We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [16]
It’s easy to forget, now that AWAP has attracted so much competition, but in the mid-sixties globe-trotters were pretty much at the mercy of The Blue Guide, whose target audience was middle-aged and middle class. In 1966, when the first edition of Western Europe on a Wing and a Prayer went into a second printing almost overnight, I realized that I was onto something. I like to portray myself as shrewd, but we both know I was lucky. I couldn’t have anticipated the backpacking craze, and I wasn’t enough of an amateur demographer to have taken deliberate advantage of all those restless baby boomers coming of age at once, all on Daddy’s dime in an era of prosperity, but all optimistic about how far a few hundred dollars would take them in Italy and desperate for advice on how to make a trip Dad never wanted them to take in the first place last as long as possible. I mostly reasoned that the next explorer after me would be scared, the way I was scared, and nervous of being taken, the way I was sometimes taken, and if I was willing to get the food poisoning first I could make sure that at least our novice wayfarer didn’t stay up heaving on that first electric night overseas. I don’t mean that I was benevolent, only that I wrote the guide that I wished I’d been able to use myself.
You’re rolling your eyes. This lore is shopworn, and maybe it’s inevitable that the very things that first attract you to someone are the same things with which you later grow irritated. Bear with me.
You know that I was always horrified by the prospect of turning out like my mother. Funny, Giles and I only learned the term “agoraphobic” in our thirties, and I’ve always been perplexed by its strict definition, which I’ve looked up more than once: “fear of open or public spaces.” Not, from what I could tell, an apt description of her complaint. My mother wasn’t afraid of football stadiums, she was afraid to leave the house, and I got the impression she was just as panicked by enclosed spaces as by open ones, so long as the enclosed space did not happen to be 137 Enderby Avenue in Racine, Wisconsin. But there doesn’t seem to be a word for that (Enderbyphilia?), and at least when I refer to my mother as agoraphobic, people seem to understand that she orders in.
Jesus that’s ironic, I’ve heard more times than I can count. With all the places you’ve been? Other people savor the symmetry of apparent opposites.
But let me be candid. I am much like my mother. Maybe it’s because as a child I was always running errands for which I was too young and that therefore daunted me; I was sent out to locate new gaskets for the kitchen sink when I was eight years old. In pushing me to be her emissary while I was still so small, my mother managed to reproduce in me the same disproportionate anguish about minor interactions with the outside world that she herself felt at thirty-two.
I can’t recall a single trip abroad that, up against it, I have truly wanted to take, that I haven’t in some way dreaded and wanted desperately to get out of. I was repeatedly forced out the door by a conspiracy of previous commitments: the ticket purchased, the taxi ordered, a host of reservations confirmed, and just to box myself in a little further I would always have talked up the journey to friends, before florid farewells. Even on the plane, I’d have been blissfully content for the wide-body to penetrate the stratosphere for all eternity. Landing was agony, finding my first night’s bed was agony, though the respite itself—my ad hoc replication of Enderby Avenue—was glorious. At length, I got hooked on this sequence of accelerating terrors culminating in a vertiginous plunge to my adoptive mattress. My whole life