Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen

“I’ll make us sandwiches,” she said. “I really am a bad hostess, I know.” I watched her wash two plates, pat them dry with the edge of her bathrobe. “We’ll feel better if we eat something.”

“I feel fine,” I said defensively. It just came out of me, and rang out in that cold kitchen as cutting, rude and untrue. I began to excuse myself, babbling a bit, but Rebecca interrupted me.

“You know as well as I do that there’s a bit of tension in the air,” she said. “You feel it and I feel it. It’s there, so why deny it?” She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, gave a half smile, then turned her back to me and piled up the sliced bread on the counter.

I let out a high neurotic giggle. I couldn’t tell if Rebecca was angry or entertained. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. But she ignored me. Laying aside the awkwardness hanging between us, she turned back to the subject of Moorehead as she worked at the counter. I watched as with unsteady hands she composed our sandwiches. I picked at my chapped lips, fingered the gun inside my purse, listened as she talked. She seemed to relax a bit, her voice now wafting down into its lower registers. With her back turned, she paused now and then, punctuating the air with her knife as she spoke.

“They’ve hired me to develop some sort of blanket curriculum for the boys, a daily plan for the lot of them, as though they’re all the same age and at the same level. As if we could just repeat lessons over and over again. It’s a ridiculous idea on its own. I’m not some nineteenth-century farm schoolteacher. And these boys can learn. Most of them are already literate. Of course there will have to be testing, trial and error on my part, to know what works, and then the big questions — what are the goals, what’s the point? I’m not here to teach them how to repair car engines, after all. They need to learn literature, history, philosophy, the hard sciences. That’s what I think. It’s a job big enough for a dozen people. Robert doesn’t understand that the boys have minds, that they’re even conscious. To him they’re just cattle.”

“Robert?” I asked. “You mean the warden?”

“The warden,” she shook her head. “All he does is punish boys for jerking off.” I had a good idea of what that meant. “You knew that, didn’t you?” Rebecca turned slightly, showing me the seriousness of her profile. “That guy is really something. His ridiculous Christian rhetoric is completely inappropriate. Then I find out that Leonard Polk got stuck in the cave for ‘inappropriate touching.’” She shook her head. “If I were those boys I’d be touching myself all the time. It’s about the only fun that can be had in a place like Moorehead, don’t you think?” She turned to me then, nose crinkled, eyes shining, suddenly full of sprightly and conniving joy.

“Oh, of course,” I said, twisting my hands around in the air to indicate that I was flexible, open-minded, that I had no qualms.

“I swear,” Rebecca went on. “I just don’t understand what the big deal is.” She shook her head. I tried to imagine Rebecca touching herself, what sort of touching she did and how it was different from my sort, as it seemed — given what I knew about her — that she had no shame. I wondered what sort of ecstasy there was to be had without shame to incite it. I couldn’t imagine. I was a bit stunned sitting there then, and was grateful that she kept rattling on. She told me how happy she was to be working at the prison, how relieved she was to have finished her degree. She said she was sure she could have a great effect, and how much she cared for the boys already. “Like they’re my own brothers,” is a phrase I recall clearly. She handed me a plate, plunked a sandwich on it. We sat and ate in silence.

“As you’ve probably figured out by now, Eileen,” she said after a while, “I live a little differently from most people.”

“Oh, not at all,” I insisted. “Your house is really nice.”

“Please, don’t be so polite,” she said. “I don’t mean the house.” She looked at me as she stood, munching an onion. “I mean I have my own ideas. I’m not like those women you work with.” That was obvious. “Or like your teachers at school, or your mother.” She slid her plate back into the sink. “I can tell you have your own ideas, too. Maybe you and I even share some of the same ideas.”

Now I felt she was testing me — was I a follower like “most people,” or was I “different” like her. I could barely eat the sandwich she’d given me. The bread was stale, the ham was gummy. Still, like a good girl, I chewed and nodded.

“I’ve realized some things over the years,” she said, licking her fingers. “I don’t believe in good and bad.” She offered me a cigarette. I took it, grateful for an excuse to put down the sandwich. “Those boys at Moorehead, they don’t belong there. I don’t care what they’ve done. No child deserves that kind of punishment.”

I’d barely drunk two cups of wine, and since it was not in my nature to argue when I wasn’t drunk, what I said next surprised me. Perhaps it was the spirit of my father moving in me, because I really didn’t care much about the issue. “But those boys are all criminals. They need to be punished somehow,” I said. Rebecca was silent. I finished the wine. A few moments passed in which my head grew heavy and spun with regret. It seemed clear that I had offended her. I felt sick to my stomach.

“I should go,” I said. “You must be tired.” By then, I believe, I’d been in that house less than an hour. My skin felt greasy and hot. The air in the room seemed to be spinning with dust and smoke and the smell of rotting food. I put out my cigarette. Rebecca looked deep in thought — I assumed her thoughts revolved around me, my lack of vision or compassion. What a square I was. What a pig. I worried I might vomit. It seemed imperative that I go home immediately. But Rebecca had other ideas.

“May I confide in you?” she asked, her voice suddenly soft, but urgent. She squatted down toward me, leaning one arm on the table.

Nobody had ever confided in me before. I looked at her squarely in the face, held my breath. She really was beautiful. Suddenly clear-eyed and still and vulnerable, like a scared child in the forest. She held my hand absentmindedly, her fingers cool and soft against my rough skin. I tried to relax, to show that I was open, accepting, available. But I felt my death mask creep up again. I nodded with my eyes closed, thinking that would be a somber and reliable gesture of fidelity. If she had tried to kiss me then, I think I would have gone along.

“It’s about Lee Polk,” she said.

I really thought that I would vomit at that moment. I began to stand, reaching for my purse, hoping she’d lose her nerve before she could tell me that they’d kissed, or worse. She gripped my hand again, though, and I sat back down.

How relieved I was when she said not, “I’m in love with him,” but rather, “He spoke to me.” Still there was a kind of perverse look of pride and pleasure on her face. I was reminded of Joanie’s self-satisfaction when she’d told me, so many years ago at that point, “He likes to taste me.” Rebecca squeezed my fingers, swallowed hard. “He told me everything. What happened and what he did and how he ended up in Moorehead. Look at this.” She pulled an old photograph from her robe pocket. It was a photo of the crime scene. Lee Polk’s father lay on the blood-darkened carpet, wrapped partly in a tangled sheet, a disheveled bed beside him.

“That’s the father,” Rebecca went on. “People always think it’s Oedipal. Kill the father, marry the mother. That’s what I’d assumed.”

“Gross,” I said. I looked at the photo again. The man’s eyes were partly open, as though he were surreptitiously glancing downward, shifty. His arms were held over his head, fingers jammed and piled up against the bedside table. I’d seen pictures of dead people before in various books and magazines, mostly important figures lying in mausoleums or photos from wars — soldiers slumped on the battlefield, starved corpses. Then of course there was Jesus dead on the cross everywhere I looked. There had been a few such crime scene photos in the files of other inmates at Moorehead, but none of them had captured the essence of death quite like that photo of Mr. Polk. Not even my own mother’s dead body struck me as powerfully. She’d just faded away, really, a little bit every day until there was nothing left. Life had been ripped out of Mr. Polk, however. The death was there, alive in the photo. I twisted my hand away from Rebecca and got up and flung myself toward the sink, vomiting that terrible sandwich, all that wine.