Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

mouth. I was so impressed. The soft pink color of the girl’s tongue, the way the clean winter light reflected on its sleek surface, and the contrast in its color and texture to the pure, aquiline face, so beautiful. Sitting in my car, I couldn’t shake the image—such erotic force seemed impossible. Of course I’d heard of French kissing and seen the lolling heads of young people necking on the 1-H lookout, but this view of it was as though I’d had X-ray lenses. It struck me just how forward the girl was, how gutsy, how bold to kiss that way, and so of course I thought to myself that I’d never have the guts to be anything like her. The boy was impassive, eyes shut, mouth wide, arms enfolding the girl, the collar of his plaid wool jacket flipped up. It all haunted me and compounded my headache and fatigue into severe anxiety. Sexual excitement nearly always made me feel sick. At home I could have taken a scalding bath, washed vigorously, but I was far from home. So I opened the car door and leaned out and scooped up a fistful of crystalline snow and stuffed itdown the front of my trousers and into my underpants. It was very cold and very painful, but I left it there to melt as I drove. I rolled down the windows. How I didn’t catch pneumonia is beyond me.
    As I did oftentimes when I was disturbed, I headed back up to Randy’s. On the drive I thought of his thick arms, his top lip, sensuous yet boyish, the sideways glint of his smile which he tried to hide behind a comic book or some funny magazine. Would he miss me when I was gone? Perhaps he would. “Oh, Eileen,” he’d say to the cops when they’d investigate my disappearance. “She left before I ever got the nerve to ask her on a date. I missed out and I’ll always regret it.” It soothed me to think of us together, perhaps reunited after several years which I’d have spent becoming a real woman, his type—whatever that meant—and we’d embrace each other and cry at the sadness of our lost love and separation. “I was so blind,” Randy would say, kissing my fingers, tears coasting down his beautiful cheekbones. I loved a crying man—a weakness which led me into countless affairs with whiners and depressives. I suspected Randy cried rarely, but when he did, it was a thing of great beauty. Did I really drive by his apartment that afternoon, my seat wet with melting snow? Of course I did. I can’t say what I was looking for exactly, though I was ever hopeful that he might come out and profess his love, save me, run away with me, solve all my problems. As I idled in front of his place, I was suddenly overcome with nausea. I opened the car door and vomited. The gray, melted ice cream sank into the snowbank, then disappeared.
    As soon as I got home that afternoon, I ran upstairs to my mother’s room and peeled off my cold, wet pants and underwear. My father, sitting on the toilet across the dim hall, swung the bathroom door open to ask, “Where’ve you been?”
    I pulled on a pair of old woolen tights and went and found a spare bottle of gin I’d hidden in the closet and handed it to my father. He took it and flipped the light on with his free hand. When his newspaper slipped from his knees, I caught sight of the dark patch of pubic hair in his lap. That terrified me. I saw, too, his gun sitting on the edge of the sink. I’d wondered about that gun from time to time. In my darkest moments, I’d imagined easing it out from under my father’s sleeping body and pulling the trigger. I’d aim straight through the back of my skull so that I’d slump down over him, my blood and brains oozing all over his cold, flaccid chest. But honestly, even in those darkest moments, the idea of anyone examining my naked corpse was enough to keep me alive. I was that ashamed of my body. It also concerned me that my demise would have no great impact, that I could blow my