My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,46

bath and a nap. Sunday? Fine, but call first.”

In the afternoons, I took the car out, driving aimlessly or to the mall or the supermarket. My mother left me lists of things to buy, with a note for the guy at the liquor store. “This girl is my daughter, and I permit her to purchase alcohol. Call if you’d like to verify her identity. The number is . . .” I bought her vodka. I bought her whiskey and mixers. I didn’t think she was in any real danger. She’d been a heavy drinker for years. Maybe I did take some pleasure in aiding her self-destruction by buying her booze, but I didn’t want my mother to die. It wasn’t like that. I remember one afternoon, she came out of her room and walked past me where I lay on the floor sobbing. She went to the kitchen, wrote a check for the housekeeper, took a bottle of vodka from the freezer, told me to turn down the television, and went back to her room.

That was the worst of it. I was pretty upset. I couldn’t have described with any accuracy how I was “doing.” And nobody called to ask me. Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty. In hindsight, Reva was a pioneer: she was the only friend who ever really dared to try to know me. We didn’t get to be friends until later that year. For the rest of my week of mourning, my moods trespassed out of the standard categories I’d come to recognize. One moment was silent and gray, Technicolor and garish and absurd the next. I felt like I was on drugs, though I had taken nothing. I didn’t even drink that week until a man from the university, Professor Plushenko, one of my father’s colleagues, came to the house, and my mother attempted to entertain him.

Professor Plushenko had come under the veil of condolence with a store-bought Bundt cake and a bottle of Polish brandy. He was there to convince my mother to give him my father’s papers. I had the feeling he wanted something my father wouldn’t have given to him willingly. I felt a responsibility to watch and make sure the guy didn’t take advantage of my mother’s fragile state. Apparently the man had known my parents for many years.

“You look just like your mother,” he said that night, leering at me. His skin was cardboard colored and matte, his lips weirdly red and gentle. He wore a striped gray suit and smelled of sweet cologne.

“My daughter is barely nineteen years old,” my mother scoffed. She wasn’t defending me against his lechery. She was bragging. By then, I was actually twenty.

Of course there was no dinner—my mother was incapable of providing that—but there were drinks. I was allowed to drink. After a few, the man sat down on the sofa between us. He spoke of my father’s invaluable contribution to future generations of scientists, how blessed he felt to have worked so closely beside him. “His legacy is in his students, and in his papers. I want to be the one to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. It’s precious material. It must be handled very thoughtfully.”

My mother could barely speak then. She allowed a tear to run down her face, leaving a muddled gray stripe through her makeup. The man put one arm around her shoulders. “Oh, you poor thing. A tragic loss. He was a great man. I know how much he loved you.” I guess my mother was too aggrieved, too drunk, or too medicated to see the man’s other arm snake over from his knee to mine at some point during the conversation. I was drunk, too, and I kept still. When my mother got up to use the bathroom, we were left alone on the sofa, and there was a kiss on my forehead, a finger traced down the side of my neck and over my left nipple. I knew what he was doing. I did not resist. “You poor thing.”

My nipple was still erect when my mother came back in, tripping over the edge of the carpet.

My father had left everything to my mother, including the contents of his study. After she died, I was the one who went in there and packed things up and lugged the boxes to the basement. That colleague of his never saw a single page. What I was bartering for in letting that