Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

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-destruction 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."