Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen

“What do we do?”

I shuffled around in my purse for my mother’s pills. “I have these,” I said, shaking the bottle. “They’re for pain.”

“Tranquilizers?” Rebecca’s face brightened. She grabbed them from my hand. “What else do you have in your purse, Eileen?” she asked. I didn’t catch her sarcasm at first.

“Lipstick,” I answered.

I watched as Rebecca approached Mrs. Polk again, this time cautiously, coolly, as she would a frightened animal. The woman twisted her neck and bucked her head as Rebecca reached out to grab her face, one fist under her jaw, holding the pills in her other hand. She wrestled with the woman’s head like a farmer with a cow, pinched her nose closed. Seeing her move like that made me wonder still, where had Rebecca come from? Perhaps she was a country girl, a farmer’s daughter, a rancher. Truthfully, I cared less and less to make sense of her. I watched as Mrs. Polk clenched her jaw, held her breath, stared up fiercely into Rebecca’s eyes. Finally her lips parted, and Rebecca opened her fist and took the pills in her other hand and worked them into Mrs. Polk’s mouth. I was crouched down at a distance, observing them. I had a strangely comic impulse to pray or sing. I thought of the rites of passage I’d read about in National Geographic, bizarre ceremonies where people are bound and gagged, left in the desert, trapped in cages for days without food or water, administered hallucinogenic drugs so powerful that they forget their childhoods, their names. They return to their villages entirely new people, imbued with the spirit of God, fearless of death, and respected by everyone. Perhaps this experience in the basement, I thought, was akin to that. After it was over I’d be living on a higher plane. No one could ever hurt me, I imagined. I’d be immune.

“You’ll be sorry!” Mrs. Polk cried once the pills went down. “I know you now. I’ll tell everyone what you’ve done.”

“Nobody will believe you,” said Rebecca, her tone not as assured or confident as it should have been.

“Like hell,” said Mrs. Polk, eyeing me. There was no great heartfelt surrender in the basement that night, just the three of us, our faces shiny with sweat or tears in the quaking light. Rebecca and I sat back and waited. The stain of blood on Mrs. Polk’s arm seemed to stop spreading. Her breathing began to slow. “Get out, go away,” she whined. “Get the hell out of here.” Her voice dragged out like a slowing record bit by bit as the pills took effect. Once she was asleep, slumped against the wall, mouth leaking, tears drying into a crust around her eyes, Rebecca and I began to whisper. It took less than ten minutes, I’d say, to convince her that my plan was a good one. “My father’s a drunk,” I said. “If he killed somebody, it’d be on the cops — they should have locked him up years ago. Maybe they’ll find Mrs. Polk and sweep the whole thing under the rug. It doesn’t matter. We’ll be fine.” Rebecca’s face had flattened and stiffened, her knuckles white as she clutched the dirty hem of her robe. “We’ll have to hide out somewhere,” I added, trying to maintain my composure. “I was thinking New York City.”

“How do we get her to your father’s house?” is all Rebecca asked me.

“We’ll have to carry her out to the car.” It seemed easy.

“And you’ll shoot her?”

“My father will,” I said. “But we’ll pull the trigger.”

“We?” Rebecca’s eyebrows lifted. She pushed her hair out of her face.

“I will,” I assented. It didn’t seem so terrible. The woman had nothing to live for anyway. Either she could die quickly and painlessly or stay and rot in that awful house of hers, her dark past weighing on her day after day. “It won’t hurt,” I said. “Look.” I kicked at the woman’s fat feet. “She’s out cold.”

After a few moments of biting her lip and wringing her hands, Rebecca agreed. Together we untied Mrs. Polk’s hands and lifted her off the floor. Remarkable how much a human being can weigh, I remember thinking. I took her from under her shoulders and Rebecca held her feet, and we hoisted her bit by bit up the steps, me going backward and bearing most of the load. It took every reserve of energy I had, and by the time we’d reached the top of the stairs, my knees shook and my arms burned. “Let’s take a break,” I said. But Rebecca insisted we move quickly.

“Let’s get her out of here. Then you go on ahead to your father’s house. Get him ready. I’ll clean up here. We can’t leave any evidence behind.” She grabbed Mrs. Polk’s feet again. The weight of her body was like a tub of water. Her head fell back toward me, her mouth hung open. When I looked down into it, her teeth were brown, her gums nearly white. She was as good as dead already, I thought. Rebecca stopped to cover her with her robe before we carried her out the front door. We moved carefully, but it was impossible not to bump her rear end on the frozen steps. A few times Rebecca slipped and let Mrs. Polk’s legs hit the snow on the path to the sidewalk. It was slapstick, ridiculous, and I remember the jubilance rising from my chest into my throat. Once the woman was in the car, I paused to exhale, looked up at the sky, the stars spangled across the darkness like splattered paint. I thought I might burst into hysterical laughter under the quiet of that night, the beautiful stillness. I could feel the entire universe revolving around me in that moment. Rebecca looked tense. I shut the car door and put my death mask on then, tried to contain my excitement. I can’t tell you what I was thinking. I’m not here to make excuses.

“I’ll see you,” Rebecca said suddenly, turning to dash back into the house.

I called out after her. “I’ll be waiting!” My voice bounded loud across the snow-filled yard. Rebecca turned and put a finger to her lips to hush me. “We can go anywhere we want,” I said, hushed. “Just the two of us. I have money. No one will ever find us.” I gave her my address. “A block from the elementary school. Can you find it?”

She just waved, hopped up the icy stairs, and closed the door behind her.

I left X-ville without a single family photo, so all I have are my shifting memories to go on. I remember Dad as I left him — drawn and unconscious on the bed. Joanie I think of as a young girl, sensual and pretty and mindless. Mom, as I’ve told you, is harder to picture. I imagine just the frothiness of her graying hair as she lay dead in her bed, me curled up beside her, waiting to catch my breath before going out to tell my father, drunk for weeks already, that she was gone. “Are you sure?” is what he asked as I stood there in the stuffy, hot morning sunlight. I remember it — that image of loneliness, looking back at the half-open door to the room where my mother was no longer sleeping. The bathroom was where I went to cry. I remember my reflection vividly, eyes swollen and red in the mirror. I took off my clothes, still shaking, my arms ropy and useless as I held myself and sobbed in the shower. She died when I was just nineteen, thin as a rail by then, something my mother had praised me for.

I never liked looking at photos of myself. I’d been a pudgy child — that pale and homely girl in grade school who could not climb the rope or run as others did in P.E. Fat, loping thighs caused me to waddle in clothes my mother bought a size too tight in the hope that I would somehow change to fit them. And as I grew older, I remained short but whittled down to a small, birdlike stature. For a while I kept a little gut, doughy and oblong like a child’s belly. By the time I left X-ville, though, I was a scarecrow, hardly an ounce of flesh to pinch, which was how I liked it. I knew that wasn’t quite right, of course. I vowed to eat better, to dress better when I grew up. Be a real lady, I thought. I suppose I figured that once I left X-ville I would grow six inches, become shapely and beautiful. I thought of Rebecca, imagined her in a swimsuit, narrow hips and long, elegant thighs like models in the fashion magazines. A healthy glow. Maybe Rebecca could help me somehow, I wished, guide me, tell me where to go, how to dress, what to do, how to live. The picture of my future I’d had in mind before meeting Rebecca turned out to be somewhat accurate: I’d move into some ramshackle apartment, maybe a girls’ boardinghouse where I’d be free to do such wonderful things as read newspapers, eat a spotted banana, go for a walk in the park, sit in a room like a normal person. But being with Rebecca could set me on a different path, I hoped. I wanted to do something great with my life. I wanted so badly to be someone important, to look down on the world from a skyscraper window and squash anyone who ever crossed me like a roach under my shoe.