We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [62]
“Sweetheart? What is it you want to stop?”
He batted a hand against the television tube. “I don like dat. Turn id ov.”
I stood up and marveled. Oh, I turned the cartoon off all right, thinking Christ, I have a toddler with good taste. As if myself the child, I was impelled to experiment with my riveting new toy, to poke at its buttons and see what lit up.
“Kevin, do you want a cookie?”
“I hate cookies.”
“Kevin, will you talk to Daddy when he comes home?”
“Not if I don feew wike it.”
“Kevin, can you say ‘Mommy’?”
I’d been queasy about what I wanted our son to call me. Mommy sounded babyish, Ma rube-ish, Mum servile. Mama was the stuff of batteryoperated doll babies, Mom rang earnest and gee-whiz, Mother seemed formal for 1986. Looking back, I wonder if I did not like being called any of the popular names for mother because I did not like—well, because I was still ill at ease with being one. Little matter, since the predictable answer was, “No.”
When you came home, Kevin refused to repeat his loquacious performance, but I recited it word for word. You were ecstatic. “Complete sentences, right off the bat! I’ve read that what seem like late bloomers can be incredibly bright. They’re perfectionists. They don’t want to try it out on you until they’ve got it right.”
I nursed a competing theory: that, having secretly been able to talk for years, he had enjoyed eavesdropping on the unwitting; that he was a spy. And I attended less to his grammar than to what he said. I know this kind of assertion always gets up your nose, but I did sometimes consider that, between us, I was the more interested in Kevin. (In my mind’s eye, I can see you going apoplectic.) I mean, interested in Kevin as Kevin really was, not Kevin as Your Son, who had continually to battle against the formidable fantasy paragon in your head, with whom he was in far more ferocious competition than he ever was with Celia. For example, that evening I remarked, “I’ve been waiting ages to find out what’s going on behind those piercing little eyes.”
You shrugged. “Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.”
See? Kevin was (and remains) a mystery to me. You had that insouciant boy-thing going and blithely assumed that you had been there yourself and there was nothing to find out. And you and I may have differed on so profound a level as the nature of human character. You regarded a child as a partial creature, a simpler form of life, which evolved into the complexity of adulthood in open view. But from the instant he was laid on my breast I perceived Kevin Khatchadourian as pre-extant, with a vast, fluctuating interior life whose subtlety and intensity would if anything diminish with age. Most of all, he seemed hidden from me, while your experience was one of sunny, leisurely access.
Anyway, for several weeks he would talk to me during the day, and when you came home he clammed up. At the clank of the elevator, he’d shoot me a complicitous glance: Let’s put one over on Daddy. I may have found a guilty pleasure in the exclusivity of my son’s discourse, thanks to which I was apprised that he did not like rice pudding with or without cinnamon and he did not like Dr. Seuss books and he did not like the nursery rhymes put to music that I checked out from the library. Kevin had a specialized vocabulary; he had genius for N-words.
The sole memory I retain of any proper childhood glee during this era was at his third birthday party, when I was busy pouring cranberry juice in his sippy cup, and you were tying ribbons on packages that you would only have to untie for him minutes later. You had brought home a threetiered marble layer cake from Vinierro’s on First Avenue that was decorated with a custom butter-cream baseball theme and had placed it proudly on the table in front of his booster chair. In the two minutes our backs were turned, Kevin