My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,51

said, motioning to a small silver Toyota. “This was my mom’s car. I started it last night. Hopefully I can start it again now. She hadn’t been driving it, obviously.” Inside, it smelled like menthol rub. There was a polar bear bobblehead on the dash, an issue of the New Yorker and a bottle of hand cream on the passenger seat. Reva started the car, sighed, clicked the garage door opener clipped to the visor, and started crying.

“See? I warned you,” she said, taking out the wad of tissues. “I’m just going to cry while the car heats up. Just a sec,” she said. She cried on, gently shaking under her puffy jacket.

“There, there,” I said, sucking down the coffee. I was intensely bored of Reva already. This would be the end of our friendship, I felt. Sometime soon, my cruelty would go too far, and now that her mother was dead, Reva’s head would start to clear of its superficial nonsense. She’d probably go back into therapy. She’d realize that we had no good reason to be friends, and that she would never get what she needed from me. She’d send me a long letter explaining her resentments, her mistakes, explaining how she had to let me go in order to move on with her life. I could already imagine her phrasing. “I’ve come to realize that our friendship is no longer serving me”—that was language her therapist would have taught her—“which is not a criticism of you.” But of course it was about me: I was the friend in the friendship she was describing.

As we drove through Farmingdale, I wrote my reply to her would-be “Dear John” letter in my head. “I got your note,” I would begin. “You have confirmed what I’ve known about you since college.” I tried to think of the worst thing I could say about a person. What was the cruelest, most cutting, truest thing? Was it worth saying? Reva was harmless. She wasn’t a bad person. She’d done nothing to hurt me. I was the one sitting there full of disgust, wearing her dead mother’s shoes. “Good-bye.”

* * *

• • •

FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, through the proceedings at Solomon Schultz Funeral Home, I stayed by Reva’s side but watched her as though from a distance. I started to feel strange—not guilty per se, but somehow responsible for her suffering. I felt as though she were a stranger I had hit with my car, and I was waiting for her to die so she wouldn’t be able to identify me. When she talked, it was like I was watching a movie. “That’s Ken, over there. See his wife?” The camera panned over the rows, narrowed in on a pretty half-Asian woman with freckles, wearing a black beret. “I don’t want him to see me like this. Why did I invite him? I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Don’t worry,” is all I could think to say. “He’s not going to fire you for being sad at a funeral.”

Reva sniffed and nodded, dabbed at her eyes with her tissue. “That’s my mom’s friend from Cleveland,” she said as an obese woman in a black muumuu hoisted herself onto the stage. She sang “On My Own” from Les Misérables, a cappella. It was painful to watch. Reva cried and cried. Tissues stained with mascara like crushed inkblot tests piled up on her lap. A dozen people went up to say nice things about Reva’s mother. A few made jokes, a few broke down shamelessly. Everyone agreed that Reva’s mother had been a good woman, that her death was sad, but that life was mysterious, death more so, and what’s the use in speculating so let’s remember the good times—at least she’d lived at all. She’d been brave, she’d been generous, she’d been a good mother and wife, a good cook and a good gardener. “My wife’s only wish was that we move on quickly and be happy,” Reva’s father said. “Everyone has already said so much about her.” He looked out at the crowd, shrugged, then seemed to get flummoxed, turned red, but instead of bursting into tears, he started coughing into the microphone. Reva covered her ears. Someone brought her father a glass of water and helped him back to his seat.

Then it was Reva’s turn to speak. She checked her makeup in her compact mirror, powdered her nose, dabbed her eyes with more tissues, then went up and stood at the