We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [34]
Is it different for men? I never asked. Perhaps you can see through them, to their private anguish about whether it’s normal to have a curved penis, the transparent way they show off for one another (though that’s just what I’m afraid of). Certainly the news that you’d be harboring one of these holy terrors in your own home so delighted you that you had to cover your enthusiasm a bit. And the sex of our child made you feel that much more that the baby was yours, yours, yours.
Honestly, Franklin, your proprietary attitude was grating. If I ever cut it close crossing the street, you weren’t concerned for my personal safety but were outraged at my irresponsibility. These “risks” I took—and I regarded as going about my regular life—seemed in your mind to exhibit a cavalier attitude toward one of your personal belongings. Every time I walked out the door, I swear you glowered a little, as if I were bearing away one of your prized possessions without asking.
You wouldn’t even let me dance, Franklin! Really, there was one afternoon that my subtle but unrelenting anxiety had mercifully lifted. I put on our Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues and began buoyantly herky-jerkying around our underfurnished loft. The album was still on the first song, “Burning Down the House,” and I’d barely worked up a sweat when the elevator clanked and in you marched. When you lifted the needle preemptorily, you scratched a groove, so that forever after the song would skip and keep repeating, Baby what did you expect and never make it to Gonna burst into fla-ame without my depressing the cartridge gently with a forefinger.
“Hey!” I said. “What was that about?”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“For once I was having a good time. Is that illegal?”
You grabbed my upper arm. “Are you trying to have a miscarriage? Or do you just get a kick out of tempting fate?”
I wrestled free. “Last time I read, pregnancy wasn’t a prison sentence.”
“Leaping around, throwing yourself all over the furniture—”
“Oh, get out, Franklin. Not that long ago women worked in the fields right up until giving birth and then squatted between rows of vegetables. In the olden days, kids really did come from the cabbage patch—”
“In the olden days infant and maternal mortality were sky high!”
“What do you care about maternal mortality? So long as they scoop the kid out of my lifeless body while its heart is still beating you’ll be happy as a clam.”
“That’s a hideous thing to say.”
“I’m in the mood to be hideous,” I said blackly, plopping onto the couch. “Though before Papa Doc came home, I was in a great mood.”
“Two more months. Is it that big a sacrifice to take it easy for the well-being of a whole other person?”
Boy, was I already sick of having the well-being of a whole other person held over my head. “My well-being, apparently, now counts for beans.”
“There’s no reason you can’t listen to music—although at a volume that doesn’t have John thumping his ceiling downstairs.” You replaced the needle at the beginning of the A side, turning it down so low that David Byrne sounded like Minnie Mouse. “But like a normal pregnant woman, you can sit there and tap your foot.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “All the vibration—it might travel up to Little Lord Fauntleroy and trouble his beauty sleep. And aren’t we supposed to be listening to Mozart? Maybe Talking Heads isn’t in The Book. Maybe by playing ‘Psycho Killer’ we’re feeding him Bad Thoughts. Better look it up.”
You were the one powering through all those parental how-tos, about breathing and teething and weaning, while I read a history of Portugal.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Eva. I thought the whole idea of becoming parents was to grow up.”
“If I’d realized that’s what it meant to you, affecting some phony, killjoy adulthood, I’d have reconsidered the whole business.”
“Don’t you ever say that,” you said, your face beet-red. “It’s too late for second thoughts. Never, ever tell me that you regret our own kid.”
That’s when