We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [87]
All the same, there’s a tacit understanding among the whole of our circle that you do not fish for details about the misconduct that landed your seatmate’s young man here. Although the transgression in question is in many cases the family’s most public manifestation, in that room we collude in the seemly view that the stuff of the Times Metro Section, the Post front page, is a private affair. Oh, a few mothers from time to time will bend a neighbor’s ear about how Tyrone never stole that Discman or he was only holding a kilo for a friend, but then the other mothers catch one another’s’ eyes with bent smiles and pretty soon little Miss We Gonna Appeal This Injustice puts a lid on it. (Kevin informs me that inside, no one claims to be innocent. Instead they confabulate heinous crimes for which they were never caught. “If half these jerk-offs were telling the truth,” he slurred wearily last month, “most of the country would be dead.” In fact, Kevin has more than once claimed Thursday and newbies haven’t believed him: “And I’m Sidney Poitier, dude.” Apparently he dragged one such skeptic to the library by the hair to confirm his credentials in an old copy of Newsweek.)
So I was struck by this young woman’s repose. Rather than clean her nails or cull old receipts from her pocketbook, she sat upright, hands at rest in her lap. She stared straight ahead, reading the AIDS awareness poster for perhaps the hundredth time. I hope this doesn’t sound racist—these days I never know what will give offense—but black people seem terribly good at waiting, as if they inherited the gene for patience along with the one for sickle-cell. I noticed that in Africa as well: dozens of Africans sitting or standing by the side of the road, waiting for the bus or, even harder, waiting for nothing in particular, and they never appeared restive or annoyed. They didn’t pull grass and chew the tender ends with their front teeth; they didn’t draw aimless pictures with the toes of their plastic sandals in the dry red clay. They were still, and present. The capacity is existential, that ability to just be, with a profundity that I have seen elude some very well educated people.
At one point she crossed to the candy machine in the corner. The exact-change light must have been on, because she returned and asked if I had change of a dollar. I fell over myself checking every coat pocket, every cranny of my purse, so that by the time I scrounged the coins together she may have wished she’d never asked. I contend with strangers so infrequently now—I still prefer booking flights in the back room at Travel R Us—that during small transactions I panic. Maybe I was desperate to have a positive effect on someone else’s life, if only by providing the means to a Mars Bar. At least this awkward exchange broke the ice, and, to pay me back for what I made seem so much trouble, she spoke when she resumed her seat.
“I ought to bring him fruit, I guess.” She glanced apologetically at the M&M’s in her lap. “But Lord, you know he’d never eat it.”
We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.
“My son claims Claverack food is ‘hog slop,’” I volunteered.
“Oh, my Marlon do nothing but complain, too. Say it ain’t ‘fit for human consumption.’ And you hear they bake saltpeter in the bread rolls?” (This rusty summer-camp rumor is surely sourced in adolescent vanity: that a teenager’s lavish libidinous urges are so seditious as to demand dampening by underhanded means.)
“No, ‘hog slop’ was all I could get out of him,” I said. “But Kevin’s never been interested