We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [46]
A wide-hipped divorcée with a braying laugh, Wanda herself may have hoped that we would become fast friends. By the end of our first lunch, she had confided that her ex-husband got an erection watching her pee, that she had just had a hemorrhoid “tied off,” and that, until a near-miss with a Saks security guard at thirty-six, she’d been a compulsive shoplifter. I returned with the disclosure that after six months in my toy duplex I had finally gotten myself to buy curtains. You can see how she might have been a little put out that I’d got Manhattan while she got beads.
So tonight Wanda cornered me by the fax machine. She didn’t want to pry, but had I sought out “help”? I knew what she meant, of course. The entire student body of Gladstone High School was offered free counseling by the school board, and even some of this year’s intake, not even enrolled in 1999, has claimed to be traumatized and plunged to the couch. I didn’t want to seem hostile and so say honestly that I couldn’t see how the mere iteration of my troubles to a stranger would lessen them one iota, and that surely counseling was the logical refuge of those whose problems were ephemeral fancies and not matters of historical fact. So I demurred that my experience with the mental health profession had been rather sour, kindly omitting that the failures of my son’s psychiatric care had made headlines coast to coast. Moreover, it didn’t seem wise to confide that thus far I had found my only “help” in writing to you, Franklin. For somehow I feel certain that these letters are not on the list of prescribed therapies, since you are at the very heart of what I need to “get past” so that I might experience “closure.” And what a terrible prospect is that.
Even back in 1983, I was bewildered why a standardized psychiatric label like postnatal depression was supposed to be consoling. Our compatriots seem to put much stock in slapping a tag on their ailments. Presumably a complaint common enough to have a name implies that you are not alone and dangles options like Internet chat rooms and community support groups for rhapsodic communal bellyaching. This compulsion to bandwagon has even infiltrated American small talk. I can’t remember the last time anyone told me that he “took a long time to wake up.” Instead I’m informed that he’s not a morning person. All those fellow travelers who require killer cups of coffee on waking must provide one’s disinclination to hop out of bed for a ten-mile run some extra clout.
I might have achieved a renewed appreciation for my own normative propensities, including a not unreasonable expectation that when bearing a child I will actually feel something, even something nice. But I hadn’t changed that much. I’d never found solace in being just like everybody else. And though Dr. Rhinestein offered up postnatal depression like a present, as if simply being told that you are unhappy is supposed to cheer you up, I did not pay professionals to be plied with the obvious, with the merely descriptive. The term was less diagnostic than tautological: I was depressed after Kevin’s birth because I was depressed after Kevin’s birth. Thanks.
Yet she also suggested that because Kevin’s disinterest in my breast had persisted, I might be suffering feelings of rejection. I colored. It embarrassed me that I might take the opaque predilections of such a tiny, half-formed creature to heart.
Of course she was right. At first I thought I was doing something wrong, not guiding his mouth. But no; I would place the nipple between his lips, where else could it go? He had sucked a time or two, but turned away, the bluish milk running down his chin. He’d cough, and, perhaps I imagined it,