We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [147]
“You could say that,” I agreed cautiously. “In a broad sense I’ve tried to do that all my life.”
“Okay, long as you can get away with it,” he said cryptically. “Not sure it’s always possible.” And he let the subject go.
Conversation once again ceased to flow, so when one of them almost ran me over, I supposed aloud that maybe we could buy Celia one of those superthin aluminum Razor scooters that had abruptly become so popular.
Kevin said, “You know, couple years ago, you give a kid some geeky scooter for Christmas and he’d have bawled his eyes out.”
I lunged at the chance to be collegial. “You’re right, that’s one of the things that’s wrong with this country, it’s so faddish. It was the same with in-line skates, right? Overnight, a must-have. Still—” I bit my lip, watching yet another boy whiz past on one of those narrow silver frames. “I wouldn’t want Celia to feel left out.”
“Mumsey. Get real. Ceil would be scared shitless. You’d have to hold her little hand everywhere she went or you’d have to carry her, scooter and all. You ready? ’Cause count me out.”
Okay. We didn’t get the scooter.
In fact, we didn’t buy anything. Kevin made me so self-conscious that everything I considered seemed to damn me. I looked at the scarves and hats through his eyes and they suddenly seemed stupid or unnecessary. We had scarves. We had hats. Why bother.
Though I was sorry to lose our parking space, I was glad of the chance to act the proper mother for once and announced sternly that we would now go back to the house, where he would dress for dinner in normal-sized clothes—although his airy response, “Whatever you say,” made me more aware of the limits to my authority than of its force. As we passed back in front of the Runcible Spoon on the way to the car, a corpulent woman was sitting alone at a table by the window, and her hot fudge sundae was built on that lavish American scale that Europeans both envy and disparage.
“Whenever I see fat people, they’re eating,” I ruminated safely out of the diner’s earshot. “Don’t give me this it’s glands or genes or a slow metabolism rubbish. It’s food. They’re fat because they eat the wrong food, too much of it, and all the time.”
The usual lack of pickup, not even mm-hmm, or true. Finally, a block later: “You know, you can be kind of harsh.”
I was taken aback and stopped walking. “You’re one to talk.”
“Yeah. I am. Wonder where I got it.”
Driving home, then, every time I came up with something to say—about pushy SUV drivers (or, as I preferred to playfully misspeak, SRO drivers), garish Nyack Christmas lights—I realized it was whittling, and I’d swallow the remark. I was apparently one of those types who, should she follow that edict about if you can’t say something nice, would say nothing at all. Our raw silence in my Luna supplied a foretaste of the long periods of dead air that would pass in Claverack.
Back home, you and Celia had been working on homemade tree ornaments all afternoon, and you’d helped her to weave tinsel in her hair. You were in the kitchen arranging frozen fish sticks on a tray when I bustled from the bedroom and asked you to fasten the top button of my hot-pink silk dress. “Wow,” you said, “you’re not looking very maternal.”
“I’d like to create a sense of occasion,” I said. “I thought you liked this dress.”
“I do. Still,” you mumbled, buttoning, “That slit up the thigh is cut pretty high. You don’t want to make him uneasy.”
“I’m making someone uneasy, obviously.”
I left to find some earrings and to splash on a little Opium, then returned to the kitchen to discover that Kevin had not, for once, merely followed the letter of my law, for I’d half expected to find him decked out in a “normal-sized” bunny suit. He was standing at the sink with his back to me, but even so I could see that his lush black rayon slacks rested gently on his narrow hips and fell to his cordovans with