My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,6

me to come in the next day at nine A.M.

Her home office was in an apartment building on Thirteenth Street near Union Square. The waiting room was a dark, wood-paneled parlor full of fake Victorian furniture, cat toys, pots of potpourri, purple candles, wreaths of dead purple flowers, and stacks of old National Geographic magazines. The bathroom was crowded with fake plants and peacock feathers. On the sink, next to a huge bar of cracked lilac soap, was a wooden bowl of peanuts in an abalone shell. That baffled me. She hid all her personal toiletries in a large wicker basket in the cabinet under the sink. She used several antifungal powders, a prescription steroid cream, shampoo and soap and lotions that smelled like lavender and violet. Fennel toothpaste. Her mouthwash was prescription. When I tried it, it tasted like the ocean.

The first time I met Dr. Tuttle, she wore a foam neck brace because of a “taxi accident” and was holding an obese tabby, whom she introduced as “my eldest.” She pointed out the tiny yellow envelopes in the waiting room. “When you come in, write your name on an envelope and fold your check inside. Payments go in here,” she said, knocking on the wooden box on the desk in her office. It was the kind of box they have in churches for accepting donations for candles. The fainting couch in her office was covered in cat fur and piled on one end with little antique dolls with chipped porcelain faces. On her desk were half-eaten granola bars and stacked Tupperware containers of grapes and cut-up melon, a mammoth old computer, more National Geographic magazines.

“What brings you here?” she asked. “Depression?” She’d already pulled out her prescription pad.

My plan was to lie. I’d given it careful consideration. I told her I’d been having trouble sleeping for the past six months, and then complained of despair and nervousness in social situations. But as I was reciting my practiced speech, I realized it was somewhat true. I wasn’t an insomniac, but I was miserable. Complaining to Dr. Tuttle was strangely liberating.

“I want downers, that much I know,” I said frankly. “And I want something that’ll put a damper on my need for company. I’m at the end of my rope,” I said. “I’m an orphan, on top of it all. I probably have PTSD. My mother killed herself.”

“How?” Dr. Tuttle asked.

“Slit her wrists,” I lied.

“Good to know.”

Her hair was red and frizzy. The foam brace she wore around her neck had what looked like coffee and food stains on it, and it squished the skin on her neck up toward her chin. Her face was like a bloodhound’s, folded and drooping, her sunken eyes hidden under very small wire-framed glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. I never got a good look at Dr. Tuttle’s eyes. I suspect that they were crazy eyes, black and shiny, like a crow’s. The pen she used was long and purple and had a purple feather at the end of it.

“Both my parents died when I was in college,” I went on. “Just a few years ago.”

She seemed to study me for a moment, her expression blank and breathless. Then she turned back to her little prescription pad.

“I’m very good with insurance companies,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know how to play into their little games. Are you sleeping at all?”

“Barely,” I said.

“Any dreams?”

“Only nightmares.”

“I figured. Sleep is key. Most people need upwards of fourteen hours or so. The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.” She scribbled for a while on her pad. “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness. You should know that I’m someone who appreciates the subtleties of human experience. Being well rested is a precondition, of course. Do you know what mirth means? M-I-R-T-H?”

“Yeah. Like The House of Mirth,” I said.

“A sad story,” said Dr. Tuttle.

“I haven’t read it.”

“Better you don’t.”

“I read The Age of Innocence.”

“So you’re educated.”

“I went to Columbia.”

“That’s good for me to know, but not much use to you in your condition. Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned, having gone to Columbia. How’s your food intake? Is it steady? Any dietary restrictions? When you walked in here, I thought of Farrah Fawcett and Faye Dunaway. Any relation? I’d say you’re what, twenty pounds below an ideal