We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [103]
Kevin graduated from kindergarten in June, and we were stuck with one another all summer. (Listen, I got on Kevin’s nerves as much as he got on mine.) Despite Miss Fabricant’s modest successes with Drano illustrations, the Montessori method was not working wonders in our home. Kevin had still not learned to play. Left to entertain himself, he would sit like a lump on the floor with a moody detachment that turned the atmosphere of the whole house oppressive. So I tried to involve him in projects, assembling yarn and buttons and glue and scraps of colorful fabric in the playroom for making sock puppets. I’d join him on the carpet and have a cracking good time myself, really, except in the end I would have made a nibbling rabbit with a red felt mouth and big floppy blue ears and drinking-straw whiskers, and Kevin’s arm would sport a plain knee-high dipped in paste. I didn’t expect our child to necessarily be a crafts wunderkind, but he could at least have made an effort.
I also tried to give him a jump on first grade by tutoring him on the basics. “Let’s work on our numbers!” I’d propose.
“What for.”
“So when you get to school you’ll be better than anyone else at arithmetic.”
“What good is arithmetic.”
“Well, you remember yesterday, and Mommer paid the bills? You have to be able to add and subtract to pay bills, and know how much money you have left.”
“You used a calculator.”
“Well, you have to know arithmetic to be sure the calculator is right.”
“Why would you use it at all if it doesn’t always work.”
“It always works,” I begrudge.
“So you don’t need arithmetic.”
“To use a calculator,” I say, flustered, “you still have to know what a five looks like, all right? Now, let’s practice our counting. What comes after three?”
“Seven,” says Kevin.
We would proceed in this fashion, until once after one more random exchange (“What comes before nine?” “Fifty-three.”) he looked me lifelessly in the eye and droned in a fast-forward monotone, “Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve ...,” pausing two or three times for a breath but otherwise making it flawlessly to a hundred. “Now can we quit?” I certainly felt the fool.
I roused no more enthusiasm for literacy. “Don’t tell me,” I’d cut him off after raising the prospect of reading time. “What for. What good is it. Well, I’ll tell you. Sometimes you’re going to be bored and there’s nothing to do except you can always read a book. Even on the train or at a bus stop.”
“What if the book is boring.”
“Then you find a different one. There are more books in the world than you’ll ever have time to read, so you’ll never run out.”
“What if they’re all boring.”
“I don’t think that would be possible, Kevin,” I’d say crisply.
“I think it’s possible,” he’d differ.
“Besides, when you grow up you’ll need a job, and then you’ll have to be able to read and write really well or no one will want to hire you.” Privately, of course, I reflected that if this were true most of the country would be unemployed.
“Dad doesn’t write. He drives around and takes pictures.”
“There are other jobs—”
“What if I don’t want a job.”
“Then you’d have to go on welfare. The government would give you just a little money so you don’t starve, but not enough to do anything fun.”
“What if I don’t want to do anything.”
“I bet you will. If you make your own money, you can go to movies and restaurants and even different countries, like Mommer used to.” At used to, I winced.
“I think I want to go on welfare.” It was the kind of line I’d heard other parents repeat with a chortle at dinner parties, and I struggled to find it adorable.
I don’t know how those home-schooling families pull it off. Kevin never seemed to be paying any attention, as if listening were an indignity. Yet somehow, behind my back, he picked up what he needed to know. He learned the way he ate—furtively, on the sly, shoveling information like a fisted