We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [166]
As his assistant restored the conformer and applied a fresh eye patch, I asked Krikor Sahatjian idly what drew him to this niche occupation. He volunteered that at age twelve, when taking a shortcut through a neighbor’s yard, he had climbed over a spiked fence; he slipped, and the tip of an arrow-shaped iron rod . . . . Leaving the rest mercifully to my imagination, he said, “I was so fascinated by the process of making my own prosthesis that I decided I’d found my calling.” Incredulous, I looked again at his soulful brown eyes, reminiscent of Omar Sharif’s. “You’re surprised,” he said amiably. “I hadn’t noticed,” I admitted. “You’ll find that’s common,” he said. “Once the prosthesis is in, many people will never know that Celia is monocular. And there are ways of covering it up—moving your head instead of your eyes to look at someone. I’ll teach her, when she’s ready.” I was grateful. For the first time her enucleation didn’t seem like the end of the world, and I even wondered if the distinction the disability conferred, and the strength it could summon, might help Celia grow into herself.
When Celia and I returned from the Upper East Side, you’d gotten home before us and were settled in the den with Kevin in front of one of those Nick at Night back-to-back binges of Happy Days. I commented in the doorway, “Ah, the 1950s that never were. I keep waiting for somebody to tell Ron Howard about Sputnik, McCarthyism, and the arms race.” I added ruefully, “Though I see you two are bonding.”
In those days, I always lavished a laden irony on trendy American buzz phrases, as if picking them up with rubber gloves. In kind, I had explained to Kevin’s English teacher that the misuse of the word literally was “one of my issues” with an exaggerated wink-and-nod that must only have perplexed the woman. I’d always thought of American culture as a spectator sport, on which I could pass judgment from the elevated bleachers of my internationalism. But these days I join in aping beer advertisements when my workmates at Travel R Us cry in unison, Whass uuuuup?, I use impact as a transitive verb, and I omit prissy quotation marks. Real culture you don’t observe but embody. I live here. As I would soon discover in spades, there is no opt-out clause.
Our son, however, could read all the above and more into my disdainful pronunciation of bonding. “Is there anything, or anybody,” he asked, looking me in the eye, “you don’t feel superior to?”
“I’ve been candid with you about my problems with this country,” I said stiffly, leaving little doubt that this candor was the source of regret, and making perhaps my sole allusion since to our disastrous dinner at Hudson House. “But I don’t know what gives you the idea that I feel ‘superior.’”
“Ever notice you never talk about Americans as ‘we’?” he said. “It’s always ‘they.’ Like you’d talk about the Chinese or something.”
“I’ve spent a large amount of my adulthood out of the country, and I probably—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Kevin broke eye contact and stared back at the screen. “I just want to know what makes you think you’re so special.”
“Eva, grab a seat and join the fun!” you said. “This is the one where Richie’s forced to blind-date the boss’s daughter, so he gets Potsie—”
“Meaning you’ve seen it twenty times,” I chided affectionately, thankful for your rescue. “How many Happy Days has it been in a row now, three or four?”
“This is the first one! Five more to go!”
“Before I forget, Franklin—I got Dr. Sahatjian to agree to glass.” Petting Celia’s fine blond hair as she hung on my leg, I refrained from citing glass-what. It had fallen to me earlier that afternoon to disabuse our daughter of the