We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [74]
I’ll never forget the first time I visited your parents after Thursday. I confess I’d put it off, and that was weak. I’m sure it would have been colossally difficult even if you’d been able to come with me, but of course irretrievable breakdown prevented that. Alone, without the cartilage of their son, I was presented with the stark fact that we were no longer organically joined, and I think they both felt the same disconnect. When your mother opened the door, her face turned ashen, but when she asked me to come in she might have been politely ushering in a salesman for Hoover uprights.
To call your mother stiff would be unjust, but she is a great one for social form. She likes to know what to do now and what comes next. That’s why she’s such a fan of elaborate meals. She finds repose in set courses, the soup before the fish, and she doesn’t resist, as I would have done, the numbing way in which preparing, serving, and cleaning up after three meals a day can stitch up a cook’s time from morning to night. She does not, as I do, struggle against convention as a constraint; she is a hazily well-meaning but unimaginative person, and she is grateful for rules. Alas, there doesn’t appear to be recorded—yet—an etiquette for afternoon tea with your former daughter-in-law after your grandson has committed mass murder.
She seated me in the formal sitting room instead of the den, which was a mistake; the rigidity of the high-backed wing chairs only served to emphasize that by contrast The Rules were in free fall. The colors of the velveteen, sea green and dusty rose, were at such variance with the glistening, livid subtext of my visit as to seem musty or faintly nauseous; these were the colors of mold. Your mother fled to the kitchen. I was about to cry after her not to bother because I really couldn’t eat a thing when I realized that to deny her this one busywork delay for which she was so thankful would be cruel. I even forced myself to eat one of her Gruyère twists later, though it made me a little sick.
Gladys is such a nervous, high-strung woman that her brittleness—and I don’t mean she couldn’t be warm or kind—her bodily brittleness had kept her looking much the same. True, the lines in her forehead had rippled into an expression of permanent perplexity; her eyes darted every which way even more frenetically than usual, and there was, especially when she wasn’t aware I was watching, a quality of lostness in her face that reminded me what she must have looked like as a little girl. The overall effect was of a woman who was stricken, but the contributing elements of this effect were so subtle that a camera might not have captured it on film.
When your father came up from the basement (I could hear his tread on the stairs, and fought dread; though seventy-five, he’d always been a vigorous man, and the steps were too slow and heavy), the change wasn’t subtle at all. His cotton work clothes sloughed off him in great drooping folds. It had only been six weeks, a period during which I was shocked that it was possible to lose so much weight. All the flesh in his weathered face had dropped: the lower eyelids sagged to expose a red rim; his cheeks slung loose like a bloodhound’s. I felt guilty, infected by Mary Woolford’s consuming conviction