Eileen

by Ottessa Moshfegh

They are who they are, for better and worse.

looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected, but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s. It was easy to hide behind the dull face I wore, moping around.

So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for children.

My pee steamed and stank, a honey-colored poison I poured out the attic window and into the snow-filled gutter. The movements of my bowels were a whole other story. They occurred irregularly—maybe once or twice a week, at most—and rarely without assistance. I’d gotten into the gross habit of gulping down a dozen or more laxative pills whenever I felt big and bloated, which was frequently. The closest bathroom was one floor down and I shared it with my father. Moving my bowels there never felt quite right. I worried that the smell would carry downstairs to the kitchen, or that my father would come knocking while I sat there on the toilet. Furthermore, I’d become dependent on those laxatives. Without them my movements were always pained and hard and took a good hour of clamping down and kneading my belly and pushing and praying. I often bled from the effort, digging my nails into my thighs, punching my stomach in frustration. With the laxatives, my movements were torrential, oceanic, as though all of my insides had melted and were now gushing out, a sludge that stank distinctly of chemicals and which, when it was all out, I half expected to breach the rim of the toilet bowl. In those cases I stood up to flush, dizzy and sweaty and cold, then lay down while the world seemed to revolve around me. Those were good times.

Go piss girl

My pee steamed and stank, a honey-colored poison I poured out the attic window and into the snow-filled gutter. The movements of my bowels were a whole other story. They occurred irregularly—maybe once or twice a week, at most—and rarely without assistance. I’d gotten into the gross habit of gulping down a dozen or more laxative pills whenever I felt big and bloated, which was frequently. The closest bathroom was one floor down and I shared it with my father. Moving my bowels there never felt quite right. I worried that the smell would carry downstairs to the kitchen, or that my father would come knocking while I sat there on the toilet. Furthermore, I’d become dependent on those laxatives. Without them my movements were always pained and hard and took a good hour of clamping down and kneading my belly and pushing and praying. I often bled from the effort, digging my nails into my thighs, punching my stomach in frustration. With the laxatives, my movements were torrential, oceanic, as though all of my insides had melted and were now gushing out, a sludge that stank distinctly of chemicals and which, when it was all out, I half expected to breach the rim of the toilet bowl. In those cases I stood up to flush, dizzy and sweaty and cold, then lay down while the world seemed to revolve around me. Those were good times.

GIRL ARE YOU OK

“Everything’s a waste of time,” I said, collapsing a bit in my chair.

My skin has always been problematic. Even now my rosacea flares up,

Girl same omg

Any function of the body that one hid behind closed doors titillated me. I recall one of my early relationships—not a heavy love affair, just a light one—was with a Russian man with a wonderful sense of humor who permitted me to squeeze the pus from his pimples on his back and shoulders. To me, this was the greatest intimacy. Before that, still young and neurotic, just allowing a man to listen to me urinate was utter humiliation, torture, and therefore, I thought, proof of profound love and trust.

that's!!!! cute!!!!

I watched for a minute or two, rapt, stunned, mystified until noise from the hall made me jump and scurry back up to the office. I really don’t think the boy saw me. I learned later on he was only fourteen. He could have passed for nineteen, twenty. I wasn’t immune to him either.

ohh that's not...

A grown woman is like a coyote—she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they’ll die of sadness. Over the years I’ve grown to love men for this weakness. I’ve tried to respect them as people, full of feelings, fluctuating and beautiful from day to day. I have listened, soothed, wiped the tears away. But as a young woman in X-ville, I had no idea that other people—men or women—felt things as deeply as I did. I had no compassion for anyone unless his suffering allowed me to indulge in my own.

His more aggressive indiscretions included pissing in the sandbox at the children’s playground,

The worst crime I could commit in his eyes was to do anything for my own pleasure, anything outside of my daughterly duties.

His smile perturbed me. He looked like a man who’d fondle children. He was a real creep.

Sandy, wherever you are buried, I hope you’ve stayed out of trouble. But if you haven’t, I’m sure you paid for it somehow. Everyone does, eventually.

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.

Believing that a friend is someone who loves you, and that love is the willingness to do anything, sacrifice anything for the other’s happiness, left me with an impossible ideal, until Rebecca.

For him, doing that with his son, that must have been love. As awful as that sounds, love is like that sometimes. It will make you rape your own son. It’s not something we think we’d ever do, but Mr. Polk must have known no other way.”

NO??

On the contrary, being kidnapped was something of a secret wish of mine. At least then I’d know that I mattered to someone, that I was of value. Violence made much more sense to me than any strained conversation. If there had been more fighting in my family growing up in X-ville, things might have turned out differently. I might have stayed.

“Death would be a blessing for someone like you,”

I don’t remember ever meeting Mr. Polk but if I did, he made no impression on me. I guess that is how those sick people get by. They look like nobodies, but behind closed doors they turn into monsters.

“You’re young. You haven’t had your heart broken.” But I understood her perfectly. Of course I did. Who wouldn’t?

I can’t tell you what I was thinking. I’m not here to make excuses.

Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day.

I knew she was long gone. In the end, she was a coward. Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose. Do I hold a grudge against her? I really don’t. She was a strange woman, Rebecca was, and came into my life at an odd moment, just when I needed to run away from it the most. I could say more about her, but this is my story after all, not hers.

He’d lost his mind, and now his daughter.

To me it is simply the mark of having been someone else once, that girl, Eileen—the one who got away.

Perhaps if I’d never met Rebecca, I would have driven out of X-ville full of regrets. Maybe I would have sobbed at my failure to thrive, sworn to God I’d change, be a real lady, eat three square meals a day, sit still like a good girl, keep a diary, go to church, pray, wear clean clothes, have nice girlfriends, date boys, go steady, do laundry, and so on—anything if it meant I didn’t have to forge my way alone, an orphan driving out into that cold Christmas morning.

I watched that old world go by, away and away, gone gone gone, until, like me, it disappeared.