We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [44]
The point is, I don’t know what exactly I’d foreseen would happen to me when Kevin was first hoisted to my breast. I hadn’t foreseen anything exactly. I wanted what I could not imagine. I wanted to be transformed; I wanted to be transported. I wanted a door to open and a whole new vista to expand before me that I had never known was out there. I wanted nothing short of revelation, and revelation by its nature cannot be anticipated; it promises that to which we are not yet privy. But if I extracted one lesson from my tenth birthday party, it was that expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.
I may have misrepresented myself here. Of course I had misgivings. But my expectations of motherhood were high, or I wouldn’t have agreed to go through with it. I’d attended hungrily to accounts from friends: You have no idea what it’s like until you have one of your own. Whenever I allowed that I was less than enamored of infants and small children, I was assured: I felt the same way! Couldn’t stand other people’s kids! But it’s different—it’s totally different—when they’re yours. I loved that, the prospect of another country, a strange land in which insolent miscreants were miraculously alchemized into, as you had said yourself, an answer to the “Big Question.” Indeed, I may even have misrepresented my feelings about foreign countries. Yes, I was suffering travel fatigue, and yes, I did always fight a hereditary dread before hopping a plane. But setting foot in Namibia, or Hong Kong, even Luxembourg for the first time made me high as a kite.
What I hadn’t realized, Brian had confided, is that you fall in love with your own children. You don’t just love them. You fall in love. And that moment, when you lay eyes on them for the first time—it’s indescribable. I do wish he had described it anyway. I do wish he had given it a try.
Dr. Rhinestein dangled the infant over my breast and rested the tiny creature down with—I was glad to see her evidence it at last—painstaking gentleness. Kevin was damp, and blood creased his neck, the crooks of his limbs. I put my hands diffidently around him. The expression on his twisted face was disgruntled. His body was inert; I could only interpret his lassitude as a lack of enthusiasm. Sucking is one of our few innate instincts, but with his mouth right at my enlarged brown nipple, his head lolled away in distaste.
I kept trying; he kept resisting; he liked the other nipple no better. And all the while I was waiting. My breath shallow, I was waiting. And I kept waiting. But everybody says—, I thought. And then, distinctly: Beware of what “everybody says.”
Franklin, I felt—absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It’s under the spatula, it’s slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee—
“He’s beautiful,” I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.
“Can I?” you asked shyly.
I offered the baby up. Whereas newborn Kevin had squirmed miserably on my breast, he rested an arm around your neck, as if having found his real protector. When I looked at your face, eyes closed, cheek pressed against our infant son, I recognized, if this does not sound too flippant: There’s the potato peeler. It seemed so unfair. You were clearly choked up, filled to the back of your throat with a wonderment that defied expression. It was like watching you lick an ice cream cone that you refused to share.
I sat up, and you returned him reluctantly, at which point Kevin began to squall. Holding the baby, who still refused to suckle, I was revisited by that now-what sensation of my tenth birthday party: Here we were, in a room, and there seemed nothing to say or do. Minutes wore