We Need to Talk About Kevin

FEBRUARY 1, 2001

Dear Franklin,

For some reason I imagine it will reassure you that I still get the Times. But I seem to have misplaced the grid I once imposed on it to determine what parts were worth reading. Famines and Hollywood divorces appear equally vital and equally trifling. Arbitrarily, I either devour the paper soup to nuts, or I toss it smooth and cool on the stack by the door. How right I was, in those days; how easily the United States can get on without me.

For the last two weeks I’ve tossed them unread, for if memory serves, the earnest pomp of presidential inaugurations left me cold even when I had clear enthusiasms and aversions. Capriciously, this morning I read everything, including an article about American workers’ excessive overtime—and perhaps it is interesting, though I couldn’t say, that the Land of the Free prefers work to play. I read about a young electrical lineman who would soon have been married, and who in his eagerness to salt away funds for his family-to-be had slept only five hours in two and a half days. He had been climbing up and down poles for twenty-four hours straight:

I have no strong feelings about overtime; I’m acquainted with no electrical linemen. I only know that this image—of a father pleading with onlookers themselves as powerless as he, while his hardworking son creaked in the breeze like a hanged man—made me cry. Fathers and sons? Grief and misspent diligence? There are connections. But I also wept for that young man’s real father.

You see, it was drilled into me since I could talk that 1.5 million of my people were slaughtered by Turks; my own father was killed in a war against the worst of ourselves, and in the very month I was born, we were driven to use the worst of ourselves to defeat it. Since Thursday was the slimy garnish on this feast of snakes, I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself hard of heart. Instead, I’m easily moved, even mawkish. Maybe my expectations of my fellows have been reduced to so base a level that the smallest kindness overwhelms me for being, like Thursday itself, so unnecessary. Holocausts do not amaze me. Rapes and child slavery do not amaze me. And Franklin, I know you feel otherwise, but Kevin does not amaze me. I am amazed when I drop a glove in the street and a teenager runs two blocks to return it. I am amazed when a checkout girl flashes me a wide smile with my change, though my own face had been a mask of expedience. Lost wallets posted to their owners, strangers who furnish meticulous directions, neighbors who water each other’s houseplants—these things amaze me. Celia amazed me.

As you instructed, I never raised the matter again. And I took no relish in deceiving you. But the eerie certainty that descended in August never lifted, and you’d left me no choice.

Kevin’s cast had been removed two weeks earlier, but it was as of Trent Corley’s bike accident that I stopped feeling guilty. Just like that. There was no equivalence between what I had done and what I would do—it was totally irrational—but still I seemed to have arrived at the perfect antidote or penance. I would put myself to the test. I was not at all sure that I would pass a second sitting.

You did notice I’d become “a horny little beastie,” and you seemed glad of a desire that, though we never alluded to the abatement outright, had sadly ebbed. With one or the other of us yawning theatrically before bed “a little beat,” we had slid from having sex almost nightly to the American average of once a week. My rekindled passion was no contrivance. I did want you, more urgently than in years, and the more we made love the more insatiable I felt during the day, unable to sit still, rubbing my inside thigh with a pencil at my desk. I, too, was glad of evidence that we had not yet sunk irretrievably into the mechanical bedtime rut that drives so many spouses to the arms of strangers at lunch.

For ever since we’d had a little boy sleeping down the hall, you’d so turned down the volume in bed that I had often to interrupt, “What?… Sorry?” Talking dirty by semaphore was too much effort, and at length we’d both withdrawn to private sexual Imax. Unembellished by your improvisations—and you had a gift for depravity; what a shame to let such talent lie fallow—my own fantasies had come to bore me, and I’d given over to floating pictures instead, rarely erotic in any literal sense, and always dominated by a certain texture and hue. But over time the visions had grown corrosive, like close-ups of a scab or geological illustrations of dried magma. Other nights I’d been afflicted by flashes of filthy diapers and taut, undescended testicles, so you can understand why I might have contributed to reducing our schedule to once a week. Perhaps worst of all, the vibrant scarlets and ceruleans that once permeated my head when we made love in our childless days had gradually muddied and lost their luster, until the miasma on the inside of my eyelids churned with the furious pitch and umber of the drawings on our refrigerator door.

Once I started leaving my diaphragm in its sky-blue case, the vista in my mind during sex went light. Where my visual perimeters had once closed in, now I saw great distances, as if gazing from Mt. Ararat or skimming the Pacific in a glider. I peered down long hallways that shimmered endlessly to the vanishing point, their marble parquet blazing, sunlight pouring in windows from either side. Everything I envisioned was bright: wedding dresses, cloudscapes, fields of edelweiss. Please don’t laugh at me—I know what I’m describing sounds like a tampon commercial. But it was beautiful. I felt, at last, transported. My mind opened up, where before my head had seemed to be spelunking into an ever narrower, more dimly lit hole. These wide-screen projections weren’t mushy soft-focus, either, but sharp and vivid and I remembered them when we were through. I slept like a baby. Rather, like some babies, as I was soon to discover.

I was obviously not at my most fertile, and it did take a year. But when I finally missed a period the following fall, I started to sing. Not show tunes this time, but the Armenian folk songs with which my mother had serenaded Giles and me when she tucked us in for the night—like “Soode Soode” (“It’s a lie, it’s a lie, it’s a lie, everything’s a lie; in this world, everything’s a lie!”). When I discovered that I’d forgotten some of the words, I called her and asked if she might write them out. She was delighted to oblige, since as far as Mother knew, I was still the willful little girl who decried her Armenian lessons as burdensome extra homework, and she inscribed my favorites—Komitas Vardapet’s “Kele Kele,” “Kujn Ara,” and “Gna Gna”—inside greeting cards pen-and-inked with mountain village scenes and patterns from Armenian carpets.

Kevin noticed my transformation, and while he mightn’t have savored his mother groveling about the house like a worm, he was no better pleased when she burst her cocoon as a butterfly. He hung back sullenly and carped, “You sing out of tune” or commanded, reciting a line he had picked up from his multiethnic primary school, “Why don’t you speak English.” I told him lightly that Armenian folk songs were polyphonic, and when he pretended to understand, I asked if he knew what that meant. “It means stupid,” he said. I volunteered to teach him a song or two, reminding him, “You’re Armenian, too, you know,” but he differed. “I’m American,” he asserted, using the derisive tone of stating the obvious, like “I’m a person” and not an aardvark.

Something was up. Mommer wasn’t slumping and shuffling and talking in a peewee voice anymore, yet even pre-broken-arm Mommer had not made a reappearance: the brisk, rather formal woman who marched through the paces of motherhood like a soldier on parade. No, this Mommer purled about her duties like a bubbling brook, and any number of stones hurled at her eddies sank with a harmless rattle to her bed. Apprised that her son thought all his second-grade classmates were “retards” and everything they studied he “knew already,” this Mommer didn’t remonstrate that he would soon find out he didn’t know everything; she didn’t abjure him not to say retard. She just laughed.

Although an alarmist by nature, I didn’t even get bent out of shape about the escalating threats issuing from the State Department over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. “You’re usually so dramatic about these things,” you remarked in November. “Aren’t you worried?” No, I wasn’t worried. About anything.

It was after I’d missed my third cycle that Kevin started accusing me of getting fat. He’d poke at my stomach and jeer, “You’re giant!” Commonly vain about my figure, I concurred cheerfully, “That’s right, Mommer’s a big pig.”

“You know, you may have gained just a bit around the waist,” you remarked finally one night in December. “Maybe we should take it easy on the spuds, huh? Could stand to drop a couple pounds myself.”

“Mmm,” I hummed, and I practically had to put my fist in my mouth to keep from laughing. “I don’t mind a little extra weight. All the better for throwing it around.”

“Jesus, what’s this, maturity? Usually if I suggest you’ve gained an ounce you go ape-shit!” You brushed your teeth, then joined me in bed. You picked up your mystery but only drummed the cover, sidling your other hand to a swollen breast. “Maybe you’re right,” you murmured. “A little more Eva is pretty sexy.” Slipping the book to the floor, you turned toward me and lifted an eyebrow. “Is it in?”

“Mmm,” I hummed again, with an affirmative cast.

“Your nipples are big,” you observed, nuzzling. “Time for your period? Seems like it’s been a while.”

Your head stilled between my breasts. You pulled back. You looked me in the eye with the soberest of expressions. And then you turned white.

My heart sank. I could tell that it would be worse than I’d led myself to believe.

“When were you planning to tell me?” you asked stonily.

“Soon. Weeks ago, really. It just never seemed the right time.”

“I can see why it wouldn’t,” you said. “You expecting to palm this off as some kind of accident?”

“No. It wasn’t an accident.”

“I thought we discussed this.”

“That’s what we didn’t do, discuss it. You went on a tirade. You wouldn’t listen.”

“So you just go ahead and—a fait accompli—just—like some kind of mugging. As if it has nothing to do with me.”

“It has everything to do with you. But I was right and you were wrong.” I faced you squarely. As you would say, there were two of us and one of you.

“This is the most presumptuous… arrogant thing you’ve ever done.”

“Yes. I guess it is.”

“Now that it no longer matters what I think, you going to explain what this is about? I’m listening.” You didn’t look as if you were listening.

“I have to find something out.”

“What’s that? How far you can push me before I push back?”

“About—,” I decided not to apologize for the word, “about my soul.”

“Is there anyone else in your universe?”

I bowed my head. “I’d like there to be.”

“What about Kevin?”

“What about him.”

“It’s going to be hard for him.”

“I read somewhere that other children have brothers and sisters.”

“Don’t be snide, Eva. He’s used to undivided attention.”

“Another way of saying he’s spoiled. Or could get that way. This is the best thing that could possibly happen to that boy.”

“Little bird tells me that’s not the way he’s going to look at it.”

I took a moment to reflect that in five minutes we were already dwelling on our son. “Maybe it will be good for you, too. For us.”

“It’s an agony aunt standard. Stupidest thing you can ever do to cement a shaky marriage is to have a baby.”

“Is our marriage shaky?”

“You just shook it,” you fired back, and turned away from me on your side.

I switched off the light and slid down on the pillow. We weren’t touching. I started to cry. Feeling your arms around me was such a relief that I cried harder still.

“Hey,” you said. “Did you really think—? Did you wait so long to tell me so it would be too late? Did you really think I’d ask you to do that? With our own kid?”

“Of course not,” I snuffled.

But when I’d calmed down you grew sterner. “Look, I’ll come around to this if only because I have to. But you’re forty-five, Eva. Promise me you’ll get that test.”

There was a purpose to “that test” only if we were prepared to act on a discouraging outcome. With our own kid. Little wonder that I put off telling you for as long as possible.

I didn’t get the test. Oh, I told you I did, and the new gynecologist I found—who was lovely—offered, but unlike Dr. Rhinestein, she did not seem to regard all pregnant women as public property and didn’t unduly press the point. She did say that she hoped I was prepared to love and care for whoever—she meant, whatever—came out. I said that I didn’t think I was romantic about the rewards of raising a disabled child. But I was probably too strict about what—and whom—I chose to love. So I wanted to trust. For once, I said. To have blind faith in—I chose not to say life or fate or God—myself.

There was never any doubt that our second child was mine. Accordingly, you exhibited none of the proprietary bossiness that tyrannized my pregnancy with Kevin. I carried my own groceries. I drew no scowls over a glass of red wine, which I continued to pour myself in small, sensible amounts. I actually stepped up my exercise regime, including running and calisthenics and even a little squash. Our understanding was no less clear for being tacit: What I did with this bump was my business. I liked it that way.

Kevin had already sensed the presence of perfidy. He hung back from me more than ever, glaring from corners, sipping at a glass of juice as if tasting for arsenic, and poking so warily at anything I left him to eat, often dissecting it into its constituent parts spread equidistant around his plate; he might have been searching for shards of glass. He was secretive about his homework, which he protected like a prisoner encrypting his correspondence with details of savage abuse at the hands of his captors that he would smuggle to Amnesty International.

Someone had to tell him, and soon; I was starting to show. So I suggested that we take this opportunity to explain generally about sex. You were reluctant. Just say you’re pregnant, you suggested. He doesn’t have to know how it got there. He’s only seven. Shouldn’t we preserve his innocence a little longer? It’s a pretty backward definition of innocence, I objected, that equates sexual ignorance with freedom from sin. And underestimating your kid’s sexual intelligence is the oldest mistake in the book.

Indeed. I had barely introduced the subject while making dinner when Kevin interrupted impatiently, “Is this about fucking?”

It was true: They didn’t make second-graders the way they used to. “Better to call it sex, Kevin. That other word is going to offend some people.”

“It’s what everybody else calls it.”

“Do you know what it means?”

Rolling his eyes, Kevin recited, “The boy puts his peepee in the girl’s doodoo.”

I went through the stilted nonsense about “seeds” and “eggs” that had persuaded me as a child that making love was something between planting potatoes and raising chickens. Kevin was no more than tolerant.

“I knew all that.”

“What a surprise,” I muttered. “Do you have any questions?”

“No.”

“Not any? Because you can always ask me or Dad anything about boys and girls, or sex, or your own body that you don’t understand.”

“I thought you were going to tell me something new,” he said darkly, and left the room.

I felt strangely ashamed. I’d raised his expectations, then dashed them. When you asked how the talk had gone I said okay, I guess; and you asked if he’d seemed frightened or uncomfortable or confused, and I said actually he seemed unimpressed. You laughed, while I said dolefully, what’s ever going to impress him if that doesn’t?

Yet phase two of the Facts of Life was bound to be the more difficult installment.

“Kevin,” I began the following evening. “Remember what we talked about last night? Sex? Well, Mommer and Daddy do that sometimes, too.”

“What for.”

“For one thing, so you could keep us company. But it might be nice for you to have some company, too. Haven’t you ever wished you had someone right around the house to play with?”

“No.”

I stooped to the play table where Kevin was systematically snapping each crayon of his Crayola 64 set into pieces. “Well, you are going to have some company. A little baby brother or sister. And you might find out that you like it.”

He glared at me a long, sulky beat, though he didn’t look especially surprised. “What if I don’t like it.”

“Then you’ll get used to it.”

“Just cause you get used to something doesn’t mean you like it.” He added, snapping the magenta, “You’re used to me.”

“Yes!” I said. “And in a few months we’ll all get used to someone new!”

As a crayon piece gets shorter it’s more difficult to break, and Kevin’s fingers were now straining against one such obdurate stump. “You’re going to be sorry.”

Finally, it broke.

I tried to draw you into a discussion about names, but you were indifferent; by then the Gulf War had started, and it was impossible to distract you from CNN. When Kevin slumped alongside you in the den, I noted that the boy stuff of generals and fighter pilots didn’t captivate him any more than the ABC song, though he did show a precocious appreciation for the nature of a “nuclar bomb.” Impatient with the slow pace of madefor-TV combat, he grumbled, “I don’t see why Cone Power bothers with all that little junk, Dad. Nuke ’em. That’d teach the Raqis who’s boss.” You thought it was adorable.

In the spirit of fair play, I reminded you of our old pact, offering to christen our second child a Plaskett. Don’t be ridiculous, you dismissed, not taking your eyes off an incoming Patriot missile. Two kids, different last names? People would think one was adopted. As for Christian names, you were equally apathetic. Whatever you want, Eva, you said with a flap of your hand, is fine with me.

So for a boy I proposed Frank. For a girl, I deliberately rejected Karru or Sophia from my mother’s vanquished clan and reached for the vanquished in yours.

The death of your Aunt Celia, your mother’s childless younger sister, had hit you hard when you were twelve. A frequent visitor, zany Aunt Celia had a playful taste for the occult; she gave you a magic eight ball that told fortunes and led you and your sister in darkened séances, the more delicious for your parents’ disapproval. I’d seen her picture, and she’d been heartbreakingly not-quite-pretty, with a wide mouth and thin lips but piercing, clairvoyant eyes, at once brave and a little frightened. Like me, she was adventurous, and she died young and unmarried after climbing Mt. Washington with a dashing young climber for whom she had high hopes, succumbing to hypothermia after their party was hit by a freak snowstorm. But you shrugged off the tribute with irritation, as if I were seeking to ensnare you by your Aunt Celia’s own supernatural means.

My second confinement felt vastly less restrictive than the first, and with Kevin in second grade, I could involve myself more fully in AWAP. Yet with child I also felt less lonely, and when I spoke aloud with you scouting and Kevin in school, I did not feel that I was talking to myself.

Of course, the second time around is always easier. I knew enough to opt for anesthesia, though when the time came, Celia would prove so tiny that I probably could have managed without. I also knew better than to expect a blinding Vulcan mind-meld at her birth. A baby is a baby, each miraculous in its way, but to demand transformation on the instant of delivery was to place too great a burden on a small confused bundle and an exhausted middle-aged mother both. All the same, when she begged to arrive two weeks early on June 14, I couldn’t resist inferring an eagerness on her part, as I had once inferred a corresponding reluctance from Kevin’s foot-dragging fortnight’s delay.

Do babies have feelings, even at zero hour? From my modest study of two, I believe they do. They don’t have names for feelings yet, and without separating labels probably experience emotion in a goulash that easily accommodates opposites; I am likely to pin myself to feeling anxious, while an infant might have no trouble feeling simultaneously apprehensive and relaxed. Still, on the birth of both my children, I could immediately discern a dominant emotional tone, like the top note of a chord or the foreground color of a canvas. In Kevin, the note was the shrill high pitch of a rape whistle, the color was a pulsing, aortal red, and the feeling was fury. The shriek and pump of all that rage was unsustainable, so as he grew older the note would descend to the uninflected blare of a leaned-on car horn; the paint in his foreground would gradually thicken, its hue coagulating to the sluggish black-purple of liver, and his prevailing emotion would subside from fitful wrath to steady, unabating resentment.

Yet when Celia slid to hand, she may have been visually beet-faced and bloody, but her aural color was light blue. I was overcome by the same clearskied azure that had visited me when we made love. She didn’t cry when she was born, and if she emitted a figurative sound it was the quiet, meandering tune of a rambler far from home who is enjoying the walk and doesn’t think anyone is listening. As for the ascendant emotion that exuded from this blind creature—her hands not grasping at the air but wandering, wondering at it, her mouth, once led to the nipple, suckling right away—it was gratitude.

I’m not sure if you could tell the difference instantly, though once Celia was fed, tied off, swabbed, and handed over to her father, you did return her rather quickly. Maybe you were still irked at my presumption, and maybe your new daughter’s perfection dismayed you further, as living evidence that my deception had been righteous. In any case, the years ahead would later confirm my initial intuition: that you could tell the difference, and that the difference made you angry. I imagine you bristling with a similar resistance if, after living for years in our fatally middlebrow Dream Home, you walked into the Victorian one with the porch swing, dumbwaiter, and mahogany balustrade and learned it was for sale. You’d wish you’d never seen it, and something in you would hate it a bit. On tramping back into our hackneyed cathedral of teak, the scales would fall from your eyes, and you’d see only a slag heap of pretensions, your brave capacity for rounding up crippled for life.

That’s my only explanation for your coolness, since you seemed so leery of picking her up and anxious to avoid looking at her with those long soulful gazes during which Brian claimed that a parent falls in love. I think she frightened you. I think you regarded your attraction to your daughter as a betrayal.

The birth went so smoothly that I only spent the one night, and you brought Kevin with you to retrieve us from Nyack Hospital. I was nervous, having every appreciation for how infuriating it must be for a firstborn child to contemplate the invasion of his patch by a speechless weakling. But when Kevin trailed into the hospital room behind you, he hardly leaped onto the bed to smother my suckling daughter with a pillow. Wearing an “I’m the Big Brother” T-shirt with a smiley face in the O—its fresh squared creases and price tag in the neck betokening your purchase of a last-minute prop from the lobby’s gift shop—he slouched around the foot, sauntered to the other side, dragged a zinnia from your bedside bouquet, and set about denuding the flower of petals. Perhaps the safest outcome was that Celia should simply bore him.

“Kevin,” I said. “Would you like to meet your sister?”

“Why should I meet it,” he said wearily. “It’s coming home with us, isn’t it. That means I’ll meet it every day.”

“So you should at least know her name, shouldn’t you?” I gently pulled the baby away from the breast in which Kevin himself had once shown such resolute disinterest, though she’d just started feeding. In that event, most infants would squall, but from the start Celia took deprivation as her due, receiving whatever trifle she was offered with wide-eyed abashment. I tugged up the sheet and held out the baby for inspection.

“This is Celia, Kevin. I know she’s not a lot of fun yet, but when she gets a little bigger I bet she’ll be your best friend.” I wondered if he knew what one was. He’d yet to bring a classmate home from school.

“You mean she’ll tag along after me and stuff. I’ve seen it. It’s a pain.”

You clapped your hands on Kevin’s shoulders from behind and rocked him in a pally motion. Kevin’s face twitched. “Yeah, well that’s all part of being a big brother!” you said. “I should know, because I had a little sister, too. They never leave you alone! You want to play with trucks, and they’re always pestering you to play with doll babies!”

“I played with trucks,” I objected, shooting you a look; we would have to talk about this retrograde sex-role crap when we got home. It was a shame that, born back-to-back, you and your sister Valerie—a prissy girl grown officious woman, consumed by the cut of her drapes, and on our brief visits to Philadelphia determined to organize “outings” to historical homes—were never very close. “There’s no telling what Celia will like to do, any more than you can tell if Kevin may like to play with dolls.”

“In a pig’s eye!” you cried fraternally.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Spiderman? Action figures are dolls.”

“Great, Eva,” you muttered. “Give the little guy a complex.”

Meantime, Kevin had sidled closer to the bed and dipped his hand into the glass of water on the bedside table. Eyeing the baby askance, he held his wet hand over her face and let drops of water drip, drip onto her face. Celia twisted, disconcerted, but the baptism didn’t seem to be upsetting her, though I would later learn to regard the fact that my daughter hadn’t complained or cried out as meaningless. His face stirring with a rare if clinical curiosity, Kevin wet his hand again and spattered his sister’s nose and mouth. I wasn’t sure what to do. Kevin’s christening reminded me of fairy tales in which an aggrieved relative arrives to curse the princess in her crib. Yet he wasn’t really hurting her, and I didn’t want to taint this introduction with a reprimand. So when he dipped his hand a third time, I resettled myself on the pillow and, dabbing her face with the sheet, discreetly withdrew the baby out of his reach.

“Hey, Kev!” You rubbed your hands. “Your mother has to get dressed, so let’s go find something really greasy and really salty in those machines down the hall!”

When we left the hospital together, you said I must be shot after being up and down all night with a newborn and volunteered to baby-sit while I got some sleep.

“No, it’s the oddest thing,” I whispered. “I did get up a couple of times for feeding, but I had to set an alarm. Franklin—she doesn’t cry.”

“Huh. Well, don’t expect that to last.”

“You never know—they’re all different.”

“Babies ought to cry,” you said vigorously. “Kid just lolls in bed and sleeps all day, you’re raising a doormat.”

When we came home, I noticed that the framed photo of me in my late twenties that we kept on the little table in the foyer was missing, and I asked you if you’d moved it. You said no, shrugging, and I declined to pursue the matter, assuming it would turn up. It didn’t. I was a little perturbed; I no longer looked nearly that pretty, and these verifications that we were once lineless and lovely do grow precious. The shot had been snapped on an Amsterdam houseboat with whose captain I had a brief, uncomplicated affair. I treasured the expression he’d captured—expansive, relaxed, warm; it fixed a simple glorying in all that I then required of life: light on water, bright white wine, a handsome man. The portrait had softened the severity that marked most of my pictures, with that shelved brow of mine, my deep-set eyes in shadow. The houseboat captain had mailed me the photo, and I didn’t have the negative. Oh, well. Presumably, while I was in the hospital Kevin had snatched the print to poke pins in.

Anyway, I was in no mood to get exercised over one silly snapshot. In fact, though I fear that my martial metaphor may seem provocative, when I carried Celia over our threshold I had the exhilarating impression of having reset our troop strengths at a healthy par. Little could I know that, as a military ally, a trusting young girl is worse than nothing, an open left flank.