We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [58]
“But I love New York!” I sounded like a bumper sticker.
“It’s dirty and swimming in diseases, and a kid’s immune system isn’t fully developed until he’s seven years old. And we could stand to move into a good school district.”
“This city has the best private schools in the country.”
“New York private schools are snobbish and cutthroat. Kids in this town start worrying about getting into Harvard at the age of six.”
“What about the tiny matter that your wife doesn’t want to leave this city?”
“You had twenty years to do whatever you wanted. I did, too. Besides, you said you yearned to spend our money on something worthwhile. Now’s your chance. We should buy a house. With land and a tire swing.”
“My mother never made a single major decision based on what was good for me.”
“Your mother has locked herself in a closet for forty years. Your mother is insane. Your mother is hardly the parent to look to as a role model.”
“I mean that when I was a kid, parents called the shots. Now I’m a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can’t believe this.” I flounced onto the couch. “I want to go to Africa, and you want to go to New Jersey.”
“What’s this about Africa? Why do you keep bringing it up?”
“We’re going ahead with AFRIWAP. The Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide are starting to squeeze us badly in Europe.”
“What does this edition have to do with you?”
“The continent is huge. Someone has to do a preliminary canvass of countries.”
“Someone other than you. You still don’t get it, do you? Maybe it was a mistake for you to think of motherhood as ‘another country.’ This is no overseas holiday. It’s serious—”
“We’re talking about human lives, Jim!”
You didn’t even smile. “How would you feel if he lost a hand reaching through that elevator gate? If he got asthma from all this crap in the air? If some loser kidnapped him from your grocery cart?”
“The truth is, you want a house,” I charged. “You want a yard. You have this dorky Norman Rockwell vision of Daddydom, and you want to coach Little League.”
“Got that right.” You straightened victoriously at the changing table, Kevin in his blazing fresh Pampers on your hip. “And there are two of us, and one of you.”
It was a ratio I was destined to confront repeatedly.
Eva
December 25, 2000
Dear Franklin,
I agreed to visit my mother for Christmas, so I’m writing from Racine. At the last minute—when he found out I was coming—Giles decided that his family would spend the holiday with his in-laws instead. I could choose to feel injured, and I do miss my brother if only as someone with whom to mock my mother, but she’s getting so frail now at seventy-eight that our patronizing despair on her behalf seems unfair. Besides, I understand. Around Giles and his kids, I never mention Kevin, Mary’s lawsuit; a little traitorously, I never even mention you. But through benign discussion of the snow, whether to put pine nuts in the sarma, I still personify a horror that, in defiance of my mother’s locked doors and sealed windows, has gotten inside.
Giles resents my having co-opted the role of family tragic figure. He only moved as far as Milwaukee, and the child at closer hand is always chopped liver, while for decades I made a living from being as far away from Racine as I could get. Like De Beers restricting the supply of diamonds, I made myself scarce, a cheap gambit in Giles’s view for artificially manufacturing the precious. Now I have stooped even lower, using my son to corner the market on pity. Having kept his head below the parapet working for Budweiser, he’s in grudging awe of anyone who’s been in the newspaper. I keep trying to find some way of telling him that this is the kind of dime-store fame that the most unremarkable parent could win in the sixty seconds it takes an automatic assault rifle to fire a hundred bullets. I don’t feel special.
You know, there’s a peculiar smell in this house that I used to find rank. Remember how I used