My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,64
the train to Coney Island, I thought, walk along the beach in the freezing wind, and swim out into the ocean. Then I’d just float on my back looking up at the stars, go numb, get sleepy, drift, drift. Isn’t it only fair that I should get to choose how I’ll die? I wouldn’t die like my father did, passive and quiet while the cancer ate him alive. At least my mother did things her own way. I’d never thought to admire her before for that. At least she had guts. At least she took matters into her own hands.
I opened my eyes. There was a spiderweb in the corner of the ceiling, fluttering like a scrap of moth-eaten silk in the draft. I tuned in to Reva for a moment. Her words cleansed the palette of my mind. Thank God for her, I thought, my whiny, moronic analgesic.
“So then I was like, ‘I’m tired of you jerking me around.’ And he starts talking about how he’s my boss. All macho, right? And actually evading the real issue which is the thing I told you about, which I can’t even think about right now.” I had no memory of her telling me anything. The sound of more gin. “I mean, I’m not keeping it. Obviously. Especially not now! But no. Ken can’t be bothered about that. Being evasive is totally his thing.”
I turned around and peeked at her.
“If he thinks he can get rid of me so easily . . . ,” she said, wagging her finger. “If he thinks he’s gonna get away with this . . .”
“What, Reva? What are you going to do to him? Are you going to kill him? You’re going to burn his house down?”
“If he thinks I’m just going to eat his shit and slink away . . .”
She couldn’t finish her sentence. She had no threats to make. She was too afraid of her own rage to ever imagine it through to any violent end. She would never exact revenge. So I suggested, “Tell his wife he’s been fucking you. Or sue him for sexual harassment.”
Reva wrinkled her nose and sucked her teeth, her rage suddenly transformed into calculated pragmatism. “I don’t want people to know, though. That puts me in such an awkward position. And I am getting a raise, so that’s good. Plus, I’ve always wanted to work in the World Trade Center. So it’s not like I can complain exactly. I just want Ken to feel bad.”
“Men don’t feel bad the way you want them to,” I told her. “They just get grouchy and depressed when they can’t have what they want. That’s why you got fired. You’re depressing. Consider it a compliment, if you want.”
“Transferred, not fired.” Reva set her mug down on the coffee table and lifted her hands up in front of her face. “Look, I’m shaking.”
“I don’t see it,” I said.
“There’s a tremor. I can feel it.”
“Do you want a Xanax?” I asked sarcastically.
To my surprise, Reva said yes. I told her to bring me the bottle from the medicine cabinet. She clacked back and forth to the bathroom and handed me the bottle.
“There must be twenty prescriptions in there,” she said. “Are you on all of them?”
I gave Reva one Xanax. I took two.
“I’m just going to lie here with my eyes closed, Reva. You can stay if you want, but I might fall asleep. I’m really tired.”
“Yeah, OK,” she said. “But can I keep talking, though?”
“Sure.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
I waved my hand. I’d never seen Reva so shamelessly unbridled. Even when she drank a lot, she was extremely uptight. I heard her spark the lighter. She coughed for a while.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” she said. She sounded calmer now. “Maybe I can move on and meet somebody new. Maybe I’ll go online again. Or maybe there’ll be someone at the downtown office. I kind of like the Twin Towers. It’s peaceful up there. And I think if I start things off on the right foot, with a whole new group of people, they won’t treat me like a slave. Nobody ever listened to me at Ken’s office. We’d have these strategy meetings, and instead of letting me speak, they’d make me take notes like I’m some nineteen-year-old intern. And Ken treated me like shit at work because he didn’t want people to know we’re involved. Were involved. Isn’t it kind of weird that he brought his wife to my mother’s funeral?