Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

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.)