Something Happened

by Joseph Heller

  "You're very smart. You're very bright and very clever. Maybe you should be a lawyer. That's a compliment. I don't pay you compliments often."

  "I'll say."

  "You like to force people into a corner. I'm the same way."

  "I think I try to be like you."

  "I was happier."

  "Was your family disappointed in you?"

  "I can't remember. Is yours?"

  "I don't know."

  "I think my mother was. But later on, not when I was a child. When I was older and moved away."

  "You never kiss me," my daughter says. "Or hug me. Or kid with me. Like other fathers."

  She has black, large shadows under her eyes, which are swollen, gummy, and red suddenly, and she looks more wretched than any other human being I have ever stared at before. (I want to wrench my gaze away.) "You stopped wanting me to kiss you," I explained softly with tenderness, feeling enormous pity for her (and for myself. Whenever I feel sorry for someone, I find that I also feel sorry for myself). "I used to. I used to want to hug you and kiss you. Then you began to pull away from me or draw your face back with a funny expression and make a disgusted sound. And laugh. As a joke at first, I thought. But then it became a habit, and you pulled away from me every time and made that same face and disgusted sound every time I tried to kiss you."

  "So now you've stopped trying."

  "It wasn't pleasant for me to be insulted that way."

  "Were you hurt?" There is that glitter of too much eagerness in her expression. "Did it make you unhappy?"

  "Yes." We are talking in monotones. (I don't remember when it really did begin to hurt me deeply each time she pulled away from my demonstrations of affection with signs of mock revulsion; and I also don't remember when it stopped bothering me at all.) "I was very unhappy. My feelings were hurt."

  "You never said so."

  "I wouldn't give you the satisfaction."

  "I was little then."

  "It was still very painful."

  "I was just a little girl then. Wouldn't you give up just a little bit of your pride to satisfy me, if that's what I wanted?"

  "No. I didn't."

  "Would you do it now?"

  "I'm not."

  "You won't?"

  "No. I don't think so. I don't think I'll ever let you get any satisfaction out of me that way."

  "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 ach
e 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: "Good girl, grandma!"

  It takes a moment for all of us to comprehend. And when we do, all simultaneously it seems, we roar with laughter and begin applauding and congratulating this little girl and ourselves exuberantly (and my daughter, seeing this response of raucous gaiety she has stimulated, bounces and rocks with glee so vigorously in her high chair that we fear she will fall out or topple over), for my mother (her hair was not all white yet, her face not all desiccated and creased) had merely lifted a glass to her lips and drained it of some strawberry punch. But my daughter was watching her. And when my daughter, who was herself being trained then by my wife and me to drink from a glass and faithfully rewarded with handclaps of delight and cries of "Good girl!" whenever she succeeded, saw my mother drink from a glass, she banged her own hands down with delight and approval and called out: "Good girl, grandma!"

  (Not long afterward, my mother could not drink from a glass unless someone held it to her lips.) It was a small thing, an incident of tiny surprise, but it filled the room with rolling waves of tremendous pleasure and warmth. (All of us there were happier people then and closer to each other than we have ever been since.) All of us rejoiced and united in merry praise of my daughter and made the sunniest predictions, and my daughter was so exhilarated by the sheer volume and intensity of such good feeling and elation that she sang out "Good girl, grandma!" two or three more times (no longer spontaneously, but with discerning calculation) and bounced and rocked on her throne of a high chair, giggling her hearty laugh, luxuriating in her triumph and in the looks and words of adoration directed toward her. (She knew. I was proud of her then, I remember. So pleased with what she had said. So devoted and protective.) All of us marveled breathlessly at her cheerful wit and beauty (she was our miracle) and foresaw sparkling attainments. And even my mother, who tended to be cynical toward everything superstitious, was convinced, she declared, that my daughter had been born under an exceedingly lucky star and would enjoy a brilliant, happy, unblemished future. My daughter really was a darling child, and everybody loved her then, even me.

  That was just about the last time I saw my daughter so happy. That was just about the last time I saw my mother happy. It was shortly afterward that I made my decision not to invite my mother to live with us, which meant she would have to live the rest of her life alone. Words were not necessary. The omission itself was an indelible statement (She never asked, never made me say so. She made it easy for me. She was very, kind to me about that.) Although I would have dinner with her every other week, at her apartment or ours, and on appropriate family holidays. (I would even drive her home. None of us wanted her, not my wife, not my daughter, not my sister, not me.) Not much after that, she suffered the first in a series of crippling brain spasms that robbed her at "the outset of her ability to speak and at the end of her ability to think or remember. (As my mother faded away, speechless, in one direction, Derek emerged, speechless, from the other.) And there you have my tragic chronicle of the continuity of human experience, of this great chain of being, and the sad legacy of pain and repudiation that one generation of Slocums gets and gives to another, at least in my day. (I got little. I gave back less.) I have this unfading picture in my mind (this candid snapshot, ha, ha), and it can never be altered (as I have a similar distinct picture of my hand on Virginia's full, loosely bound breast for the first time or the amazingly silken feel of the tissuey things between her legs the first time she let me touch her there), of this festive, family birthday celebration in honor of my little girl at which my old mother and my infant daughter are joyful together for perhaps the very last time. And there I am between them, sturdy, youthful, prospering, virile (fossilized and immobilized between them as though between bookends, without knowing how I got there, without knowing how I will ever get out), saddled already with the grinding responsibility of making them, and others, happy, when it has been all I can do from my beginning to hold my own head up straight enough to look existence squarely in the eye without making guileful wisecracks about it or sobbing out loud for help. Who put me here? How will I ever get out? Will I ever be somebody lucky? What decided to sort me into precisely this slot? (What the fuck makes anyone think I am in control, that I can be any different from what I am? I can't even control my reveries. Virginia's tit is as meaningful to me now as my mother's whole life and death. Both of them are dead. The rest of us are on the way. I can almost hear my wife, or my second wife, if I ever have one, or somebody else, saying: "Won't you wheel Mr. Slocum out of the shade into the sunlight now? I think he looks a little cold."

  A vacuum cleaner that works well is more important to me than the atom bomb, and it makes not t
he slightest difference to anyone I know that the earth revolves around the sun instead of vice versa, or the moon around the earth, although the measured ebb and flow of the tides may be of some interest to mariners and clam diggers, but who cares about them? Green is more important to me than God. So, for that matter, is Kagle and the man who handles my dry cleaning, and a transistor radio that is playing too loud is a larger catastrophe to me than the next Mexican earthquake. "Someday"--it must have crossed my mother's mind at least once, after my denial and rejection of her, since she was only human--"this will happen to you." Although she was too generous to me ever to say so. But I know it must have crossed her mind.) "When I was a baby," my daughter asks, "did you ever play with me?"

  "Sure," I reply. "What do you think?" A warning shudder of some kind shoots through me at her question, turning my skin icy.

  "Did you ever pick me up and toss me into the air," she inquires, "or give me piggyback rides, or tell me stories before I went to bed, or carry me around in your arms and talk baby talk to me and say very funny things?"

  "All the time," I answer. "Of course, I did." Her look of doubt shocks me. "What kind of monster do you think I am?"

  "You don't do anything like that now."

  "You're a big girl now. I always yell out hello when I come home, don't I? You don't even answer."

  "Did I have parties when I was little? Birthday parties?"

  "You sure did. Very beautiful parties. Mommy went to a lot of trouble to make them very good ones."

  "I don't remember them."

  "Yes, you do. You mention them."

  "I mean when I was very little. And all our relatives came and made a big fuss over me and gave me expensive presents?"

  "Yes. I used to play with you a lot. I used to go right in to see you every day as soon as I came home from work. You were the first person I wanted to see. I always played with you."

  "Mommy told me you did. But I didn't believe her."

  "What kind of person do you think I am?"

  "You're never the same. You always change. Sometimes you laugh at something I do. Sometimes you get angry and annoyed when I do exactly the same thing and want me to go away. I don't like it when you drink. I never know what to expect."