Something Happened by Joseph Heller
She envies all other girls she knows for one quality or another (this one's figure, that one's hair, the next one's money, the next one's brains or talents) and does not know who it is she should want to emulate. (Now that she is tall for her age, she feels mammoth and clumsy. When she was shorter than most of her friends, she was convinced that only very tall girls were ever considered beautiful. When she was slender, she felt flat and sexless. Now that she is overweight a bit and has large developing breasts, she feels ungainly and believes that boys only fall in love with girls who are slim and have straight bellies.) This might be funny, if it were not so real for her. She cannot decide, for example, whether she wants her breasts (tits) to be larger or smaller. (This might be funny too, if she did not brood over the matter mournfully for long, silent stretches during which she is very much withdrawn. Sometimes she sits with us and is worlds away.
"A penny for your thoughts," I used to say.
Now I get no answer to this gambit, just a look of disdain.)
She feels she is not much good for anything; and she isn't. But who cares? Who cares if she does not have any special aptitudes, talents, beauty, or social skills? She cares. (And perhaps I care. And my wife. And perhaps we have let her know we care. If we said to her that we did not care about things like that, she would say to us that we did not care about her at all. She knows all the tricks. How can I tell my daughter she is the most marvelous, beautiful teen-age girl in the whole world when we both know she isn't? What answer can I give when she asks me how she compares to other girls who outshine her in one way or another?) She cares a great deal. (And so, perhaps, do I.) "Are you very disappointed in me?" she asks periodically.
"No, of course not," I answer. "Why should I be?"
She knows many people and is lonely, and almost never seems to have a good time. (This is infuriating to us, her obdurate refusal to be happy and have fun, although we try not to look at it in just that light. But I know I have been so enraged with her at times for having nothing to do that I have wanted to seize her fiercely by the shoulders, my darling little girl, and shake her, pummel her frenziedly on the face and shoulders with the sides of both my fists, and scream: "Be happy--God dammit! You selfish little bitch! Can't you see our lives depend on it?"
I have never done that, of course, or even mentioned the impulse to my wife, who would be repelled by the brutal ugliness of the urge and regard it as abnormal and depraved--even though I know she experiences this same brutal and abnormal impulse herself. And about my wife's own endless nigglings with my daughter, I have commented: "I hope you understand that it's really your own happiness you're thinking about, and not hers."
"That isn't true." My wife was adamant in objection. "Don't you think I want her to be happy? I'm thinking of her!"
"Balls," I replied, or wanted to.
Because I know it was my wife who sent her into a paroxysm of weeping by suggesting to her, apropos of nothing else we were talking about, that she have a sweet sixteen party; for it has been an unmentioned secret that she never knows enough boys and girls she likes at any one time, or who like her, to compose a decent celebration for her, and that this is one of the poignant sources of her unhappiness.) She thinks of herself as unpopular. She makes friends easily and discards them callously. She is still shy with boys. (She has already had, I think, at least one bad sex experience of some kind and is looking forward apprehensively to having some more.) She is not comfortable with boys in the house when I am there. Was my wife as innocent in her proposal as she seemed, or did she make the suggestion with sly, and perhaps unconscious, cruelty? I don't know. Probably she was innocent, for my wife tends to look back with nostalgia on what she remembers as the enjoyable occasions of her own girlhood. My wife reveled like a princess in the sweet sixteen party her own mother made for her, or thinks she did. (Perhaps it was the last time in her life she was allowed to feel important.) My wife is one of these warm-hearted, sentimental human beings who are drawn to see some good in everyone (when I let her) and to project the rosiest colorations onto past experiences, with the result that her recollections are often inaccurate. She likes to think she loved her mother, but she knows she hated her. Her girlhood was tortured, not happy. She hates her younger sister and always has. (At least I didn't begin hating my mother until she became a burden to me. I still have sad, yearning dreams about my mother in which I am young and she is going away. And there are tears drying in the corners of my eyes when I open them.) My daughter doesn't really like her friends very much (she shuffles them in and out of her good graces arbitrarily), and neither do I, with the exception of one classmate half a year older who is slim and pretty and secretive and who, I am just about convinced, is flirting with me, leading me on. (I encourage her.) She is not, my daughter tells me, a virgin anymore. She has a knowing, searching air about her that sets her apart from the others. She keeps her look on me when I am near, and I keep mine on hers. I'm not sure which one of us started it. I think it was me. (Perhaps we recognize something, the same thing, in each other, and she thinks that I am flirting with her, which may be true, but if I am, I am only kidding. I hope I'm only kidding.) Sixteen would be too young, even for me. (Or would it? Someone is going to be laying that provocative, pretty, hot-pantsed little girl soon, if someone isn't doing it already, and why shouldn't it be me, instead of some callow, arrogant wise guy of eighteen or twenty-one, who would not relish her as much as I would, regale and intoxicate her with the spell of flattery and small attentions I could weave, or savor the piquant degeneracy of it nearly as much as I would be certain to. Although I'm not so sure I would want to tell anyone about this one.) No, sixteen is too young (young enough to be my daughter, ha, ha), and I turn irritable whenever my daughter comes out of her room to chat with us wearing only a nightgown or a robe that she doesn't always keep fully closed on top or bottom. (I don't know where to look.) I either walk right out without explanation (seething with anger but saying nothing) or command her in a brusque, irascible voice to put a robe on or put her legs together, or keep the robe she does have on closed around the neck and down below her knees if she wants to stay. She is always astounded by my outburst; her eyes open wide. (She does not seem to understand why I am behaving that way. I cannot explain to her; I can't even explain it to my wife. I find it hard to believe my daughter is really that naive. But what other interpretation is there?) Afterwards, I am displeased with myself for reacting so violently. (But there is little I can say to apologize. Where am I supposed to look when my tall and budding buxom daughter comes in to talk to me wearing almost nothing, sprawls down negligently with her legs apart, her robe open? How am I supposed to feel? Nobody ever told me.) They are all morbidly alike, the girls and boys in this somber social circle of adolescents of which my daughter is a part (none are happy), much more so than the girls and boys and men and women I work with in the company (although, to them, we might seem all alike). None are well-adjusted. (I am well-adjusted, which is not exactly the best recommendation for adjustment, is it?) They manifest defiance, displeasure, lassitude, and indifference. They generally have nothing they want to do. There is nothing they want to be when they grow up; they have no idols. (Neither have I. There is now no one else I would rather be than me--even though I don't really like me and am not even sure who it is I am.) They are not comfortable with adults (me); they pose and attitudinize when they are with us; they strive to be as reticent and solitary as moles. They do not want us to hear what they say when they talk to each other. I used to believe they were always feigning; now I believe they really are as cynical and disheartened as they think they are pretending to be. They don't want to be doctors when they grow up, or aviators, or heavyweight champions of the world. They don't really want to be lawyers. None of them wants to be President of the United States, Chief of Staff, Chairman of the Board of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., or me. (Why should they? There are enough other people to do that kind of work. Me, for instance. I will do it because by now I have noth
Some of the girls and some of the boys always do seem to be having an easier time of it than the others, but this only lasts a little while for any of them, and even my daughter will surface buoyantly every now and then and whiz along vivaciously until something happens (sometimes that something is so elusive that it cannot even be identified; it is almost as though she suddenly runs out of her supply of joy the way a car runs out of gas) that breaks her morale and dissolves her confidence, and she sinks back sluggishly and safely into her accustomed mire of regret. Some of the boys she goes with swagger and boast a good deal more than the others, but the worldly self-assurance they affect is transparently unreal. If not, if they really were as tough and egotistical and domineering and amoral as they wish to appear, I would find them obnoxious and insufferable, for I have seen my daughter with these boys in crowded cars, and I did not like what I saw, or imagined. (But what difference does that make?) What difference does it make, really, what she is or isn't doing already with those boys I could so easily dislike, and even perhaps with girls (just about all of the young girls I do it with these days brag now about having done it, at least once, with other girls too), in those crowded cars she drives in to pizza joints with loud music (I don't really like most of their music, although I sometimes pretend to just to please my daughter) or to parties with the same loud music in other people's darkened houses--as long as they don't drive recklessly and get killed or maimed in an automobile accident?
(What difference does it make anymore who is screwing whom?) It is already too late for anything else. It is too late, I think, for me to stop her or change her, and I would not know anymore how to try. Something happened to both my children that I cannot explain and cannot undo. I can't be good to them, it seems, even when I want to.
"Listen," I say to both of them anxiously, practically pleading with them to allow me to help them. "What do you want to be when you grow up? Tell me. What do you want to do?"
"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 ri