My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,20
these moments, and she’d move from room to room, away, looking for some piece of paper where she’d scrawled down a phone number. “If you threw it away, I swear,” she’d warn. She was always calling someone—some new friend, I guess. I never knew where she met these women, these new friends—at the beauty parlor? At the liquor store?
I could have acted out if I’d wanted to. I could have dyed my hair purple, flunked out of high school, starved myself, pierced my nose, slutted around, what have you. I saw other teenagers doing that, but I didn’t really have the energy to go to so much trouble. I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it. I’d be punished if I showed signs of suffering, I knew. So I was good. I did all the right things. I rebelled in silent ways, with my thoughts. My parents barely seemed to notice I existed. Once I heard them whispering in the hallway while I was using the bathroom.
“Did you see she has two blemishes on her chin?” my mother asked my father. “I can’t stand to look at them. They’re so pink.”
“Take her to a dermatologist if you’re that concerned,” my father said.
A few days later, our housekeeper brought me a tube of Clearasil. It was the tinted kind.
At the private all girls’ high school I went to, I’d had a flock of Reva-like adorers. I was emulated and gossiped about. I was blond and thin and pretty—that’s what people noticed. That’s what those girls cared about. I learned to float on cheap affections gleaned from other people’s insecurities. I didn’t stay out late. I just did my homework, kept my room clean, bided my time until I could move out and grow up and feel normal, I hoped. I didn’t go out with boys until college, until Trevor.
When I was applying to schools, I overheard my mother talking to my father about me one more time.
“You should read her college essay,” said my mother. “She’ll never let me look at it. I’m worried she might try to do something creative. She’ll end up at some awful state school.”
“I’ve had some very bright graduate students who went to state schools,” my father replied calmly. “And if she just wants to major in English or something like that, it doesn’t really matter where she goes.”
In the end I did show my college essay to my mother. I didn’t tell her that Anton Kirschler, the artist I wrote about, was a character of my own invention. I wrote that his work was instructive for how to maintain “a humanistic approach to art facing the rise of technology.” I described various made-up pieces: Dog Urinating on Computer, Stock Market Hamburger Lunch. I wrote that his work spoke to me personally because I was interested in how “art created the future.” It was a mediocre essay. My mother seemed unperturbed by it, which shocked me, and handed it back with the suggestion that I look up a few words in the thesaurus because I’d repeated them too often. I didn’t take her advice. I applied to Columbia early decision and got in.
On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk.
“Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?”
I shook my head.
“It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding.
“Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me.
“Orgasm,” my mother whispered.
“Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said.
“That warm fuzzy feeling.”
“It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.”
“For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.”
“Men don’t attach as easily. They’re more rational,” my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, “We just want you to be careful.”
“He means use a rubber.”
“And take these.”
My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills.