Published in the 2017 issue of Columbia Journal, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “This Should Explain It” sketches an imperfect mother to an imperfect daughter and spares neither from the harsh light of abjection that has become the hallmark of her work. Here, Moshfegh dredges the well of memory with ample quirkiness, pulling from it a tangle of grief, love, and strangeness that besets a daughter in the wake of her mother’s passing. In short: this should explain it.
This Should Explain It
Ottessa Moshfegh
She was always on a diet—chicken-soup-flavored milkshakes and purple yams, ice water and pills that expanded like a sponge in her stomach, grapefruits, twenty apples a day, hot vinegar, all rice. No matter what, she stayed fat and came at me screaming, tripping over her long skirts down the steps to the basement. I liked jumping rope in front of the television down there, and napping.
“Practice your piano!” she cried, finding me splayed out on the filthy basement rug. “What am I working so hard for? Television will make you poor and stupid.”
I did what she said, struggling with small hands at the piano, scales and arpeggios going up and down like her hysterical laughter. She rapped me on the knuckles with a wooden spoon every time I hit a wrong, chipped ivory key. She was a fan of Bach and Berlioz. I preferred Liszt sonatas and Scriabin etudes played cloyingly slowly. At low speeds, I could get all the fingering. It sounded deranged and terrible, but I enjoyed it.
My only friends were male twin nerds who fondled each other openly when we were alone together. They had curly blond hair, large, rounded front teeth, small, lukewarm body parts. My mother suspected there was something perverted about the relationship. “These are the friends you choose? Humpty and Dumpty?” I was lonely. I was mean. I was exactly how you’d expect a person to be.
My poor mother. She’d been dumbed down and poisoned by the lie: Be good and pretty and you’ll get everything you want. At least we agreed that madness was the only way to greatness. I gave her a gift once—a porcelain frog I stole from a consignment shop on the way home from school. She used to kiss it, invoking the fairytale, which I found hilarious. I used to rub the frog on my asshole when she wasn’t looking. That was the extent of our intimacy. My mother is completely dead now. Cancer got her in the ovaries. She died thin, but miserable and full of rage. I miss her daily.
