We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [42]
But if my coworkers of both stripes are disappointed that such an invigorating affray is finished, I feel a measure more disconsolate still, banished even from their shared, binding sense of loss. Multiplied by many times, this loneliness of mine must approximate my mother’s experience of the end of the war, for my birthday of August 15 coincides with VJ-Day, when Hirohito broadcast his surrender to the Japanese. Apparently the nurses were so ecstatic that it was hard to get them to attend to the timing of her contractions. Listening to champagne corks pop down the hall, she must have felt so dolefully left out. Many of the nurses’ husbands would be coming home, but my father would not. If the rest of the country had won the war, the Khatchadourians of Racine, Wisconsin, had lost.
Later she must have felt similarly at odds with the sentiments embalmed by the commercial greeting card company for which she went to work (anything but Johnson Wax). How eerie, boxing other people’s Happy Anniversary tributes and having no need to slip one in her purse when the date came around in her own home. I’m of two minds as to whether I should be glad that the job gave her the idea of starting her own handcrafted greeting-card business, which allowed her to withdraw to Enderby Avenue in perpetuity. But I will say that the “On the Birth of Your First Baby” card that she made up especially for me—layered with bled tissue in blues and greens—well, it was lovely.
In fact, when my head cleared in Beth Israel, I remembered my mother and felt ungrateful. My father had been unable to hold her hand as you held mine. Yet, offered the clasp of a living husband, I crushed it.
Still, we all know that women in labor can grow abusive, so I’m tempted to admit to having gotten a little hostile in the thick of things, and to leave my confession at that. After all, I was immediately abashed and kissed you. This was before the days when doctors slid a newborn right onto the mother’s breast, gore and all, and we had a few minutes while they tied the cord and cleaned him up. I was excited, stroking and squeezing your arm, nestling my forehead into the soft inside of your elbow. I had never held our child.
But I cannot let myself off the hook so lightly.
Up until April 11, 1983, I had flattered myself that I was an exceptional person. But since Kevin’s birth I have come to suppose that we are all profoundly normative. (For that matter, thinking of one’s self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.) We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations—beyond expectations; they are requirements. Some of these are small: If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous. If it does not seem too shocking, for the duration of our marriage I lived with one terror: that if something happened to you it would break me. But there was always an odd shadow, an underfear, if you will, that it would not—that I would swing off blithely that afternoon to play squash.
The fact that this underfear rarely becomes overweening proceeds from a crude trust. You have to keep faith that if the unthinkable does come to pass, despair will come crashing in of its own accord; that grief, for example, is not an experience you need summon or a skill you need practice, and the same goes for prescriptive joy.
Thus even tragedy can be accompanied by a trace of relief. The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity (though considering what people get up to, that’s a queer word to equate with compassion, or even with emotional competence). By way of a ready example, take yesterday,