We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [86]
Indeed, I’ve developed a healthy respect for fact itself, its awesome dominance over rendition. No interpretation I slather over events in this appeal to you has a chance of overwhelming the sheer actuality of Thursday, and maybe it was the miracle of fact itself that Kevin discovered that afternoon. I can comment until I’m blue, but what happened simply sits there, triumphing like three dimensions over two. No matter how much enamel those vandals threw at our windowpanes, the house remained a house, and Thursday has the same immutable feel about it, like an object I can paint but whose physical enormity will persist in shape, regardless of hue.
Franklin, I’m afraid I caught myself giving over in the Claverack visitors’ waiting room today. And by the way, I’d be the last to complain about the facilities overall. Newly constructed to supply a burgeoning market sector, the institution is not yet overcrowded. Its roofs don’t leak, its toilets flush; Juvenile Detention on a Wing and a Prayer (JUVIEWAP) would give the joint an enthusiastic listing. Claverack’s classrooms may provide a better meat-and-potatoes education than trendy suburban high schools whose curricula are padded with courses in Inuit Literature and Sexual Harassment Awareness Training. But aside from the incongruous Romper Room primary colors of the visiting area, Claverack is aesthetically harsh—laying bare, once you take away the frippery of life, how terrifyingly little is left. Cinder-block walls a stark white, the pea-green linoleum unpatterned, the visitors’ waiting room is cruelly lacking in distractions—a harmless travel poster for Belize, a single copy of Glamour—as if to deliberately quash self-deceit. It is a room that does not wish to be confused with anything so anodyne as an airline ticket-purchasing office or a dental waiting room. That lone poster for AIDS prevention doesn’t qualify as decor, but as an accusation.
Today a slight, serene black woman sat next to me, a generation younger but doubtless a mother. I kept shooting fascinated glances at her hair, plaited in a complex spiral that disappeared into infinity at the crown, my admiration fighting a prissy middle-class foreboding about how long the braids went unwashed. Her restful resignation was characteristic of the black relatives who frequent that room; I’ve made a study of it.
White mothers of delinquents, a statistically rarer breed, tend to jitter, or if they are still, they are ramrod rigid, jaws clenched, heads held stiffly as if fixed in place for a CAT-scan. Should low-enough attendance allow, white moms always assume a chair with at least two empty plastic seats on either side. They often bring newspapers. They discourage conversation. The implication is bald: Something has violated the space-time continuum. They do not belong here. I often detect a Mary Woolford brand of outrage, as if these mothers are looking fiercely around the room for someone to sue. Alternatively, I will get a sharp reading of this-cannot-be-happening—an incredulity so belligerent that it can generate a holographic presence in the waiting room of an ongoing parallel universe in which Johnny or Billy came home at the same time he always did after school that day, another ordinary afternoon on which he had his milk and Ho-Hos and did his homework. We white folks cling to such an abiding sense of entitlement that when things go amiss, we cannot let go of this torturously sunny, idiotically cheerful doppelgänger of a world that we deserve in which life is swell.
By contrast, black mothers will sit next to one another, even if the room is practically empty. They may not always talk, but there is an assumption of fellowship in their proximity, an esprit