Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen

“Where is Mrs. Dunlop this morning?” someone always asked. The excuses my father would give were that she wasn’t feeling well, that she was visiting her mother, but she sends her very best. My mother never once came to Mass. The only time I remember her setting foot in that church was for my grandfather’s funeral. When we got home Sunday afternoons — Joanie and I sat through endless hours of Bible study taught by an elderly nun, none of whose teachings penetrated into my consciousness one bit — the house would be only slightly less disheveled, and our mother would be lying on the couch in the living room, reading a magazine, a bottle of vermouth stuck between her thighs, cigarette smoke floating above her head in the stuffy afternoon sunlight like a brooding storm cloud.

“Promise you’ll visit me in hell, Eileen?” she’d ask.

“Go to your room,” said my father.

My mother rolled her eyes at my father’s superstitions, how he’d cross himself before eating, look up at the ceiling whenever he was hopeful or mad. “God is for dummies,” she told us. “People are scared of dying, that’s all. Listen to me, girls.” I remember when she said this, pulling us aside one day after our aunt Ruth had come over and scolded us for being lazy, for being spoiled brats, or something like that. She and our mother didn’t get along. “God is a made-up story,” our mother told us, “like Santa Claus. There is nobody watching you when you’re alone. You decide for yourself what’s right and wrong. There are no prizes for good little girls. If you want something, fight for it. Don’t be a fool.” I don’t think she was ever so caring as when she delivered this terrifying pronouncement: “To hell with God. And to hell with your father.”

I remember sitting for hours on my bed after that, picturing all of eternity laid out before me. God was, in my mind, a white-haired old man in a robe — not unlike the man my father would later turn into — presiding over the world, marking papers with red pencil. And then there was my sad, mortal body. It seemed impossible that such a God could care what I did with my little life, but perhaps I was special, I thought. Perhaps He was saving me for good things. I pricked my finger with a safety pin and sucked the blood out. I decided I would only pretend to believe in God since that seemed just as good as real faith, which I didn’t have. “Pray like you mean it!” my father would shout when it was my turn to say grace. I’m not as angry at my father for his idiotic moralism as I am for the way he treated me. He had no loyalty to me. He was never proud of me. He never praised me. He simply didn’t like me. His loyalty was to the gin, and his twisted war against the hoodlums, his imaginary enemies, the ghosts. “Devil’s spawn,” he’d say, waving his gun around.

When I pulled up to the X-ville library that Sunday, I parked and slogged through the slush, but the big red door was locked. It was a small library in the town’s old meeting house, and the one librarian — Mrs. Buell, I still remember her name — kept hours according to her personal schedule. I visited often enough to know all the books there by the look of their spines, the order they appeared on the shelves. In some books I’d even memorized the stains on their pages — spaghetti sauce spilt here, ant squashed there, booger smeared over here. I remember sensing something hopeful in the breeze that morning. I detected a hint of spring in it, although it was late December. My favorite part of drinking too much was the enthusiasm and vigor I felt at certain points of my hangover the day afterward. It sometimes carried a kind of blind excitement — mania, it’s called now. The good feeling always petered out into gloom by noon, but in that bright light of Sunday morning, I pushed the books through the return slot for Mrs. Buell and decided to take a drive to Boston.

If I’d had any idea that this would be the last Sunday I’d ever spend in X-ville, I might have spent it packing a suitcase surreptitiously up in my attic, or darkly meditating on the house I’d never see again. I could have taken the time and space to weep at the kitchen table, mourn my entire youth while my father was at church. I could have kicked the walls, torn at the peeling paint and wallpaper, spat on every floor. But I got on the highway. I didn’t know I’d soon be gone.

Roads were slick with melting ice, I remember. I rolled the windows down so as not to be poisoned by the exhaust fumes. I pulled on the knit hat I’d found a few nights previous, let the icy cold air freeze my face a little. Several times that winter with the car windows up I’d nearly fallen asleep at the wheel. One night on my way home from Randy’s, I think, I veered off the road and into a snowbank. Luckily my foot had fallen off the pedal, so there was no great impact. On that Sunday drive out of X-ville, I thought about stopping at my old college on the way to Boston, but I couldn’t summon the courage. I’d lived in that small college town barely over a year, in a dorm with other girls. I went to class, ate in the cafeteria, et cetera. It felt good to have a coffee percolator, a set of sheets of my own, and to be away, albeit not far, from home. Then I was pulled out of school halfway through my sophomore year and forced back to X-ville to care for my mother, though “care for” is not quite the right way to say it. I was terrified of my mother. She was a mystery to me, and by then I didn’t “care for” her in the least. Since she was sick, I tended to her as a nurse would, but there was nothing warm or caring about what I did.

I was secretly glad that I had to leave school. I hadn’t received very good grades in college, and the prospect of failing my classes, classes my father was paying for me to pass, had kept me up at night. I’d been in some trouble with the dean already since I’d chosen to “fall ill” and stay in bed instead of taking my quarterly exams. Of course, back home I blamed my parents for my misery, wished I was in school again learning to use a typewriter, studying the history of art, Latin, Shakespeare, whatever nonsense lay in store.

Even with that hat I wore, the whipping cold air was so severe that I had to roll the windows up. You can’t imagine how cold it was driving down that frozen highway. I played the radio and drove fast for a while, but there was some traffic approaching the city — an accident up ahead, I think — and as I sat there waiting for the cars to move, the wooziness suddenly hit me. My eyelids began to droop and my head felt heavy. I was dead tired. My brain ached. Those fumes get into the brain tissue. I believe I have permanent damage to this day. Still, I loved that car. I lay my head on the steering wheel for what couldn’t have been more than a minute, and when I woke up, cars were streaming past me, honking their horns. So I drove, and I must have swerved out of my lane as I struggled to stay alert because then there was a police car behind me, a face in my rearview mirror, a black gloved hand motioning for me to pull over. In my confusion, I assumed it was my father’s face in the mirror, that he’d somehow followed me out of town. I still had that picture of him as a cop in my head, in his uniform, laughing, ruddy cheeks and hands, an ominous glimmer in his eye. The man had never worn a coat as long as he was on the force. “You can’t cover up your uniform with a coat,” he said. And so he’d always been sick, his nose always dripping, his body tense, shoulders high up by his ears, shifting his weight from side to side. You can picture him. Of course, my father was sitting in Mass at this time, and he hadn’t worn a uniform in years. But I always thought I saw him everywhere. Years after I left X-ville and still today I sometimes think I see him, swinging a baton at the park, coming out of a bar or coffee shop, slumped over at the top of the stairs.