Something Happened

by Joseph Heller

  "Maybe I do," he hints enigmatically.

  "Then why don't you try?"

  "Maybe I know I can't," he replies, with a trace of a mysterious smile (and it is impossible for me to know, as I study him, whether he means what he implies or is merely practicing slyly some cryptic and discerning and unpleasant game he has devised to confound me. Is he clever enough for that?).

  At least we do know he is smug: on days when he does do as well as he hopes to in gym, when no one makes fun of him or criticizes, or when nothing at all happens to him there (or in public speaking), he comes home confident, jubilant, and composed, swaggering almost conceitedly with an exalted view of himself, so it all isn't all bad. On days, though, when something bad happens, he turns cranky and anguished and declares he hates things and people, so it isn't all good either. He sits motionless, then rises abruptly to move about in rage and shame that he only expresses in dribs, yearning (we see) to cry, but restraining himself unhappily. It is pitiful to watch him (my wife and I want to cry too), and infuriating (I want to yell at him in displeasure, perhaps beat him, for reacting so disconsolately). He doesn't want to talk about unpleasant events beyond a certain point. And he continues to try as hard as he can at chinning, pushups, and rope climbing. He improves, but slowly (and he probably is already gazing ahead in discouragement to high school and more chinning, pushups, and rope climbing and to swimming nude with others in the chlorinated pool. He probably will not want to swim nude. I know I didn't. If he is like so many of the rest of us, he will think that his cock is small and in danger of vanishing. I will have to tell him, if he lets me, to stare at it in the mirror if he wants to see it look as large as it appears to other people. I will not go into the phenomenon of foreshortening, unless he asks me. He does not like having his hair cut, even when we leave it long, and is afraid of having his teeth pulled or his gums injected with Novocain. If he had to have his tonsils taken out now, he would probably refuse to cooperate and would have to be lugged to the hospital by force. We clipped them from him at the right time. He doesn't like injections of any kind, except those in the side of his ass when he really does have a red throat and is too disoriented by fever to remember he's afraid). And Forgione is pleased with his "hubba, hubba, hubba," for my boy, under Forgione's tutelage, tries hard now, competes vigorously, and has developed (or at least displays for Forgione, Forgione's assistant, and others in the gymnasium) that good competitive spirit.

  "You didn't tell me," my boy murmurs to me accusingly, "that you went to see him."

  "How did you find out?"

  "I did."

  "Who told you?"

  "I did. You told me. Just now. By answering me. I guessed. You did. Didn't you?"

  "You ought to be a lawyer too."

  "I figured it out."

  "You wanted me to do something, didn't you? I know you did."

  "You didn't tell me," he answers peevishly. "So I'd know."

  "What else did you think I could do?"

  He shrugs.

  "You aren't being fair to me now. If you don't tell me what else you think I could do."

  "I don't know."

  "You're glad I did. Aren't you now?"

  And soon, almost imperceptibly, because things have worked out so well for him, he moves back to worrying again about going to school on days when he has gym (and public speaking), worrying that he might perform poorly and his team might not win because of him. Because he has shown a good competitive spirit and a true will to win, he is now afraid of losing. He does not want the blame. He is afraid of making errors in baseball, mistakes in basketball, stumbling or dropping the beanbag in relay races, and getting part way up the rope and being unable to come down, ever, without falling. And soon, at breakfast on days he has gym, he is depressed and pasty again and complaining of nausea and red throats. He has bellyaches and doesn't want to eat, and I am right back where I started from. (I get nauseated when I see him this way, and I don't eat either.) "Do you want me to speak to Forgione again?"

  "No, I'll manage."

  "I will if you want me to."

  "I don't."

  "Or to someone else. I can go to the principal."

  "No, don't. I'll manage."

  "Big shot," I respond with a laugh, trying to buoy him up. "You don't even know what manage means."

  "No. But I will, anyway."

  "Okay."

  And he does. So far.

  (While I watch.)

  (And wait.)

  He is waiting too.

  (For what? He doesn't know. I don't have to ask.)

  The pity of it is that (instead of waiting) he could probably be having a good time if he would only stop waiting and were allowed to develop and do things his own way. But he has never been allowed to (I wasn't allowed to either, and nobody else I can think of was); he is not being allowed to; and he will never be allowed to, not by me, by my wife, by himself, or by others. (I wonder what we would all grow up to be if we were never ordered about by anybody else. Apes, probably. Instead of babies.) The "others" are all virtually superfluous by now, even Forgione: there is enough right here at the family hearth to shackle, twist, and subdue him (and render him and all the rest of us all the more susceptible to haphazard, unfriendly "others" like Forgione and Horace White, with whom I really have little contact, and whom I know I would be afraid of even if I did not have to be. He's got the whammy on me. We were put into that relationship from the beginning, before we even met. And he is a simpleton. Horace White is a simpleton; yet, I was prepared to kneel before him even before I knew he existed. What has happened to my boy and me to make us so subservient?). Only my daughter has never attempted to improve, damage, educate, or train him (just to dominate and manipulate him) once she succeeded in tearing her way through that draining, turbulent period of stunned and bitter wrath that raged through her like a flame at his having been brought into her home and family at all (even though she had been taught and promised for months that a brand-new baby brother or sister for her, and a baby for us also, would be coming into the house soon and wasn't she happy and lucky? The irony is that she would have felt equally deprived if we had permitted her to remain an only child. She did not want Derek either and blames herself for his affliction--at times--because she cursed him silently before he was delivered and wished him harm). She used to try to injure my boy when he was an infant in his crib or lying prone or supine, unable yet to walk or squirm away to safety, on our bed or on our blanket on the floor or sitting in his stroller or his high chair or his playpen. (She tried to push him over and he did not know what was happening.) When he was learning to walk she would knock him down if we were not alert enough to stop her. She would try to put her fingers in his eyes. Now she's stopped. They get along well now, affectionately (unless she is with friends and does not want him around), and almost never have any serious disagreements. (He gives in readily.) My daughter does not like me to shout at him: she cannot bear it when I lose my temper with him and begin shouting, and she will often scurry away in flight with her head down or whirl upon me hysterically and harangue me (and then scurry away before I can reply and defend myself. That's another tactic of hers, and I am often caught unawares and find myself shouting abuse or explanations into empty space after she has sped away. That makes me angrier). Sometimes when I do lose my temper with him (usually without realizing I have done so until afterward) and begin to bark demeaning, threatening remarks (I have called him "sissy" more than once merely by warning him contemptuously not to act like one, although I never intend to do just that while I am doing it and will detest myself afterward for having done so and seek some face-saving way of apologizing to him. Usually by letting him see I am no longer angry with him and offering to buy him something expensive I think he wants), shouting, probably (without knowing I am doing so and denying that I am if charged), with my lips deranged, probably, and my teeth bared and my whole red or bloodless face glaring at him, probably, my daughter will fling herself between us heedl
essly to shield him from me, holding her ground there to defend him against me and actually start to cry.

  "What are you doing to him?" she will demand, with tears forming and spilling from the corners of her eyes. "Why can't you leave him alone?"

  She does not yield so readily to emotion when my fight is with her. When my fight is with her, she tries (with fortitude, perversity, with face-saving spite) not to let me make her cry (not to give me the satisfaction of seeing I can affect her even remotely. I am a matter of "supreme indifference" to her), as though that is what I want to do. (It often is.) I always desist as soon as I see I can, curbing my own spiteful intentions and drawing back from her mercifully.

  (Nothing is suppressed in our family.)

  (In our family, everything is suppressed.)

  On the other hand, my daughter can be cruel to my boy when she is with her friends and feels no need to show him off, shutting him out rudely, discouraging especially those slouching, mumbling teen-age boys from kidding with him or tossing a ball or paying any attention to him at all. She does not want him around when she is with her friends. (She does not like to share.) She will separate them and chase him away, snapping: "Don't bother with him. Don't let him bother you. Go back to your room."

  He does not know what is happening to him when this does. He does not know what is happening to him now. He wants to be like other boys he thinks, mistakenly, we want him to be like. He thinks he is not now the person anyone wants him to be. We don't want him to be like everybody else. We want him to be like we want him to be (but we haven't spelled that out yet even to ourselves. So how could he know?). We want him to be different, and superior. (But we also want him to be not much different. Frankly, I don't know what I want him to be--except no trouble. He does not know yet what he's supposed to want to be when he grows up, except that he now knows he is not supposed to want to work in a filling station. And I can't guide him. A doctor? He has no idols. A lawyer? I wouldn't want that. I have no models to give him. James Pierpont Morgan II? August Belmont, Jr. III? Clara Bow? At least I had people like Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Joe Louis, and Cordell Hull I could want to be when I grew up, although I'm glad now that I didn't grow up to be any of them. But I still don't know yet what I want to be when I do grow up. Or even what I should want to be. I'd like to be rich. I know this much: I don't want to be President of the United States. They have bad reputations, and ruin neighborhoods.) So he struggles manfully (childishly), doggedly, dazedly to change himself into everybody else his age. He wishes to be able to conform successfully without effort or thought. He wants to wear, at nine years old, what other boys of nine or ten are wearing (even though he might not like what they are wearing) and experience the same enthusiasms and frustrations. (He really doesn't care about baseball anymore, I feel, and also feel he doesn't know that yet. One time when I was very young and had doubts, probably, that I would ever grow larger or older--there must have been a time, I think I recall, when I was unable to believe I would ever be any different from the lonely, isolated little boy I was then--I wanted to be a jockey in a cerise and white cap and ride race horses, even though I had never been on a horse and was too frightened even to step near the ponderous, spiritless ones that delivered ice or milk or laundry or dropped dead in the street, like people--I never could feel friendly with my brother's wife after he died and never see her now, am not clear in my mind anymore just where in New Jersey or Long Island she and her two children, my niece and my nephew, live--and soon attracted dense, buzzing clouds of green and blue pot-bellied flies. As a jockey in a red and white cap astride a huge, speeding, lunging thoroughbred, I think I felt I could trick everyone into believing I was a tiny man instead of a little boy. I'm glad I never became a jockey. I would be too heavy now and would not win many races.) And this is unfortunate in many ways (not for me, but for him) because there is so much about him entirely his own that is profoundly endearing (there is also much about him that he would be better off without, and maybe he will be able to shed that all someday, although I doubt by now that he will be able to shed any of it. By now I feel we remain pretty much the same. We grow scar tissue instead, or corns and callouses in our soul that cover, and we forget, when we can, what's there. Until occasions remind us); and what there is about him that is good, I'm afraid, we all (not my daughter, but me, my wife, Forgione, the world, and even those dusty, ghostly rocks and craters familiar to us on the moon now, connoting dark times and transparent specters) collaborate to destroy. (Even Derek exerts a haunting effect upon him, and tall buildings. If we were stones instead of people we would have an effect upon him, perhaps that same one. Everything does. Perhaps we are stones to him. I do not know how he thinks of us. I know I do not always think of my children as children. I know I remember my father now and other dim adult males from my early childhood, and even my big brother then when he was alive and I was small, as figures of voiceless stone capable of swift, unobservable journeys from one locale to another and communicating always obscure intimations of awful, indefinable things about to occur.) He has a lively, imaginative taste for the comic, some courage, and a warm heart; and even the colored maid we have now, who pads about on tiptoe in my presence and is rarely valiant enough to talk in anything louder than a faltering mumble, will grin at something unpredictably funny he has said or done and blurt out impulsively: "That boy. Oh, that boy of yours. He is really something."

  We think so too (we are somewhat vain and braggarty about those precocious intuitions and idiosyncracies of his in which we can take proprietary delight) and (like rigid, high-powered machines not really in charge of ourselves) operate automatically to change him--to harden him, soften him, smarten him, desensitize him--lying to him and to ourselves (as I lied, and knew I was lying, when I filed my mother away into that repulsive nursing home that I described to her and others with false energy as being beautiful, new, and comfortable as a modern hotel) that it is for his own good. (And not for ours.) "Be good," we fire at him. "Don't be afraid. You can do it. Try. Try harder. You can be anything you want to be. Don't do that. You're getting me angry."

  (Maybe it is for his own good.)

  (And maybe it isn't.)

  And even the nurse we have for Derek now, who is considerate to none of us (and especially dislikes my daughter, who is defiant and impolite to her and never truckles at all), not even to Derek anymore, I suspect, singles my boy out periodically for loud flattery that embarrasses him and clumsy, possessive hugs that make him miserable as he sees her scowling reproachfully at the rest of us in taunting contrast, even though she does not approve of the way he acts toward Derek either.

  "It's no wonder he doesn't want to play with him," she has censured the rest of us in his presence, "when he sees how the rest of you treat him. None of you want to play with him."

  My boy does not like Derek's nurse or the harsh spotlight of her praise. (I think he senses he is being used by her to get at us.) He is actually afraid of her, as he is afraid of most of his teachers and the school nurse, and wishes, without evincing any of his dislike (he is always afraid to show antagonism to anyone), to avoid all possibilities for conversation with her and to escape her pinches, touches, and embraces. (He finds her obnoxious.) "Get rid of her," I decide on cranky impulse and snap at my wife.

  She sighs. "I don't want to have to start again."

  "She isn't even good to him. She doesn't keep him clean."

  "Where should I go?"

  "Get someone young this time, can't you?"

  "Where?"

  "I wish we could get someone who would really like him. You can't. I know. They don't want to have to take care of him either."

  "Maybe I should do it. Maybe I should devote my whole life to taking care of him."

  "Holy you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Become a nun."

  "Maybe I should."

  "Not if you think about it that way. You don't mean it. You'd probably be worse to him than any of them."


  "Fuck you."

  "I like the way you swear now," I joke. "You say 'Fuck you' much better than you used to."

  "Practice. You taught me."

  "T'm proud."

  "Only with you. You make it very easy to say 'Fuck you' to you."

  "You do it better too."

  "Any complaints?"

  "Not at this moment."

  "Well fuck you again."

  She rolls away from me. We are nearly naked. I continue laughing.

  "I'm trying to," I tell her, coaxing her back. "I'm trying to get you to."

  "Maybe we should start thinking about sending him away someplace."

  "Maybe we should stop talking about him now."

  "I want to."

  "No, I said."

  "We'll have to, sooner or later. Think about it, I mean. You never want to think about it."

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  "We'll have the money now. Won't we?"

  "You don't understand, do you?"

  "I'm asking."

  "If I decide to take the job. I've got money enough for that anyway. It isn't money."

  "Maybe you should decide to take it."

  "I don't want to talk about it now."

  "I'm talking about the job."

  "I don't want to talk about that, either. No, you're not. You're not talking about the job. You lie a lot about yourself."

  "We have to talk about it sometime. We're going to have to decide. Stop a minute, will you? You can't keep ducking away forever."

  "I can till I die."

  "Don't joke about it."

  "And leave you with him?"

  "Don't joke about that, either."

  "And her. And him too. Won't you be busy."

  "None of that's funny."

  "Don't you want me to die?"