Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen

The office ladies gave me the stink eye when I walked in late from lunch that day. My mood and health feeling much improved, I whirled my coat off onto my chair, used my teeth to pull off my useless gloves, fingered the sleep out of the corners of my eyes and rubbed my hands together. Mrs. Stephens chatted with the corrections officer while the new boy fidgeted with his handcuffs. He was a pudgy blond teenager with an upturned nose, large, fleshy hands, but small, girllike shoulders. I remember him. He squeezed his eyes shut in an effort not to cry, which touched me. He sat across from me, handcuffed and sedated. I asked his name and wrote it down, took his height, his weight, noted his eye color, checked for facial scars, handed him the starched blue uniform. I felt like a nurse, dry and caring and untortured. I talked to him quietly, took his picture. I remember the look on his face in the viewfinder, the strange passive mix of resignation and rage, the tender sadness. Like when I’d peek at that dead mouse in my glove box, the boy’s picture bolstered me. “Glad I’m not you,” was my sentiment. All the while the corrections officer stood behind the boy with crossed arms, waiting to witness his signature. Two guards milled around in case the boy tried to make a run for it or attack me, though none of them ever did. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen, as I recall. My heart went out to him, I guess, because I was in a good mood and he was rather short and plump for his age, and from his sorrow I gathered that, like me, he was an odd child, deeply pained by the hard world around him, tender, distrustful. When I put his file away in the cabinet I read his charge: infanticide by drowning.

When I was conducting these little intake exams, I felt normal, just a regular person going about her day. I enjoyed having a set of clean instructions, following protocol. It gave me a sense of purpose, an easiness. It was a brief vacation from the loud, rabid inner circuitry of my mind. I’m sure people found and still find me odd. I’ve changed considerably over the last fifty years, of course, but I can make some people very uncomfortable. Now it’s for entirely different reasons. These days I’m afraid I am too outspoken, too loving. I’m a sap, too passionate, too effusive, too much. Back then I was just an odd young woman. An awkward youngster. Angst wasn’t quite so mainstream back then. My old deadpan stare would terrify me if I saw it in the mirror today. Looking back I’d say I was barely civilized. There was a reason I worked at the prison, after all. I wasn’t exactly a pleasant person. I thought I would have preferred to be a teller in a bank, but no bank would have taken me. For the best, I suppose. I doubt it would have been long before I stole from the till. Prison was a safe place for me to work.

Visiting hours came and went. It delighted me to see the ugly brown leather purse now hanging by its worn strap from the back of my desk chair. If I or anyone jostled it, the gun inside the purse would clank against the chair’s hollow metal backing. What would Rebecca think, I wondered, if she knew I was thus armed? I had the vague notion that bearing arms was in poor taste. Unless you were terribly wealthy, hunting was for the brutish lower class, uncivilized country folk, primitive types, people who were dumb and callous and ugly. Violence was just another function of the body, no less unusual than sweating or vomiting. It sat on the same shelf as sexual intercourse. The two got mixed up quite often, it seemed.

For the rest of the day, I did my duties mechanically. I tried to fixate again on Randy, as usual glancing over at him as he sat on his stool, but my fascination fell flat. Like a favorite song you’ve heard so many times it begins to annoy you, or like when you scratch an itch so hard it begins to bleed, Randy’s face now seemed common, his lips childishly plump, almost feminine, his hair silly and pretentious. There was nothing mesmerizing about his crotch, nor did his arms seem at all special — the magic of his muscles had vanished. I even felt a bit sick when I imagined him coming toward me in the dark, his breath smelling of sausage, burnt coffee, cigarettes. The heart is a moody, greedy thing, I suppose. He really was special, though. I wish I’d just told Randy I loved him when I had the chance, before Rebecca came along. He had captivated me. It’s rare to meet someone who can do that to you. Randy, wherever you may be, I saw you, and you were beautiful. I loved you.

• • •

I left Moorehead for the last time that afternoon, though I couldn’t have predicted that. I left my desk a mess. The vermouth and chocolates sat in my locker, a library book in my drawer. I don’t recall my last moments in that prison, and I occasionally wondered what became of my belongings, or what the office ladies had to say about me when I didn’t show up for work after the holidays. Mrs. Stephens was probably put back in charge of visitation, Mrs. Murray intake. I doubt much fuss was made. If Rebecca went back there, maybe she tried to cover for me. “She’s visiting family,” she might have lied. I don’t care. I haven’t lost any sleep thinking about what I left behind at Moorehead.

I was exhausted on the drive home that evening, and already suffering from the powerful wrenching pain that usually accompanied my period on the third day. I was too tired to stop by Lardner’s on my way home that night. If my father needed something, that was his problem. It wouldn’t kill him to drink a glass of milk, spend a single night sober, I thought. Or perhaps it would kill him. Either way, I didn’t care. I suppose it was at that moment, with the weight of the gun in my purse on my lap, turning into the dark and icy driveway between the tall walls of piled up snow, that I thought of trying to put him out of his misery. I could have shot him, but that would have been messy and might get me in trouble. My mother’s pills were a better idea, but there were only a few left in the bottle. She had taken them to alleviate the pain of dying, as the doctor had prescribed. She said, however, that she took them to protect her daughter, poor me, from having to hear her moan and yelp and gripe and complain all day. I took one, too, from time to time as I waited for her to finally “kick the bucket.” This was how I described what had happened when I called Joanie on the phone the morning after she died. I’d spent the night before in the blackness those good pills provided, then woke up to a cold dead body in the bed beside me, my mother’s angry corpse.

The gun was heavy in my purse on my shoulder as I walked up the front steps that night. I let myself in through the front door, careful under the dripping daggers of ice. Even through the dimness, it was apparent that the foyer had been cleared of old newspapers and bottles, even swept. The cool shape of a white circular tablecloth on the kitchen table told me that someone had been cleaning. Perhaps the station had sent over a rookie after word got around that my esteemed father had been living in a pigsty. Or maybe my father had cleaned up on his own — boiled a strong pot of coffee, got industrious, sober for a day. He had undertaken projects to improve the home in the past — building a shelf to organize the basement, insulating the attic — projects he always abandoned as soon as the coffee got cold and he figured he deserved a beer. None of his pledges to get off the bottle lasted more than an afternoon. When I left, there were still bright pink rolls of insulation stuffed in the slanted corners of the attic. I’d stared at them for years every night as I fell asleep.

My father’s coat was hanging on the hook by the front door. When I turned the light on in the kitchen, I found his chair empty. I pulled out two slices of bread from the refrigerator, slathered some mayonnaise on one, slapped the two pieces together, and let each bite melt on my tongue. That was my dinner. It took me years to learn how to feed myself properly, or rather it took years to develop the desire to feed myself properly. Back there in X-ville, I desperately hoped I could avoid ever having to resemble a grown woman. I didn’t see that any good could come of that.