Ottessa Moshfegh
Slumming
YOU COULD TELL JUST by looking—grape-soda stains on their kids’ T-shirts, cheap dye jobs, bad teeth—the people of Alna were poor. Some of them liked to huddle on turnouts or thumb rides up and down Route 4, sunburnt and tattooed, but I never thought to stop and pick one up. I was a woman alone, after all. And I didn’t want to have to talk to them, get to know them, or hear their stories. I preferred to keep the residents of Alna as part of its scenery. Wild teens, limping men, young mothers, kids scattered on the hot concrete like the town’s lazy rats or pigeons. From a distance I watched the way they congregated, then dispersed, heads hung at midlevel, neither noble nor disconsolate. The trashiness of the town was comforting, like an old black-and-white movie. Picture an empty street with a broken-down car, a child’s rusty tricycle abandoned on the curb, a wrinkled old lady scratching herself while watering her dun-colored lawn, the hose twisting perversely in her tight fist. Crumbling sidewalks. I played along when I went up there, slipping pennies in and out of the dish on the counter of the Gas Plus on State Street as though a few cents could make or break me.
I made an abysmal living back home teaching high school English, and my ex-husband rarely paid his alimony on time. But by Alna’s standards, I was rich. I owned my summer house up there. I’d bought it from the bank for next to nothing, full of cobwebs and tacky wallpaper. It was a one-and-a-half-story bungalow overlooking the Omec River, a sloshy mile-long tributary to a lake twice the size of Alna itself. The real estate taxes were negligible. The cost of living was a joke. The teenage boys in the sandwich shop in town remembered me from summer to summer because I tipped them the fifty-cents change they tried to give me. Otherwise I didn’t mingle. I’d made the acquaintance of a few of the neighbors—mostly single moms whose teenage children smoked and strollered their own babies around the graveled driveways. An old man across the street had a long beard stained brassy from cigarette smoke. “Hey neighbor,” he’d say, wheezing, if I saw him out walking his dog. But I never felt I was anybody’s neighbor. I was only ever just visiting Alna. I was slumming it up there. I knew that.
Clark supplied a steady stream of coeds to occupy the house during the school year. He taught computer programming at the community college ten miles away, in Pittville. I paid him to look after my place. I sometimes got the sense he was overcharging me, inventing problems and costs to inflate his monthly bills, but I didn’t care. It was worth the peace of mind. If something went wrong—if the pipes froze or the rent was late—Clark would handle it. He’d wrap the windows once it got cold, fix a leaky faucet, a short circuit, a broken step. And I was glad I never had to deal with any of the tenants. Each summer I drove up to Alna, I’d find the house altered—a new perfume lacing the humid air, menstrual stains on the mattress, hardened bacon grease splattered on the kitchen counter, a fleck of mascara on the bathroom mirror like a squashed fly. I mostly didn’t mind these remnants. Having a tenant kept the vagrants out of what would otherwise be an empty shelter from September to June. The street people of Alna were notorious for taking up residence wherever they could find it and refusing to leave, especially during the winters, which were, in Alna, deadly.
There was no scenic hike or museum to visit, no guided tour, no historic monument. Unlike where my sister summered, Alna had no gallery of naïve art, no antique shop, no bookstore, no fancy bakery. The only coffee to buy was at the Gas Plus or the doughnut shop. Occasionally I drove to Pittville to see a movie for two dollars. And sometimes I visited the deluxe shopping center on Route 4, where the fattest people on earth could be found buzzing around in electronic wheelchairs, trailing huge carts full of hamburger meat and cake mix and jugs of vegetable oil and pillow-size bags of chips. I only shopped there for things like bug spray and batteries, clean underwear when I didn’t feel like doing laundry, an occasional box of Popsicles.
Monday through Friday I kept to my summer diet of one foot-long submarine sandwich per day—the first half for lunch, the second half for dinner. I got these sandwiches from the deli downtown, around the corner from the bus depot at the hilltop crossing of Riverside Road and Main Street, where the vagrant townsfolk dressed like zombies and kept wolf dogs on rope leashes. The town was rife with meth and heroin. I knew that because it was obvious and because I dabbled in both when I was up there. Unless it was raining, I walked the two miles back and forth up Riverside every weekday morning, got a soda and my sandwich, and more often than not hit the bus depot restroom to buy ten dollars’ worth of whatever was on sale—up or down.
On the weekends, I took myself out to eat. I had lunch either at the doughnut shop, where you could get an egg-and-cheese sandwich for a dollar, or at the diner on 122. I liked to sit at the counter there and get a platter of chopped iceberg smothered in ranch dressing and a bottomless Diet Coke and listen to the waitress greet the regulars—big men in T-shirts and suspenders, left arms brown as burnt steak. Half the time I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. For Saturday night dinners I hit the Chinese buffet for sautéed broccoli and free box wine, or I went to Charlie’s Good-Time, a family-style bar serving french fries and pizza. The bar was attached to a combination arcade and bowling alley. I didn’t talk to anybody when I went out. I just sat and ate and watched the people talk and chew and gesture.
The Good-Time was where I met Clark my first summer in Alna. Through the haze of cigarette smoke and steam from the bar’s kitchen, he was the only person who looked remotely educated. I was inclined to brush him off at first because he was nearly bald and wore a knotted hemp necklace. His hand was limp and clammy when I shook it. But he was persistent. He was kind. I let him pay for a pitcher of beer and try to impress me with his knowledge of literature. He told me he didn’t—couldn’t—read fiction written after ’93, the year William Golding died, and he claimed to know the editor of a well-known literary journal in the city, one I’d never heard of. “Stan,” Clark called him. “We go way back.” I overlooked all the glaring errors in his personality—his arrogance, his airs, his bony, hairy hands. I still remember the humility it took for me to agree to take him home, then the appalling ease with which I accepted his pathetic overtures of gratitude and affection. He wore a cheap white dress shirt and blue jeans, brown leather sandals, and a small gold hoop earring in one ear, and when we undressed in the dark in my empty upstairs bedroom, me crouching under the sloped ceiling, his genitals swung in my face like a fist. Afterward he said I was a “real woman,” whatever that was, asked if I had any children, then shook his head. “Of course you don’t,” he said, cradling my pelvis. I ran my fingers through his soft, thinning hair.
For the next few weeks he helped me sand the kitchen counters, peel off wallpaper, paint, scrub, fix the old stove. He rubbed my back at night while we watched videos we rented from the Gas Plus. He liked to blow into my ear—some high school trick, I supposed. We talked mostly of the house, what needed to get done and how to do it. Things started to feel serious when he got a friend of his with a truck to help move in furniture I bought for pennies from the secondhand store in Pittville. My sister would have called it all “shabby chic,” not that I cared. Nobody was judging me in Alna. I could do whatever I wanted.
Clark was the one to introduce me to the submarine-sandwich diet and to the zombies at the bus depot. One morning he held out his long pinky fingernail. “Sniff it up,” he said. The stuff threw sex and romance under an immediate dark and meaningless shadow. It blotted out all our “feelings for each other,” as Clark had described our rapport. We didn’t sleep together again after that first high, but we did spend a few more weeks in each other’s company, nibbling the sandwiches and snorting the stuff from the zombies. Depending on what stuff they’d given us, we’d spend the days either cleaning or passed out on the brittle wicker daybed or on loose cushions on the porch, overlooking the Omec. The day I left to drive back down to the city that summer was a strange parting. We hugged and everything. I cried, sorry to sa
y good-bye to my narcotic afternoons, my freedom. Clark offered to keep the house up while I was away, find me tenants, act as “property manager,” as he called it. I generally don’t like to hold on to loose ends, but I made this exception. If the house burned down, if the pipes burst, if the vagrants made a move, Clark would let me know.
—
Half a dozen years had passed since that first summer in Alna, and almost nothing had changed. The town was still full of young people crashing junk cars, dirty diapers littering the parking lots. There were x-ed–out smiley faces spray-painted over street signs, on the soaped-up windows of empty storefronts, all over the boarded-up Dairy Queen long since blackened by fire and warped by rain. And the zombies, of course, still inhabited Alna’s shadowy, empty hilltop downtown. They slumped on the curb nodding, or else they rifled through dumpsters for things to fix or sell. I often saw them speed walking up and down the slopes of Main Street with toasters or TV sets under their arms, ghost faces smeared with Alna’s dirt, leaving a trail of garbage in their wake. If they ever left Alna, cleaned up, shipped out, the magic of the place would vanish. Monday, Wednesday, Friday—I figured three times a week was a sane frequency—I visited that bus depot restroom, my ten-dollar bill at the ready.
Nobody ever asked me any questions. The zombie in charge just handed me my little nugget, my little jewel, kept his face hidden under the hood of his raggedy sweatshirt, sweat dripping off his chin and plinking down onto the dirty bathroom tiles. There was no logic to what was kept in stock on a given day. Each time I got home and tried what they’d given me, it was always the right stuff. It was always a revelation. Never once did those zombies steer me wrong.
Clark never got that about the zombies—their supernatural wonder. He was too concerned with his own intelligence to see the bigger picture. He thought that the drugs we bought in the bus depot restroom were intended to expand his mind, as though some door could be unlocked up there and he would greet his own genius—some glowing alien in glasses and sneakers, spinning planet Earth on its finger. Clark was an idiot. We saw each other once or twice each summer. I’d take him out to eat in Pittville to thank him for his help with the house, and I’d listen to him gripe about how hard the winter had been, the state of affairs at the college, budget cuts, local government, the health of his dog. He quoted Shakespeare too often. And that’s just life was a common phrase he used to sound deep and wary—a perfect example of his laziness. Still, I didn’t hate him. A few times we even tried to recapture whatever odd coincidence of lonesomeness and availability we’d found together that first summer in Alna, but inevitably one of our body parts would fail us—sometimes his, sometimes mine. It was always humbling when that happened. Time was passing, I was getting old, “middle-aged,” my sister called it. The truth was undeniable: I’d be dead soon. I considered this every morning I walked home from the bus depot bathroom, a little foil-wrapped turd of drugs stuffed in with the lint and pennies in the pocket of my pleated khaki shorts.
I missed Alna during the school year. I missed the zombies. Grading papers, sitting in staff meetings, I wished I was sitting on my porch, looking down at the Omec and considering small matters—the little birds and where they found worms to feed their babies, the shifting shades of brown on the rocks as the water splashed them, the way the vines fell from the highest tree branches and got tangled tumbling in the rushing, sudsy water below. When the big city was covered in snow, my bones like ice, frozen air stabbing at my lungs, I told myself I’d go swimming in the lake that summer, get a real tan, frolic, so to speak. I owned a bathing suit, but it was pilly and stretched and the last time I’d worn it—at my sister’s pool party a few years before—I’d felt droopy and pasty, like my mother. The freckles on my thighs, once adorable marks of health and frivolity, were now like spots of dirt or little bugs I kept trying to scrape away with my fingernail. My sister showed me pictures later on, pointing out how flat my breasts had gotten.
“Do some of these,” she told me, pumping the air with her elbows in her stainless-steel kitchen. That was another thing I liked about Alna. Once I’d settled in each June, I could ignore my sister’s phone calls, claiming bad reception. I needed a break from her. She had too much influence over me. She only wanted to discuss things and name things for what they were. That was her thing. “Melasma,” she said, pointing to my upper lip. “That’s what you call that.”
One morning on my way home from the sandwich shop and bus depot, I passed a yard sale selling the usual garbage: baseball caps, plastic kitchen utensils, baby clothes folded into tiny cubes spread out on stained floral bedsheets. The only books at Alna yard sales were convenience-store paperbacks or cookbooks for microwave ovens. I didn’t like to read while I was in Alna anyway. I didn’t have the patience. That day a tall, gray metal sunlamp caught my eye. The scrap of masking tape stuck to its base was marked in red: three dollars. I didn’t care if it worked. If it didn’t, trying to fix it would occupy me for at least an afternoon. It was worth the trouble.
“Whom do I pay?” I said to the gaggle of women sitting on the front steps. They all had the same flat, long brown hair, the same pinched eyes, bulbous mouths, and throats like frogs. Their bodies were so fat, their breasts hung and rested on their knees. They pointed to the matriarch, a huge woman sitting on a piano bench in the shade of a large oak. Her left eye was swollen shut, bruised yellow, black, and blue. I gave her the money. Her hand was tiny and plump, like a doll’s, fingernails painted bright red. She stuffed the bills I gave her in the pocket of her worn cotton housedress, pulled a sucker from her mouth, and smiled, showing me—not without some hostility—a lone bottom row of teeth rotted down to stubs, like a baby’s teeth. She was probably around my age, but she looked like a woman with a hundred years of suffering behind her—no love, no transformations, no joy, just junk food and bad television, ugly, mean-spirited men creaking in and out of stuffy rooms to take advantage of her womb and impassive heft. One of her obese offspring would soon overtake her throne, I imagined, and preside over the family’s abject state of existence, the beating hearts of these young women pointlessness personified. You’d think that, sitting there, oozing slowly toward death with every breath, they’d all go out of their minds. But no—they were too dumb for insanity. “Rich bitch,” I imagined the mother to be thinking as she plunked her sucker back into her mouth. I lugged the lamp up the street, thinking of her flesh spreading around her as she lay down on her bed. What would it feel like, I wondered, to let myself go? I was anxious to get home, uncrinkle the little fortune in my pocket. If the sunlamp did work, I would bring it back down to the city with me. The light could soothe me in the winter and clean my dirty city soul each night.
It’s not that I lacked respect for the people of Alna. I simply didn’t want to deal with them. I was tired. During the school year, all I did was contend with stupidity and ignorance. That’s what teachers are paid to do. How I got stuck teaching Dickens to fourteen-year-olds is a mystery to me. I’d never planned on working all my life. I’d had this fantasy that I’d get married and suddenly find a calling beyond the humiliating need to make a living. Art or charity work, babies—something like that. Each time seniors had me sign their yearbooks, I wrote, “Good luck!” then stared off into space, thinking of all the wisdom I could impart, but didn’t. At graduation, I’d take a few Benadryl to soothe my nerves, watch those tassled caps float around, all the idiotic high fives. I’d shake a few hands, go home to load my car with musty summer clothes and a case of sparkling mineral water, then drive the five hours up to Alna.
When I got back to my house with the lamp that day, a girl was standing in my front yard. She had her back turned, and she seemed to be staring up at the windows, a hand held over her head to block the sun’s glare. Nobody had ever come into my yard before. In all my time in Alna, nobody but Clark had ever even knocked on my door. I put the lamp down by my car and cleared my throat.
When the girl turned around, I saw that she was pregn
ant. The swell of her baby made a tent of her long black sleeveless shirt. She was thin otherwise, a scrawny young mother, the kind my sister abhorred. Her leggings were pastel purple, and her hair was short like a boy’s, and blond. She approached me, her hands supporting the small of her back, wincing in the sunshine, trying to smile.
“Is this your house?” she asked. As she came closer, I thought I detected rose perfume. A raised mole on her chin glistened with sweat. I folded my arms.
“Yes,” I stammered, “it’s my house. I’m the owner.” I guessed at who she was then—a former tenant. A Teri or Maxine or Jennifer or Jill, whatever their names were. Maybe she’d forgotten something in the house. Those girls always left things behind—a hairbrush, a bobby pin, empty boxes of crackers, tampons in the medicine cabinet, stray socks and underwear between the washer and dryer. I happily used up their leftover bars of vanilla- and floral-scented soaps, each laced with hairs and gouged by their fingernails in sharp half-moons. “Can I help you?”
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 29