We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [84]
Meanwhile I was burbling to Kevin, something all very Virginia Woolf like, “Everyone needs a room of their own. You know how you have your room? Well, this is Mommer’s room. And everyone likes to make their room special. Mommer’s been lots of different places, and all these maps remind me of the trips I’ve taken. You’ll see, you may want to make your room special some day, and I’ll help you if you want—”
“What do you mean special,” he said, hugging one elbow. In his drooping free hand drizzled his squirt gun, whose leakage had worsened. Although he was still slight for his age, I’d rarely met anyone who took up more metaphysical space. A sulking gravity never let you forget he was there, and if he said little, he was always watching.
“So it looks like your personality.”
“What personality.”
I felt sure I’d explained the word before. I was continually feeding him vocabulary, or who was Shakespeare; educational chatter filled the void. I had a feeling he wished I’d shut up. There seemed no end to the information that he did not want.
“Like your squirt gun, that’s part of your personality.” I refrained from adding, like the way you ruined my favorite caftan, that’s part of your personality. Or the way you’re still shitting in diapers coming up on five years old, that’s part of your personality, too. “Anyway, Kevin, you’re being stubborn. I think you know what I mean.”
“I have to put junk on the walls.” He sounded put-upon.
“Unless you’d rather not.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Great, we’ve found one more thing you don’t want to do,” I said. “You don’t like to go to the park and you don’t like to listen to music and you don’t like to eat and you don’t like to play with Lego. I bet you couldn’t think of one more thing you don’t like if you tried.”
“All these squiggy squares of paper,” he supplied promptly. “They’re dumb.” After Idonlikedat, dumb was his favorite word.
“That’s the thing about your own room, Kevin. It’s nobody else’s business. I don’t care if you think my maps are dumb. I like them.” I remember raising an umbrella of defiance: He wouldn’t rain on this parade. My study looked terrific, it was all mine, I would sit at my desk and play grown-up, and I could not wait to screw on my crowning touch, a bolt on its door. Yes, I’d commissioned a local carpenter and had added a door.
But Kevin wouldn’t let the matter drop. There was something he wanted to tell me. “I don’t get it. It was all gucky. And it took forever. Now everything looks dumb. What difference does it make. Why’d you bother.” He stamped his foot. “It’s dumb!”
Kevin had skipped the why phase that usually hits around three, at which point he was barely talking. Although the why phase may seem like an insatiable desire to comprehend cause and effect, I’d eavesdropped enough at playgrounds (It’s time to go make dinner, cookie! Why? Because we’re going to get hungry! Why? Because our bodies are telling us to eat! Why?) to know better. Three-year-olds aren’t interested in the chemistry of digestion; they’ve simply hit on the magic word that always provokes a response. But Kevin had a real why phase. He thought my wallpaper an incomprehensible waste of time, as just about everything adults did also struck him as absurd. It didn’t simply perplex him but enraged him, and so far Kevin’s why phase has proved not a passing developmental stage but a permanent condition.
I knelt. I looked into his stormy, pinched-up face and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Because I love my new study. I love the maps. I love them.”
I could have been speaking Urdu. “They’re dumb,” he said stonily. I stood up. I dropped my hand. The phone was ringing.
The separate line for my study wasn’t installed yet, so I left to grab the phone in the kitchen. It was Louis, with another crisis regarding JAP-WAP, whose resolution took a fair amount of time. I did call to Kevin to come out where I could see him, more than once. But I still had a business to oversee, and have you any notion how fatiguing it is to keep an eye on a small child every single