We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [123]
Celia was not clingy. She was simply affectionate. She did sometimes wrap her arms around my leg in the kitchen, press her cheek to my knee, and exclaim with amazement, “You’re my friend!” Yet whatever difficulty you may have had with her arrival, you were never so hard a man as to find such demonstrations anything but touching. Indeed, confirmation that we were her friends seemed to entrance her far more than broad, rather abstract protestations of parental love. Although I know you thought Kevin the far smarter of the two, Kevin entered this world utterly stymied by what it was for and what to do with it, where Celia arrived with unshakable certainty about what she wanted and what made life worth living: that goo that wouldn’t brush off. Surely that constitutes intelligence of a kind.
All right, she didn’t do well in school. But that’s because she tried too hard. She became so caught up in wanting to get things right, so seized by the prospect of failing her parents and teachers, that she couldn’t get down to the task itself. At least she didn’t hold everything they tried to teach her in contempt.
I tried to drill into her: You just memorize that the capital of Florida is Tallahassee, period. As great a believer in mystery as her namesake, Celia couldn’t imagine it was that simple, that there wasn’t a magic trick, and she doubted herself, so that taking the state capitals test she would immediately question “Tallahassee” for the very reason that it popped into her head. Kevin never had any trouble with mystery. He ascribed to the whole world the same terrifying plainness, and the question was never whether he was able to learn something, but whether to bother. Celia’s faith, as emphatic in relation to others as it was deficient in relation to herself, assured her that no one would ever insist that she study the manifestly useless. Kevin’s cynicism equally assured him that a malign, sadistic pedagogy would pitch him nothing but chaff.
I don’t mean that Celia couldn’t exasperate me as well. Like Kevin, she was impossible to punish, though there was rarely reason to punish her aside for something that, as it turned out, she didn’t actually do. Still, she took the least admonition to heart, so that any remonstrance was like killing a fly with a sledgehammer. At the least suggestion that she had disappointed us, she was inconsolable, pouring out apologies before she was quite sure what we’d like her to regret. A single sharp word would send her into a tailspin, and I admit it would have been a relief once in a while to be able to bark out, “Celia, I told you to set the table!” (she was rarely disobedient, but she was absent-minded) and not have my daughter melt into a time-consuming puddle of remorse.
But my primary exasperation was otherwise. Judiciously applied, fear is a useful tool of self-protection. While the drain would hardly leap out and bite her, Celia was sufficiently replete with dread to have plenty left over for dangers that could. There was one thing in our house of which she might have been justifiably afraid, and she adored him.
On this point I’m brooking no argument, and I intend to take ruthless advantage of the fact that this is my account, to whose perspective you have no choice but to submit. I don’t pretend to know the whole story, because I don’t think that’s a story that you or I will ever fully know. I remember uneasily from my own childhood that on Enderby Avenue, where the alliance between my brother and me was far more fickle, Giles and I conducted the main of our lives below our mother’s line of sight. One of us might run to her to argue our side (frowned upon as cheating), but for the most part our collusions, battles, and mutually inflicted tortures took place, if not out of view, in code. So total was my own immersion in the world of other short people that