My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  “I’ve been worried,” Reva said, barging in with a bottle of sparkling rosé. “Are you sick? Have you been eating? Did you take time off of work?”

  “I quit,” I lied. “I want to devote more time to my own interests.”

  “What interests? I didn’t know you had interests.” She sounded utterly betrayed. She stumbled a little on her heels.

  “Are you drunk?”

  “You really quit your job?” she asked, kicking her shoes off and flopping down on the armchair.

  “I’d rather eat shit than have to work for that cunt one more day,” I told her.

  “Didn’t you say she was married to a prince or something?”

  “Exactly,” I answered. “But that was just a rumor anyway.”

  “So you’re not sick?”

  “I’m resting.” I lay down on the sofa to demonstrate.

  “That makes sense,” Reva said, nodding compliantly, although I could tell she was suspicious. “Take some time off and think about your next move. Oprah says we women rush into decisions because we don’t have faith that something better will ever come along. And that’s how we get stuck in dissatisfying careers and marriages. Amen!”

  “I’m not making a career move,” I started to explain, but I went no further. “I’m taking some time off. I’m going to sleep for a year.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  I pulled a vial of Ativan out from between the sofa cushions, unscrewed the cap, and fished out two pills. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Reva squirming. I chewed the pills up—simply to horrify her—swallowed and gagged, then stuffed the vial back between the cushions and lay down and closed my eyes.

  “Well, I’m glad you have a life plan. But to be honest,” Reva began, “I’m concerned about your health. You’ve lost at least three pounds since you started taking all those medications.” Reva was expert at guessing the weights of things and people. “What about the long term? Are you going to take pills for the rest of your life?”

  “I’m not thinking that far ahead. And I might not live that long.” I yawned.

  “Don’t say that,” Reva said. “Look at me. Please.”

  I blinked my eyes open and turned to face the perfumed haze on the armchair. I squinted and focused. Reva was wearing a dress I recognized from a J. Crew catalogue the year before: a raw silk shift in a shade of pink I could only describe as “taffy.” Orange-hued lipstick.

  “Don’t get defensive, but you’re kind of off these days,” she said. “You’ve been sort of distant. And you’re just getting thinner and thinner.” I think that bothered Reva more than anything. She must have felt that I was cheating in the game of skinniness, which she had always worked so hard to play. We were about the same height, but I wore a size 2 and Reva wore a 4. “A six when I’m PMSing.” The discrepancy between our bodies was huge in Reva’s world.

  “I just don’t think it’s healthy to sleep all day,” she said, popping a few sticks of gum in her mouth. “Maybe all you need is a shoulder to cry on. You’d be surprised how much better you’ll feel after a good cry. Better than any pill can make you feel.” When Reva gave advice, it sounded as though she were reading a bad made-for-TV movie script. “A walk around the block could do wonders for your mood,” she said. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “I’m not in the mood for food,” I said. “And I don’t feel like going anywhere.”

  “Sometimes you need to act as if.”

  “Dr. Tuttle can probably give you something to get rid of your gum addiction,” I told her flatly. “They have pills for everything now.”

  “I don’t want to get rid of it,” Reva replied. “And it’s not an addiction. It’s a habit. And I enjoy chewing gum. It’s one of the few things in my life that makes me feel good about myself, because I do it for my own pleasure. Gum and the gym. Those are like my therapy.”

  “But you could have the medication instead,” I argued. “And spare your jaw from all that chewing.” I didn’t really care about Reva’s jaw.

  “Uh-huh,” she replied. She was looking straight at me, but was so entranced by her gum chewing, her mind seemed to drift off. When it returned, she got up and spat her gum out in the kitchen trash can, came back, lay down on the floor and started doing rhythmic crunches, crinkling the midsection of her dress. “We all have our own ways to cope with stress,” she said, and rambled on about the benefits of habitual behaviors. “Self-soothing,” is how she described it. “Like meditation.” I yawned, hating her. “Sleeping all the time isn’t really going to make you feel any better,” she said. “Because you’re not changing anything in your sleep. You’re just avoiding your problems.”

  “What problems?”

  “I don’t know. You seem to think you have a lot of problems. And I just don’t get it. You’re a smart girl,” Reva said. “You can do anything you put your mind to.” She got up and fished in her bag for her lip gloss. I could see her eyeing the sweaty bottle of rosé. “Come out with me tonight, pretty please? My friend Jackie from Pilates is having a birthday party at a gay bar in the Village. I wasn’t going to go, but if you come with me it could be fun. It’s only seven thirty. And it’s Friday night. Let’s drink this and go out. The night is young!”

  “I’m tired, Reva,” I said, peeling the wrapper off the cap of a bottle of NyQuil.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “You go without me.”

  “You want to stay here and sleep your life away? That’s it?”

  “If you knew what would make you happy, wouldn’t you do it?” I asked her.

  “See, you do want to be happy. Then why did you tell me that being happy is dumb?” she asked. “You’ve said that to me more than once.”

  “Let me be dumb,” I said, glugging the NyQuil. “You go be smart and tell me how great it is. I’ll be here, hibernating.”

  Reva rolled her eyes.

  “It’s natural,” I told her. “People used to hibernate all the time.”

  “People never hibernated. Where are you getting this?”

  She could look really pathetic when she was outraged. She got up and stood there holding her stupid knockoff Kate Spade bag or whatever it was, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and crowned with a useless, plastic, tortoiseshell headband. She was always getting her hair blown out, her eyebrows waxed into thin arched parentheses, her fingernails painted various shades of pink and purple, as though all of this made her a wonderful person.

  “It’s not up for discussion, Reva. This is what I’m doing. If you can’t accept it, then you don’t have to.”

  “I accept it,” she said, her voice dropping. “I just think it’s a shame to miss out on a fun evening.” She wrestled her white feet into her fake Louboutin stilettos. “You know, in Japan, companies have special rooms for businessmen to take naps in. I read about it in GQ. I’ll check on you tomorrow. I love you,” she said, grabbing the bottle of rosé on her way out.

  * * *

  • • •

  I DREAMT A LOT at the beginning, especially when the summer started in full force and the air in my apartment got thick with the sickly chill of AC. Dr. Tuttle said my dreams might indicate how well certain medications were working. She suggested I keep a log of my dreams as a way of tracking the “waning intensity of suffering.”

  “I don’t like the term ‘dream journal,’” she told me at our in-person appointment in June. “I prefer ‘night vision log.’”

  So I made notes on Post-its. Each time I awoke, I scribbled down whatever I could remember. Later I copied the dreams over in crazier-looking handwriting on a yellow legal pad, adding terrifying details, to hand in to Dr. Tuttle in July. My hope was that she’d think I needed more sedation. In one dream, I went to a party on a cruise ship and watched a lone dolphin circling in the distance. But in the dream journal, I reported that I was actually on the
Titanic and the dolphin was a shark that was also Moby Dick and also Dick Tracy and also a hard, inflamed penis, and the penis was giving a speech to a crowd of women and children and waving his gun around. “Then I saluted everyone like a Nazi and jumped overboard and everybody else got executed.”

  In another dream, I lost my balance standing in a speeding subway car, “and accidentally grabbed and ripped the hair off an old woman’s head. Her scalp was teeming with larvae, and the larvae were all threatening to kill me.”

  I dreamt I drove a rusted Mercedes up onto the Esplanade by the East River, “skinny joggers and Hispanic housekeepers and toy poodles thudding under the tires, and my heart exploded with happiness when I saw all the blood.”

  I dreamt I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and found an underwater village abandoned because its inhabitants had heard life was better somewhere else. “A fire-breathing serpent disemboweled me and slurped up my entrails.” I dreamt I stole somebody’s diaphragm and put it in my mouth “before giving my doorman a blow job.” I cut off my ear and e-mailed it to Natasha with a bill for a million dollars. I swallowed a live bee. “I ate a grenade.” I bought a pair of red suede ankle boots and walked down Park Avenue. “The gutters were flooded with aborted fetuses.”

  “Tsk-tsk,” Dr. Tuttle replied, when I showed her the “log.” “Looks like you’re still in the depths of despair. Let’s up your Solfoton. But if you have nightmares about inanimate objects coming to life, or if you experience such things while you’re awake, discontinue.”

  And then there were the dreams about my parents, which I never mentioned to Dr. Tuttle. I dreamt my dad had an illegitimate son he kept in the closet of his study. I discovered the boy, pale and undernourished, and together we conspired to burn down the house. I dreamt that I lathered up my mother’s pubic hair with a bar of Ivory soap in the shower, then pulled a tangle of hair out of her vagina. It was like the kind of fur ball a cat coughs up, or a clog in a bathtub drain. In the dream, I understood that the tangle of hair was my father’s cancer.

  I dreamt that I dragged both my parents’ dead bodies down into a ravine, then waited calmly in the moonlight, watching for vultures. In a few dreams, I’d answer the phone and hear a long silence, which I interpreted as my mother’s speechless disdain. Or I heard crackling static, and cried out, “Mom? Dad?” into the receiver, desperate and devastated that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. And other times, I was just reading transcripts of dialogues between the two of them, typed on aging onionskin paper that fell apart in my hands. Occasionally I’d spot my parents in places like the lobby of my apartment building or on the steps of the New York Public Library. My mother seemed disappointed and rushed, as though the dream had pulled her away from an important task. “What happened to your hair?” she asked me in the Starbucks on Lexington Avenue, then she trotted down the hall to the restroom.

  My father was always sick in my dreams, sunken eyes, greasy smudges on the thick lenses of his glasses. Once, he was my anesthesiologist. I was getting breast implants. He put his hand out a little hesitantly for me to shake, as though he wasn’t sure who I was or if we’d met before. I lay down on the steel gurney. Those dreams with him were the most upsetting. I’d wake up in a panic, take a few more Rozerem or whatever, and go back to sleep.

  In my waking hours, I often thought about my parents’ house—its nooks and corners, the way a room looked in the morning, in the afternoon, in the still of the night during summer, the soft yellow light of the streetlamp out front glinting off the polished wooden furniture in the den. The estate lawyer had recommended that I sell the house. The last time I’d been up there was the summer after my parents had died. Trevor and I were in the midst of one of our many failed romantic reunions, so we spent a weekend in the Adirondacks and took a detour to my hometown on the drive back down to the city. Trevor stayed in the rented convertible as I walked around the perimeter of the house, peering through the dusty windows at the empty spaces inside. It hardly looked any different from when I’d lived in it. “Don’t sell until the market improves,” Trevor yelled. I got emotional and embarrassed, ducked away and jumped in the mucky pond behind the garage, then emerged covered in rotting moss. Trevor got out of the car to hose me off in the garden, made me strip and put on his blazer before getting back into the car, then asked for a blow job in the parking lot of the Poughkeepsie Galleria before he went in to buy me a new outfit. I acquiesced. For him, this was erotic gold.

  When Trevor dropped me off at school, I called the lawyer and told him that I couldn’t let go of the house. “Not until I’m sure I’ll never get married and have children,” I said. It wasn’t true. And I didn’t care about the housing market or how much money I could get. I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.

  There were moments when I was little, my mother could make me feel very special, stroking my hair, her perfume sweet and light, her pale, bony hands cool and jangling with gold bracelets, her frosted hair, her lipstick, breath woody with smoke and stringent from booze. But the next moment she’d be in a haze, distracted, suffering from some grave fear or worry and struggling to put up with even the thought of me. “I can’t listen to you now,” she’d say in these moments, and she’d move from room to room, away, looking for some piece of paper where she’d scrawled down a phone number. “If you threw it away, I swear,” she’d warn. She was always calling someone—some new friend, I guess. I never knew where she met these women, these new friends—at the beauty parlor? At the liquor store?

  I could have acted out if I’d wanted to. I could have dyed my hair purple, flunked out of high school, starved myself, pierced my nose, slutted around, what have you. I saw other teenagers doing that, but I didn’t really have the energy to go to so much trouble. I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it. I’d be punished if I showed signs of suffering, I knew. So I was good. I did all the right things. I rebelled in silent ways, with my thoughts. My parents barely seemed to notice I existed. Once I heard them whispering in the hallway while I was using the bathroom.

  “Did you see she has two blemishes on her chin?” my mother asked my father. “I can’t stand to look at them. They’re so pink.”

  “Take her to a dermatologist if you’re that concerned,” my father said.

  A few days later, our housekeeper brought me a tube of Clearasil. It was the tinted kind.

  At the private all girls’ high school I went to, I’d had a flock of Reva-like adorers. I was emulated and gossiped about. I was blond and thin and pretty—that’s what people noticed. That’s what those girls cared about. I learned to float on cheap affections gleaned from other people’s insecurities. I didn’t stay out late. I just did my homework, kept my room clean, bided my time until I could move out and grow up and feel normal, I hoped. I didn’t go out with boys until college, until Trevor.

  When I was applying to schools, I overheard my mother talking to my father about me one more time.

  “You should read her college essay,” said my mother. “She’ll never let me look at it. I’m worried she might try to do something creative. She’ll end up at some awful state school.”

  “I’ve had some very bright graduate students who went to state schools,” my father replied calmly. “And if she just wants to major in English or something like that, it doesn’t really matter where she goes.”

  In the end I did show my college essay to my mother. I didn’t tell her that Anton Kirschler, the artist I wrote about, was a character of my own invention. I wrote that his work was instructive for how to maintain “a humanistic approach to art facing the rise of technology.” I described various made-up pieces: D
og Urinating on Computer, Stock Market Hamburger Lunch. I wrote that his work spoke to me personally because I was interested in how “art created the future.” It was a mediocre essay. My mother seemed unperturbed by it, which shocked me, and handed it back with the suggestion that I look up a few words in the thesaurus because I’d repeated them too often. I didn’t take her advice. I applied to Columbia early decision and got in.

  On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk.

  “Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding.

  “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me.

  “Orgasm,” my mother whispered.

  “Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said.

  “That warm fuzzy feeling.”

  “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.”

  “For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.”

  “Men don’t attach as easily. They’re more rational,” my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, “We just want you to be careful.”

  “He means use a rubber.”

  “And take these.”

  My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills.

  “Gross,” was all I could say.

  “And your father has cancer,” my mother said.

  I said nothing.