My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,69
saucer, his huge gray computer blinking neon green, a stack of papers he’d marked in red, mechanical pencils, yellow legal pads that flared open like daffodils. Journals and magazines and newspapers and manila folders, gummy pink erasers that struck me suddenly as somehow genital. Squat glass bottles of Canada Dry a quarter full. A chipped crystal dish of oxidizing paper clips, loose change, a crumpled lozenge wrapper, a button he had meant to sew back onto a shirt but never did. My father.
How many of my parents’ hairs and eyelashes and skin cells and fingernail clippings had survived between the floorboards since the professor moved in? If I sold the house, the new owners might cover the hardwood with linoleum, or tear it out. They might paint the walls bright colors, build a deck in the back and seed the lawn with wildflowers. The place could look like “the hippie house” next door by spring, I thought. My parents would have hated that.
I put the letter from the lawyer aside and lay down on the sofa. I should have felt something—a pang of sadness, a twinge of nostalgia. I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that—if I were in a movie—would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life’s most meaningful moments: my first steps; Dad pushing me on a swing at sunset; Mom bathing me in the tub; grainy, swirling home video footage of my sixth birthday in the backyard garden, me blindfolded and twirling to pin the tail on the donkey. But the nostalgia didn’t hit. These weren’t my memories. I felt just a tingling feeling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don’t. My heart bumped up a little. I could drop it, I told myself—the house, this feeling. I had nothing left to lose. So I called the estate lawyer.
“What would make more money?” I asked him. “Selling the house, or burning it down?” There was a breathless pause on the phone. “Hello?”
“Selling it, definitely,” the lawyer said.
“There are some things in the attic and the basement,” I began to say. “Do I have to—”
“You can pick that up when we pass the papers. In due time. The professor moves out mid-February, and then we’ll see. I’ll let you know what transpires.”
I hung up and put my coat on and went down to Rite Aid.
It was cold and windy out, snow brushing up off parked cars like rainbow glitter in the noon light. I could smell the coffee burning as I passed the bodega and was tempted to get some for the walk to the pharmacy, but I knew better. Caffeine wouldn’t help me now. I was already shaky and nervous. I had high hopes for the Ambien. Four Ambien with a Dimetapp chaser could put me out for at least four hours, I thought. “Think positive,” Reva liked to tell me.
At Rite Aid, I browsed the videos: The Bodyguard, The Mighty Ducks, The Karate Kid Part III, Bullets over Broadway, and Emma, then remembered, heartbreakingly, again—the truth was cruel—that my VCR was still broken.
The woman working the pharmacy counter was old and birdlike. I’d never seen her before. Her name tag said her name was Tammy. The worst name on Earth. She spoke to me with a clinical professionalism that made me hate her.
“Date of birth? Have you been here before?”
“Do you guys sell VCRs?”
“I don’t think so, ma’am.”
I could have made the trek to Best Buy on Eighty-sixth Street. I could have taken a cab there and back. I was just too lazy, I told myself. But really, by this point, I think I had resigned myself to fate. No stupid movie would save me. I could already hear the jet planes thunder overhead, a rumble in the atmosphere of my mind that would rend things open, then obscure the damage with smoke and tears. I didn’t know what it would look like. That was fine. I paid for some Dimetapp, the Ambien, a tiny tin of Altoids, and strutted home through the cold—vibrating but relieved, the pills and mints now rattling like snakes, I thought, with each step I took. Soon I’d be home again. Soon, God willing, I’d be asleep.
A dog walker passed by with a team of yipping teacups and lapdogs on whiplike leashes. The dogs skittered across