We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [126]
Oh, you were by no means uniquely credulous; Kevin pulled the wool over his teachers’ eyes for years. I still have, thanks to you, stacks of his schoolwork. An amateur student of American history, you were the family chronicler, the photographer, the scrapbook paster, while I was more apt to regard experience itself as my souvenir. So I’m not quite sure what possessed me to rescue, from among the Stairmasters and egg slicers I abandoned en masse when I moved, the file folders of Kevin’s essays.
Did I save the files just for your tight, slanted cursive, “First Grade”? For once, I think not. I have been through two trials, if what preceded them is not to be considered a third, and I have learned to think in terms of evidence. Why, I’ve become so accustomed to abdicating ownership of my life to other people—to journalists, judges, web-site writers; to the parents of dead children and to Kevin himself—that even now I’m reluctant to fold or deface my son’s essays lest it constitute actionable tampering.
Anyway, it’s a Sunday afternoon, and I have been forcing myself to read a few. (Do you realize that I could sell these? I don’t mean for spare change, either. Apparently this is just the kind of ephemera that gets auctioned on eBay for thousands, along with the passably competent landscapes of Adolph Hitler.) Their innocent physical manifestation is disarming: the fat, characterless printing, the fragile yellowed paper. How prosaic, I thought at first; I’ll learn nothing but that, like a good boy, he did his homework. But as I read on, I grew more compelled, drawn in with the nervous fascination that leads one to poke and squeeze at an emerging cyst or a burrowing ingrown hair.
I’ve concluded that Kevin was prone to snow his schoolmasters less with that scrubbed-behind-the-ears Partridge-family buoyancy with which he greeted your return from work than with an eerie lack of affect. Kevin’s papers always follow the assignment excessively to the letter; he adds nothing, and whenever they are marked down, it is usually for being too short. There is nothing wrong with them. They are factually correct. Their spelling is accurate. On those rare occasions his teachers jot vague notes about how he might “take a more personal approach to the material,” they are unable to pinpoint anything in his essays that is precisely lacking:
Abraham Lincoln was president. Abraham Lincoln had a beard. Abraham Lincoln freed the African-American slaves. In school we study great African-American Americans for a whole month. There are many great African-American Americans. Last year we studied the same African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Next year we will study the same African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Abraham Lincoln was shot.
If you don’t mind my weighing in on Kevin’s side for once, you and his teachers thought all through primary school that he needed help on his organizational skills, but I’ve decided that his organizational skills were razor sharp. From first grade on, those assignments demonstrate an intuitive appreciation for the arbitrary, for the numbing powers of repetition, and for the absurdist possibilities of the non sequitur. More, his robotic declaratives do not indicate a failure to master the niceties of prose