“What good is arithmetic.”
“Well, you remember yesterday, and Mommer paid the bills? You have to be able to add and subtract to pay bills, and know how much money you have left.”
“You used a calculator.”
“Well, you have to know arithmetic to be sure the calculator is right.”
“Why would you use it at all if it doesn’t always work.”
“It always works,” I begrudge.
“So you don’t need arithmetic.”
“To use a calculator,” I say, flustered, “you still have to know what a five looks like, all right? Now, let’s practice our counting. What comes after three?”
“Seven,” says Kevin.
We would proceed in this fashion, until once after one more random exchange (“What comes before nine?” “Fifty-three.”) he looked me lifelessly in the eye and droned in a fast-forward monotone, “Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve ...,” pausing two or three times for a breath but otherwise making it flawlessly to a hundred. “Now can we quit?” I certainly felt the fool.
I roused no more enthusiasm for literacy. “Don’t tell me,” I’d cut him off after raising the prospect of reading time. “
What for. What good is it
. Well, I’ll tell you. Sometimes you’re going to be bored and there’s nothing to do except you can always read a book. Even on the train or at a bus stop.”
“What if the book is boring.”
“Then you find a different one. There are more books in the world than you’ll ever have time to read, so you’ll never run out.”
“What if they’re all boring.”
“I don’t think that would be possible, Kevin,” I’d say crisply.
“I think it’s possible,” he’d differ.
“Besides, when you grow up you’ll need a job, and then you’ll have to be able to read and write really well or no one will want to hire you.” Privately, of course, I reflected that if this were true most of the country would be unemployed.
“Dad doesn’t write. He drives around and takes pictures.”
“There are other jobs—”
“What if I don’t want a job.”
“Then you’d have to go on
welfare
. The government would give you just a little money so you don’t starve, but not enough to do anything fun.”
“What if I don’t want to do anything.”
“I bet you will. If you make your own money, you can go to movies and restaurants and even different countries, like Mommer used to.” At
used to
, I winced.
“I think I want to go on welfare.” It was the kind of line I’d heard other parents repeat with a chortle at dinner parties, and I struggled to find it adorable.
I don’t know how those home-schooling families pull it off. Kevin never seemed to be paying any attention, as if listening were an indignity. Yet somehow, behind my back, he picked up what he needed to know. He learned the way he ate—furtively, on the sly, shoveling information like a fisted cheese sandwich when no one was watching. He hated to admit he didn’t know something already, and his blanket playing-dumb routine was cunningly crafted to cover any genuine gaps in his education. In Kevin’s mind, pretend-ignorance wasn’t shameful, and I was never able to discriminate between his feigned stupidity and the real thing. Hence, if at the dinner table I decried Robin Williams’s role in
Dead Poets Society
as
trite
, I felt obliged to explain to Kevin that the word meant “like what lots of people have done already.” But he’d receive this definition with a precocious
uh-duh
. Had he learned the word
trite
at three, when he was faking not being able to talk at all? You tell me.
In any event, after belligerently botching his alphabet for weeks (“What comes after R?”
Elemenno
), he interrupted one of my diatribes—about how he couldn’t just sit there and expect learning to pour into his ear all by itself—by singing the alphabet song impeccably start to finish, albeit with an aggressive tunelessness that even for the tin-eared was improbable and tinged with a minor key that made this bouncy children’s pneumonic sound like kaddish. I suppose they’d taught it at Love-’n’-Learn, not that Kevin had let on. When he finished mockingly,
Now I’ve said my ABCs, tell me what you think of me,
I snapped furiously, “I think you’re a wicked little boy who enjoys wasting his mother’s time!” and he smiled, extravagantly, with both sides of his mouth.
He wasn’t precisely disobedient, which is one detail that the Sunday magazine exposés often got wrong. Indeed, he could follow the letter of his assignments with chilling precision. After the obligatory period of aping incompetence—crippled, unclosed P’s wilting below the line as if they’d been shot—he sat down on command and wrote perfectly within the lines of his exercise book, “Look, Sally, look. Go. Go. Go. Run. Run. Run. Run, Sally, Run.” I have no way of explaining why it was rather awful, except that he exposed to me the insidious nihilism of the grade-school primer. Even the way he formed those letters made me uneasy. They had no character. I mean, he didn’t really develop
handwriting
as we understand it, connotatively the personal stamp on standardized script. From the point he admitted he knew how, his printing unerringly replicated the examples in his textbook, with no extra tails or squiggles; his T’s were crossed and I’s dotted, and never before had the bloated interior of B’s and O’s and D’s seemed to contain so much empty space.
My point is that, however technically biddable, he was exasperating to teach. You could savor his remarkable progress when you came home, but I was never treated to those
Eureka!
moments of sudden breakthrough that reward an adult’s hours of patient coaxing and mind-numbing repetition. It is no more satisfying to teach a child who refuses to learn in plain view than it is to feed one by leaving a plate behind in the kitchen. He was clearly denying me satisfaction on purpose. He was determined that I should feel useless and unneeded. Though I may not have been as convinced as you were that our son was a genius, he was—well, I suppose he still is, if such things can be said of a boy who clings to an act of such crowning idiocy—very bright. But my day-to-day experience as his tutor was that of instructing an
exceptional child
only in the euphemistic tradition that seems to concoct an ever more dishonest name for
moron
every year. I would drill what-istwo-plus-three
over
and
over
and
over
, until once when he staunchly, maliciously refused to say
five
one more time I sat him down, scrawled,
12,387
6,945
138,964
3,987,234
I missed you during the day, as I missed my old life when I was too busy to miss you during the day. Here I had become quite well versed in Portuguese history down to the order of the monarchy and how many Jews were murdered during the Inquisition, and now I was reciting the alphabet. Not the Cyrillic alphabet, nor the Hebrew one, the
alphabet
. Even if Kevin had proved an ardent pupil, for me the regime would doubtless have felt like a demotion of the precipitous sort commonly constrained to dreams: Suddenly I’m sitting in the back of the class, taking a test with a broken pencil and no pants. Nonetheless, I might have abided this humbling role if it weren’t for the additional humiliation of living, for over six years now, up to my elbows in shit.
Okay—out with it.
There came an afternoon in July that, per tradition, Kevin had soiled his diapers once and been cleaned up with the whole diaper cream and talcum routine, only to complete the evacuation of his bowels twenty minutes later. Or so I assumed. But this time he outdid himself. This was the same afternoon that, after I had insisted he write a sentence that was meaningful about his life and not one more tauntingly inert line about Sally, he wrote in his exercise book, “In kendergarden evrybody says my mother looks rilly old.” I’d turned beet-red, and that was when I sniffed another telltale waft. After I’d just changed him
twice
. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I lifted him to a stand by the waist, pulling his Pampers open to make sure. I lost it. “How do you
do
it?” I shouted. “You hardly
eat
anything, where does it
come
from?”
A rush of heat rippled up through my body, and I barely noticed that Kevin was now dangling with his feet off the carpet. He seemed to weigh nothing, as if that tight, dense little body stocked with such inexhaustible quantities of shit was packed instead with Styrofoam peanuts. There’s no other way to say this. I threw him halfway across the nursery. He landed with a dull clang against the edge of the stainless steel changing table. His head at a quizzical tilt, as if he were finally
interested
in something, he slid, in seeming slow motion, to the floor.
Eva
JANUARY 19, 2001
Dear Franklin,
So now you know.
I had rash hopes when I first rushed over to him that he was all right—he looked unmarked—until I rolled him over to reveal the arm he fell on. His forearm must have struck the edge of the changing table when for the first time, as you once remarked in jest, our son had learned to fly. It was bleeding and a little crooked and bulging in the middle with something white poking out and I felt sick.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!
I whispered. Yet however weak with remorse, I was still intoxicated from a moment that may put the lie to my preening incomprehension of
Thursday
. On its far side, I was aghast. But the very center of the moment was bliss. Hurtling our little boy I-didn’t-care-where-besides-away, I had heedlessly given over, like Violetta, to clawing a chronic, torturous itch.
Before you condemn me utterly, I beg you to understand just how hard I’d been trying to be a good mother. But trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one. Distrusting my every impulse from the instant he was laid on my breast, I’d followed a devout regime of hugging my little boy an average of three times a day, admiring something he did or said at least twice, and reciting
I love you, kiddo
or
You know that your Daddy and I love you very much
with the predictable uniformity of liturgical professions of faith. But too strictly observed, most sacraments grow hollow. Moreover, for six solid years I’d put my every utterance on the five-second delay of call-in radio shows, just to make sure I didn’t broadcast anything obscene, slanderous, or contrary to company policy. The vigilance came at a cost. It made me remote, halting, and awkward.
When hoisting Kevin’s body in that fluid adrenal lift, for once I’d felt graceful, because at last there was an unmediated confluence between what I felt and what I did. It isn’t very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. 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. For two seconds I’d felt whole, and like Kevin Khatchadourian’s real mother. I felt close to him. I felt like myself—my true, unexpurgated self—and I felt we were finally communicating.
As I swept a shock of hair from his moist forehead, the muscles of Kevin’s face worked furiously; his eyes screwed up and his mouth grimaced into a near-smile. Even when I ran to fetch that morning’s
New York Times
and slipped it under his arm he did not cry. Holding the paper under the arm—I still remember the headline by his elbow, “More Autonomy for Baltics Stirs Discomfort in Moscow”—I helped him to his feet, asking if anything else hurt and he shook his head. I started to pick him up, another shake; he would walk. Together we shuffled to the phone. It’s possible that he wiped away the odd tear when I wasn’t looking, but Kevin would no more suffer in plain view than he would learn to count.
Our local pediatrician Dr. Goldblatt met us at Nyack Hospital’s tiny, crushingly intimate emergency room, where I felt certain that everyone could tell what I’d done. The notice for the “New York Sheriff’s Victim Hotline” beside the registration window seemed posted specially for my son. I talked too much and said too little; I babbled to the admissions nurse about what had happened but not how. Meantime Kevin’s unnatural self-control had mutated into the bearing of a martinet; he stood straight with his chin lifted, and turned at right angles. Having assumed responsibility for supporting his arm with the newspaper, he allowed Dr. Goldblatt to hold his shoulder as he marched down the hall but shook off my hand. When he entered the orthopedic surgeon’s examining room, he about-faced in the doorway to announce briskly, “I can see the doctor by myself.”
“Don’t you want me to keep you company, in case it hurts?”
“You can wait out there,” he commanded, the muscles rippling in his clenched jaw the only indication that it hurt already.
“That’s quite a little man you’ve got there, Eva,” said Dr. Goldblatt. “Sounds like you got your orders.” To my horror, he closed the door.