We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [102]
“I wouldn’t ask him because that’s an ugly story that would hurt his feelings. And I don’t see the mystery—gossip and cliquishness and smalltown fallings out. Typical of stay-at-home mothers with time on their hands.”
“I’m one of those stay-at-home mothers, at considerable sacrifice I’d remind you, and the last thing we have is time on our hands.”
“So he was blackballed! Why doesn’t that make you angry at them? Why assume it was something our son did, and not some neurotic hen with a bug up her ass?”
“Because I’m all too well aware that Kevin doesn’t tell me everything. Oh, and you could also ask him why not one baby-sitter will come back a second night.”
“I don’t need to. Most teenagers around here get an allowance of $100 a week. Only 12 bucks an hour isn’t very tempting.”
“Then at least you could get your sweet, confiding little boy to tell you just exactly what he said to Violetta.”
It’s not as if we fought all the time. To the contrary, though, it’s the fights I remember; funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade. I’m not one of those sorts, either, who thrives on turmoil—more’s the pity, as it turns out. Still, I may have been glad to scratch the dry surface of our day-to-day peaceableness the way Violetta had clawed the sere crust on her limbs, anything to get something bright and liquid flowing again, out in the open and slippery between our fingers. That said, I feared what lay beneath. I feared that at bottom I hated my life and hated being a mother and even in moments hated being your wife, since you had done this to me, turned my days into an unending stream of shit and piss and cookies that Kevin didn’t even like.
Meanwhile, no amount of shouting was resolving the diaper crisis. In a rare inversion of our roles, you were apt to regard the problem as all very internally complicated, and I thought it was simple: We wanted him to use the toilet, so he wouldn’t. Since we weren’t about to stop wanting him to use the toilet, I was at a loss.
You doubtless found my usage of the word war preposterous. But in corralling Kevin to the changing table—now small for the purpose; his legs dangled over its raised flap—I was often reminded of those scrappy guerrilla conflicts in which underequipped, ragtag rebel forces manage to inflict surprisingly serious losses on powerful armies of state. Lacking the vast if unwieldy arsenal of the establishment, the rebels fall back on cunning. Their attacks, while often slight, are frequent, and sustained aggravation can be more demoralizing over time than a few high-casualty spectaculars. At such an ordnance disadvantage, guerrillas use whatever lies at hand, sometimes finding in the material of the everyday a devastating dual purpose. I gather that you can make bombs, for example, out of methanating manure. For his part, Kevin, too, ran a seat-of-the-pants operation, and Kevin, too, had learned to form a weapon from shit.
Oh, he submitted to being changed placidly enough. He seemed to bask in the ritual and may have inferred from my growing briskness a gratifying embarrassment, for swabbing his tight little testicles when he was nearly six was beginning to feel risqué.
If Kevin enjoyed our trysts, I did not. I have never been persuaded that even an infant’s effluents smell precisely “sweet”; a kindergartner’s feces benefit from no such reputation. Kevin’s had grown firmer and stickier, and the nursery now exuded the sour fug of subway tunnels colonized by the homeless. I felt sheepish about the mounds of nonbiodegradable Pampers we contributed to the local landfill. Worst of all, some days Kevin seemed deliberately to hold his intestines in check for a second strike. If no Leonardo of the crayon world, he had a virtuoso’s command of his sphincter.
Mind, I’m setting the table here, but hardly