JANUARY 13, 2001
Dear Franklin,
Yes, second Saturday of the month, and I’m debriefing in the Bagel Café again. I’m haunted by the image of that guard with the mud-spatter of facial moles, who looked at me today with his routine mixture of sorrow and distaste. I feel much the same way about his face. The moles are large and puffy, like feeding ticks, mottled and gelatinous, widening toadstoollike from a narrower base so that some of them have started to droop. I’ve wondered if he obsesses over his lesions, doing overtime at Claverack to save for their removal, or has developed a perverse fondness for them. People seem able to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment. In fact, I read recently that a neural operation has been developed that can virtually cure some Parkinson’s patients. So successful is the surgery that it has moved more than one of its beneficiaries to kill themselves. Yes, you read correctly: to kill themselves. No more trembling, no more spastic arm swings in restaurants that knock over the wine. But also, no more aching sympathy from doe-eyed strangers, no more spontaneous outpourings of tenderness from psychotically forgiving spouses. The recovered get depressed, reclusive. They can’t handle it: being just like everybody else. Between ourselves, I’ve started to worry that in some backhanded way I’ve become attached to the disfigurement of my own life. These days it is solely through notoriety that I understand who I am and what part I play in the dramas of others. I’m the mother of “one of those Columbine kids” (and how it grieves Kevin that Littleton has won the generic tag over Gladstone). Nothing I do or say will ever outweigh that fact, and it is tempting to stop fighting and give over. That must explain why some mothers of my ilk have abandoned any attempt to recoup the lives they led before, as marketing directors or architects, and have gone on the lecture circuit or spearheaded the Million Mom March instead. Perhaps this is what Siobhan meant by being “called.” 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 de corps reminiscent of a book club whose members are all plowing through the same arduously long classic. They never seem angry, or resentful, or surprised to find themselves here. They sit in the same universe in which they’ve always sat. And black people seem to have a much more sophisticated grasp of the nature of events in time. Parallel universes are science fiction, and Johnny—or Jamille—didn’t come home that afternoon, did he? End of story. 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 in food. When he was little I was afraid he would starve, until I figured out that he would eat as long as I wasn’t watching. He didn’t like to be seen needing it—as if hunger were a sign of weakness. So I’d leave a sandwich where he was sure to find it, and walk away. It was like feeding a dog. From around the corner I’d see him cram it in his mouth in two or three bites, looking around, making sure nobody saw. He caught me peeking once, and spat it out. He took the half-chewed bread and cheddar and mashed it onto the plate glass door. It stuck. I left it there for the longest time. I’m not sure why.” My companion’s eyes, previously alert, had filmed. She had no reason to be interested in my son’s dietary proclivities and now looked as if she regretted having started a conversation. I’m sorry, Franklin—it’s just that I go for days barely speaking, and then if I do start to talk it spews in a stream, like vomit. “At any rate,” I continued with a bit more calculation, “I’ve warned Kevin that once he’s transferred to an adult facility the food is bound to be far worse.” The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Your boy don’t get out at eighteen? Ain’t that a shame.” Skirting the waiting room’s taboo subject, she meant: He must have done something bad. “New York is pretty lenient with juveniles under sixteen,” I said. “But even in this state, kids have to do a five-year minimum for murder—especially when it’s seven high school students and an English teacher.” I added as her face rearranged, “Oh, and a cafeteria worker. Maybe Kevin has stronger feelings about food than I thought.” She whispered, “ KK. ” I could hear the reels in her head rewinding, as she grasped frantically after everything I’d said to which she’d only half listened. Now she had reason to be interested in my son’s secretive appetite—and in his “musical” preference for tuneless cacophony randomly generated by computer, in the ingenious little game he used to play composing school essays entirely with three-letter words. What I had just done, it was a kind of party trick. Suddenly she was at a loss for what to say, not because I bored her, but because she was bashful. If she could scavenge a hasty bushel of bruised and mealy details from my conversational drop-fruit, she would present it to her sister over the phone the next day like a Christmas basket. “None other,” I said. “Funny how ‘KK’ used to mean ‘ Krispy Kreme.’” “That must be... ” She faltered. I was reminded of the time I got a free upgrade to first class, where I sat right next to Sean Connery. Tonguetied, I couldn’t think of a thing to say besides, “You’re Sean Connery,” of which presumably he was aware. “That must be a m-mighty cross to bear,” she stammered. “Yes,” I said. I was no longer driven to get her attention; I had it. I could control the upchuck of chatter that had embarrassed me minutes before. I experienced a seated sensation, literalized in an improbable physical comfort in my form-fitted orange chair. Any obligation to express interest in the plight of this young woman’s own son seemed to vanish. Now I was the serene party, and the one to be courted. I felt almost queenly. “Your boy,” she scrambled. “He holding up okay?” “Oh, Kevin loves it here.” “How come? Marlon curse this place up one side, down the other.” “Kevin has few interests,” I said, giving our son the benefit of the doubt that he had any. “He’s never known what to do with himself. After-school hours and weekends hung off him in big drooping folds like an oversized car coat. Bingo, his day is agreeably regimented from breakfast to lights-out. And now he lives in a world where being pissed off all day long is totally normal. I think he even feels a sense of community,” I allowed. “Maybe not with the other inmates themselves. But their prevailing humors—disgust, hostility, derision—are like old friends.” Other visitors were clearly eavesdropping, since they flicked averted eyes at our chairs with the swift, voracious motion of a lizard’s tongue. I might have lowered my voice, but I was enjoying the audience. “He look back on what he done, he feel any, you know—” “Remorse?” I provided dryly. “What could he conceivably regret? Now he’s somebody, isn’t he? And he’s found himself, as they said in my day. Now he doesn’t have to worry about whether he’s a freak or a geek, a grind or a jock or a nerd. He doesn’t have to worry if he’s gay. He’s a murderer. It’s marvelously unambiguous. And best of all,” I took a breath, “he got away from me.” “Sounds like there’s a silver lining, then.” She held herself at an inch or two greater distance than women in earnest conversation are wont, eyeing me at an angle that departed from a straight line by about thirty degrees. These subtle removals seemed almost scientific: I was a specimen. “Like, you get away from him, too.” I gestured helplessly at the waiting room. “Not quite.” Glancing at her Swatch, she displayed a growing awareness that in what could prove a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, she had to work in the one question she had always wanted to ask KK ’s actual mother before it was too late. I knew what was coming: “You ever figure what it was drove him to—you ever figure out why?” It’s what they all want to ask—my brother, your parents, my coworkers, the documentary makers, Kevin’s psychiatric consult, the gladstone_carnage.com web-page designers, though interestingly never my own mother. After I steeled myself to accept Thelma Corbitt’s gracious invitation for coffee the week after her son’s funeral (though she never asked aloud, and she spent most of our session reading me his poems and showing me what seemed like hundreds of snapshots of Denny in school plays), it came off her in pulses, it clutched at my dress: a craving for comprehension that verged on hysteria. Like all those parents, she’d been wracked by the apprehension that the entire gory mess whose sticky pieces we would both be picking up for the rest of our lives was unnecessary. Quite. Thursday was an elective, like printmaking, or Spanish. But this incessant badgering, this pleading refrain of why, why, why —it’s so grossly unfair. Why, after all I have borne, am I held accountable for ordering their chaos? Isn’t it enough that I suffer the brunt of the facts without shouldering this unreasonable responsibility for what they mean? That young woman at Claverack meant no harm I’m sure, but her all-toofamiliar question made me bitter. “I expect it’s my fault,” I said defiantly. “I wasn’t a very good mother—cold, judgmental, selfish. Though you can’t say I haven’t paid the price.” “Well, then,” she drawled, closing up that two inches and swiveling her gaze thirty degrees to look me in the eye. “You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it’s the fault of somebody who’s dead.” Stolid in my guilt, clutching it like a girl with a stuffed bunny, I failed to follow. “Greenleaf?” shouted the guard. My companion tucked the candy into her pocketbook, then rose. I could see her calculating that she had just enough time to slip in one more quick question-and-answer or to deliver a parting thought. With Sean Connery, that’s always the quandary, isn’t it: to siphon information, or to pour. Somehow it impressed me that she chose the latter. “It’s always the mother’s fault, ain’t it?” she said softly, collecting her coat. “That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or a she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don’t teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. Don’t you believe that old guff. Don’t you let them saddle you with all that killing.” “ Loretta Greenleaf! ” “It hard to be a momma. Nobody ever pass a law say ’fore you get pregnant you gotta be perfect. I’m sure you try the best you could. You here, in this dump, on a nice Saturday afternoon? You still trying. Now you take care of yourself, honey. And you don’t be talking any more a that nonsense.” Loretta Greenleaf held my hand and squeezed it. My eyes sprang hot. I squeezed her hand back, so hard and so long that she must have feared I might never let go. 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 standards: He derides blubberers like Paducah’s Michael Carneal who recant, who sully the purity of their gesture with a craven regret. He admires style—for instance, Evan Ramsey’s crack as he took aim at his math class in Bethyl, Alaska, “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?” He appreciates capable planning: Carneal inserted gun-range earplugs before aiming his.22 Luger; Barry Loukaitis in Moses Lake had his mother take him shopping in seven different stores until he found just the right long black coat under which to hide his.30-caliber hunting rifle. Kevin has a refined sense of irony, too, treasuring the fact that the teacher Loukaitis shot had only recently written on the report card of this A-student, “A pleasure to have in the class.” Like any professional, he has contempt for the kind of rank incompetence featured by John Sirola, the fourteen-year-old in Redlands, California, who blasted his principal in the face in 1995, only to trip when fleeing the scene and shoot himself dead. And in the way of most established experts, Kevin is suspicious of parvenus trying to elbow their way into his specialty with the slightest of qualifications—witness his resentment of that thirteen-year-old eviscerater. He is difficult to impress. Much as John Updike dismisses Tom Wolfe as a hack, Kevin reserves a particular disdain for Luke Woodham, “the cracker” from Pearl, Mississippi. He approves of ideological focus but scorns pompous moralizing, as well as any School Shooting aspirant who can’t keep his own counsel—and apparently before taking out his nominal once-girlfriend with a.30-.30 caliber shotgun, Woodham couldn’t stop himself from passing a note to a friend in class that read (and you should hear your son’s puling rendition): “I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society push us and we will push back.” Kevin decried Woodham’s sniveling while mucus drizzled onto his orange jumpsuit on Prime Time Live as totally uncool: “I’m my own person! I’m not a tyrant. I’m not evil and I have a heart and I have feelings!” Woodham has admitted to warming up by clubbing his dog, Sparky, wrapping the pooch in a plastic bag, torching him with lighter fluid, and listening to him whimper before tossing him in a pond, and after studious consideration Kevin has concluded that animal torture is clichéd. Lastly, he is especially condemnatory of the way this whiny creature tried to worm out responsibility by blaming a satanic cult. The story itself showed panache, but Kevin regards a refusal to stand by one’s own handiwork as not only undignified but as a betrayal of the tribe. I know you, my dear, and you’re impatient. Never mind the preliminaries, you want to hear about the visit itself—what his mood’s like, how he’s looking, what he said. All right, then. But by imputation, you asked for it. He looks well enough. Though there is still a tinge too much blue in his complexion, fine veins at his temples convey a promising hint of vulnerability. If he has hacked his hair in uneven shocks, I take that as representation of healthy concern with his appearance. The perpetual half cock on the right corner of his mouth is starting to carve a permanent single quote into the cheek, remaining behind when he switches to a pursedmouth scowl. There’s no close quote on the left, and the asymmetry is disconcerting. No more of those ubiquitous orange jumpsuits these days at Claverack. So Kevin is free to persist in the perplexing style of dress he developed at fourteen, arguably crafted in counterpoint to the prevailing fashion in clothing that’s oversized—the jib of Harlem toughs, boxers catching sun, sauntering through moving traffic as the waistband of jeans that could rig a small sailboat shimmy toward their knees. But if Kevin’s alternative look is pointed, I can only make wild guesses at what it means. When he first trotted out this fashion in eighth grade, I assumed that the T-shirts biting into his armpits and pleating across his chest were old favorites he was reluctant to let go, and I went out of my way to find duplicates in a larger size. He never touched them. Now I understand that the dungarees whose zipper would not quite close were carefully selected. Likewise the windbreakers whose arms rode up the wrist, the ties that dangled three inches above the belt for when we forced him to look “nice,” the shirts that gaped between popping buttons. I will say, the tiny-clothes thing did get a lot across. At first glance, he looked poverty-stricken, and I stopped myself more than once from commenting that “people will think” we don’t earn enough to buy our growing boy new jeans; adolescents are so greedy for signals that their parents are consumed with social status. Besides, a closer inspection revealed that his shrunken getup was designer labeled, lending the pretense at hard luck a parodic wink. The suggestion of a wash load churned at an errantly high temperature connoted a comic ineptitude, and the binding of a child-sized jacket across the shoulders would sometimes pull his arms goofily out from his sides like a baboon’s. (That’s as close as he’s come to fitting the mold of a conventional cutup; no one I’ve spoken to about our son has ever mentioned finding him funny.) The way the hems of his jeans stopped shy of his socks made a hayseedy impression, consonant with his fondness for playing dumb. There was more than a suggestion of Peter Pan about the style—a refusal to grow up—though I’m confused why he would cling so to being a kid when throughout his childhood he seemed so lost in it, knocking around in those years much the way I was rattling around our enormous house. Claverack’s experimental policy of allowing inmates to wear street clothes has allowed Kevin to reiterate his fashion statement inside. While New York’s corner boys flapping in outsized gear look like toddlers from a distance, Kevin’s shrunken mode of dress has the opposite effect of making him look bigger—more adult, bursting. One of his psych consultants has accused me of finding the style unnerving for its aggressive sexuality: Kevin’s crotch cuts revealingly into his testicles, and the painted-on T-shirts make his nipples protrude. Perhaps; certainly the tight sleeve hems, the taut collars, and the yanked-in waistbands strap his body in cords and remind me of bondage. He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin. Reading his suffocating attire as equivalent to a penitential hair shirt might seem a stretch, but the waistbands chafe, the collars score his neck. Discomfort begets discomfort in others, of course, and that, too, must be part of the plan. I often find that when I’m with him I pull at my own clothes, discreetly prizing a seam from between my buttocks or releasing an extra button on my blouse. Eyeing laconic interchanges at adjoining tables, I’ve detected that some of his fellow inmates have started to mimic Kevin’s eccentric dress sense. I gather that T-shirts in unusually small sizes have become prized possessions, and Kevin himself has mentioned smugly that runts are being robbed of their clothes. He may hold imitators up to ridicule, but he does seem gratified at having initiated his very own fad. Were he commensurately concerned with originality two years ago, the seven students he used for target practice would be preparing applications to the college of their choice by now. Anyway, today? He lounged into the visiting room wearing what must have been one of the runts’ sweatpants, since I didn’t recognize them as ones I’d bought. The little plaid button-down he wore on top was only secured by the middle two buttons, exposing his midriff. Now even his tennis shoes are too small, and he crushes their heels under his feet. He might not like to hear me say it, but he’s graceful. There’s a languor to his motions, as to the way he talks. And he always has that skew, too; he walks sideways, like a crab. Leading with his left hip gives him the subtle sidle of a supermodel on a catwalk. If he realized I saw traces of effeminacy in him, I doubt he’d be offended. He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing. “What a surprise,” he said smoothly, pulling out the chair; its back legs had lost their plastic feet and the raw aluminum shrieked across the cement, a fingernail-on-the-blackboard sound that Kevin drew out. He slid his elbow across the table, resting his temple on his fist, assuming that characteristic tilt, sardonic with his whole body. I’ve tried to stop myself, but whenever he sits in front of me I rear back. I do get irked that I’m always the one who has to come up with something to talk about. He’s old enough to carry a conversation. And since he has imprisoned me in my life every bit as much as he’s imprisoned himself in his, we suffer an equal poverty of fresh subject matter. Often we run through the same script: “How are you?” I ask with brutal simplicity. “You want me to say fine?” “I want you to say something,” I throw back. “You’re the one came to see me,” he reminds me. And he can and will sit it out, the whole hour. As for which of us has the greater tolerance for nullity, there’s no contest. He used to spend whole Saturdays propped theatrically in front of the Weather Channel. So today I skipped even a perfunctory how’s tricks, on the theory that folks who shun small talk are still dependent on its easing transitions but have learned to make other people do all the work. And I was still agitated by my exchange with Loretta Greenleaf. Maybe having tempted his own mother into boasting about her connection to his filthy atrocity would afford him some satisfaction. But apparently my messianic impulse to take responsibility for Thursday onto myself reads to Kevin as a form of stealing. “All right,” I said, no-nonsense. “I need to know. Do you blame me? It’s all right to say so, if that’s what you think. Is that what you tell your psych consults, or they tell you? It all traces back to your mother.” He snapped, “ Why should you get all the credit? ” The conversation that I had expected to consume our whole hour was now over in ninety seconds. We sat. “Do you remember your early childhood very well, Kevin?” I had read somewhere that people with painful childhoods will often draw a blank. “What’s to remember?” “Well, for example you wore diapers until you were six.” “What about it.” If I had some idea of embarrassing him, I was misguided. “It must have been unpleasant.” “For you.” “For you as well.” “Why?” he asked mildly. “It was warm.” “Not for long.” “Didn’t sit in it for long. You were a good mumsey.” “Didn’t other kindergartners make fun of you? I worried at the time.” “Oh, I bet you couldn’t sleep.” “I worried,” I said staunchly. He shrugged with one shoulder. “Why should they? I was getting away with something and they weren’t.” “I was just wondering if, at this late date, you could shed some light on why the delay. Your father gave enough demonstrations.” “Kevvy-wevvy!” he cooed, falsetto. “ Honey sweetie! Look at Daddykins! See how he pee-pees in the pooper-dooper? Wouldn’t you like that, too, Kevvy-woopsie? Wouldn’t it be fun to be just like Dadda-boo, piddle your peenie-weenie over the toileywoiley? I was just hoisting you on your own retard.” I was interested that he had allowed himself to be verbally clever; he’s generally careful not to let on that he’s got a brain. “All right,” I said. “You wouldn’t use the toilet for yourself, and you and I—you wouldn’t do it for me. But why not for your father?” “You’re a big boy, now!” Kevin minced. “ You’re my big boy! You’re my little man! Christ. What an asshole.” I stood up. “Don’t you ever say that. Don’t you ever, ever say that. Not once, not ever, not one more time!” “Or what,” he said softly, eyes dancing. I sat back down. I shouldn’t let him get to me like that. I usually don’t. Still any dig at you—. Oh, maybe I should count myself lucky that he doesn’t press this button more often. Then, lately he is always pressing it, in a way. That is, for most of his childhood his narrow, angular features taunted me with my own reflection. But in the last year his face has started to fill out, and as it widens I begin to recognize your broader bones. While it’s true that I once searched Kevin’s face hungrily for resemblance to his father, now I keep fighting this nutty impression that he’s doing it on purpose, to make me suffer. I don’t want to see the resemblance. I don’t want to spot the same mannerisms, that signature downward flap of a hand when you dismissed something as insignificant, like the trifling matter of neighbor after neighbor refusing to let their kids play with your son. Seeing your strong chin wrenched in a pugnacious jut, your wide artless smile bent to a crafty grin, is like beholding my husband possessed. “So what would you have done?” I said. “With a little boy who insisted on messing his pants until he was old enough for first grade?” Kevin leaned further onto his elbow, his bicep flat on the table. “Know what they do with cats, don’t you. They do it in the house, and you shove their faces into their own shit. They don’t like it. They use the box.” He sat back, satisfied. “That’s not that far from what I did, is it?” I said heavily. “Do you remember? What you drove me to? How I finally got you to use the bathroom?” He traced a faint white scar on his forearm near the elbow with a note of tender possessiveness, as if stroking a pet worm. “Sure.” There was a different quality to this affirmation; I felt he truly remembered, whereas these other recollections were post hoc. “I was proud of you,” he purred. “You were proud of yourself,” I said. “As usual.” “Hey,” he said, leaning forward. “Most honest thing you ever done.” I stirred, collecting my bag. I may have craved his admiration once, but not for that; for anything but that. “Hold on,” he said. “I answered your question. Got one for you.” This was new. “ All right,” I said. “Shoot.” “Those maps,” he said. “What about them,” I said. “Why’d you keep them on the walls?” It’s only because I refused to tear those spattered maps from the study for years, or to allow you to paint over them as you were so anxious to, that Kevin “remembers” the incident at all. He was, as you observed repeatedly at the time, awfully young. “I kept them up for my sanity,” I said. “I needed to see something you’d done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn’t all in my head.” “Yeah,” he said, tickling the scar on his arm again. “Know what you mean.” I promise to explain, Franklin, but right now I just can’t.
Eva
