Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"You must be very disappointed in me?"

"Why?"

"I'll bet you are. You and Mommy both."

"Why should we be?"

"I know she is. I'm not good at anything."

"Like what? Neither am I."

"I've got a greasy scalp and skin. And pimples. I'm not pretty."

"Yes, you are."

"I'm too tall and fat."

"For what?"

"I'm not even sure I want to be. I don't know what I'd do even if I was good at anything."

"Like what?"

"Like art. I can't paint or sculpt. I'm not very smart. I'm not good at music. I don't study ballet."

"I don't study ballet either."

"It's not funny!"

"I'm not trying to be." (I was trying to be.) "We're not good at those things either."

"I'm not even rich."

"That's my fault, not yours."

"At least that would be something. I could be proud of that. Are we ever going to be? I mean really rich, like Jean's father, or Grace."

"No. Unless you do it."

"I can't do anything. Should I be ashamed?"

"Of what?"

"Because we're poor."

"We aren't poor."

"Of you."

"At least you're frank."

"Should I be?"

"What would you expect me to say?"

"The truth."

"Of me? I hope not. Being ashamed is something you either are or aren't, not something you do because you should or shouldn't. I do well enough. Jean is ashamed of her father because he's mean and stupid, and thinks I'm better. Isn't she? So is Grace. I think Grace likes me a lot more than she does her father."

"I'm never going to be anything."

"Everybody is something."

"You know what I mean."

"Like what?"

"Famous."

"Few of us are."

"I don't blame you. I don't blame you for being disappointed in me."

"We're not. Do you think we'd be disappointed in you just because you aren't good at anything?"

"Then you never even expected anything of me, did you?" she accuses, with a sudden surge of emotion that catches me by surprise.

"Now you're not being fair!" I insist.

"It's not funny."

"Honey, I —»

But she is gone, disappearing intransigently with a look of mournful loathing as I put my arms out to comfort her (and I am left again by myself in my study with my empty hands outstretched in the air, reaching out toward nothing that is there).

There is something I have done to her (or am doing to her now) for which she refuses to forgive me, and I don't know what that something is (or even if it is to her I am doing it. I know she acts angry and hurt when I am drunk or even a little high. She does not like it either when I flirt with her friends). I try to remember when it began, this mordant, stultifying sorrow into which she sneaks away to bury herself so often. I know it was nothing that happened this year, for she was not much different last year, and it was nothing that happened last year for she was not much different then than the year before. (She is not much different at fifteen from what she was at twelve and not much different at twelve from what she was at nine.) Almost as far back as I can recall, in fact, she has always been pretty much the same person she is now, only smaller. And yet, there must have been a break somewhere, an end and a starting point, a critical interval in her development of some breadth and duration that I cannot remember or did not notice (just as there must certainly have been a similar start of metamorphosis somewhere back in my own past that I took no notice of then and cannot remember now), for she was an infant once (indeed she was, I do remember that), a playful, chubby, gleeful, curious, active, giggling, responsive baby, easily pleased, quickly interested, and happily diverted. (Whatever happened to it, that baby she was? Where did it go? Where is it now? And how did it get there? Such beings, such things, just don't happen one day and stop happening the next. Do they? What happened to the lovely little me that once was? I remember certain things about him well and know he used to be.) What happened to her early childhood, that unmarked waste between the infant we had then and the daughter we have now and have kept reasonably good track of? (Where is it? Where was it? When — I can remember intact everything in her history, and I don't know — did it take place? I know this much: there was a cheerful baby girl in a high chair in my house once who ate and drank with a hearty appetite and laughed a lot with spontaneous zest; she isn't here now; and there is no trace of her anywhere. And I am sure of this much: there was a little boy who surprised his big brother with a girl in a coal shed once and had a lump of coal thrown at him, and opened a door once on his father and mother embracing in bed, or thinks he did; the mother and father are dead, and the little boy is missing; I don't know where he came from; I don't know where I went; I don't know all that's happened to me since. I miss him. I'd love to know where he's been.) Where in her lifetime (and in mine too, of course) was that legendary happy childhood I used to hear so much about (those carefree days of joy and sunshine, ha, ha, that birthright) that she is entitled as a human being to be enjoying even right now (along with all those other moldering, moody, incapacitated kids her own age who are her friends) and should be at liberty to look back upon fearlessly later with intense and enriching gratification (like my wife, whose childhood was really like some kind of suffocating ashland until I swept into the picture and carried her away from unhappiness into her present life of uninterruptable bliss. Ha, ha) when life turns old, threadbare (teeth come out, toes abrade, arches begin to ache and spinal columns too, and shoes no longer fit), dry, and sour? Where is that pleasurable childhood everybody keeps thinking everybody else has? I know I didn't have one (although I might have thought I did and could have thought I knew why I didn't in case I thought I didn't). If I was unhappy, I could always tell myself it was because my father was dead. If my daughter is unhappy, she might feel it's because her father is alive!

(Freud or not, I have never been able to figure out how I really did feel about my mother, whether I liked her or not, or even felt either way about her at all. I think I felt nothing. I had the same feeling, or absence of feeling most of the time, toward the other members of my family and my best friend, with whom I am not on very friendly terms anymore. We grew tired of each other, and I am relieved. He needed money; I couldn't give it generously more than once. I have never been sure I ever really cared for anyone in this whole world but myself and my little boy. But I still do have these grief-filled dreams about my mother. There's a part of me I can't find that is connected to her still as though by an invisible live wire transmitting throbs. It refuses to die with her, and will continue to live inside me, probably, for as long as I survive. In my final coma, I suppose, even if I live to be a million, my self-control will lapse and I will die moaning: "Ma. Momma. Momma." Which is pretty much the way I began. I feel lucky sometimes that I don't remember my father, that he died without making an impression upon me, or I might be having dreams about him, too. In case I ain't having them already. He might have fucked up my life even more just by being around if he had lived, just the way I seem to be fucking up everyone else's around me. Even though I don't want to. I swear to Christ I never consciously wanted to. Maybe I am having bad dreams about him anyway and just don't know it. Soon after I die, nobody will ever think about him again. And soon after my children die, nobody will ever think of me.)

I had no happy childhood, if I recall correctly, and neither did my wife (who prefers to recollect incorrectly, when I let her), and my boy, at nine, though he laughs a lot and is intent on making many good jokes, is running into stormy weather already, even though I do everything I can to try to make things easier for him. (With my daughter, I've stopped trying. There does not seem to be any way left to propitiate her, except to allow her to continue forcing us to buy expensive things for her and yield her those minute, transitory victories of ego that evaporate in an instant and dump her right back down where she was, in that same vacant, unlighted predicament of not knowing what to do next, no different than before. It was easier for me to spend the eight or eighty dollars on her than to argue with her why I shouldn't.) I forage through experience to try to discover when my daughter was different from now, and I must go very far back indeed to find her radiant in a high chair (she was a gorgeous, lovable child, and I feel a wistful pang of love and regret when I remember) at a birthday party in her honor, when she was either two or three years old. (What a difference there is between a baby and the person it becomes.) She is our only child. Relatives from both sides of the family are present. My wife and I are younger. My mother is alive. Many people have assembled. The apartment bustles. Our attention is dispersed. We are absorbed in each other, and my little girl is forgotten until she suddenly strikes the tableboard of the high chair sharply with the plastic pink party spoon clutched in her dimpled fist and calls out clearly and gloriously: