We Need to Talk About Kevin

I seem finally to be learning what you were always trying to teach me, that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria.

There’s no better way to get people to cooperate in this country than by seeming a little unhinged.

Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not to a different airport. “Motherhood,” I condensed in the park. “Now, that is a foreign country.”

How lucky we are, when we’re spared what we think we want!

I was visiting your country. The one you had made for yourself, the way a child constructs a log cabin out of Popsicle sticks.

You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.

“It’s very dangerous,” I said. Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.

The whole time I was pregnant with Kevin I was battling the idea of Kevin, the notion that I had demoted myself from driver to vehicle, from householder to house.

Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket.

When you lifted the needle peremptorily, you scratched a groove, so that forever after the song would skip and keep repeating, Baby what did you expect…

And I was visited by a prescient taste of adulthood, an unbracketed “No Exit” sensation, which rarely plagues children: that we were sitting in a room and there was nothing to say or do.

I panicked, thinking, There’s nowhere to hide.

After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born. Me, I’m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus.

The secret is that there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it’s the fault of somebody who’s dead.

A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.

“Just cause you get used to something doesn’t mean you like it.” he added, snapping the magenta, “You’re used to me.” “Yes!” I said.

Impatient with the slow pace of made-for-TV combat, he grumbled, “I don’t see why Cone Power bothers with all that little junk, Dad. Nuke ‘em. That’d teach the Raqis who’s boss.” You thought it was adorable.

In Kevin […] the color was a pulsing, aortal red, and the feeling was fury…the paint in his foreground would gradually thicken, its hue coagulating to the sluggish black-purple of liver […]. Yet when Celia slid to hand. […] her aural color was light blue. I was overcome by the same clear-skied azure that had visited me when we made love.

“Like how?” he said, carefully pulling the rough salmon-colored husk off the fruit, exposing the pinkish-white flesh. “Celia does not look like a geek?” When the pale translucent orb was peeled, he popped it in his mouth, sucked, and pulled it back out.

When you love your kids, and you’re there for them, and you take them on trips, like to museums and battlefields, and make time for them, you have faith in them and express an interest in what they think? That’s when this kind off plunging off the deep end doesn’t happen. And if you don’t believe me, ask Kevin.

Almost to, what, know you’re alive. To show other people they don’t control you. To prove you can do something, even if it could get you arrested.

Because after three days short of eighteen years, I can finally announce that I am too exhausted and too confused and too lonely to keep fighting, and if only out of desperation or even laziness I love my son. He has five grim years left to serve in an adult penitentiary, and I cannot vouch for what will walk out the other side. But in the meantime, there is a second bedroom in my serviceable apartment. The bedspread is plain. A copy of Robin Hood lies on the bookshelf. And the sheets are clean.