Eileen

by Ottessa Moshfegh

But instead I used the sharp point of my car key to poke a hole in the inside lining around the hem and tore it a little. I pulled on my old clothes, which felt all the more old and stank of my sweat, the shirt under my sweater cold and wet in the armpits. I walked out back through the store.

“How’d you do?” I remember the shopgirl asked, as though I may have done well or poorly. Why was my performance always called into question? Of course the dress looked awful on me. The shopgirl must have predicted that. But why was it I who had failed, and not the dress? “How did the dress do?” is what she should have asked instead.

When I stole things I felt I was invincible, as though I had punished the world and rewarded myself, setting things right for once—justice served.

A psychoanalyst may term it something like a formative trauma, but I know little about psychology and reject the science entirely. People in that profession, I’d say, should be watched very closely. If we were living several hundred years ago, my guess is they’d all be burned as witches.

I got over my childhood fear of the dark that day, I suppose. Nothing came at me—no angry spirits attacked me, no restless ghosts tried to suck out my soul. They left me alone down there, which was just as painful.

Joanie and I sat through endless hours of Bible study taught by an elderly nun, none of whose teachings penetrated into my consciousness one bit—the house would be only slightly less disheveled, and our mother would be lying on the couch in the living room, reading a magazine, a bottle of vermouth stuck between her thighs, cigarette smoke floating above her head in the stuffy afternoon sunlight like a brooding storm cloud. “Promise you’ll visit me in hell, Eileen?” she’d ask. “Go to your room,” said my father. My mother rolled her eyes at my father’s superstitions, how he’d cross himself before eating, look up at the ceiling whenever he was hopeful or mad. “God is for dummies,” she told us. “People are scared of dying, that’s all. Listen to me, girls.” I remember when she said this, pulling us aside one day after our aunt Ruth had come over and scolded us for being lazy, for being spoiled brats, or something like that. She and our mother didn’t get along. “God is a made-up story,” our mother told us, “like Santa Claus. There is nobody watching you when you’re alone. You decide for yourself what’s right and wrong. There are no prizes for good little girls. If you want something, fight for it. Don’t be a fool.” I don’t think she was ever so caring as when she delivered this terrifying pronouncement: “To hell with God. And to hell with your father.”

out. I decided I would only pretend to believe in God since that seemed just as good as real faith, which I didn’t have. “Pray like you mean it!” my father would shout when it was my turn to say grace. I’m not as angry at my father for his idiotic moralism as I am for the way he treated me. He had no loyalty to me. He was never proud of me. He never praised me. He simply didn’t like me. His loyalty was to the gin, and his twisted war against the hoodlums, his imaginary enemies, the ghosts. “Devil’s spawn,” he’d say, waving his gun around.

Like Doris Day, this woman must live in a charmed world of fluffy pillows and golden sunshine. So of course I hated her. I’d never come face-to-face with someone so beautiful before in my life.

Per aspera ad astra.

My eyebrows were always thin and weak, so I never had to pluck them. I’ve heard having weak brows is a sign of indecisiveness. I prefer to think it is the mark of an open heart, an appreciation of possibility. In that fashion magazine with the cat-fur hat, I’d read how some women draw their eyebrows with a pencil to be thick and dark. Ridiculous, I’d thought. Standing outside the visitation room, I tapped the bony points of my hips with the butt of my fist, a habit which assured me, somehow, of my superiority, my great strength.

I understood perfectly that the rule that prohibited parents from giving gifts to their children was to keep the boys in a state of desperation. The warden proselytized at every possible occasion. His logic was quite sound, I believed. Only a desperate soul would feel remorse for his sins, and if the remorse was deep enough, the boy would surrender and hence he’d be pliable, finally willing to be transformed, so the warden said. The last people on Earth I’d put in charge of transforming anyone were that warden and Dr. Frye, or Dr. Morris—though I never knew him—or, sorry to say, Rebecca. She may have been the worst of all. But I speak with hindsight.

Everybody was broken. Everybody suffered. Each of those sad mothers wore some kind of scar—a badge of hurt to attest to the heartbreak that her child, her own flesh and blood, was growing up in prison.

I suppose the details of my behavior that morning are unnecessary, but I like to remember myself in action. I’m old now. I don’t move vigorously or frenetically anymore. Now I’m graceful. I move with measured and elegant precision, but I am slow. I’m like a beautiful tortoise. I don’t waste my energy. Life is precious to me now.

“Dunlop” was etched into the wooden handle. I’ve since looked in books about guns and have identified it as a Smith & Wesson Model 10. It had a four-inch barrel and weighed nearly two pounds. I kept it for a few weeks once I ran away, then I threw it off the Brooklyn Bridge.

It’s amazing what the mind will do when the heart is throbbing.

I quickly figured out my route to Rebecca’s house, which seemed to be on the wrong side of the tracks, as they say—that barely registered as odd at the time—and then I folded up the map and put it in my coat pocket. I still have that map. It’s at home, pinned up on the back of my closet door. Faded and stiff now, I carried it around for years and I’ve cried over it many times. It’s the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home. When I look at it now, my heart swells with gratitude, then shrinks with disgust.

I will say this about houses. Those perfect, neat colonials I’d passed earlier that evening on my way through X-ville are the death masks of normal people. Nobody is really so orderly, so perfect. To have a house like that says more about what’s wrong with you than any decrepit dump. Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four.

I cannot say for sure why Rebecca had to drag me into her scheme. Did she really think I could help her? Or was I just there to witness her brilliant project, absolve her of her guilt? I’ve debated with myself time and again the earnestness of her compassion. Just what was her motivation for getting involved in the Polk family drama? Did she honestly think she had the power to atone for someone else’s sins, that she could exact justice with her wit, her superior thinking? People born of privilege are sometimes thus confused. But now she was frightened. Mrs. Polk was perhaps more evil than Rebecca had counted on.