We Need to Talk About Kevin

DECEMBER 2, 2000

Dear Franklin,

I’ve settled myself down in a little coffee shop in Chatham, which is why this is handwritten; then, you were always able to decipher my spidery scrawl on postcards, since I gave you a terrible lot of practice. The couple at the next table is having a knockdown drag-out over the application process for absentee ballots in Seminole County—the kind of minutiae that seems to consume the whole country right now, since everyone around me has turned into a procedural pedant. All the same, I bask in their heatedness as before a woodstove. My own apathy is bone chilling.

The Bagel Café is a homey establishment, and I don’t think the waitress will mind if I nurse a cup of coffee by my legal pad. Chatham, too, is homey, authentic—with the kind of Middle America quaintness that more well-to-do towns like Stockbridge and Lenox spend a great deal of money to feign. Its railroad station still receives trains. The commercial main drag sports the traditional lineup of secondhand bookstores (full of those Loren Estleman novels you devoured), bakeries with burnt-edged bran muffins, charity consignment shops, a cinema whose marquee says “theatre” on the parochial presumption that British spelling is more sophisticated, and a liquor store that, along with Taylor magnums for the locals, stocks some surprisingly pricey California zinfandels for out-oftowners. Manhattan residents with second homes keep this disheveled hamlet alive now that most local industries have closed—these summer folk and, of course, the new correctional facility on the outskirts of town.

I was thinking about you on the drive up, if that doesn’t go without saying. By way of counterpoint, I was trying to picture the kind of man I assumed I’d end up with before we met. The vision was doubtless a composite of the on-the-road boyfriends you always rode me about. Some of my romantic blow-ins were sweet, though whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

If that assortment of cameo companions in Arles or Tel Aviv was anything to go by (sorry—“the losers”), I was destined to settle down with a stringy cerebral type whose skittering metabolism burns chickpea concoctions at a ferocious rate. Sharp elbows, prominent Adam’s apple, narrow wrists. A strict vegetarian. An anguished sort who reads Nietzsche and wears spectacles, alienated from his time and contemptuous of the automobile. An avid cyclist and hill walker. Professional marginalia—perhaps a potter, with a love of hardwoods and herb gardens, whose aspirations to an unpretentious life of physical toil and lingering sunsets on a porch are somewhat belied by the steely, repressed rage with which he pitches disappointing vases into an oil drum. A weakness for weed; brooding. An understated but ruthless sense of humor; a dry, distant laugh. Back massages. Recycling. Sitar music and a flirtation with Buddhism that is mercifully behind him. Vitamins and cribbage, water filters and French films. A pacifist with three guitars but no TV, and unpleasant associations with team sports from a picked-on childhood. A hint of vulnerability in the receding hairline at the temples; a soft, dark ponytail whisping down the spine. A sallow, olive complexion, almost sickly. Tender, whispering sex. Curious carved wooden talisman thonged around the neck that he will neither explain nor take off, even in the bath. Diaries that I mustn’t read, pasted up with sick squib clippings that illustrate what a terrible world we live in. (“Grisly Find: Police found assorted bits of a man’s body, including a pair of hands and two legs, in six luggage lockers in Tokyo’s central railway station. After inspecting all 2,500 coin lockers, police found a pair of buttocks in a black plastic garbage bag.”) A cynic about mainstream politics with an unabating ironic detachment from popular culture. And most of all? With fluent if prettily accented English, a foreigner.

We would live in the countryside—in Portugal, or a little village in Central America—where a farm up the road sells raw milk, fresh-churned sweet butter, and fat, seedy pumpkins. Our stone cottage would writhe with creepers, its window boxes blushing red geraniums, and we would bake chewy ryes and carrot brownies for our rustic neighbors. An overeducated man, my fantasy partner would still root about the soil of our idyll for the seeds of his own discontent. And surrounded by natural bounty, grow spitefully ascetic.

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knockknock jokes. Hot dogs—not even East 86th Street bratwurst, but mealy, greasy pig guts of that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of every description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies—you’re laughing, but I don’t eat them—anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key—how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear? Beach Boys. Elvis—never lost your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them… (sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn’t any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn’t notice that “Quiet City” made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasures: the Bronx Zoo and the Botanical Gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I’d ever met who’d actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art—Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise—yourself a strong defense. There were times you worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in at a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds’ worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How lucky we are, when we’re spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!

But the biggest surprise of all was that I married an American. Not just any American either, a man who happened to be American. No, you were American by choice as well as by birth. You were, in fact, a patriot. I had never met one before. Rubes, yes. Blind, untraveled, ignorant people who thought the United States was the whole world, so to say anything against it was like decrying the universe, or air. Instead, you had been a few places—Mexico, one disastrous trip to Italy with a woman whose cornucopia of allergies included tomatoes—and had decided that you liked your own country. No, that you loved your own country, its smoothness and efficiency, its practicality, its broad, unpretentious accents and emphasis on honesty. I would say—I did say—that you were enamored of an archaic version of the U.S., either an America that was long past or that never was; that you were enamored of an idea. And you would say—did say—that part of what America was was an idea, and that was more than most countries could claim, which were mostly scrappy pasts and circumscriptions on a map. It was a fine, it was a beautiful idea, too, you said, and you pointed out—I granted you this—that a nation that aimed to preserve above all the ability of its citizens to do pretty much whatever they wanted was exactly the sort of place that should have captivated the likes of me. But it hasn’t worked out that way, I’d object, and you’d counter, better than anywhere else, and we would be off.

It is true that I grew disenchanted. But I would still like to thank you for introducing me to my own country. Wasn’t that how we met? We’d decided at AWAP to run those advertisements in Mother Jones and Rolling Stone, and when I was vague about the photos we wanted, Young & Rubicam had you stop in. You showed up at my office in a flannel shirt and dusty jeans, a beguiling impertinence. I tried so hard to be professional, because your shoulders were distracting. France, I supposed. The Rhone Valley. And then I dithered over the expense—sending you over, putting you up. You laughed. Don’t be ridiculous, you dismissed. I can find you the Rhone Valley in Pennsylvania. Which indeed you did.

Hitherto, I had always regarded the United States as a place to leave. After you brazenly asked me out—an executive with whom you had a business relationship—you goaded me to admit that had I been born elsewhere, the U.S. of A. was perhaps the first country I would make a beeline to visit: whatever else I might think of it, the place that called the shots and pulled the strings, that made the movies and sold the Coca-Cola and shipped Star Trek all the way to Java; the center of the action, a country that you needed a relationship with even if that relationship was hostile; a country that demanded if not acceptance at least rejection—anything but neglect. The country in every other country’s face, that would visit you whether you liked it or not almost anywhere on the planet. Okay, okay, I protested. Okay. I would visit.

So I visited. In those early days, remember your recurrent astonishment? That I had never been to a baseball game. Or to Yellowstone. Or the Grand Canyon. I sneered at them, but I had never eaten a McDonald’s hot apple pie. (I confess: I liked it.) Someday, you observed, there would be no McDonald’s. Just because there are lots of them doesn’t mean that the hot apple pies aren’t excellent or that it isn’t a privilege to live in a time when you can buy them for 99 cents. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn’t necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.

And that was your perspective on your country as well: that it was not forever. That of course it was an empire, though that was nothing to be ashamed of. History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had ever dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted. Sure it was imperfect, you would add, with the same hastiness with which I observed before Kevin was born that of course some children “had problems.” But you said that if the U.S. were to fall or founder during your lifetime, collapse economically, be overrun by an aggressor, or corrupt from within into something vicious, you would weep.

I believe you would. But I sometimes considered during those days you were carting me off to the Smithsonian, needling me to recite the presidents in order, grilling me on the causes of the Haymarket Riots, that I wasn’t visiting the country, quite. I was visiting your country. The one you had made for yourself, the way a child constructs a log cabin out of Popsicle sticks. It was a lovely reproduction, too. Even now, when I glimpse snippets of the Preamble to the Constitution, We, the people… , the hair raises on the back of my neck. Because I hear your voice. The Declaration of Independence, We hold these truths—your voice.

Irony. I have thought about you and irony. It always got your back up when my friends from Europe would come through and dismiss our countrymen as “having no sense of irony.” Yet (ironically) in the latter twentieth century, irony was huge in the U.S., painfully so. In fact, I was sick of it, though I didn’t realize that until we met. Coming into the eighties, everything was “retro,” and there was an undercurrent of snideness, a distancing in all those fifties diners with chrome stools and oversized root-beer floats. Irony means at once having and not having. Irony involves a prissy dabbling, a disavowal. We had friends whose apartments were completely tricked out in sardonic kitsch—pickaninny dolls, framed advertisements for Kellogg’s cornflakes from the twenties (“Look at the bowlfuls go!”)—who owned nothing that wasn’t a joke.

You wouldn’t live that way. Oh, to have “no sense of irony” was supposedly to not know what it was—to be a moron—to have no sense of humor. And you knew what it was. You laughed, a little, at the lampbearing cast-iron black jockey that Belmont picked up for their hearth, to be polite. You got the joke. You just didn’t think it was that funny, really, and in your own life you wanted objects that were truly beautiful and not just a laugh. Such a bright man, you were sincere by design and not merely by nature, American by personal fiat, and you would embrace all that was good in that. Is it called naïveté when you’re naive on purpose? You would go on picnics. You would take conventional vacations to national monuments. You would sing O’er the la-and of the free! at the top of your tuneless voice at Mets games, and never with a smirk. The United States, you claimed, was on the existential cutting edge. It was a country whose prosperity was without precedence, where virtually everyone had enough to eat; a country that strove for justice and offered up nearly every entertainment and sport, every religion, ethnicity, occupation, and political affiliation to be had, with a wild wealth of landscapes, of flora and fauna and weather. If it was not possible to have a fine, rich, sumptuous life in this country, with a beautiful wife and a healthy, growing boy, then it was not possible anywhere. And even now, I believe that you may be right. But that it may not be possible anywhere.

The waitress was tolerant, but the Bagel Café was closing. And printout may be impersonal, but it’s easier on the eye. For that matter, I worry that throughout that handwritten passage you’ve been skimming, reading ahead. I worry that the instant you spotted “Chatham” up top you could think of nothing else, and that you for once couldn’t care less about my feelings for the United States. Chatham. I go to Chatham?

I do. I go at every opportunity. Fortunately, these journeys every two weeks up to Claverack Juvenile Correctional Facility are aimed at such a restrictive window of visiting hours that I am not free to consider going an hour later or another day. I leave at exactly 11:30 because it is the first Saturday of the month and I must arrive immediately after the second lunch slot at 2:00. I do not indulge myself in reflection over how much I dread going to see him, or, more improbably, look forward to it. I just go.

You’re astonished. You shouldn’t be. He’s my son, too, and a mother should visit her child in prison. I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules. If anything, following the letter of the unwritten parental law was one of my failings. That came out in the trial—the civil suit. I was appalled by how upstanding I looked on paper. Vince Mancini, Mary’s lawyer, accused me in court of visiting my son so dutifully in detention during his own trial only because I anticipated being sued for parental negligence. I was acting a part, he claimed, going through the motions. Of course, the trouble with jurisprudence is that it cannot accommodate subtleties. Mancini was onto something. There may indeed be an element of theater in these visits. But they continue when no one is watching, because if I am trying to prove that I am a good mother, I am proving this, dismally, as it happens, to myself.

Kevin himself has been surprised by my dogged appearances, which is not to say, in the beginning at least, pleased. Back in 1999, at sixteen, he was still at that age when to be seen with your mother was embarrassing; how bittersweetly these truisms about teenagers persist through the most adult of troubles. And in those first few visits he seemed to regard my very presence as an accusation, so before I said a single word he’d get angry. It didn’t seem sensible that he should be the one mad at me.

But in the same vein, when a car nearly sideswipes me in a crosswalk, I’ve noticed that the driver is frequently furious—shouting, gesticulating, cursing—at me, whom he nearly ran over and who had the undisputed right of way. This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad. If I’d had the presence back then to seize on the first part of that proof, I might have glimpsed in Kevin’s instantaneous dudgeon a glimmer of hope. But at the time, his fury simply mystified me. It seemed so unfair. Women tend more toward chagrin, and not only in traffic. So I blamed me, and he blamed me. I felt ganged up on.

Hence, when he was first incarcerated we didn’t have conversations as such. Simply being in front of him made me limp. He sapped me even of the energy to cry, which anyway would not have been very productive. After five minutes, I might ask him, my voice hoarse, about the food. He would gawk at me incredulously, as if under the circumstances the inquiry were as inane as it actually was. Or I’d ask, “Are they treating you all right?” although I wasn’t sure what that meant or even whether I wanted his minders to treat him “all right.” He’d slur that sure they kiss me beddy-bye every night. It didn’t take long for me to run out of pro forma Mommy questions, for which I think we were both relieved.

If it took little time to get past my posing as the loyal mother who’s only concerned that sonny is eating his vegetables, we are still contending with Kevin’s more impenetrable pose as the sociopath who is beyond reach. The trouble is, while my role as a mother who stands by her son no matter what is ultimately demeaning—it is mindless, irrational, blind, and sappy, hence a part I might gratefully shed—Kevin gets too much sustenance from his own cliché to let it go quietly. He still seems intent on demonstrating to me that he may have been a subjugant in my house who had to clean his plate, but now he’s a celebrity who’s been on the cover of Newsweek, whose fricative appellation, Kevin Khatchadourian—or “KK” to the tabloids, like Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia—has tsked chidingly off every major network news anchor’s tongue. He’s even had a hand in setting the national agenda, sparking new calls for corporal punishment, juvenile death sentences, and the V-chip. In lockup, he would have me know that he is no tinhorn delinquent, but a notorious fiend of whom his less accomplished fellow juveniles are in awe.

Once in those early days (after he’d grown more talkative), I asked him: “How do they regard you, the other boys? Do they… are they critical? Of what you did?” This was as close as I could come to asking, do they trip you in hallways or hawk in your soup. At first, you see, I was hesitant, deferential. He frightened me, physically frightened me, and I was desperate not to set him off. There were prison guards nearby, of course, but there had been security personnel in his high school, police in Gladstone, and what good had they been? I never feel protected any more.

Kevin honked, that hard, joyless laugh forced through his nose. And said something like, “Are you kidding? They fucking worship me, Mumsey. There’s not a juve in this joint who hasn’t taken out fifty dickheads in his peer group before breakfast—in his head. I’m the only one with the stones to do it in real life.” Whenever Kevin cites “real life,” it is with the excessive firmness with which fundamentalists reference heaven or hell. It’s as if he’s trying to talk himself into something.

I had only his word, of course, that far from being shunned Kevin had achieved a status of mythic proportions among hoods who had merely hijacked cars or knifed rival drug dealers. But I have come to believe he must have once garnered some prestige, since, in his oblique fashion, just this afternoon he allowed that it had begun to ebb.

He said, “Tell you what, I’m fucking tired of telling that same fucking story”—from which I could infer that, rather, his fellow inmates were tired of hearing it. Over a year and a half is a long time for teenagers, and Kevin is already yesterday’s news. He’s getting old enough to appreciate, too, that one of the differences between a “perp,” as they say in cop shows, and your average newspaper reader is that onlookers are allowed the luxury of getting “fucking tired of the same fucking story” and are free to move on. Culprits are stuck in what must be a tyrannical rehearsal of the same old tale. Kevin will be climbing the stairs to the aerobicconditioning alcove of the Gladstone High gym for the rest of his life.

So he is resentful, and I don’t blame him for being bored with his own atrocity already, or for envying others their capacity to abandon it. Today, he went on to grouse about some “pipsqueak” new arrival at Claverack who was only thirteen. Kevin added for my benefit, “His cock’s the size of a Tootsie Roll. The little ones, you know?” Kevin wiggled his pinkie. “Three for a quarter.” With relish, Kevin explained the boy’s claim to fame: An elderly couple in an adjacent apartment had complained about how loudly he played his CDs of the Monkees at three in the morning. The next weekend, the couple’s daughter discovered her parents in their bed, slit from crotch to throat.

“That’s appalling,” I said. “I can’t believe anyone still listens to the Monkees.”

I earned a begrudging snort. He went on to explain that the police have never found the entrails, which is the detail on which the media, not to mention the boy’s overnight Claverack fan club, has seized.

“Your friend’s precocious,” I said. “The missing entrails—didn’t you teach me that to get noticed in this business you have to add a twist?”

You may be horrified, Franklin, but it has taken me the better part of two years to get this far with him, and our black, straight-faced banter passes for progress. But Kevin is still not comfortable with my gameliness. I usurp his lines. And I had made him jealous.

“I don’t think he’s so smart,” said Kevin aloofly. “Probably just looked down at those guts and thought, Cool! Free sausages!”

Kevin shot me a furtive glance. My impassivity was clearly a disappointment.

“Everyone around here thinks that twerp’s so tough,” Kevin resumed. “All like, ‘Man, you can play, like, “Sound of Music” loud’s you want, I ain’t sayin’ nuttin.’” His African-American accent has become quite accomplished and has made inroads into his own. “But I’m not impressed. He’s just a kid. Too little to know what he was doing.”

“And you weren’t?” I asked sharply.

Kevin folded his arms and looked satisfied; I had gone back to playing Mother. “I knew exactly what I was doing.” He leaned onto his elbows. “And I’d do it again.”

“I can see why,” I said primly, gesturing to the windowless room whose walls were paneled in vermilion and chartreuse; I have no idea why they decorate prisons like Romper Room. “It’s worked out so well for you.”

“Just swapped one shithole for another.” He waved his right hand with two extended fingers in a manner that betrayed he’s taken up smoking. “Worked out swell.”

Subject closed, as usual. Still I made a note of the fact that this thirteen-year-old parvenu’s stealing the Claverack limelight aggrieved our son. It seems that you and I needn’t have worried about his dearth of ambition.

As for my parting with him today, I had thought to leave it out. But it is just what I would like to withhold from you that I may need most to include.

The guard with a mud-spatter of facial moles had called time; for once we had used up the full hour without spending most of it staring at the clock. We were standing on either side of the table, and I was about to mumble some filler line like “I’ll see you in two weeks,” when I realized Kevin had been staring straight at me, whereas his every other glance had been sidelong. That stopped me, unnerved me, and made me wonder why I had ever wanted him to look me in the eye.

Once I was no longer fussing with my coat, he said, “You may be fooling the neighbors and the guards and Jesus and your gaga mother with these goody-goody visits of yours, but you’re not fooling me. Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don’t be dragging your ass back here on my account.” Then he added, “Because I hate you.”

I know that children say that all the time, in fits: I hate you, I hate you! eyes squeezed with tears. But Kevin is approaching eighteen, and his delivery was flat.

I had some idea of what I was supposed to say back: Now, I know you don’t mean that, when I knew that he did. Or, I love you anyway, young man, like it or not. But I had an inkling that it was following just these pat scripts that had helped to land me in a garish overheated room that smelled like a bus toilet on an otherwise lovely, unusually clement December afternoon. So I said instead, in the same informational tone, “I often hate you, too, Kevin,” and turned heel.

So you can see why I needed a pick-me-up coffee. It was an effort to resist the bar.

Driving home, I was reflecting that however much I might wish to eschew a country whose citizens, when encouraged to do “pretty much what they want,” eviscerate the elderly, it made perfect sense that I would marry another American. I had better reason than most to find foreigners passé, having penetrated their exoticism to the chopped liver they are to one another. Besides, by the time I was thirty-three I was tired, suffering the cumulative exhaustion of standing all day that you only register when you sit down. I was forever myself a foreigner, feverishly rehearsing phrase-book Italian for “basket of bread.” Even in England, I had to remember to say “pavement” instead of “sidewalk.” Conscious that I was an ambassador of sorts, I would defy a daily barrage of hostile preconceptions, taking care not to be arrogant, pushy, ignorant, presumptuous, crass, or loud in public.

But if I had arrogated to myself the whole planet as my personal backyard, this very effrontery marked me as hopelessly American, as did the fanciful notion that I could remake myself into a tropical internationalist hybrid from the horribly specific origins of Racine, Wisconsin. Even the carelessness with which I abandoned my native land was classically of a piece with our nosy, restless, aggressive people, who all (save you) complacently assume that America is a permanent fixture. Europeans are better clued. They know about the liveness, the contemporariness of history, its immediate rapacities, and will often rush back to tend their own perishable gardens to make sure that Denmark, say, is still there. But to those of us for whom “invasion” is exclusively associated with outer space, our country is an unassailable bedrock that will wait indefinitely intact for our return. Indeed, I had explained my peripatetics more than once to foreigners as facilitated by my perception that “the United States doesn’t need me.”

It’s embarrassing to pick your life partner according to what television shows he watched as a child, but in a way that’s exactly what I did. I wanted to describe some wiry, ineffectual little man as a “Barney Fife” without having to tortuously append that Barney was a character in a warm, rarely exported serial called The Andy Griffith Show, in which an incompetent deputy was always getting into trouble by dint of his own hubris. I wanted to be able to hum the theme song to The Honeymooners and have you chime in with, “How sweet it is!” And I wanted to be able to say “That came out of left field” and not kick myself that baseball images didn’t necessarily scan abroad. I wanted to stop having to pretend I was a cultural freak with no customs of my own, to have a house that itself had rules about shoes to which its visitors must conform. You restored to me the concept of home.

Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me. My neighbors now regard me with the same suspicion they reserve for illegal immigrants. They grope for words and speak to me with exaggerated deliberation, as if to a woman for whom English is a second language. And since I have been exiled to this rarefied class, the mother of one of those “Columbine boys,” I, too, grope for words, not sure how to translate my off-world thoughts into the language of two-for-the-price-of-one sales and parking tickets. Kevin has turned me into a foreigner again, in my own country. And maybe this helps to explain these biweekly Saturday visits, because it is only at Claverack Correctional that I need not translate my alien argot into the language of the suburban mundane. It is only at Claverack Correctional that we can make allusions without explanations, that we can take as understood a shared cultural past.