Little Weirds Read online

  Fast Bad Baby

  When I was a baby I was fast and bad. I was born and my mother says I started walking around right away and she had to put bells on my feet so that she would know where I was going. I was born and I started moving around the space because I wanted to whip around in this world. I never wanted to go to sleep and my mother says I didn’t have “first words” but instead I just started talking one day and I’ve never been able to be very quiet since then. Even in my dreams I talk and make a commotion. In the past, I was a baby and I was running around and my mother didn’t know what to do because her baby was so rowdy and speedy compared to other babies she knew. She couldn’t lock me up or tell me to slow down because I didn’t know why I should listen to her and I just wanted to go fast, so what happened was that she put the little bells on my shoes and that way I was free to roam and she could hear me as I ran ringing through the house. With a bad and fast baby like me, the really worrisome thing would be when the jingles stopped. One time, before she put the bells on to track me, I climbed a dresser, using the drawers like stairs. One time I took a door off its hinges. One time I picked up a wild baby rabbit before it had a chance to run. One time I ate a thermometer. If you let me onto your land, I might be very wild, and I will not be able to totally change myself, but you can always track me by the tinkle of my lively clamor.

  My Mother

  Last summer, toward the end of a long walk, my mother went to the side of the dirt road and showed me a plant. I am used to having a rhythm with her in which she shows me something interesting in nature or architecture, and it’s like a test: Do you know what it is? And it is very pleasing when I tell her what it is, and then we both enjoy that we both know.

  Sometimes I don’t know, and she likes the situation of me being “stumped” and she likes that she does know and can tell me what she knows. This is also one of the first ways that I perceived power in another person: Information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on. That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.

  I told my mother that the flower she showed me was a honeysuckle. I knew from the little conical, trumpet-shaped blooms. She nodded and we both knew that we knew. She picked a flower off and smelled it. Then she gave it to me to smell, and I sniffed in its honey-floral petal cone. It smelled like a fancy candy, and even though I’d smelled honeysuckle before, its scent pleasure-stung me anew, and I laughed a bit and said, “Unbelievable.” She knew I was talking about the gentle shock you can feel about how straightforward nature is in its generosity, its dizzyingly intricate offerings.

  I looked at my mother and asked her, “Do you want to smell it again?” But she shook her head and so I held the very small flower in my two hands and the position of my hands was like when Christian children say their bedtime prayers and I thought to start to try to make a prayer for this flower cone, but I also thought, This is what makes my mother my mother. She loves the flower and she wants me to know this flower, but she will only smell it once, and then give it to me for unlimited sniffing pleasure and she will be happy about it all.

  I knew this to be true, and that the power of the flower had not just been its astounding smell or that I thought to create a prayer for it and consequently felt myself glow a bit, but that because of what happened between me and my mother and the small flower that we named and passed between us, my thoughts about how I saw her became an instantaneous prayer of gratitude and awe for her style of motherhood and unique humanity. And inside of myself, I knelt down in honor of this style of care that is her brand of nurturing, care that urges creativity and thinking, that is selfless and classy. It says, “The more you give, the more you have, the more new things you are a part of, the more you are truly alive.” I held the fragile flower and made my footsteps the same level of noise as hers so that I could be with her like we were one entity. We walked on toward our house.

  Deerhoof/Dream Deer

  I’m a young woman who grew up in a haunted house in Massachusetts. Because of the ghosts in my house, I became a wild and fearful person who wants to protect others from pains but also expects all pains to fly right at me.

  I’m so afraid of the dark in our house in Massachusetts that I sleep with the light on all night. I hold my pee in and sleep with my head under the blankets and sheets. In the morning, I peek out and then emerge, covered in sweat, exhausted, terrified, and full of pee. When I come down to breakfast, my mother says, “Oh, Jen. You look horrible,” which is my mother’s main way of saying that she loves me and remembers that I was once a baby that she controlled and I was a bad baby but she still loves me. She thinks that I look horrible because I am upset, because I drink too much alcohol and smoke too much pot, because I’ve been fired from my job, or dumped by a boyfriend, or because I’ve had a giant success and am gorging on it. But all it really is is that I’ve been up all night because I am afraid of ghosts.

  I’m not afraid of curses or injuries that ghosts might do to me. I’m not afraid of the things that movies say that ghosts do, like lock the doors and windows, or show you what you would look like old, or make the present sour and moldy right before your eyes.

  I’m specifically afraid of one thing: That they will watch me, and that they won’t stop doing that. I’m afraid that I’ll wake up and feel a creeping feeling, that I will let my eyes adjust to a darkness that is holding in a bad laugh, and that then there will be an old woman watching me, and that she won’t blink enough, that she is strict, and that when my inner feelings want her to stop looking, or just do something else, she will start laughing at me. Basically, I am a comedian and actress who is afraid of people staring right at me, and only me, and then laughing. I’m not saying this because I feel bad for myself, or because I think that there is something wrong with me. I don’t think that. I love myself. I think that I am a very top-quality person.

  When I imagine my ingredients, I imagine that my muscles are made of plums, that my heart is a giant ruby with a light bulb in it, that my blood is goldenrod yellow, and the bones inside my body are made from lions’ bones and shells, and that my brain is made of steak and silk and Hawaiian Punch. I don’t have a problem with myself, really, I’m just afraid of ghosts, and because of my fear of ghosts, I sometimes have a problem when visiting my old home in Massachusetts.

  The house in Massachusetts is big, surrounded by big lawns, which are surrounded by big woods. The house is a yellow colonial with smart green shutters, it has a large front porch, it has no air conditioning, and inside, my parents are in there, living with ghosts.

  When you call my parents on the phone, this is what my father will say: “The tulips are really coming up. We had the rabbits eat a bunch of the bulbs, but we still managed to get so many flowers.” And this is what my mother will say: “It’s so sad. The rabbit must have been eaten by the fox, because there are so many more tulips than usual. The rabbit must have been eaten. There are too many tulips.”

  My mother thinks that there is just one of every animal in our woods. She is living in a fable world, where there are lessons and every animal means something. The Fox is a sneaky, skinny murderer who probably smokes cigarettes, can’t grow a full beard like God can, and thinks pens with naked bikini ladies on them are funny. The lawn is a dangerous place for all of the animals because humans are natural predators, like in Peter Rabbit. The Deer is a promising young woman who works in an office and the Hawk is a kidnapper who can’t control himself.

  Now that my sisters and I are out of the house, there are even more animals around. When I was a teenager, I planted a vine of Concord grapes on the chain-link fence around the tennis court. I made a sign that said “Jenny’s Grapes” and then never did anything else to it. The grapes worked, and in the fall there were a lot of them. They were all over the
clay tennis court. “The Deer loves the grapes. She loves them and she eats them for lunch” is what my mother says, as if the Deer is a midtown office lady who comes in her ladies’ suit, tennis sneakers, and tube socks and diet-lunches on the grapes.

  One day in early November, the Deer comes to the court for her lunch break from her office job in the woods. She is a secretary for a tree. She clomps softly onto the court, the teal Har-Tru kicking up, and starts eating the now rotten grapes with her face. She wants more grapes, and so she steps closer to the fence. As she gets a new grape between her teeth, her Deerhoof gets stuck in the fence. It’s gone through to the other side and she can’t get it out. She struggles and struggles to get her foot out. She never goes back to the woods, because she struggles all afternoon and rests, then struggles throughout the night, and rests, and over the next few days, she gets weaker and weaker and more scared, and eventually she dies of a Deerheart attack, or of fright, or of just death from being so big and lying down too much.

  Because it is November, nobody goes up to the tennis court, and also nobody goes up there because the court was built “for the girls,” and now “the girls” have done the outrageous and unthinkable: They’ve become gigantic and can’t fit into their baby clothes, they’ve wanted to go have sex, and so they’ve left. We really built the court for the girls. Our bodies hurt too much to go up there and have fun. So nobody goes up there.

  A week or more after the Deer’s deathly lunch break, my mother goes up there, maybe with the dog, who is now dead.

  Here is the dog’s life in a very short description: I went to the orthodontist, the orthodontist said I didn’t have any canine teeth, my mother said to x-ray more of my head. They found the teeth up there in my head. I had braces for seven years, along with a terrible speech impediment and ugly face, accompanied by horniness that had started way before that and also never went away. At this time, we were allowed to get a hypoallergenic dog. We weren’t allowed to take the dog upstairs. The dog was undisciplined because we only wanted to teach him how to hug, and he and my father were at war for thirteen years until the dog couldn’t see or walk, and my father took good care of him and they became unlikely companions with a true bond. The dog’s butthole fell out while he was pooping and they got an operation to put it back in. The butthole fell out again and because the dog was blind and his butthole was ruined and he was suffering from tumors and old age, they let the dog pass on.

  But back in the time when he is still alive, my mother probably walks him up there and finds a giant dead Deer on the tennis court. Its eyes are open and it’s just a huge mess. She has to call the animal control lady to come, the same lady who came for the rabid raccoons lolling on the lawn, and the coyote who pranked us by streaking through the yard. When the lady gets there, it’s either this or that: This is that we cut a hole in the chain-link fence. That is that we cut the foot off of the dead Deer, saving the fence. Well, the Deer was already a goner, says my mother. “SO YOU CUT OFF THE FOOT?!” I scream. “Jen, we had to.”

  And in the aftertaste of what my mother says, I know she means, “Well, you were the person who planted the tempting grapes and then moved to New York and didn’t get a home phone and makes us call you on your cell phone, which is only supposed to be for emergencies. You did that.”

  There is a feeling that by doing the natural thing of growing up, I have carelessly waltzed away from a mess. It feels that I have disowned my tribe by choosing to believe that the world is full of creatures and spirits rather than predators and ghosts.

  When I go home, I sit and talk with my parents for hours. I love my parents. But now, especially now, when I go there, I hold in my pee and let out my sweat and squeeze my eyes tight because I am afraid of a ghost that is mine. It reflects my will to be wild, my inclination to plant roots, my hunger for treats, my fear that straying too far from the pack is what I must do but perhaps at a large cost.

  When I wake up in the night, I know what I am scared to see: It is a three-footed deer, staring at me. Its eyes are eyes and then its eyes are grapes.

  Restaurant

  Hello, I am a woman on a blue and green sphere that has dollops and doinks of mountains all over it. Some of the mountains on my cosmic sphere splooge out thick liquid fire spurts that run downhill and cool and turn into vacation destinations after a few thousand years. I am a woman living on a planet that has noodle-shaped guys squiggling silently in the soil and four-legged mammal-kings with hammer feet, or horns on their heads, or coats covered in spots and stripes, and my planet has live feathered beaky skeletons flying through the environment, and big heavy creatures who are tusked and trunked and have sad long memories and wash their bodies with cold mud puddles and know who their babies are.

  There are large deadly cats watching everything in the dark, sneaking through the fanned-out ferns. There are delighted pigs and gossiping geese and dogs that sit with their mouths open so that they can cool off after running around. There are arrows of extra electricity ripping through the air, loud drum noises in the sky when two opposite temperatures collide, deep wide dents filled with water and populated by animals that have scales or blowholes or no eyes or live in shells that look like tiny hard purses made out of little plates. There are white puffs floating in the air here; they float high above my house. The puffs turn into wet water-bloops and fall down and turn my hair from straight to curly. The water-bloops also make the flowers open up, they turn dust to mudslides, they intercept a sunbeam and make an arch that you can’t touch because it is made of swoops of colored light.

  Hello? Tonight I am going to the Restaurant, where I will eat a killed and burned-up bird and drink old purple grapes and also I will gulp clear water that used to have bugs and poop and poison in it but has been cleaned up so that it doesn’t make us blow chunks. Oh Joy I am going to the Restaurant and I am just drooling at the thought of the killed and burned bird and I want to sip the grape gunk and so I put skin-colored paint all over my face and I dab pasty red pigment on my lips and swish peachy powder on my cheeks and I take a pencil and draw an eye-shaped line around my eye so that people know where my blinkers are.

  And then I take a little brush and I slick black paint over each eyelash and then I take a hot metal stick and wind my head-hairs around it so that everything is spirals. I stuff each breast into a cotton cup-bag, and the bags are sewn together as a pair of bags for boobs, and the pair of boob-bags is held on by straps because I guess this helps the boobs from not floating past the mountains and white puffs and into outer space?

  This is the right way to appear if you want to go out of the house and go to the Restaurant and not have to stay home and be alone forever, which, on Earth, is bad.

  Inside the cotton-cups my nipples press like bright coins against the boundaries of the bags because they want to be out and on a beach and not in bags, and they would gladly pay to be set free, but I can’t give any money toward freedom because my money is for the Restaurant tonight.

  I cover my body with a fabric that has been made into a certain shape to help remind you of my butt and vagina, but it does not show the actual butt or vagina that I have. Hello, I am a woman here on this ancient ball that rotates with a collection of other balls around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts. Don’t be immature. I wear this paint and these bags and this butt-vagina fabric-map so that I can be here on the globe and go to places like the Restaurant. At the Restaurant I pay with my money that I earn from pretending to be other women. I get that money so that I can afford all of the face paint and boob-bags that I need to put on so that I can go to the Restaurant and eat the dead burned bird and gargle the purple grape gloop that sometimes makes me fall down or throw up all over this globe. This is the cycle that I rotate through so that I can go to more places on this sphere as it rotates through eternal darkness and endless space.

  Daydreams/Tides

  A day at the beach was never so dull as it is now.

  I recycl
e the same daydreams over and over—

  This man decides that indeed I am the one to love and so he travels to where I live. He travels far, directly to my front door, thinking of me the whole time that he is moving across the country and across the sky. He thinks of me as he puts on his clothes, as he buys coffee in the airport, thinking, “It doesn’t feel normal to buy coffee before something so huge! It feels like I should be buying a cloud or a star. I can’t believe I’m in normal life but also, I hope, about to begin this huge love. Maybe one day I will tell her about this experience.”

  He has packed his toothbrush. It feels like pleasure to him but also too urgent, it feels like starving as he thinks about how full he would feel, how filling it would be to stand next to me in his pajamas and me in my pajamas and us both using our toothbrushes, looking at ourselves and each other in the mirror.

  He thinks that it is so precious that he knows that it would be a privilege to be allowed in to my evening. He thinks in layers when he thinks about how he loves me.

  He travels all the way to my edge of the country. He touches down, speeds forward until he stands at the gate to my house and he sees me doing something dear and useful but also related to my belief in adornment, like watering my geraniums or talking to the dog and saying something to the dog like, “Aren’t you happy about the softness in the air today? That’s what they call balmy.” And he sees as I bend closer to the dog and he sees down my shirt and I touch the dog’s velveteen ear and I say very softly and in a very rich tone, “Balmy.”