering I understood, in contrast to the baffling despair of new motherhood. The relief of simple quiet was immense.

Still in the grip of your breadwinning fever and perhaps—admit it—reluctant to put our son’s “good-natured” temperament to the test, you took this opportunity to hire a nanny. Or should I say two nannies, since by the time I came home the first one had quit.

Not that you were volunteering this information. In the pickup as you were driving me home you simply began nattering about the marvelous Siobhan, and I had to stop you. “I thought her name was Carlotta.”

“Oh, her. You know, a lot of these girls are immigrants who plan to go AWOL when their visa turns into a pumpkin. They don’t really care about kids.”

Whenever the pickup hit a bump, my breasts flamed. I wasn’t looking forward to the excruciating process of expressing milk on arrival, which I’d been dictated to do religiously every four hours for the sake of the mastitis, even if only to pour the milk down the drain. “I take it Carlotta didn’t work out.”

“I told her up front he was a baby. A pooping, farting, burping—”

“—Screaming—”

“—Baby. She seemed to have expected, like, a self-cleaning oven or something.”

“So you sacked her.”

“Not exactly. But Siobhan is a saint. From Northern Ireland, of all places. Maybe folks used to being bombed and shit can keep a little whimpering in perspective.”

“You mean Carlotta quit. After only a few days. Because Kevin was—what’s the term of art? Cranky.”

“After one day, if you can believe it. And when I call at lunchtime to make sure everything’s all right, she has the gall to insist I cut my workday short and relieve her of my son. I was tempted not to pay her a dime, but I didn’t want us blacklisted with her agency.” (Prophetic. We were blacklisted by her agency two years later.)

Siobhan was a saint. A bit homely at first glance, with unruly black curls and that deathly white Irish skin, she had one of those doll-baby bodies that didn’t narrow at the joints, but merely crimped a bit; though she was slim enough, the columnar limbs and waistless torso gave the impression of thickness. Yet I grew to regard her as prettier with time because she was so good-hearted. True, I was apprehensive when she mentioned at our introduction that she was a member of that Alpha Course Christian sect. I conceived of such people as mindless fanatics and dreaded being subjected to daily testimonials. A prejudice, and one Siobhan did not substantiate; she rarely raised the subject again. Maybe this offbeat religious route was her bid to opt out of the Catholic-Protestant folderol back in County Antrim, of which she never spoke, and from which she had further insulated herself with the Atlantic Ocean as if for good measure.

You teased me that I took such a shine to Siobhan just because she was a Wing and a Prayer fan, for she’d used AWAP when traveling the Continent. Unsure what God would “call” her to do, she said she couldn’t imagine a more delightful occupation than professional globetrotting, stirring my nostalgia for a life already growing distant. She ignited the same pride that I hoped Kevin would some day kindle, when he got old enough to appreciate his parents’ accomplishments. I’d already indulged the odd fantasy whereby Kevin would pore over my old photographs, asking breathlessly, Where’s this? What’s that? You’ve been to AFRICA? Wow! But Siobhan’s admiration proved cruelly misleading. Kevin did pour over a box of my photographs once—with kerosene.

After a second round of antibiotics, the mastitis cleared up. Resigned that Kevin was on formula for keeps, I allowed my breasts to engorge and dry up, and with Siobhan holding down the fort was at length able to return to AWAP that fall. What a relief, to dress well, to move briskly, to speak in low, adult tones, to tell someone what to do and to have them do it. While I took fresh relish in what had previously grown workaday, I also chided myself for having imputed to a tiny bundle of confusion such malign motives as an intent to drive a wedge between you and me. I’d been unwell. It had been harder to adapt to our new life than I’d expected. Recuperating some of my old energy and discovering with pleasure that I had agitated myself back down to my former figure, I assumed that the worst was over and made a mental note that the next time one of my friends bore a first child I would fall all over myself to sympathize.

Often I’d invite Siobhan to linger with me for a cup of coffee when I came home, and the enjoyment I took in conversing with a woman roughly half my age may have been less the delight of leaping generations than the more standard one of talking to anybody. I was confiding in Siobhan because I was not confiding in my husband.

“You must have wanted Kevin something fierce,” said Siobhan on one such occasion. “Seeing the sights, meeting amazing people—and paid for the pleasure, if you can credit it! I can’t imagine giving that up.”

“I haven’t given it up,” I said. “After a year or so, I’ll resume business as usual.”

Siobhan stirred her coffee. “Is that what Franklin expects?”

“It’s what he ought to expect.”

“But he mentioned, like,” she was not comfortable with tattling, “that your running off for months at a go, like—that it was over.”

“For a while there, I was a little burned out. Always running out of fresh underwear; all those French train strikes. It’s possible I gave the wrong impression.”

“Oh, aye,” she said sorrowfully. I doubt that she was trying to make trouble, though she saw it coming. “He must have been lonely, when you’d go away. And now if you take your trips again, he’d be the only one to mind wee Kevin when I’m not here. Of course, in America, don’t some da’s stay home, and the ma’s go to work?”

“There are Americans and Americans. Franklin’s not the type.”

“But you run a whole company. Sure you could afford…”

“Only in the financial sense. It’s hard enough when a man’s wife is profiled in Fortune magazine and he’s only location-scouted the advertisement on the facing page.”

“Franklin said you used to be on the road five months a year.”

“Obviously,” I said heavily, “I’ll have to cut back.”

“You know, you may find that Kevin’s a wee bit tricky, like. He’s a—an uneasy baby. Sometimes they grow out of it.” She hazarded starkly, “Sometimes they don’t.”

You thought that Siobhan was devoted to our son, but I read her loyalty as more to you and me. She rarely spoke of Kevin in other than a logistical sense. A new set of bottles had been sterilized; our disposable “nappies” were running low. For such a passionate girl this mechanical approach seemed unlike her. (Though she did observe once, “He has like, beady eyes, so he does!” She laughed nervously and qualified, “I mean—intense.” “Yes, they’re unnerving, aren’t they,” I rejoined, as neutrally as I knew how.) But she adored the two of us. She was entranced with the freedom of our dual self-employment, and, despite the evangelical romance with “family values,” was clearly disconcerted that we would willfully impair this giddy liberty with the ball and chain of an infant. And maybe we gave her hope for her future. We were middle-aged, but we listened to The Cars and Joe Jackson; if she didn’t approve of bad language, she may still have been broadly heartened that a codger nearing forty could decry a dubious baby manual as horseshit. In turn, we paid her well and accommodated her church obligations. I gave her the odd present, like a silk scarf from Thailand, which she gushed over so much that I was embarrassed. She thought you devastatingly handsome, admiring the sturdiness of your figure and the disarming flop of your flaxen hair. I wonder if she didn’t “fancy” you a tad.

Having every reason to assume that Siobhan was contented in our employ, I was puzzled to note as the months advanced that she began to look curiously drawn. I know the Irish don’t age well, but even for her thinskinned race she was much too young to develop those hard worry lines across her forehead. She could be testy when I returned from the office, snapping when I had simply expressed surprise that we were low again on baby food, “Och, it doesn’t all go in his mouth, you know!” She immediately apologized, and grew fleetingly tearful but wouldn’t explain. She became more difficult to entice into a debriefing cup of coffee, as if anxious to be quit of our loft, and I was nonplussed by her reaction when I proposed that she move in. You remember that I offered to wall off that illused catchall corner, and to install a separate bath. What I had in mind would have been far more capacious than the cubbyhole she shared in the East Village with a loose, boozing, godless waitress she didn’t much like. I wouldn’t have cut her salary, either, so she’d have saved buckets on rent. Yet at the prospect of becoming a live-in nanny, she recoiled. When she protested that she could never break her lease on that Avenue C hovel, it sounded like, well, horseshit.

And then she started calling in sick. Just once or twice a month at first, but at length she was phoning in with a sore throat or an upset stomach at least once a week. She looked wretched enough; she couldn’t have been eating well, because those doll-baby curves had given way to a stickfigure frailty, and when the Irish pale, they look exhumed. So I was hesitant to accuse her of faking. Deferentially I inquired if she had boyfriend problems, if there was trouble with her family in Carickfergus, or if she was pining for Northern Ireland. “Pining for Northern Ireland,” she repeated wryly. “You’re having me on.” That moment of humor served to highlight that her jokes had grown rare.

These impromptu vacations of hers put me to great inconvenience, since according to the now-established logic of your tenuous freelance employment versus my fatuous security as CEO, I was the one to stay home. Not only would I have to reschedule meetings or conduct them awkwardly in conference calls, but a whole extra day spent with our precious little ward tipped a precarious equilibrium in me; by nightfall on a day I had not been girded for Kevin’s unrelenting horror at his own existence, I was, as our nanny would say, mental. It was through the insufferable addition of that extra day a week that Siobhan and I came, tacitly at first, to understand each other.

Clearly, God’s children are meant to savor His glorious gifts without petulance, for Siobhan’s uncanny forbearance could only have issued from catechism. No amount of wheedling would elicit whatever was driving her abed every Friday. So if only to give her permission, I complained myself.

“I have no regrets about my travels,” I began one early evening as she prepared to go, “but it’s a shame I met Franklin so late. Four years just the two of us wasn’t nearly enough time to get tired of him! I think it must be nice if you meet your partner in your twenties, with long enough as a childless couple to, I don’t know, get a little bored even. Then in your thirties you’re ready for a change, and a baby is welcome.”

Siobhan looked at me sharply, and though I expected censure in her gaze I caught only a sudden alertness. “Of course, you don’t mean Kevin isn’t welcome.”

I knew the moment mandated hurried reassurances, but I couldn’t furnish them. This would happen to me sporadically in the coming years: I would do and say what I was supposed to week upon week without fail until abruptly I hit a wall. I would open my mouth and That’s a really pretty drawing, Kevin or If we tear the flowers out of the ground they’ll die, and you don’t want them to die, do you? or Yes, we’re so awfully proud of our son, Mr. Cartland would simply not come out.

“Siobhan,” I said reluctantly. “I’ve been a little disappointed.”

“I know I’ve been poorly, Eva—”

“Not in you.” I considered that she may have understood me perfectly well and had misinterpreted me on purpose. I shouldn’t have burdened this young girl with my secrets, but I felt strangely impelled. “All the bawling and the nasty plastic toys… I’m not sure quite what I had in mind, but it wasn’t this.”

“Sure you might have a touch of postpartum—”

“Whatever you call it, I don’t feel joyful. And Kevin doesn’t seem joyful either.”

“He’s a baby!”

“He’s over a year and a half. You know how people are always cooing, He’s such a happy child! Well, in that instance there are unhappy children. And nothing I do makes the slightest bit of difference.”

She kept fiddling with her daypack, nestling the last of her few possessions into its cavity with undue concentration. She always brought a book to read for Kevin’s naps, and I finally noticed that she’d been stuffing the exact same volume in that daypack for months. I’d have understood if it was a Bible, but it was only an inspirational text—slim, the cover now badly stained—and she had once described herself as an avid reader.

“Siobhan, I’m useless with babies. I’ve never had much rapport with small children, but I’d hoped… Well, that motherhood would reveal another side of myself.” I met one of her darting glances. “It hasn’t.”

She squirmed. “Ever talk to Franklin, about how you’re feeling?”

I laughed with one ha. “Then we’d have to do something about it. Like what?”

“Don’t you figure the first couple of years is the tough bit? That it gets easier?”

I licked my lips. “I realize this doesn’t sound very nice. But I keep waiting for the emotional payoff.”

“But only by giving do you get anything back.”

She shamed me, but then I thought about it. “I give him my every weekend, my every evening. I’ve even given him my husband, who has no interest in talking about anything but our son, or in doing anything together besides wheeling a stroller up and down the Battery Park promenade. In return, Kevin smites me with the evil eye, and can’t bear for me to hold him. Can’t bear much of anything, as far as I can tell.”

This kind of talk was making Siobhan edgy; it was domestic heresy. But something seemed to cave in her, and she couldn’t keep up the cheerleading. So instead of forecasting what delights were in store for me once Kevin became a little person in his own right, she said gloomily, “Aye, I know what you mean.”

“Tell me, does Kevin—respond to you?”

“Respond?” The sardonicism was new. “You could say that.”

“When you’re with him during the day, does he laugh? Gurgle contentedly? Sleep?” I realized that I had refrained from asking her as much for all these months, and that in so doing I’d been taking advantage of her ungrudging nature.

“He pulls my hair,” she said quietly.

“But all babies—they don’t know—”

“He pulls it very hard indeed. He’s old enough now and I think he knows it hurts. And Eva, that lovely silk muffler from Bangkok. It’s in shreds.”

Ch-plang! Ch-plang! Kevin was awake. He was banging a rattle onto that metal xylophone you came home with (alas), and was not showing musical promise.

“When he’s alone with me,” I said over the racket. “Franklin calls it cranky—”

“He throws all his toys out of the playpen, and then he screams, and he will not stop screaming until they are all back, and then he throws them out again. Flings them.”

P-p-plang-k-chang-CHANG! PLANK! P-P-P-plankpankplankplank! There was a violent clatter, from which I construed that Kevin had kicked the instrument from between the slats of his crib.

“It’s desperate!” Siobhan despaired. “He does the same thing in his highchair, with Cheerios, porridge, cream crackers… With all his food on the floor like, I haven’t a baldy where he gets the energy!”

“You mean,” I touched her hand, “you don’t know where you get the energy.”

Mwah… Mmwah… Mmmmwhawhah… He started like a lawnmower. Siobhan and I looked each other in the eye. Mwah-eee! EEEeee! EEEEEEEE! EEahEEEEEEEE! Neither of us arose from our chair.

“Of course,” said Siobhan hopefully, “I guess it’s different when it’s yours.”

“Yup,” I said. “Totally different.”

EEahEEEEEahEEEE! EEahEEEEEahEEEE! EEahEEEEEahEEEE!

“I used to want a big family,” she said, turning away. “Now I’m not so sure.”

“If I were you,” I said, “I’d think twice.”

Kevin filled the silence between us as I fought a rising panic. I had to say something to forestall what was coming next, but I couldn’t think of any comment to pass that wouldn’t further justify what I wished fervidly to prevent.

“Eva,” she began. “I’m knackered. I don’t think Kevin likes me. I’ve prayed until I’m blue—for patience, for love, for strength. I thought God was testing me—”

“When Jesus said Suffer the little children,” I said dryly, “I don’t think nannying is what he had in mind.”

“I hate to think I’ve failed Him! Or you, Eva! Still, do you think there’s any chance—do you think you could use me at Wing and a Prayer? Those guidebooks, you said loads of them’s researched by university students and that. Could you—could you please, please send me to Europe, or Asia? I’d do a brilliant job, I promise!”

I sagged. “You mean you want to quit.”

“You and Franklin been dead decent, you must think me terrible ungrateful. Still, when you lot move to the suburbs you’d have to find someone else anyway, right? ’Cause I came over here bound and determined to live in New York City.”

“I am, too! Who says we’re moving to the burbs?”

“Franklin, of course.”

“We’re not moving to any suburbs,” I said firmly.

She shrugged. She had already withdrawn so from our little unit that she regarded this miscommunication as none of her affair.

“Would you like more money?” I offered pathetically; my full-time residence in this country was beginning to take its toll.

“The pay’s great, Eva. I can’t do it anymore, just. Every morning I wake up….”

I knew exactly how she woke feeling. And I couldn’t do it to her any longer. I think I’m a bad mother, and you always thought so, too. But deep inside me lurks the rare maternal bone. Siobhan was at her limit. Though it ran wildly counter to our interests, her earthly salvation was within my power to grant.

“We’re updating NETHERWAP,” I said morosely; I had an awful premonition that Siobhan’s resignation would be effective right away. “Would you like that? Rating hostels in Amsterdam? The rijsttafels are delicious.”

Siobhan forgot herself and threw her arms around me. “Would you like for me to try and quiet him?” she offered. “Maybe his nappy—”

“I doubt that; it’s too rational. No, you’ve put in a full day. And take the rest of the week off. You’re shattered.” I was already sweetening her up, to get her to stick around until we found a replacement. Fat chance.

“One last thing,” said Siobhan, tucking my note with the name of NETHERWAP’s editor into her pack. “Wee’uns vary, of course. But Kevin should really be talking by now. A few words anyway. Maybe you should ask your doctor. Or talk to him more.”

I promised, then saw her to the elevator, shooting a rueful glance at the crib. “You know, it is different when it’s yours. You can’t go home.” Indeed, my yearning to go home had grown recurrent, but was most intense when I was already there.

We exchanged wan smiles, and she waved behind the gate. I watched from the front window as she ran down Hudson Street, away from our loft and wee Kevin as fast as her unshapely legs could carry her.

I returned to our son’s marathon and looked down at his writhing dudgeon. I was not going to pick him up. No one was there to make me and I didn’t want to. I would not, as Siobhan had suggested, check his diaper, nor would I warm a bottle of milk. I would let him cry and cry. Resting both elbows on the crib rail, I cradled my chin on intertwined fingers. Kevin was crouched on all fours in one of the positions that the New School commended for birthing: primed for exertion. Most tots cry with their eyes shut, but Kevin’s were slit open. When our gazes locked, I felt we were finally communicating. His pupils were still almost black, and I could see them flintily register that for once Mother was not going to get in a flap about whatever might be the matter.

“Siobhan thinks I should talk to you,” I said archly over the din. “Who else is going to, since you drove her off? That’s right, you screamed and puked her out the door. What’s your problem, you little shit? Proud of yourself, for ruining Mummy’s life?” I was careful to use the insipid falsetto the experts commend. “You’ve got Daddy snowed, but Mummy’s got your number. You’re a little shit, aren’t you?”

Kevin hoisted to a stand without missing a yowl. Clutching the bars, he screamed at me from just a few inches away, and my ears hurt. So scrunched up, his face looked like an old man’s, and it was screwed into the I’m-gonna-get-you expression of a convict who’s already started digging a tunnel with a nail file. On a purely zoo-keeping level, my proximity was hazardous; Siobhan hadn’t been kidding about the hair.

“Mummy was happy before widdle Kevin came awong, you know that, don’t you? And now Mummy wakes up every day and wishes she were in France. Mummy’s life sucks now, doesn’t Mummy’s life suck? Do you know there are some days that Mummy would rather be dead? Rather than listen to you screech for one more minute there are some days that Mummy would jump off the Brooklyn Bridge—”

I turned, and blanched. I may never have seen quite that stony look on your face.

“They understand speech long before they learn to talk,” you said, pushing past me to pick him up. “I don’t understand how you can stand there and watch him cry.”

“Franklin, ease up, I was only kidding around!” I shot a parting private glare at Kevin. It was thanks to his caterwauling that I hadn’t heard the elevator gate. “I’m blowing off a little steam, okay? Siobhan quit. Hear that? Siobhan quit.”

“Yeah, I heard you. Too bad. We’ll get someone else.”

“It turns out that all along she’s regarded this job as a modern rewrite of the Book of Job—Look, I’ll change him.”

You wrenched him away. “You can steer clear until you get your mind right. Or jump off a bridge. Whichever comes first.”

I trailed after you. “Say, what’s this about moving to the suburbs? Since when?”

“Since—I quote—the little shit is getting mobile. That elevator is a death trap.”

“We can gate off the elevator!”

“He needs a yard.” Sanctimoniously, you balled the wet diaper in the pail. “Where we can toss a baseball, fill a pool.”

The awful revelation dawned that we were dealing with your childhood—an idealization of your childhood—that could prove, like your fantasy United States, an awesome cudgel. There’s no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary.

“But I love New York!” I sounded like a bumper sticker.

“It’s dirty and swimming in diseases, and a kid’s immune system isn’t fully developed until he’s seven years old. And we could stand to move into a good school district.”

“This city has the best private schools in the country.”

“New York private schools are snobbish and cutthroat. Kids in this town start worrying about getting into Harvard at the age of six.”

“What about the tiny matter that your wife doesn’t want to leave this city?”

“You had twenty years to do whatever you wanted. I did, too. Besides, you said you yearned to spend our money on something worthwhile. Now’s your chance. We should buy a house. With land and a tire swing.”

“My mother never made a single major decision based on what was good for me.”

“Your mother has locked herself in a closet for forty years. Your mother is insane. Your mother is hardly the parent to look to as a role model.”

“I mean that when I was a kid, parents called the shots. Now I’m a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can’t believe this.” I flounced onto the couch. “I want to go to Africa, and you want to go to New Jersey.”

“What’s this about Africa? Why do you keep bringing it up?”

“We’re going ahead with AFRIWAP. The Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide are starting to squeeze us badly in Europe.”

“What does this edition have to do with you?”

“The continent is huge. Someone has to do a preliminary canvass of countries.”

“Someone other than you. You still don’t get it, do you? Maybe it was a mistake for you to think of motherhood as ‘another country.’ This is no overseas holiday. It’s serious—”

“We’re talking about human lives, Jim!”

You didn’t even smile. “How would you feel if he lost a hand reaching through that elevator gate? If he got asthma from all this crap in the air? If some loser kidnapped him from your grocery cart?”

“The truth is, you want a house,” I charged. “You want a yard. You have this dorky Norman Rockwell vision of Daddydom, and you want to coach Little League.”

“Got that right.” You straightened victoriously at the changing table, Kevin in his blazing fresh Pampers on your hip. “And there are two of us, and one of you.”

It was a ratio I was destined to confront repeatedly.