We Need to Talk About Kevin Read Online Free PDF Page B

(3:40 A.M.)
    I’ve been trying to go cold turkey on sleeping pills, if only because I know you’d disapprove of my using them. But without the pills I keep tossing. I’ll be worthless at Travel R Us tomorrow, but I wanted to get down another memory from that period.
    Remember having soft-shell crabs with Eileen and Belmont at the loft? That evening was wanton. Even you threw caution to the winds and lurched up for the raspberry brandy at 2 A.M. With no interruptions to admire dolly outfits, no tomorrow is a school day , we gorged on fruit and sorbet and splashed immoderate second shots of clear, heady framboise, whooping at each others’ top-this tales in the orgy of eternal adolescence characteristic of the childless in middle age.
    We all talked about our parents—rather to their collective detriment, I’m afraid. We staged an unofficial contest of sorts: whose parents were the most bonkers. You were at a disadvantage; your parents’ uninflected New England stoicism was difficult to parody. By contrast, my mother’s ingenious contrivances for avoiding leaving the house made for great hilarity, and I even managed to explain the private joke between me and my brother Giles about “It’s very convenient”—the catchphrase in our family for “They deliver.” In those days (before he was reluctant to let his children anywhere near me), I had only to say “It’s very convenient” to Giles, and he guffawed. By the wee-smalls I could say “It’s very convenient ” to Eileen and Belmont and they cracked up, too.
    Neither of us could compete with that interracial vaudeville team of been-around-the-block bohemians. Eileen’s mother was schizophrenic, her father a professional cardsharp; Belmont’s mother was a former prostitute who still dressed like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and his father was a semifamous jazz drummer who had played with Dizzy Gillespie. I sensed that they’d told these stories before, but as a consequence they told them very well, and after so much chardonnay to wash down a feast of crabs I laughed until I wept. Once I considered bending the conversation toward this monstrous decision you and I were trying to make, but Eileen and Belmont were at least ten years older, and I wasn’t sure childless by choice; raising the matter might have been unkind.
    They didn’t leave until almost 4 A.M. And make no mistake: On this occasion I’d had a wonderful time. It was one of those rare evenings that had proved worth the bustle of rushing to the fish market and chopping all that fruit, and that should even have been worth cleaning up the kitchen, dusty with dredging flour and sticky with mango peel. I could see being a little let down that the night was over, or a little heavy with too much booze, whose giddy effects had peaked, leaving only an unsteadiness on my feet and a difficulty in focusing when I needed to concentrate on not dropping the wine glasses. But that wasn’t why I felt dolorous.
    “So quiet,” you noticed, stacking plates. “Beat?”
    I noshed on a lone crab claw that had fallen off in the skillet. “We must have spent what, four, five hours, talking about our parents.”
    “So? If you feel guilty about bad-mouthing your mother, you’re looking at penance until 2025. It’s one of your favorite sports.”
    “I know it is. That’s what bothers me.”
    “She couldn’t hear you. And no one around that table assumed that because you think she’s funny you don’t also think she’s tragic. Or that you don’t love her.” You added, “In your way.”
    “But when she dies, we won’t, I won’t be able to carry on like that. It won’t be possible to be so scathing, not without feeling traitorous.”
    “Pillory the poor woman while you can, then.”
    “But should we be talking about our parents, for hours, at this age?”
    “What’s the problem? You were laughing so hard you must have wet yourself.”
    “I had this image, after they left—the four