We Need to Talk About Kevin

DECEMBER 27, 2000

Dear Franklin,

Having asked gently beforehand if I was up to it, tonight my mother had a little holiday hen party here, and I think she regretted her timing. As it happened, yesterday in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a very large, unhappy man—a software engineer named Michael McDermott, who the whole nation now knows is a science fiction fan, much as most men off the street are familiar with our son’s predilection for undersized clothing—walked into Edgewater Technology with a shotgun, an automatic, and a pistol and murdered seven of his coworkers. I gather Mr. McDermott was upset—and here I am, conversant with details of his financial life, down to the fact that his six-year-old car was on the verge of repossession—that his employers had garnished his wages for back taxes.

I couldn’t help but think of your parents, since they don’t live far from Wakefield. Your father was always concerned that his top-of-theline appliances have a fine sense of proportion, a preoccupation that surely extends to behavioral ratios like grievance to redress. Your parents must imagine that the world of the physically preposterous, which doesn’t respect materials, is closing in on them.

Having long since given up on the painful charade of inviting Sonya Khatchadourian for soirees in return and suffering the kind of fanciful excuses she always supplied me for why she could not attend opening night of my school play, these old birds had sampled my mother’s lahmajoon and sesame-topped ziloogs many times before and were disinclined to dwell on the finger food. Instead, with some diffidence, given the guest of honor, they were all dying to talk about Michael McDermott. One dowager commented sorrowfully that she could see how a young man might feel rejected with a nickname like “Mucko.” My crusty Aunt Aleen muttered that her own ongoing fight with the IRS—a $17 disputed underpayment in 1991 had over the years ballooned from interest and late fees to over $1,300—might soon move her to firearms herself. But they all subtly deferred to me, the resident expert with insight into the twitchy mind.

I was finally forced to remind these women firmly that this friendless, overweight loner and I had never met. It seemed to register all at once that no one in this country specialized in plain old murder these days, any more than a lawyer would study plain old Law. There was Workplace Massacre, and there were School Shootings, quite another field of concentration altogether, and I sensed a collective embarrassment in the room, as if they’d all rung the Sales Department when they should have asked for Customer Relations. Since it’s still too dangerous to bring up “Florida” in company without being sure that everyone is on-side, someone prudently changed the subject back to the lahmajoon.

Anyway, who says crime doesn’t pay? I doubt the IRS will ever see a dime of Mucko’s money now, and the forty-two-year-old tax cheat is bound to cost Uncle Sam a far prettier penny in prosecution costs than the IRS would ever have squeezed from his paycheck.

That’s the way I think now, of course, since the price of justice is no longer an abstract matter in my own life but a hard-nosed tally of dollars and cents. And I do often have little flashbacks of that trial—the civil trial. The criminal one is almost a blank.

“Ms. Khatchadourian,” I will hear Harvey begin stentoriously on his re-direct. “The prosecution has made much of the fact that you ran a company in Manhattan while leaving your son to the care of strangers, and that when he turned four you were away in Africa.”

“At the time I was unaware that having a life was illegal.”

“But after your return from this trip you hired someone else to oversee the day-to-day business of your firm, in order to be a better mother to your child?”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t you take over as his primary caregiver? In fact, aside from occasional baby-sitters, didn’t you cease to bring in outside help altogether?”

“Frankly, we gave up on hiring a nanny because we couldn’t find anyone to put up with Kevin for more than a few weeks.”

Harvey looked sour. His client was self-destructive. I imagined that this quality made me special, but my lawyer’s fatigued expression suggested that I was a set type.

“But you were concerned that he needed continuity, and that’s why you terminated this revolving door of young girls. You no longer went into the office nine-to-five.”

“Yes.”

“Ms. Khatchadourian, you loved your work, correct? It gave you great personal satisfaction. So this decision was a considerable sacrifice, all for the sake of your child?”

“The sacrifice was enormous,” I said. “It was also futile.”

“No further questions, your honor.” We had rehearsed enormous, period; he shot me a glare.

Was I, back in 1987, already planning my defense? Though my openended leave from AWAP was on a grand, over-compensatory scale, it was cosmetic. I thought it looked good. I’d never conceived of myself as someone who dwelled upon what other people thought, but hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

Hence, when you two met my plane at Kennedy I stooped to hug Kevin first. He was still in that disconcerting rag-doll phase, “floppy”; he didn’t hug back. But the strength and duration of my own embrace paraded my born-again conversion in Harare. “I’ve missed you so much!” I said. “Mommy’s got two surprises, sweetheart! I brought you a present. But I’m also going to promise that Mommy’s never, ever going away for this long again!”

Kevin just got floppier. I stood up and arranged his willful shocks of hair, embarrassed. I was playing my part, but onlookers might have deduced from my child’s unnatural lassitude that I kept him handcuffed to the water heater in the basement.

I kissed you. Although I’d thought children liked to see their parents be affectionate with one another, Kevin stamped impatiently and mooed, dragging at your hand. Maybe I was mistaken. I never saw my mother kiss my father. I wish I had.

You cut the kiss short and mumbled, “It may take a while, Eva. For kids this age, three months is a lifetime. They get mad. They think you’re never coming back.”

I was about to josh that Kevin seemed more put out that I had come back, but I caught myself; one of our first sacrifices to family life was lightness of heart. “What’s this uherr, uherr! thing?” I asked as Kevin continued to tug at you and moo.

“Cheese doodles,” you said brightly. “The latest must-have. Okay, buster! Let’s go find you a bag of glow-in-the-dark petrochemicals, kiddo!” And you tottered off down the terminal in tow, leaving me to wheel my luggage.

In the pickup, I had to remove several viscous doodles from the passenger seat, in various stages of dissolve. Kevin’s dietary enthusiasm did not extend to eating the snacks; he sucked them, leeching off their neon coating and imbuing them with enough saliva to melt.

“Most kids like sugar?” you explained zestfully. “Ours likes salt.” Apparently a sodium fetish was superior to a sweet tooth in every way.

“The Japanese think they’re opposites,” I said, slipping my gooey collection out the window. Though there was a shallow back seat, Kevin’s child seat was fastened between us, and I was sorry that I couldn’t, as I used to, place a hand on your thigh.

“Mommer farted,” said Kevin, now halving the difference between Mommy and Mother. (It was cute. It must have been.) “It stinks.”

“That’s not the kind of thing you have to announce, Kevin,” I said tightly. I’d had that mashed beans and banana side dish at the Norfolk before catching the plane.

“How about Junior’s?” you proposed. “It’s on the way, and they’re kid-friendly.”

It wasn’t like you to fail to consider that I’d been in transit from Nairobi for fifteen hours, so I might be a little tired, bloated from the flight, overfed with airline Danishes and cheddar packets, and less than in the mood for a loud, camp, brightly lit hash house whose sole redeeming feature was cheesecake. I’d privately hoped that you’d have found a sitter and met my plane alone, to sweep me off to a quiet drink where I could bashfully reveal my turned maternal leaf. In other words, I wanted to get away from Kevin the better to confide to you how very much more time I planned to spend with him.

“Fine,” I said faintly. “Kevin, either eat those cheese thingies or I’ll put them away. Don’t crumble them all over the truck.”

“Kids are messy, Eva!” you said merrily. “Loosen up!”

Kevin shot me a crafty orange smile and fisted a doodle into my lap.

At the restaurant, Kevin scorned the booster seat as for babies. Since clearly parenthood turns you overnight into an insufferable prig, I lectured, “ALL right, Kevin. But remember: You only get to sit like an adult if you act like one.”

“NYEE nyee, nyeh nyeh. Nyeh nyeh-nyee-nyeh: Nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyee nyeh nyeh.” With waltzing mockery, he had captured my stern cadence and preachy inflection with such perfect pitch that he might have a future singing covers as a lounge singer.

“Cut it out, Kevin.” I tried to sound offhand.

“Nye-nye nyee, nye nye!”

I turned to you. “How long has this been going on?”

“Nyeh nyeh nyeh NYEE nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh?”

“A month? It’s a phase. He’ll grow out of it.”

“Nyeh nyeh? Nyeh-nyeh nyeee. Nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh-nyeh.”

“I can’t wait,” I said, increasingly loath to let anything out of my mouth, lest it come parroting back to me in nyeh-nyeh-speak.

You wanted to order Kevin onion rings, and I objected that he must have been eating salty crap all afternoon. “Look,” you said. “Like you, I’m grateful when he eats anything. Maybe he’s craving some trace element, like iodine. Trust nature, I say.”

“Translation: You like eaty-whizzes and curly-munchies, too, and you’ve been bonding over snack food. Order him a hamburger patty. He needs some protein.”

When our waitress read back our order, Kevin nye-nye-ed throughout; “NYEE-nyeh nyeh-nyeh, nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh-nyeeeh” apparently translates “garden salad, house dressing on the side.”

“What a cute little boy,” she said, glancing with desperation at the wall clock.

When his patty came, Kevin retrieved the tall, faceted saltcellar with huge pour-holes and covered the beef with salt until it looked like Mount Kilimanjaro after a recent snow. Disgusted, I reached over with a table knife to scrape it off, but you held my arm. “Why can’t you let anything with this little guy be fun, or funny?” you chided quietly. “The salt thing is a phase too, and he’ll grow out of it too, and later we’ll tell him about it when he’s older and it’ll make him feel he had plenty of quirky personality even when he was a little kid. It’s life. It’s good life.”

“I doubt Kevin’s going to have a hard time finding quirks.” Although the sense of maternal mission that had powered me through my last fortnight was fast abating, I had made myself a promise, Kevin a promise on arrival, implicitly you one as well. I took a breath. “Franklin, I made a major decision while I was gone.”

With the classic timing of dining out, our waitress arrived with my salad and your cheesecake. Her feet gritted on the lino. Kevin had emptied the saltcellar onto the floor.

“That lady has poop on her face.” Kevin was pointing at the birthmark on our waitress’s left cheek, three inches across and roughly the shape of Angola. She’d slathered beige concealer over the big brown blotch, but most of the makeup had worn off. Like most disguises, the cover-up was worse than honest flaw, a lesson I had yet to register on my own account. Before I could stop him, Kevin asked her directly, “Why don’t you clean your face? It’s poopy.”

I apologized profusely to the girl, who couldn’t have been much more than eighteen and had no doubt suffered from that blemish her whole life. She managed a dismal smile and promised to bring my dressing.

I wheeled to our son. “You knew that spot wasn’t ‘poop,’ didn’t you?”

“Nyeh NYEE nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyee, nyeh-nyeh nyeh?” Kevin skulked in the booth, his eyes at half-mast and glittering. He’d placed his fingers on the table and his nose against its rim, but I could tell from that telltale sparky squint that below the table lurked a grin: wide, tight-lipped, and strangely forced.

“Kevin, you know that hurt her feelings, didn’t you?” I said. “How would you like it if I told you your face was ‘poopy’?”

“Eva, kids don’t understand that grown-ups can be touchy about their looks.”

“Are you sure they don’t understand that? You read this somewhere?”

“Can we not ruin our first afternoon out together?” you implored. “Why do you always have to think the worst of him?”

“Where did that come from?” I asked, looking perplexed. “It sounds more as if you always think the worst of me.”

Innocent mystification would remain my tack for the next three years. Meantime, the mood had gone all wrong for my announcement, so I got it over with as unceremoniously as I could. I’m afraid my intentions came out as defiant: Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, if you think I’m such a rotten mother.

“Wow,” you said. “ Are you sure? That’s a big step.”

“I remembered what you said about Kevin and talking, that maybe he didn’t for so long because he wanted to do it right. Well, I’m a perfectionist, too. And I’m not doing AWAP or motherhood right. At the office, I’m continually taking days off with no warning, and publications get behind schedule. Meanwhile, Kevin wakes up and has no idea who’s taking care of him today, his mother or some hopeless hireling who’ll hightail it by the end of the week. I’m thinking mostly until Kevin is in primary school. Hey, it might even be good for W&P. Bring in a new perspective, fresh ideas. The series may be overly dominated by my voice.”

“You,” shock-horror, “domineering?”

“NYEEEEEEE? Nyeh-nyeh nyeeeeh nyeh?”

“Kevin, stop it! That’s enough. Let Mommer and Daddy talk—”

“NYEH-nyeh, NYEEEE nyeh—! Nyeh nyeh-NYEEH—!”

“I mean it, Kevin, quit the nyeh-nyeh or we’re leaving.”

“Nyeh NYEE nyeh, nyeh nyeh, nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh NYEE-NYEH !”

I don’t know why I threatened him with departure, lacking any evidence that he wanted to stay. This was my first taste of what would become a chronic conundrum: how to punish a boy with an almost Zen-like indifference to whatever you might deny him.

“Eva, you’re just making everything worse—”

“How do you propose to get him to shut up?”

“Nyeh nyeh NYEEE nyeh-nyeeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeeeeeeenyeeeeeeee ?”

I slapped him. It wasn’t very hard. He looked happy.

“Where’d you learn that trick?” you asked darkly. And it was a trick: This was the first sentence of mealtime conversation that did not get translated into nyeh-nyeh.

“Franklin, he was getting louder. People were starting to look over.”

Now Kevin started to wail. His tears were a bit late, in my view. I wasn’t moved. I left him to it.

“They’re looking over because you hit him,” you said sotto voce, lifting our son and cuddling him into your lap as his weeping escalated to a shriek. “It’s not done anymore, Eva. Not here. I think they’ve passed a law or something. Or they might as well have. It’s considered assault.”

“I smack my own kid, and I get arrested?”

“There’s a consensus—that violence is no way to get your point across. Which it sure as heck isn’t. I don’t want you to do that again, Eva. Ever.”

So: I slap Kevin. You slap me. I got the picture.

“Can we please get out of here?” I proposed coldly. Kevin was winding down to lurching sobs, but he could easily milk the decrescendo another good ten minutes. Christ, it was practically a love pat. What a little performer.

You signaled for the bill. “This is hardly the context in which I wanted to make my announcement,” you said, wiping Kevin’s nose with a napkin. “But I have some news, too. I bought us a house.”

I did a double take. “You bought us a house. You didn’t find one for me to look at. It’s a done deal.”

“If I didn’t pounce it was going to be snapped up by somebody else. Besides, you weren’t interested. I thought you’d be pleased, glad it’s over.”

“Well. There’s only so pleased I’m going to get over something that wasn’t my idea in the first place.”

“That’s it, isn’t it? You can’t get behind anything that isn’t your own pet project. If you didn’t personally cook up SUBURBAWAP then you’re all disaffected. Good luck doing all that delegating at the office. It doesn’t come naturally.”

You left a generous tip. The extra three bucks, I inferred, was to cover those poopy face cracks. Your motions were mechanical. I could see you were hurt. You’d searched far and wide for this house, you’d been looking forward to delivering your big news, and you must have been excited about the property or you wouldn’t have bought it.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered as we walked out, and other patrons peered furtively at our party. “I’m just tired. I am pleased. I can’t wait to see it.”

“Nyeh nyeh-nyeh. Nyeh-nyeh nyeh. Nyeh nyeh nyeh… ”

I thought, Everyone in this restaurant is relieved we’re leaving. I thought, I’ve become one of those people I used to feel sorry for. I thought, And I still feel sorry for them, too.

More than ever.