HELP YOURSELF! -page 2-
Otessa Moshfegh
I had a baby once. It came out like a monster and sat breathing like a huffing furless goat in its glass cage. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. As far as I know it is being cared for by a thankful pair of human beings somewhere in this city. It seems ridiculous, I know.
You see, I’ve always had a trouble when it comes time to trust. If there were someone I could trust in this world, let it be someone in this shit-stink diner, let it be that young man—the runaway, the whore—who will break out of the din and ask if he may join me.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he might say
“Good morning, young man,” I’ll say.
He motions to the empty seat with what is in his hand—a sweaty handkerchief, a battered hat, a soiled newspaper. It is at this time I see he is a good actor. He grins shyly, now holding his hands together humbly in front of him. He does the slightest shuffle of his feet. When he lifts his eyes they are kind, bulging, hungry, appeasing eyes. I decide to look him up and down and squint just to see what he thinks about that. He doesn’t mind. I nod at the empty orange booth across from me. He does an awkward, manly move and scoots in.
“I don’t cook,” I tell him. “I’m not that kind of woman.”
“Mmm hmm,” he turns his head mechanically to the window, thinking of words.
The plates of food sit and steam. Someone at the counter yells something in his direction.
“Help yourself,” I tell him.
While we are eating, I set my fork down on the table and pull out my gun. Nobody notices. It’s just a little game, just to see.
I could have some expansive thoughts while this boy tries to eat like a civilized person in front of me. Bits of food get caught in his spotty beard. His lips are glistening with the grease in the soft sunlight. His silence paints over the situation and it is easier to ignore everything else around and focus more on the evenness of his jaw working, the delicate skin around his eyes, a soft down of blond hairs picked up by the sun. His eyes are a honey brown. I want to kidnap him. I think about walking out on the street with him and hailing a taxi. I imagine leaning back against the warm leather seat and giving directions to the driver. The boy would be nervous and excited. Or maybe he would be all business as usual and roll down the window to spit. Maybe I would hold the gun on him. If he refused to come with me, I would pay him a dime every ten minutes. Every five minutes if he looked forlorn. We would go to the art museum. In the hallway with pewter and bronze relics from early America, I would point at what I like and make him look at it. The reflections of our faces in the curved and polished silver cups and pots and plaques would twist and swirl us into a kind of two-toned monster, symmetrical and complete. In the high-ceilinged galleries of portraits, we would stand absorbed together, staring up into the eyes of dead kings and queens: men and women who sat for hours, days, weeks, years maybe, just so that their faces would show up somewhere in the world.
Back in the maid’s room, I put on the radio and let the music do to me what it will do. I think of myself as a great oriental carpet in an elegant banquet hall, and I crawl around it, and trace every pattern, designs like dreams spreading infinitely, on and on.
Knock knock knock.
Three times means someone is on the phone for me.
“Long distance,” says the booming voice of the boy in the hall.
It’s not what you think: a long-lost twin, my drunk boss, a police officer, a distant relation announcing a death, my child, nothing like that.
The payphone in the hall is strangely sterile, an ugly mauve color with hardened little buttons. Next to the phone, a legal pad is stuck on the wall with a hanging ballpoint pen to keep track of the bills.
“I’m calling in answer to your ad,” says the man on the phone. “I have a daughter and a dog.”
“Tell me more,” I say.
When we pull up to the small wooden house in the forest, the dog is smaller than I imagined. Just a little raggish grey thing that skulks around the porch and does not come when I put my hand out.
The daughter is well-groomed and sets the plates carefully on the table.
“My girl likes to draw, don’t you honey?” says the man.
If I feel like letting you in on any privacy about this man, I say to you that at his finest moments, he’s just as adaptable to tragedy as to triumph, and that he looks away when I do my nasties.
After dinner the daughter spreads out her drawings. And there it is, the crystal clear vision of youth. The curling yellowed paper, the lines delicate and perturbed, each self-portrait truer than the last. And she keeps them coming. “This is me, and this is me, and this is me again.” Announcing all the silvery sketches, each with that same brilliant phrase: “This is me!” The father sweats luminously across the table.
“I do one every day,” says the daughter, her uncharacteristic big gripping hands smoothing over the edges, moving over the world she knows with a certainty that makes me want to weep. She puts one of these hands on my shoulder absentmindedly.
“If I do one a day, by the time I die I’ll have thousands,” she says. “And then I’ll hang them up in a line and walk past them while I’m really sick and dying. And so the last thing I’ll see before I die is the picture I drew of myself when I’m dead.”
“Everyone has a few great ideas,” she says restfully.
And then she says to me, “What do you do? What is your great idea?”