My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,47

guy kiss me was still not immediately clear. Maybe my mother’s dignity. Or maybe I just wanted a little affection. Trevor and I had been on the outs for months at the time. I hadn’t called to tell him my father had died. I was saving it to tell him later, so he’d feel terrible.

I called a taxi to take me to the train station the morning after that kiss. I didn’t wake my mother to tell her I was going back to school. I didn’t leave a note. A week went by. She didn’t call. When she “had her accident,” which is how they termed it at the hospital, Peggy was the one to find her.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said on the phone. “She’s still alive, but the doctors say you should come as soon as you can. I’m so, so sorry.”

My knees didn’t buckle. I didn’t fall to the ground. I was at the sorority house. I could hear girls cooking in the kitchen, chatting about their fat-free diets and how not to “bulk up” at the gym.

“Thanks for letting me know,” I told Peggy. She was whimpering and snorting. I didn’t tell anyone at the sorority house what was happening. I didn’t want to deal with the indignity of it all.

It took me almost an entire day to get up there. I wrote a final paper for a class on Hogarth on the train. Part of me was hoping my mother would be dead by the time I arrived.

“She knows you’re here,” Peggy said in the hospital room. I knew that wasn’t true. My mother was in a coma. She was already gone. Once in a while, her left eye would blink open—clear blue, frozen, blind, a terrifying, empty, soulless eye. I remember noticing in the hospital room that her roots were showing. She’d been vigilant about keeping her hair icy blond as long as I’d known her, but her natural color had grown in, a warmer shade—honey blonde, my color. I’d never seen her real hair before.

My mother’s body stayed alive for exactly three days. Even with a tube down her throat, a machine taped to her face to keep her breathing, she was still pretty. She was still prim. “Her organs are shutting down,” the doctor explained. System failure. She felt nothing, he assured me. She was brain dead. She wasn’t thinking or dreaming or experiencing anything, not even her own death. They turned off the machine and I sat there, waiting, watching the screen blip, then stop. She wasn’t resting. She was not in a state of peace. She was in no state, not being. The peace to be had, I thought, watching them pull the sheet over her head, was mine.

“Oh, sweetheart. I’m so, so sorry.” Peggy sobbed and embraced me. “You poor thing. You poor dear little orphan.”

Unlike my mother, I hated being pitied.

There was nothing new to be gleaned from these memories, of course. I couldn’t revive my mother and punish her. She took herself out before we could ever have a real conversation. I wondered if she’d been jealous of my father, at how well attended his funeral had been. She left a note. I found it at the house the night I came home from the hospital. Peggy drove me. I was stoic. I was numb. The note was on my father’s desk. My mother had used a page from a yellow legal pad to write it. Her penmanship started off as bold, capital letters, but by the end it petered out into tight, itchy cursive. The letter was totally unoriginal. She felt she wasn’t equipped to handle life, she wrote, that she felt like an alien, a freak, that consciousness was intolerable and that she was scared of going crazy. “Good-bye,” she wrote, then gave a list of people she’d known. I was sixth on the list of twenty-five. I recognized some of the names—long abandoned girlfriends, her doctors, her hairdresser. I kept the letter and never showed it to anybody. Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and scared and heard a voice in my mind say, “I want my mommy,” I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

My mother had been like I turned out to be—an only child with dead parents, so there wasn’t any family