We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver Page B

tempting fate?”
    I wrestled free. “Last time I read, pregnancy wasn’t a prison sentence.”
    “Leaping around, throwing yourself all over the furniture—”
    “Oh, get out, Franklin. Not that long ago women worked in the fields right up until giving birth and then squatted between rows of vegetables. In the olden days, kids really did come from the cabbage patch—”
    “In the olden days infant and maternal mortality were sky high!”
    “What do you care about maternal mortality? So long as they scoop the kid out of my lifeless body while its heart is still beating you’ll be happy as a clam.”
    “That’s a hideous thing to say.”
    “I’m in the mood to be hideous,” I said blackly, plopping onto the couch. “Though before Papa Doc came home, I was in a great mood.”
    “Two more months. Is it that big a sacrifice to take it easy for the well-being of a whole other person?”
    Boy, was I already sick of having the well-being of a whole other person held over my head. “ My well-being, apparently, now counts for beans.”
    “There’s no reason you can’t listen to music—although at a volume that doesn’t have John thumping his ceiling downstairs.” You replaced the needle at the beginning of the A side, turning it down so low that David Byrne sounded like Minnie Mouse. “But like a normal pregnant woman, you can sit there and tap your foot .”
    “I don’t know about that,” I said. “All the vibration—it might travel up to Little Lord Fauntleroy and trouble his beauty sleep. And aren’t we supposed to be listening to Mozart? Maybe Talking Heads isn’t in The Book. Maybe by playing ‘Psycho Killer’ we’re feeding him Bad Thoughts. Better look it up.”
    You were the one powering through all those parental how-tos, about breathing and teething and weaning, while I read a history of Portugal.
    “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Eva. I thought the whole idea of becoming parents was to grow up.”
    “If I’d realized that’s what it meant to you, affecting some phony, killjoy adulthood, I’d have reconsidered the whole business.”
    “Don’t you ever say that ,” you said, your face beet-red. “It’s too late for second thoughts. Never, ever tell me that you regret our own kid.”
    That’s when I started to cry. When I had shared with you my most sordid sexual fantasies, in such disturbing violation of heterosexual norms that, without the assist of your own disgraceful mental smut shared in return, I’m too embarrassed to mention them here—since when was there anything that one of us was never, ever to say?
    Baby what did you expect—Baby what did you expect—
    The track had started to skip.
     
    Eva
     

 
     
    December 12, 2000
     
     
    Dear Franklin,
     
    Well, I had no desire to linger at the agency today. The staff has gone from good-hearted jousting to all-out war. Observing the showdowns in our small office without taking sides has lent these scenes the slightly comic, unaffecting quality of television with the sound off.
    I’m a little at a loss as to how “Florida” has become a race issue, except in the way that sooner or later everything becomes a race issue in this country—sooner, as a rule. So the three other Democrats here have been throwing terms like “Jim Crow” at the two beleaguered Republicans, who huddle together in the back room and speak in low tones that the rest construe as the conspiratorial mutter of shared bigotry. Funny; before the election none of these people displayed the least interest in what was generally agreed to be a dreary contest.
    Anyway, today some Supreme Court decision was due, and the radio was on all day. The staff’s recriminations flew so fast and furious that more than one customer, abandoned at the counter, simply walked out. At length I did the same. Whereas the two conservatives tend to argue nakedly for their side , the liberals are always weighing in on behalf of truth, justice, or humanity. Though once a