We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [2]
Everything here is precarious. The steep stairway to the second floor has no banister, spicing my ascent to bed with vertigo after three glasses of wine. The floors creak and the window frames leak, and there is an air about the place of fragility and underconfidence, as if at any moment the entire structure might simply blink out like a bad idea. Swinging on rusty coat hangers from a live wire across the ceiling, the tiny halogen bulbs downstairs have a tendency to flicker, and their tremulous light contributes to the on-again, off-again sensation that permeates my new life. Likewise the innards of my sole telephone socket are disgorged; my uncertain connection to the outside world dangles by two poorly soldered wires, and it often cuts off. Though the landlord has promised me a proper stove, I really don’t mind the hot plate—whose “on” light doesn’t work. The inside handle of the front door often comes off in my hand. So far I’ve been able to work it back on again, but the stump of the lock shaft teases me with intimations of my mother: unable to leave the house.
I recognize, too, my duplex’s broad tendency to stretch its resources to the very limit. The heating is feeble, rising off the radiators in a stale, shallow breath, and though it is only early November, I have already cranked their regulators on full. When I shower, I use all hot water and no cold; it’s just warm enough that I don’t shiver, but awareness that there is no reserve permeates my ablutions with disquiet. The refrigerator dial is set at its highest point, and the milk keeps only three days.
As for the decor, it evokes a quality of mockery that feels apt. The downstairs is painted in a slapdash, abrasively bright yellow, the brushstrokes careless and aerated with streaks of underlying white, as if scrawled with crayon. Upstairs in my bedroom, the walls are sponged amateurishly in aqua, like primary-school daubs. This tremulous little house—it doesn’t feel quite real, Franklin. And neither do I.
Yet I do hope that you’re not feeling sorry for me; it’s not my intention that you do. I might have found more palatial accommodation, if that’s what I wanted. I like it here, in a way. It’s unserious, toy. I live in a dollhouse. Even the furniture is out of scale. The dining table strikes chesthigh, which makes me feel underage, and the little bedside table on which I have perched this laptop is much too low for typing—about the right height for serving coconut cookies and pineapple juice to kindergartners.
Maybe this askew, juvenile atmosphere helps to explain why yesterday, in a presidential election, I didn’t vote. I simply forgot. Everything around me seems to take place so far away. And now rather than pose a firm counterpoint to my dislocation, the country seems to have joined me in the realm of the surreal. The votes are tallied. But as in some Kafka tale, no one seems to know who won.
And I have this dozen eggs—what’s left of them. I’ve emptied the remains into a bowl and fished out the shards of shell. If you were here I might whip us up a nice frittata, with diced potato, cilantro, that one teaspoon of sugar that’s the secret. Alone, I’ll slop them in a skillet, scramble, and sullenly pick. But I will eat them all the same. There was something about Mary’s gesture that I found, in an inchoate sort of way, rather elegant.
Food revulsed me at first. Visiting my mother in Racine, I turned green before her stuffed dolma, though she’d spent all day blanching grape leaves and rolling the lamb and rice filling into neat parcels; I reminded her they could be frozen. In Manhattan, when I scurried past the 57th Street deli on the way to Harvey’s law office, the peppery smell of pastrami fat would flip my stomach. But