Something Happened

  "All the time now."

  "I don't always mean to."

  "You're always so irritable."

  "I'm irritable all the time now. I'm always tired."

  "Maybe you're working too hard."

  "I don't work hard. I worry a lot."

  "Maybe you should try to get an easier job."

  "Don't you ever listen to me?"

  "One where you wouldn't have to work so hard."

  "I said I don't work hard."

  "Well, maybe you should try to get another job."

  "I am trying to get another job."

  "Will it be harder or easier?"

  "Easier, I think. More responsibility, but much less pressure. More money. More worry. I don't know."

  "Will you be able to make speeches?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You know what I mean. Speeches."

  "Yeah. All I want."

  "I hate Jack Green," she says.

  "Why?" I retort suspiciously.

  "He's a lousy bastard," she declares passionately. "I'll never forgive him for what he did to you."

  "What?" I ask, feeling my face burn suddenly and a tense, protective anger begin to rise.

  "Not letting you make that speech at the convention last year, like everyone else. I bet he's jealous of you, that's why. I'm surprised Arthur Baron let him do that to you."

  "It wasn't that important."

  "I know how hard you worked on it. I know how small it must have made you feel."

  "Are you doing this deliberately?"

  "But how did it make you feel?"

  "I don't feel any bigger being reminded of it now."

  "See?" she says. "You're too sensitive to things like that. Maybe you shouldn't take this new job if you have to work too hard and worry more."

  "Maybe I won't. To hell with the money and the prestige and the success."

  "I don't think you ought to travel more."

  "I don't think you can keep your mind on one subject for more than one minute at a time, can you?"

  "That's just the kind of remark you would make to me. That's just the kind of remark you would make to her, too."

  "I made it to you. Let's not fight now. I didn't come in here for that this time. You and I can fight later."

  "I'm not trying to fight."

  "Then stop needling me like an oh-so-innocent bitch. Or that I'm too dumb to know what you're doing. That speech is none of your business. Why bring it up all the God-damned time if it really makes you so angry? You do it just to remind me."

  "And I'm not angry at what you said just now about my mind. I know you think I'm the dumbest person who ever lived. And I'm not trying to pick on you now. But did you hear how you sounded just now? That's just the kind of thing you would say to her. That's just the way you would sound to her. Try to remember when you talk to her that she's only fifteen and a half years old."

  My wife is right.

  I do not talk to my daughter as I should to a child, or would if she were somebody else's. I'm not nice to her. If my little boy misbehaves, I respond to him dotingly as a careless, mischievous, or overtired little boy who needs a kiss and a hug and the mildest of reprimands; it is a normal, predictable, endearing mistake, and I correct him tolerantly in an almost deferential way. If my teen-age daughter does something wrong, it is something wrong: it is an insulting, intentional, inexcusable attack against me that requires swift and severe retribution. (I do not treat them the same.) I wonder why. Is it because she's a daughter? Or a first child, for whom my aspirations were too high, and in whom I am now therefore disappointed? Or is it that she is already in her teens, growing up and away from me, slipping free from my authority, already preparing to live without me, to challenge frontally my wisdom, morality, and ability, and threatening to dislodge me, if she can, from my shaky stronghold of dictatorial self-esteem? Will I have to endure and survive these same assaults and rejections from my little boy when he grows up too? I hope not, for I would derive no satisfaction (I think) in vanquishing him. (Thank God my third child is an idiot: I really don't mean that. What I do mean is that thank goodness I will at least be spared a rebellion from him. I know how I will feel when Derek dies, or when he is finally sent away: relieved, liberated, and I will release a long-compressed breath and say, perhaps even aloud to someone whom I may feel I can trust: "Well, at last that's over with too now, isn't he?")

  I try to remember when this rivalry between my daughter and me first began. I can't. It sometimes seems that we have always been this way with each other, that we have never gotten along any better or differently. I would like to make my daughter less miserable if I can, to help her to be happier and much more pleased with herself. I don't know how. (I like to trap my daughter in carelessness and lies in order to make her admit she's sorry.) "She wants to know you love her," my wife says. "She doesn't think you do."

  "Well, I do. She knows it."

  "How?"

  "I think I do."

  "By your actions? You never tell her."

  "That isn't so."

  "When?"

  "She's my daughter. I can't say 'I love you' to my own daughter."

  "Why not?"

  "It sounds like incest."

  "Only to you. She thinks you're disappointed in her."

  "You are. You certainly let her know you are."

  "Only because I know she can be better. She could be a good dancer or actress or piano player now if only she'd stuck to things when she was younger. She had so much talent. She could still study dancing or acting."

  "So don't deny it. Don't accuse me of that, too."

  "I know what happened to me. I wish I'd stuck to something. Like my mother wanted me to. I wish my father had kept out of it and let my mother make me practice more. I might be something today."

  "You could be the king of France."

  "I'm your wife. You never say 'I love you' to me either."

  "You're my wife, I don't have to."

  "That isn't funny now."

  "Are we talking about you again?"

  "I'm not talking about that now. I don't know what to talk about. I don't know what to do with myself. I don't know how to kill time. What am I supposed to do with time if I don't know how to kill it?"

  "Have another drink."

  "All right. Will you get it?"

  "Sure. I don't know what to do about my daughter."

  "Me neither," my wife intones in a distant, hollow voice. "She breaks my heart," she adds fretfully. "She can be such a bitch when she wants to hurt me."

  "I know."

  "You too. A bastard. You can be such a bastard. You could at least try to be friendly with her when she wants to talk to you. Even if it hurts."

  "I do. And it does hurt."

  "That's why she does it. It's the only way she knows how to make you notice her."

  "What about you?"

  "Maybe me too. I don't even have that way anymore. I don't think you even care anymore whether I'm nasty or not. I think you just don't care."

  (Maybe she is right.)

  My wife can wring my conscience for a little while (if I decide to let her), but she does not have the power to hurt me anymore (which is why I think I feel secure with her, why I even might have decided it would be good for me to marry her). She wishes she did. She would like to know she means more to me than she thinks she does, would like to believe I need her. (I don't. I don't think I do. I don't let her know I do.) She wants me to tell her I love her, although she has stopped asking me to (I bring her a box of chocolates every Saint Valentine's Day now, and she is pleased to receive it, although we both know it is only a box of chocolates. Still, it is a box of chocolates, and everybody in the family enjoys eating chocolates but me), just as she has too much pride (or good sense) to delve into the subject of my sleeping away from home so often or hint that I might be sleeping with other girls (as she does surmise about other married men we know. If that ever hopped out into the open between us, lik
e that little mouse I was afraid of in our apartment in the city so long ago, she would have to do something about it, she would have to act--and I know she does not want to. I know that she, like me, prefers to keep us together until time, or life, runs out). I know I don't want my daughter to grow up to become the kind of girl I run around with now (none of whom can hurt me either. I pick them for that, reject them, in fact, in advance, before I even take up with them), but I don't know what kind of girl I do want her to become. (She will never become the king of France either.) She will never dance on the stage of the Radio City Music Hall. She will be some boy's girl friend for a short while, then some other boy's, and then an unhappy wife and mother who will get along no better with her children than I get along with mine, and I don't know what else she can become or anything I can do to help her toward something better--except nothing. (There are really so few things that can happen to people in this lifetime of ours, so few alternatives, so little any of us can become, although neither my wife nor daughter realizes that yet.) "You never like to talk to me, do you?" my daughter says to me softly and earnestly, speaking this time not merely for effect.

  "Yes, I do," I reply, avoiding her eyes guiltily. (She is vulnerable in her candor. I do not want to hurt her.) "You don't even like to look at me."

  "I'm looking at you now."

  "Only because I just said so. You were looking over my shoulder, like you always do, until I just said so."

  "I was watching a fly. I thought I saw one. When I do look at you, you want to know why I'm staring at you. You do the same thing with Mommy. You yell."

  "If I come in here to talk to you, you always look annoyed because I'm interrupting you, even when you're not doing anything but reading a magazine or writing on a pad."

  "Sometimes you keep saying good night to me for an hour or two and keep coming back in with something else you want to take up with me. Five or six times. I keep thinking you've gone to bed and I can concentrate and you keep coming back in and interrupting me. Sometimes I think you do it for spite, just to keep interrupting me."

  "I keep thinking of other things to say."

  "I'm not always that way."

  "I'm the only one who ever comes in here."

  "Am I always that way?"

  "Everybody else is afraid to."

  "Except the maid," I say, trying a mild joke.

  "I'm not counting her."

  "I do come in here to work, or to get away from all of you for a little while and relax. I don't know why everyone around here is so afraid of me when I never do anything to anybody or even threaten to. Just because I like to be alone every now and then. I know I certainly don't get the impression that people around here are afraid to come in here and interrupt me when they want to, or do or say anything else to me, for that matter. Everybody always is."

  "You spend nearly all your time at home in here. We have to come in here when we want to talk to you."

  "I have a lot of work to do. I make a lot of money. Even though it may not seem like much to you. My work is hard."

  "You keep saying it's easy."

  "Sometimes it's hard. You know I do a lot of work in here. Sometimes when I just seem to be scribbling things on a pad or reading I'm actually thinking or doing work that I'll need in the morning the next day. It isn't always easy to do it at the office."

  "If you ever do say you want to speak to me, it's only to criticize me or warn me or yell at me for something you think I did."

  "That's not true."

  "It is."

  "Is it?"

  "You never come into my room."

  "Is that true?"

  "When do you?"

  "You told us not to come in. You don't want me to. You keep the door closed all the time and you ask me to please get out if I do knock and come in."

  "That's because you never come in."

  "That doesn't make sense, does it?"

  "Yes, it does. Mommy would know what I mean. You never want to come in."

  "I thought you didn't like Mommy."

  "Sometimes I do. She knows what I mean. All you ever do when you come into my room is tell me to open a window and pick my clothes up off the floor."

  "Somebody has to."

  "Mommy does."

  "But they're still always on the floor."

  "Sooner or later they get picked up. Don't they? I don't think that's so important. I don't think that's the most important thing you have to talk to me about Is it?"

  "I'll try never to say that to you again. What is important?"

  "I've got posters on my wall and some funny lampshades that I painted myself and some funny collages that I made out of magazine advertisements. And I'm reading a book by D. H. Lawrence that I'm really enjoying very much. I think it's the best book I ever read."

  "I'm interested in all that," I tell her. "I'd like to see your posters and your funny lampshades and collages. What's the book by D. H. Lawrence?"

  "You don't like D. H. Lawrence."

  "My own taste isn't too good. I'd like to see what you've done with your room."

  "Now?"

  "If you'd let me."

  She shakes her head. "You don't want to. You'd only pretend to look around for a second and then tell me to pick my clothes up off the floor."

  "Are they on the floor?"

  "You see? You're only interested in joking. You're not really interested in anything I do. You're only interested in yourself. You're not interested in me."

  "You're not interested in me," I retaliate gently. "When I do start to ask you questions about yourself, you think I'm snooping into your affairs or trying to trap you in a lie or something."

  "You usually are."

  "Not always. You do tell lies. You do have things you try to hide."

  "You won't let me hide them. You want to know everything. Mommy too."

  "Sometimes they're things we should know."

  "Sometimes they've got nothing to do with you."

  "How can I tell until I find out what they are?"

  "You could take my word."

  "I can't. You know that."

  "That's very flattering."

  "You do lie a lot."

  "You don't enjoy talking with me. You never want to discuss things with me or tell me anything. Unless it's to make me do my homework. Mommy spends more time talking to me than you do."

  "Then why don't you like her more?"

  "I don't like what she says."

  "You aren't being fair. If I do try to tell you something about the company or my work, you usually sneer and make snotty wisecracks. You don't think the work I do is important."

  "You don't think it's important, either. You just do it to make money."

  "I think making money for you and the rest of the family is important. And doing my work well enough to maintain my self-respect is important, even though the work itself isn't. You know, it's not always so pleasant for me to have the work I do at the company ridiculed by you and your brother. Even though you're joking, and I'm not always sure you are. I spend so much of my life at it."

  (Why must I win this argument? And why must I use this whining plea for pity to do it? Why must I show off for her and myself and exult in my fine logic and more expert command of language and details--in a battle of wits with a fifteen-year-old child, my own? I could just as easily say, "You're right. I'm sorry. Please forgive me." Even though I'm right and not really sorry. I could say so anyway. But I can't. And I am winning, for her look of resolution is failing, her hesitations are growing, and now it is her gaze that is shiftily avoiding mine. I relax complacently, with a momentary tingle of scorn for my inferior adversary, my teen-age daughter. I am a shit But at least I am a successful one.) My daughter replies apologetically. "I'm interested in your work," she tries to defend herself. "Sometimes I ask you questions."

  "I always answer them."

  "With a wisecrack."

  "I know you're going to sneer."

  "If you didn't wisecrack, maybe I
wouldn't sneer."

  "I promise never to wisecrack again," I wisecrack.

  "That's a wisecrack," she says. (She is bright, and I am pleased with her alertness.)

  "So is that," I retort (before I can restrain myself, for I suppose I have to show her that I am at least as good).

  My daughter doesn't return my smile. "See? You're grinning already," she charges in a low, accusing tone. "You're turning it into a joke. Even now, when we're supposed to be serious."

  I turn my eyes from her face and look past her shoulder uneasily at the bookcase on the wall. "I'm sorry. I was only trying to make you feel better. I was trying to make you laugh."

  "I don't think there's anything funny."

  "No, I'm not. I'm sorry if you thought so."

  "You like to turn everything into a joke."

  "I don't. Now don't get rude. Or I'll have to."

  "You start making fun of me. You never want to talk seriously to any of us."

  "That isn't true. That's the third time you've made me deny it."

  "You always try to laugh and joke your way out whenever something serious comes up."

  "That's the fourth."

  "Or you get angry and bossy and begin yelling, like you're starting to do now."

  "I'm sorry," I say, and pause to lower my voice. "It's my personality, I guess. And my nerves. I'm not really proud of it. What you have to try to remember, honey, and nobody seems to, is that I've got feelings too, that I get headaches, that I can't always control my own moods even though I seem to be the one in charge. I'm not always happy either. Please go on talking to me."

  "Why should I?"

  "Don't you want to?"

  "You don't enjoy talking to me."

  "Yes, I do."

  "Now?"

  "Yes. Tell me what you want to. That's how I'll know. Please. Otherwise I always have to guess."

  "Was Derek born the way he is?"

  "Yes. Of course. We think so."

  "Or was it caused by something one of us did?"

  "He was born that way."

  "Why?"

  "Nobody knows. We all think he was. That's part of the problem. Nobody knows what happened to him."

  "Maybe that's what I'll be when I go to college. An anthropologist."

  "Geneticist."

  "Did you have to say that now?"

  "You want to learn, don't you?"

  "Not always."

  "I thought you'd like to know the difference when you make a mistake."

  "Not now. You knew what I meant. You didn't have to stop me just to show you're smarter. Did you?"