We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [90]
Oh, dear, the coffee is cold.
Eva
(9 P.M.)
Now returned to my duplex, I’m ashamed of myself. I needn’t have identified myself as Kevin’s mother. Loretta Greenleaf and I might have simply talked about the Claverack food service: Who says saltpeter suppresses sex drive? or even, What the hell is “saltpeter,” anyway?
I was about to write, “I don’t know what got into me,” but I’m afraid I do, Franklin. I was thirsty for companionship, and I felt her engagement with this garrulous white lady waning. I had the power to rivet her if I wished, and I reached for it.
Of course, in the immediate aftermath of Thursday I wanted nothing more than to crawl down a sewage drain and pull the lid. I longed for unobtrusiveness, like my brother, or oblivion, if that is not simply a synonym for wishing you were dead. The last thing in the world I was worried about was my sense of distinction. But the resilience of the spirit is appalling. As I said, I get hungry now, and for more than chicken. What I wouldn’t give to go back to the days that I sat beside strangers and made a memorable impression because I had founded a successful company or had traveled extensively in Laos. I wax nostalgic for the time that Siobhan clapped her hands and exclaimed admiringly that she’d used Wing and a Prayer on her trips to the Continent. That is the eminence that I chose for myself. But we are all resourceful, and we use what falls to hand. Stripped of company, wealth, and handsome husband, I stoop to my one surefire shortcut to being somebody.
Mother of the ignoble Kevin Khatchadourian is who I am now, an identity that amounts to one more of our son’s little victories. AWAP and our marriage have been demoted to footnotes, only interesting insofar as they illuminate my role as the mother of the kid everybody loves to hate. On the most private level, this filial mugging of who I once was to myself may be what I most resent. For the first half of my life, I was my own creation. From a dour, closeted childhood, I had molded a vibrant, expansive adult who commanded a smattering of a dozen languages and could pioneer through the unfamiliar streets of any foreign town. This notion that you are your own work of art is an American one, as you would hasten to point out. Now my perspective is European: I am a bundle of other people’s histories, a creature of circumstance. It is Kevin who has taken on this aggressive, optimistic Yankee task of making himself up.
I may be hounded by that why question, but I wonder how hard I’ve really tried to answer it. I’m not sure that I want to understand Kevin, to find a well within myself so inky that from its depths what he did makes sense. Yet little by little, led kicking and screaming, I grasp the rationality of Thursday. Mark David Chapman now gets the fan mail that John Lennon can’t; Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” may have destroyed a dozen women’s chances for connubial happiness but still receives numerous offers of marriage in prison himself. In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable. Hence I am no longer amazed by the frequency of public rampages with loaded automatics but by the fact that every ambitious citizen in America is not atop a shopping center looped with refills of ammunition. What Kevin did Thursday and what I did in Claverack’s waiting room today depart only in scale. Yearning to feel special, I was determined to capture someone’s attention, even if I had to use the murder of nine people to get it.
It’s no mystery why Kevin is at home at Claverack. If in high school he was disaffected, he had too much competition; scores of other boys battled for the role of surly punk slumped in the back of the class. Now he has carved himself a niche.
And he has colleagues, in Littleton, Jonesboro, Springfield. As in most disciplines, rivalry vies with a more collegial sense of common purpose. Like many a luminary, he is severe with his contemporaries, calling them to rigorous