Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen

I remember the shower I took that morning because the hot water ran out while I dillydallied at the mirror inspecting my naked body through the wafting steam. I’m an old lady now. Like it does to everyone, time has blurred my face with lines and sagging jowls and bulging bags under my eyes, and my old body’s been rendered nearly sexless and soft and wrinkled and shapeless. So just for laughs, here I am again, my little virginal body at age twenty-four. My shoulders were small and sloped and knobbly. My chest was rigid, a taut drum of bones I thudded with my fist like an ape. My breasts were lemon-size and hard and my nipples were sharp, like thorns. But I was really just all ribs, and so thin that my hips jutted out awkwardly and were often bruised from bumping into things. My guts were still cramped from the ice cream and eggs from the day before. The sluggishness of my bowels was a constant preoccupation. There was a complex science to eating and evacuating, balancing the rising intensity of my constipated discomfort with the catharsis of my laxative-induced purges. I took such poor care of myself. I knew I should drink water, eat healthful foods, but I really didn’t like to drink water or eat healthful foods. I found fruits and vegetables detestable, like eating a bar of soap or a candle. I also suffered from that unfortunate maladjustment to puberty — still at twenty-four — that made me ashamed of my womanliness. There were days on end I ate very little — a handful of nuts or raisins here, a crust of bread there. And for fun, such as with the chocolates a few nights prior, I sometimes chewed but spat out candies or cookies, anything that tasted good but which I feared might put meat on my bones.

Back then, at twenty-four, people already considered me a spinster. I’d had only one kiss from a boy by then. When I was sixteen, Peter Woodman, a senior, took me to the high school prom. I won’t say too much about him — I don’t want to sound as though I’ve carried the memory around with any romantic nostalgia. If there’s anything I’ve learned to detest, it is nostalgia. And anyway, Randy is the romantic lead in my story, if there is one. Peter Woodman can’t hold a candle to him. My prom dress was very pretty, though — navy taffeta. I loved navy blue. Whatever I wore in that color reminded me of a uniform, something that I felt validated me and obscured me at once. We spent most of our time sitting at a table in the darkened gymnasium, Peter talking to his friends. His father worked in the police station and I’m sure Peter only asked me to the prom as a favor his father owed to mine. We didn’t dance, not that I minded. The evening of the prom ended in Peter’s father’s pickup truck in the high school parking lot when I bit the boy’s throat to keep him from reaching any farther up my dress. In fact, I think his hand was barely on my knee, I was so guarded. And the kiss was only superficial — a momentary touching of the lips, sort of sweet when I think of it now. I can’t remember how I got home that night after tumbling out of the truck, Peter heckling me and rubbing his neck as I watched him drive away. Did my teeth draw blood? I don’t know. And who cares anyway? By now he’s probably dead. Most people I knew are dead.

That Monday morning in X-ville, I put on my new blue stockings and dressed in my mother’s clothes. I locked my father’s shoes back in the trunk of the Dodge and drove to work, to Moorehead. I remember conjuring up a new strategy for my getaway. One day soon, when I was good and ready, I’d pile on all the clothes I decided on taking with me: my gray coat, several pairs of wool socks, snow boots, mittens, gloves, hat, scarf, pants, skirt, dress, et cetera, and I’d drive about three hours northwest across state lines to Vermont. I knew I could survive the drive for one hour with the windows up without fainting, and being bundled up would save me the rest of the way with the windows down. New York wasn’t that far from X-ville. Two hundred fifty-seven miles south, to be exact. But first I’d lead any search astray by abandoning the Dodge in Rutland, which I’d read about in a book about railroads. In Rutland I’d find some kind of abandoned lot or dead-end street, and then I’d walk to the railway station and take a train down to the city to start my new life. I thought I was so smart. I planned to bring along an empty suitcase to carry the clothes I’d take off once I got on the train. I’d have some clothes, the money I’d been hoarding in the attic, and nothing else.

But maybe I’d need something to read on my ride to my future, I thought. I could borrow a few of the finer books from the X-ville library, disappear and never return them. This seemed to me a brilliant idea. First, I would get to keep the books as mementos, a bit like when a killer snips a lock of hair from his victim or takes some small object — a pen, a comb, a rosary — as his trophy. Second, I’d give good cause for concern to my father and others who might wonder whether I ever intended to return or under what circumstances I was forced to leave. I pictured detectives poking around the house. “Nothing seems to be out of order, Mr. Dunlop. Maybe she’s visiting a friend.”

“Oh no, not Eileen. Eileen has no friends,” my father would say. “Something’s happened. She’d never leave me alone like this.”

My hope was that they’d think I was dead in a ditch somewhere, kidnapped, buried in an avalanche, eaten by a bear, what have you. It was important to me that nobody knew I planned to disappear. If my father thought I’d ran away, he would have humiliated me. I could imagine him puffing out his chest and scoffing at my foolishness with Aunt Ruth. They’d called me a spoiled brat, an idiot, an ungrateful rat’s ass. Perhaps they did say all that once I really had left X-ville. I’ll never know. I wanted my father to despair, cry his eyes out over his poor lost daughter, collapse at the foot of my cot, swathe himself in my smelly blankets just to remember the beautiful stink of my sweat. I wanted him to paw through my belongings like examining bleached bones, inert artifacts of a life he’d never appreciated. If I’d ever had a music box, I’d have liked the song it played to break my father’s heart. I’d have liked him to die of sadness at having lost me. “I loved her,” I wanted him to say. “And I was wrong to have acted like I didn’t.” Such were my thoughts on my way to work that morning.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I would be gone by Christmas morning, and though my memories since then have waxed and waned, I will do my best to narrate the events of my last days in X-ville. I will try to paint a complete picture. Some of my clearest memories may seem wholly irrelevant, but I will include them when I feel they add to the mood. For example, that morning when I got to Moorehead, the boys had been given special holiday sweaters knit by a group of do-gooders at a local church. Since there was a surplus of sweaters, I presume, one landed on my desk wrapped in brown paper. Mrs. Stephens told me it was a Christmas present from the warden. I tore open the package and found a navy blue, expertly knit vest with an orange crucifix across the chest and marked with an “S” for small written in shaky cursive on a scrap of wax paper safety-pinned to the collar. That shade of blue made me wonder. Maybe the warden actually liked me? He could hardly give me a box of chocolates, after all. He wouldn’t want to attract the attention of the office ladies, arousing hostile suspicions of favoritism and clandestine love affairs. I pictured embracing the warden in his office, flinging myself at him like a rag doll. Was that what I wanted? My thoughts were like dirty films reeling inside my brain, and I remember them from that morning as well as the dull thudding sound of the drawer when I shut the sweater inside it. I cannot, however, remember the layout of the prison’s recreational facilities, or whether the Christmas pageant, as they called it, was held in the gymnasium or the chapel or a small auditorium, which I’m not sure existed at all. I may be thinking of my old high school.