Free Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh Page A

bulb.” We’d had the same exchange once a week for years.
    â€œEverything’s a waste of time,” I said, collapsing a bit in my chair.
    â€œHave a drink,” my father grumbled, sipping his. “Cops brought me good whiskey,” he said again. “That Dalton boy looks like some kind of weasel.” The Daltons lived across the street. He stopped, paused. “You hear that?” He put his hand out, perked his ears. “Hoodlums are rowdy tonight. What day is it?”
    â€œSaturday,” I said.
    â€œThat’s why. Hungry as rats.” He finished his whiskey, absentmindedly fumbled through the folds of the blanket spread across his lap, pulled up a half-empty bottle of gin. “How was the movie? How’s my Joanie?” He was like that. His mind was not quite right.
    â€œShe’s fine, Dad.”
    â€œLittle Joanie,” he said wistfully, somberly. He rubbed his chin, raised his eyebrows. “The kids grow up,” he said. We stared into the hot oven like it was a crackling fireplace. I warmed my thawing fingers, poured myself more whiskey, pictured the moon and stars swirling as they would through the windshield if I’d sped off the side of that cliff and down onto the rocks earlier that evening, the glittering of broken glass over the frozen snow, the black ocean.
    â€œJoanie,” my father repeated, reverently. Despite her whorish ways, my father adored my sister, pined for her, it seemed—“my dear, sweet Joanie”—spoke of her with such admiration and decency. “My good little girl.” Those last years in X-ville, I’d stay up in the attic most times she came to visit. I couldn’t stand to watch how he’d give her money, eyes filling with tears of pride and honor, and how they loved each other—if love was what that was—in a way I could never understand. She could do no wrong. Although she was older than me, Joanie was his baby, his angel, his heart.
    As for me, no matter what I did, he was certain it was the wrong thing to do, and told me so. If I came down the stairs holding a book or a magazine, he said, “Why do you waste your time reading? Go for a walk outside. You’re pale as my ass.”And if I bought a stick of butter, he would hold it between his fingers and say, “I can’t eat a stick of butter for dinner, Eileen. Be reasonable. Be smart for once.” When I walked through the front door, his response was always, “You’re late,” or “You’re home early,” or “You’ve got to go out again, we’re in short supply.” Although I wished him dead, I did not want him to die. I wanted him to change, be good to me, apologize for the half decade of grief he’d given me. And also, it pained me to imagine the inevitable pomp and sentimentality of his funeral. The trembling chins and folded flag, all that nonsense.
    Joanie and I were never really close growing up. She was always much more personable and happier than I was, and being around her made me feel stiff and awkward and ugly. At her birthday party one year, she teased me for being too shy to dance, forced me to stand and grabbed my hips in her hands, then squatted down by my nether regions and rotated my body side to side as though I were a puppet, a rag doll. Her friends laughed and danced and I sat back down. “You’re ugly when you pout, Eileen,” my dad had said, snapping a picture. Things like that happened all the time. She left home at seventeen and abandoned me for a better life with that boyfriend of hers.
    I’m reminded of one Fourth of July when I must have been twelve, since Joanie is four years older and she’d just gotten her license to drive. We’d come home from an afternoon at the beach to find our parents hosting a barbecue in our backyard for the entire X-ville police department, a rare social event for the Dunlops. A rookie, whom I recognized