Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

"I don't ever want to get married," my daughter mumbles moodily, "or ever have children."

  "Work in a filling station," my boy answers.

  "Well, that's a bit better." I approve, nodding with a look of praise. Why not? Own his own business? It makes some sense. Profitable franchise: Exxon, Texaco, Sunoco, Shell, Gulf? Sure. It's something. A start. Okay. "Why?"

  "I like the smell of gasoline."

  Christ!

  "Jack, you've got kids," I appeal to Green at the office, almost in desperation. "That are older than mine. You've got a boy in college, haven't you? What does he want to be when he gets out?"

  "A suicide."

  "I'm not joking."

  "You think I am? I've got a daughter in college too. She has abortions. Between suicide attempts. She lays bums. They don't want to continue. There've been three attempts between them. That I know about. One by slashing, two by drugs. It sounds like Paul Revere, doesn't it? They're both on drugs. My new wife is crazy too. So is her mother. So is mine. It's not my business anymore."

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

  "Go do some work. It's not your business either."

  He has written his children off, filed them away, closed them out like dead records that are not his business anymore. But I still have my children, and I wish to engulf them in devotion and safeguard them against every slight. (I want them to believe I love them.)

  "Listen," I exclaim to them frantically, "you don't have to do what everybody else does. You can be whatever you want to be. I'll help. You don't have to join the Cub Scouts or play baseball or go to Sunday school or even to college. What do you want to do?"

  "Join the Cub Scouts and play baseball," says my boy.

  "Go into my room and play my records now," says my daughter.

  Good God — has it happened to them already? They don't care. Or they don't know. When did it happen? Where? Where was I when the decisions were made that determined he would want to join the Cub Scouts and play baseball now, and all she would want to do is go into her room to talk on the telephone and play her phonograph records? Is it really too late?

  It is too late, I feel, for me to save her, or even to help her, and I really don't think I would know what to do anymore to try (except to sit apathetically and watch her go her unhappy way). It would do no more good for me to try to change her now than it has done in the past, when she was more credulous and suggestible and more eager to please. I have tried; I have taunted, reasoned, thundered, whined, disciplined, flattered, and cajoled, to no avail and perhaps much harm, until I confessed to myself one day that it was not merely hypocritical of me, but futile, and therefore foolish. Then I stopped. (Now I go through perfunctory routines. I acknowledged to myself also that I was not really as exercised as I maintained by her shortcomings and mistakes and by the frameworks for future disasters that I watched her constructing. All that seemed calamitous to me was her disobedience, and her unwillingness to believe me. All that endangers me now is her resistance and disrespect.) What was the purpose in continuing to try to influence her (other than to be able to say someday — now — that I tried)? I know I have no power over her now. (If I knew she were about to become a heroin addict and then a common prostitute, I wouldn't know what to do to avert it. I would rail and curse my fate; but none of that would help. So I wouldn't try at all.) She doesn't know yet that I have no power over her; so I bluff, and for the time being (redundancy coming) we have a modus vivendi. (All I have left is the power to cripple her.) Where was the morality, duty, and good sense in trying to turn her into a kind of person I do not like and one that she was probably never able to become anyway? I know where it will end (and I do not like it. I do not like knowing it. But what can I do? Nothing. I know that much too). She is already what she is, already well on her way to being what she is destined to become, good and/or bad, and I don't think there is any longer a single thing I or anyone else can do at present to help her or change her. She is going to become a lonely, nervous, contemporary, female human being. (She is too smart to be dumb.) She is much smarter than my wife, which means for one thing (unlike my wife, so far) that she will sleep with other women's husbands (and that she will not be overly impressed, for long, with her own). I can't stop that. I cannot fight and nullify a whole culture, an environment, an epoch, a past (especially when it's my own past and environment as well as hers, and I myself am such a large part of hers), and I have made my own adjustment to them all so contemptibly. Why should I expect her (or even want her) to be different from other girls and women I know and like? (Except that they are not happy.) (But who is?) If she isn't really smoking a pack of cigarettes a day outside the house this year, she will smoke a pack of cigarettes a day outside the house next year. And if she isn't screwing for one or more of the boys she knows now, she'll be screwing for them later, and doing other commonplace sex stunts with them as well.

  "That's some thing to say about your own daughter," my wife remarks, with a grimace of revulsion.

  "Even if it's true?"

  "Yes."

  (And yet that is precisely the thing we both would say about her if she were not our own daughter, for my wife and I have engaged in this same derogatory speculation about most of my daughter's friends and about other people's daughters her own age and younger.)

  It is not a matter of morals anymore, or even of decision; it is only a matter of time. (And my wife, who has a romantic loyalty to the way things ought to be, ignores her own past. She prefers to forget that even we were doing it all to each other before we were married.)

  And what's the use of making believe it isn't? I know where my daughter is heading from the girls I know who have already been there. She will not go to church like my wife. (She goes now every third or fourth Sunday only to placate my wife and place her under an emotional debt for which she will later obtain exorbitant payment. She makes fun of the service while she is there and trades laughing, sidelong glances with my boy, who already finds the whole extraordinary ritual somewhat silly.) She will drink whiskey for a while instead; then stop; then start in again after she's been married several years and drink whiskey regularly from then on, like my wife. She will have two children or three and be divorced (unlike my wife), and she will marry a second time if she and the children are still young when the first marriage breaks up. She will smoke marijuana (who doesn't? Even Ivy League fraternity boys on the executive level at the company smoke it now, and so do I when it's proffered at any of the parties I attend in town without my wife), if she isn't doing so already; if she doesn't smoke pot and hash at least once in high school, she will smoke it when I send her away to college and everyone interesting she meets there is already smoking it. She will get laid. (There is just no other way to deal with that fact; and the best one can wish for her in this area is that she enjoy it wholesomely from the start. Although I find it hard to wish it. And I hope she never decides to confide in me about that.) She will go wild for a while (and think she is free), have all-night revels and bull sessions, complain about her teachers and curriculum requirements, have no interest in any of her academic subjects but get passing grades in all with very little work, if she doesn't drop out altogether because of sheer dejection and torpor (which she will eulogize into something mystic and exalted, like superior intelligence). She will experiment with pep pills (ups), barbiturates (downs), mescaline, and LSD, if LSD remains in vogue; she will have group sex (at least once), homosexual sex (at least once, and at least once more with a male present as a spectator and participant), be friendly with fags, poets, snobs, nihilists, and megalomaniacs, dress like other girls, have abortions (at least one, or lie and say she did. Just about every young girl I meet these days has had at least one abortion, or claims she did, and feels compelled to boast about it to me), and sleep, for a while, with Negroes, even though she will probably enjoy none of it, and might really not want to do any of it. (She is a strong-minded girl who is far too weak to withstand a popular trend.) If it isn't one type of self-destruc
tion and self-degradation she cultivates for a while, it is certain to be another; and she will emerge, if she is lucky, from this period of wanton profligacy and determined self-expression after two-and-one-half to four-and-two-thirds years feeling tense, worthless, spent, and remorseful, having searched everywhere and found nothing, with no ego at all, and pine for just one good, stable, interesting man to marry (like myself) and live happily ever after with. She will wish she had children. (She won't find that one man she wants, of course, because we're not that good.) I hope she stays away from addictive drugs so that she will be able to come out of it when she decides she wants to. I hope she doesn't get pregnant and have to have that abortion. I hope she doesn't insist on telling me about any of it. (I hope she never falls so deeply into some kind of trouble that I have to find out. I hope she doesn't get killed in a car crash.)

  I know this bumpy terrain too well, and I know she is already bouncing and tumbling through it downhill, with a will and momentum that cannot be stayed and which is not really entirely of her own choosing (no matter what she elects to believe). The die is cast (iacta alea est), although I don't know when her dice were rolled or who did the throwing. (I know I didn't.) I know I must have done some horribly damaging things to her when she was little, but I can't remember what those things were or when I did them. (I swear I did not want to. There have been times I wanted to hurt, I'll admit, but never seriously, I swear, and not permanently.) My daughter is already plunging downhill into her own tangled future, careening bruisingly from one obstruction right into another, and I can no more halt her descent than I could catch a boulder in an avalanche. (I would be destroyed also if I tried. She is on her way, she is no longer mine.) She is skidding and falling ahead resolutely out of control, into times of arid, incomprehensible turmoil that contain no enticement and offer nothing alluring, except having something else to do and getting free of us. ("Think positive, please," I have urged her tartly. "What do you want to be? What do you want to do?" If I were presented with those same questions, I would not have a good answer anymore either. A suicide? Why not? What's better? A filling station? No. But, what's the hurry? If I did not have girls to play around with and such serious problems at home to contend with, I think, sweet, bleeding Jesus, I would go out of my mind from this fucking job of mine.)

  And I tend to feel that she and I have come by now to a point of tacit agreement, our modus vivendi, to the mutual understanding that each of us has already written the other off, that neither of us really belongs to the other any longer, and that we are both merely keeping up appearances, going through perfunctory routines (as I wrote my mother off a long time before I buried her, and, as I now believe, she did the same with me. She saw through me, I think, dim and old and speechless as she was, and indulged and babied me correctly by letting me indulge and baby her as she wasted away in that nursing home during those final months of awkward visits in which I did nothing more useful than bring her highly seasoned things to eat and sit by her bedside for almost an hour gazing stealthily at my watch and babbling blithe, patent nonsense in which she showed little interest. That was all the solace I could produce for each of us in those final moments we were to spend with each other in all eternity. What a chance I had; we had, to say something. Nothing came out. I'll bet, now, that these inconvenient, unproductive visits were no more pleasant for her than they were for me. I made them because she was my mother; she endured them, I think, because I was her son. She was always perceptive and would see into me), biding our time, my daughter and I, as we go through the formalities of pretending to be still related. She lives here, follows loose procedures, and has dinner with us; I talk to her, buy her things, and will continue to profess to be interested in her until she is old enough to go away to college or move away somewhere else, as she never ceases stressing she wishes to do.

  "Someday soon," she says, "maybe this summer when school is over, I think I would like to live in a place of my own. An apartment or studio. In the city. Either by myself or with just one friend. And then in the fall, I think I would like to go away to boarding school. I don't really like any of my friends here."

  "I will help you," I reply noncommittally (and know instantaneously that it is the wrong thing for me to say. I had not intended this time to be unkind. But the words themselves carry a sting of rejection that makes me smart with compunction). "Seriously. I will help you find a decent, safe place, and I'll give you the money you need to pay for it and live there."

  "I meant it."

  "So do I."

  "You're making a joke out of it."

  "You'll need my help. You'll need me to sign the lease. You're too young."

  "I want to live my own life."

  "Who's stopping you?" I retort. (And now I know we are contending with each other in another one of those abrasive battles of wits.) "It seems to me you can, now that I've offered to pay the bills and said I'd let you go."

  I can outfox my daughter easily just about every time.

  (Even when I don't want to. I can't keep my mouth shut.) I don't know what else to do when we spar like that and she tries to show me she is as good as I am. (She isn't. Should I let her win?) She hurts me, and I hurt her; she strikes me, and I strike back. She likes to browbeat my wife and me into spending excessive sums of money on her for things that have not much value to her once she owns them (it is one method she has found of exercising power over us); I permit her to succeed, without resistance, comment, or complaint (it's a method I have found of outfoxing her. And it is easier for me in the long run to let these really rather negligible amounts of money go than to keep quarreling with her over them in a series of emotional discussions that might not be concluded otherwise. I win victories over her, I have found, by giving in to just about everything nettlesome she proposes). She thinks I am immature. It galls me to hear her say so (even when she says it with approval, when I am succeeding in making her laugh, it irks me to hear her tell me that I never fully grew up and that I am, in her opinion, still as playful and childish as a little boy. My boy is frequently distressed and offended when I try to make him and my daughter laugh in public, by singing, walking funny, or making unexpected, loud wisecracks in elevators, drugstores, or supermarkets), and I have taken to wondering (wishing) bitterly now and then after the most disruptive of these sessions with her, as I sit stewing resentfully in discontent and suffering so much sympathy for myself, why she does not oblige me by running far away from home like so many other unhappy girls her age (I guess I might be sorry if she did. I wouldn't miss her, I think, since we don't actually have that much to do with each other anymore, but I would have to go through such elaborate efforts to find her and so many clumsy conversations with other people about her having run away) and make things easier for me by leaving me in peace. And it is my wife, of all people, who brings me to a halt on these occasions, who makes me stop and reflect when I am feeling most murderous and sour, when I am out of my mind with wrath and aboil with a blazing yen for revenge, my wife who utters the words that shed some light, and even hope, and make me remember what I ought never allow myself to forget. She calls me stupid; she tells me I am rotten, self-centered, insane; that I am "no good" (and I regret again that I ever confided to my wife the words I think my mother tried to say to me in the nursing home the last time she spoke). It is my wife, maudlin, discouraged, repetitious, often inane, who, abused by my daughter and oppressive to her in return, berates me with grief and compassion and makes the surprising observation that puts my daughter back into vivid focus suddenly. In tears, crying quietly (I have no patience anymore with women who cry, and my wife knows it and tries not to), it is my wife who remonstrates with me, defending her: "She's just a little girl."

  My daughter is just a little girl, and I try to outfox her in argument. (I just can't help it.) I talk to her as I would to a grown-up, to Kagle, Green, Jane, or my wife, cleverly, cogently, glibly, bitingly. I react to her unpleasant moods as I would to some insulting adult my own age or
older. I try to embarrass and defeat her in debate: I want to top her always when we trade taunts and wisecracks, and I usually succeed. (If I can't be funnier, I can always get angrier and grasp my victory that way.) I am ashamed; she makes me forget she is only a child. It is very important to me that I beat her in all our contests. When we discuss or dispute anything, I must be the one to deliver the most intelligent opinions. (I compete with her.) If my daughter criticizes me or complains about me or makes a disparaging joke (even a very humorous and lighthearted one), I can be as affronted, hurt, arid unnerved as though some stinging jibe had been inflicted upon me by Green. (I will hide my feelings from both of them, although I suspect Green sees into my skull and knows everything that takes place there. I may even want to cry.) I will sulk (and it is almost as though my daughter is the adult and I am the child). Our roles are reversed; and it is somewhat eerie. (I depend on her. I wanted security from her; I do not get it. Instead, she troubles me with her problems. She takes my time. I do get some of this security from my little boy — so far. "Who do you like?" I can fire at him almost any time with a grin. "I love you, Daddy," he will cry with joy, and hurl himself forward to embrace me with an ardor that jars us both. But he is afraid of spiders and bees — so am I — and of crumbling ankle bones, and I sense much trouble ahead for both of us. I have never felt only sadness at the death of a friend or relative or the departure to a faraway place of someone I like, or even perhaps love. Always there has been simultaneously a marked undercurrent of relief, a release, a secret, unabashed sigh of "Well, at least that's over with now, isn't it?" I wonder how I would feel about the death of a child.) She still has power to wound me; I have power to wound her (so maybe we have not really written each other off entirely yet. Maybe that's why we want to, we are dangerous to each other. My wife can't hurt me. My daughter can). I don't want to hurt her. I do not want her to hurt me. I want her to like me. (I want Green to like me, and everyone else I meet in the whole world to like me, except the people I've already met, handled, found inconsequential, and forgot about.) I want her to obey and admire me (and will hit back brutally at her when she is rude or disparaging). I can't bear defiance from any member of my family (or from waiters or other public servants who are supposed to be subordinate, although I often keep silent with these others and nurse my injuries covertly). I want respect from my daughter and continual kindness. I don't get it.