Little Weirds Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Birthday Basket, Inc.

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover art © Shutterstock

  Author photograph by Katie McCurdy

  Cover © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: November 2019

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  “The Layers” copyright © 1978 by Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  ISBN 978-0-316-48535-7

  E3-20190904-DA-PC-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Treat

  Introduction/Explanation/Guidelines for Consumption

  I Was Born: The List

  Fast Bad Baby

  My Mother

  Deerhoof/Dream Deer

  Restaurant

  Daydreams/Tides

  I Want to Look Out a Window

  I Died: Valentine’s Day

  Ghosts

  Color-Spirit

  Letter: Dreams

  Trench-Times/Dream Dog

  Eclipse

  Touch vs. Smack

  I Died: Listening

  Beach Animals

  A Prayer

  I Was Born: About to Bust

  Nice Things to Do for Tipping Yourself Toward Gentleness and Simple Joy

  I Died: The Sad Songs of My Vagina

  Mouse House

  Holding the Dog

  I Died: Bonked

  The Pits

  To Norway

  Hillside

  Important Questions

  I Died: Sardines

  Sit?

  Kathleen/Dog-Flower-Face

  Letter: Super-Ego

  Creed

  The Code of Hammurabi

  Kinship

  A Fact

  Geranium

  A Tender Thief

  Night Treats for Her

  The Root: A Made-Up Myth

  Fur

  Tart

  Clothes Flying On/Day Flying Open

  I Died: Bronze Tree

  Dog Paw

  Blue Hour

  From me to you, from me to everybody

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to my mother, who is always kind even when incredibly stubborn.

  This book is dedicated to my sisters, who are two halves of the sun that warms me.

  This book is dedicated to my father, who is a gift from the universe and an actual genius, and without whom this book would not even exist at all.

  And this book is dedicated to Quinn, who is my heart’s little mother and the dearest friend of my truest self.

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  In the middle of the pouring rain she met (explosion) the first thing she could call a boyfriend in her life, her heart beating as if she’d swallowed a little fluttering and captured bird.

  —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

  In my darkest night,

  when the moon was covered

  and I roamed through wreckage,

  a nimbus-clouded voice

  directed me:

  “Live in the layers,

  not on the litter.”

  —Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers”

  Treat

  One of my fantasy dimensions is: Strangers on the street see me and think I might be French. You are a stranger. You see me, and you think that there I am, a French Woman. And then you look at me and allow a deeper kind of feeling-sight to occur, and you see past the woman and you sense that I am actually a homemade Parisian Croissant, and I was born in a kitchen in a house with cool stone floors and deep windowsills that hold the light in the shape of a big box, windowsills that are so deep that they could be a desk. I was born as a breakfast pastry in the fancy part of France and hours after I was born I was still warm from the heat of the oven. I knew that my warmth and lovely shape were the result of thoughtful and gentle work. Oh please feel it: I am the croissant that felt its own heat and curves and wished to become a woman, and I am that woman from the wish. Let me be your morning treat with your coffee. Disregard the fear that I am too rich to be an ordinary meal. Allow my antique decadence into your morning into your mouth. Pair me with jam. Treasure me for my layers and layers of fragility and richness. Name me after a shape that the moon makes. Have me in a hotel while you are on vacation. Look at me and say, “Oh, I really shouldn’t,” just because you want to have me so very much.

  There are so many times when I want to be here just for your consumption, just to satisfy your appetite. This is what I feel I am intended for—I can’t help it. An intention was inside of me already when I traveled from infinity to a kitchen with a windowsill, to a wish, to a woman.

  Introduction/Explanation/Guidelines

  for Consumption

  Hello, do you have expectations about how we should proceed together? We both know quite well that it is risky to reveal oneself, but I am compelled to do it.

  Some time ago, I made peace with wanting to be looked at. There’s no secret fold within my feeling, no pleat where I force myself to stow a slip of paper that says “shame” on one side and “weakness” on another (both sides scrawled in haughty cursive by the schoolmistress in my psyche who drinks scalding brown tea). I am fine about having the need.

  I know that to be seen is to be taken in. My delight, this inclination to sweep into your eyesight, beats in me like an extra heart. It just might bat an eyelash at you. My need to be seen is feather-light and active, with a tongue that licks its lips like a mouse peering out of a teacup, looking at the cheese. My need is a helium-filled balloon that wants to be untethered. What is this spirit in me saying “Up! Up! UP!”? Up for a better view, for a better location to be viewed. Get me to a better place so that I can see more and also be spotted by the kind of people who turn their faces up to the light. Put me in between them and the cosmos, let me be one final stop before the major everything.

  And actually, there is more about me that is like a balloon.

  Hello, I am a balloon on a string that has been tied to this page to announce, “Party here!”

  Tie me to the mailbox to mark the place on the dirt road where everyone must bang a left and drive toward a gathering of dressed-up friends. Let the motion of people attracted to this spot kick up soft brown dust as they accelerate toward the final destination, which is party time.

  About your hostes
s: I am a human woman named Jenny Slate and I am thirty-boink years old. I weigh one hundred and doo-dad pounds. I was born in Massachusetts as a one-second-old hospital baby. I love eating cucumbers and I love the xylophone and the Atlantic Ocean and I am a performer by nature and trade.

  That’s enough to form a small shape, like a gal-sized gate, into the rest. Here is more of the rest:

  When I am on stage, it is mostly my party. But I am hoping to throw it for us, to honor our having the faith to come together and feel something bubbly and balmy as a collective. I am throwing the party for the sake of itself, for your self, and for my self.

  On the stage, I am thrilled and moved. But before being seen by you, I have been terrified, often ill-tempered. I have most likely ruined an entire day by fretting about this evening. Just before I open my mouth on the stage (with bright faith in everything—me, you, that the building won’t fall down, that I will catch on to the thing that helps me zoom, that a man won’t come in and shoot me, etc.), I have most likely used my same mouth and voice to tell everyone backstage, “I know I say this every time, but I feel really off today. I can tell that it’s going to be bad.”

  Once I’m up there, so many feelings happen at once.

  The lights are shining right into my face, so I can’t really see you; I imagine you as one complex but benevolent identity. I am nervous but also excited for you to see my onstage outfit chosen just for you and the people. It took many tries to choose this one outfit. I was trying to figure out what I want to be wearing when we all fall in love. On stage and everywhere else, I know that there is so much you could do to me. My vulnerability is natural and permissible and beautiful to me, and it should remind you of your responsibility to behave like a friend to me and the world.

  I’m setting the tone and the tone is this: There is a free, wild creature up here, and now you must think about how to take her in and keep her alive. This is the tone that is rippling through the pages up ahead.

  Just as I get scared to perform, I am afraid to write this book. Across the board, I just get so scared. But I don’t want to live in a constant state of trepidation. I want to live in front of you, with you. I tremble myself to pieces when I perform. I also put myself back together and I leave without a limp.

  Recently my life fell to pieces. These things happened: Pummeling heartbreak. The sickening experience of watching a racist, homophobic, misogynist bully sit right down in the Oval Office. Loss of confidence. Astounding loneliness. Disempowerment and exhaustion.

  This book is the act of pressing onward through an inner world that was dark and dismantled.

  This book is me putting myself back together so that I can dwell happily in our shared outer world.

  Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice). Give in. Fall apart. Look at the pieces. Reassemble. This is the essential movement of my holy flux.

  This book is a party—not a set of grievances. It’s a weird party for a woman who has returned from grief. It’s a peppy procession of all of my little weirds. Many different scenarios present themselves at a really good party. Somebody kisses somebody. Somebody falls. Cake is eaten. Cake is thrown. The lights go out and somebody screams, “My jewels!” You meet your husband for the first time. Somebody gets kicked out. There are snowballs and cannonballs. There are fragments that come together as a whole. My book is a thing in motion—just as you would respond to the question “Is there a party going on?” with the answer “Yes, it is in progress!”

  Here it is, a book that represents the wholeness that I built after everything toppled. A book that honors my fragmentation by giving itself to you in pieces. If you want it, you will have to be my partner in giving in to what it is. I had to find my own language and terms.

  I am here not just to give myself an opening, not just to direct your view toward an opening, not just to fling you and myself through a density of experience, but, selfishly, so that I can experience the pleasure and honor of hosting you in my private space. It is not a mad or haunted house. But maybe a witch does live here. I am your witch and I nudge the dark waves and I cast the gentle light over the hard terrain. I coax the crocus to open in the frost. I keep the faith and I use it.

  My father says, “After a while you understand that you can create and raise the child, but the spirit…the spirit comes from the universe.”

  You have my permission to come into this space that is made out of broken-up pieces, of shards and perfect circles, slats and slices. It represents the space that I have found to house my spirit, which is from the universe. I was born to host this party. To be in the party, remind you of the party, live at the event, die at the event.

  It will be a wild ride, but the fresh air and interesting company are worth all of the frightful bouncing, I believe.

  I Was Born: The List

  The first thing that happened was that I was born.

  And now that I’m shaking out the truth from myself, let’s just shake it out for one big shake:

  I was born during the great Potato Chip, in the time of Jewish Deli Tongue Sandwich. I was born and the other items that were in the love net in which they caught me were Open Car Windows, Ghosts, Fear, Horniness, Rabbit Holes, Bird Nests, Emily Dickinson, Petticoats, Bustiers, Grapefruit Halves with Maraschino Cherry in the Middle, Chapter Books, Secret Passages, Sesame Street, Mermaids starring Cher, a messy bookstore called New England Mobile Book Fair, Grandparents, Ham for Lunch, Gems, Treehouses, Annie Oakley, Chicken Noodle Soup, Crystal Gayle, Meet Me in St. Louis, A Stage, A Theater, A Camera, A Bra, A Slip, A Mouth, A Butt and Vagina, Beer, Clarice Lispector, A Beech Tree, A Campfire, Romance, Music, Loneliness.

  I was born with a love of dressing up and facing this world with an ecstatic and elegant personal style. I was born as a good girl with the kicky ability to skip so much class that I must owe someone (my grandmother) money for the huge bulk of time that they paid for me to be there and I just simply did not show up because I hate sitting still even when I love the thing that I am sitting to see. I was born with the talent for fucking off so majorly. I was born bucking the idea that I should have to be anywhere that I don’t like or talk to people who make me feel dead or trapped.

  I was born into a world where many men want to oppress all of the women with violence and laws and you or I can’t say anything else anymore without also admitting that.

  I was born hating how boring Hebrew School is and how breath is really bad in temple, especially on the day that you are fasting and saying sorry for the entire day. It is so hard because I was born with a love of useful rules but also somehow I am always dropping and breaking them and it makes me feel very bad.

  I was born with a love of dogs and a fear of horses and I don’t want to change the way I feel about either of these things. I was born in a hatbox on a train in the past, when there were dining cars and menus and bud vases and chaperones and dandies. I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can’t add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps.

  I was born in the stacks in the Columbia University Library. I was born in shin-guards on a soccer field on a chilly little Saturday morning in the 1980s and I was too scared to even feel the sting of the ball on the inside of my shoe. I was born during tennis. I was born as a backyard swimming pool and my twin sister is an orange Popsicle and my mother is a bowl of pickles and my father is a hamburger.

  I was born with a ticking clock inside of me that chirped and rang out many years later and its gears lowered my mouth open for a French kiss and made my skirt light up like a lamp with a shade saying “Someone’s awake in here…come see who it is.”

  I was born in a Shirley Temple, and I came out with the stem of the cherry in my small, strong new hand and I walked that cherry like a dog. I was born ready to care for a pet and be a pet too.

  I was born like that.

  I
was born happy but when anything that is large, alive, and wild gets hurt and confused, I feel so sad, and I notice that I wish I could nurse big scared things. And it is worth mentioning that “big scared thing” is one way to describe how my heart often feels. My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.

  I was born in the Atlantic Ocean, and I pray to goddesses that look like whales and waves and I make tons of wishes. I was born in the day, right before lunchtime, and I arrived with a full appetite and it hasn’t settled down at all.

  I was born with a fatal allergy to both subtext and traditional organization techniques and I will tell you I have really had a few near-death experiences. I was born two years ago when one of my friends described me as “the least able-to-be-controlled person that I know,” and I started living right away.