Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

  The baby did not know that when I was a little girl in the eighties and nineties I used to take big gulps of drinks and say “AHHHH” as a joke, to my sisters or friends. The baby didn’t know that I used to be a baby, somewhere else, but because I saw this baby I sort of knew it anew, that I had been a baby too.

  There was a farmer on the airplane in the row behind me. He was talking to a stranger about how he was a farmer. Once we were in the air, the pilot got on the intercom and wished a sixteen-year-old boy a happy birthday, saying to this boy and all of the passengers that he hoped the birthday boy would “get lots of presents.”

  And then, because it was the thing to do, I prepared to sleep, fully clothed and sitting up next to a stranger while we shot through the evening sky.

  In the town of Bergen, where I stayed for the night by myself, there were raincoats for sale in the window. It wasn’t raining and the way they were displayed seemed like a straightforward and warmhearted suggestion. It felt like the raincoats said, “As a matter of fact, people are warmhearted, just as they are air breathers and leg walkers and eye see-ers. But sometimes rain makes them get all wet, and so here are coats in case that happens. They are reasonably priced and well made.”

  I went to where my friend told me to go to eat dinner and I let spaghetti hang out of my mouth while I was alone in the restaurant. I didn’t let it hang for a long time, I just paused for a moment and noticed that the pause made me feel embarrassed, not the noodle.

  Then, it’s hard to describe how happy the breakfast at the little hotel made me feel. It wasn’t because it was a huge spread, although it was certainly not skimpy. It was the combination of the offerings. It was that there was pickled fish but also cherry jam. The bread was yellow. There was ham but also cucumbers were sliced and arranged nicely. The yogurt was thin and tart and the coffee was splendid.

  The night before, the man in the room next to me snored loudly, but I wasn’t cross at all. And yes, the word to use is cross, but again, I wasn’t at all. It is so nice to be a little bit closer to other humans. No soundproofing or blocking when a hotel is just a big old mansion from three hundred years ago. It is nice to be with strangers, and everyone is trying to sleep, and we are all in nothing but a big old house. The facts are enough. And then the breakfast just pushed it all over the edge.

  I found my way to the docks so that I could take the two-hour ferry to where my friend and her sweetheart were waiting for me. They were with two other women as well. They were all friends. I was really only friends with my friend and I was new and I was shy and so of course I was also very brave. For the fjord boat, a man brought for himself a bottle of pink wine, a long sandwich, and a small can of pineapples.

  The can of pineapples was a cousin to the airport hot dog.

  On the ferry, I noticed that there was an upside-down dent in the clouds that looked like a hole to something else, like a funnel to an upside-down kingdom, for example. A seagull was in the water, trying to push ahead. The wind spun him around so that his butt was facing where he was trying to go. His expression was still the same, even though his face was where his butt should have been and his butt was facing his destination. He showed no signs of stress.

  A grumpy young man was the ticket person on this boat. He was also the person in charge of running the little snack bar. The boat moved from its dock so quickly that it seemed like it was controlled by his mind or his expression, like how somebody gets their horse to start going just by nodding at it, not that I really know about that because I dislike horses and have refused to know the truth about them and how they work.

  I listened to music and I watched what passed and I saw animals on the piney islands and I didn’t know if they were small goats or large cats, but of course large cats are not the right answer.

  When I arrived at the town and met my party of new friends, we went to dinner in a castle named after a woman called Karen. Karen was from the 1600s but her name was Karen. I have never had a really great feeling about castles because I don’t love the image of old kings. Old kings in the past are always dying of wet coughs and flaking faces, while being propped up on a million dirty velvet pillows. I find those images to be disgusting, but that was not what this castle was like. It was lovely and cozy and good.

  Inside of the castle, there were many geraniums on the windowsills, in two colors, red and pale pink. I was making a normal face but because of those geraniums, nothing inside of me was normal because it was just all fresh air in there, just possibility, no bones or muscles or anything else. I love red geraniums.

  I took a walk and there was a young Norwegian teen by a very old barn. He was doing a waltzy hip-hop dance while eating an ice cream cone.

  The next day, we played cards, walked through gardens, smelled every flower, got drunk, ate a lot of halloumi cheese, and one night I ordered from the children’s menu while I sat at the table with my adult friends. I ordered from the children’s menu because it had a dish called “Sausages” and I wanted that more than the more traditional, fish-based fare on the main menu.

  When my dinner arrived, it was a plate and on the plate were two long, curved, naked hot dogs. The waitress seemed angry to have to give it to me. Although I was not attempting to recreate the soothing normal hot dog situation that I saw with the businesswoman in the airport, I was aware that I was not even close to accomplishing whatever she had accomplished. I was a bit embarrassed of my weiners but I still ate them and they were fine. None of my new friends cared.

  When I went farther up into the Arctic Circle with my friend and her sweetheart, we met another friend of theirs. He was tall and had dark hair and I enjoyed talking to him but I could never really look him in the eye for a number of reasons. He made an apple pie, roasted a chicken, drove the car, painted me a picture of a small blue flower, and said my name when calling me over to look at a horse that he knew I was not happy about. He told me lines from a poem that he heard in a dream.

  We all went out in a boat and we were rowing from the house to a little island with a lighthouse on it. When we were halfway there, we realized that it was much farther than it had seemed when we were standing on our own shore, but we made it there and when we got there the island was covered in gorgeous shells and the lighthouse was actually strangely small, like a nub. We sat there and my friend realized that she’d forgotten the wine and when she realized she forgot the wine, she stuck her tongue out in embarrassment. I just loved her so much and I always will and I remembered that I’d seen her stick her tongue out like this previously, when we had crashed our sleds the winter before, also, strangely, in Norway.

  Later, while my friend and I sat upstairs in the house we were staying in, her sweetheart and the dark-haired man went outside in the Arctic midnight sun and went skinny-dipping in the ocean. I watched him go in. “That’s his butt,” I said to my friend. “Yes,” she said seriously, “that’s his butt.” Then the next day I had to go home because that had been the plan. I said goodbye to all of them and I felt very odd. Something had happened but nothing had happened, really. Nobody touched me but it felt like I had been touched.

  On the way home to the United States, a man on the plane spilled his coffee on his seat. He got up and showed it to the flight attendant, and he pointed at the spill with a smile that was shy but also had a little light in it like he was thinking of a funny memory but knew it would make no sense to anyone else if he were to laugh into the air of the plane. She wasn’t mad at him and understood that he didn’t want to sit in the coffee puddle, and they figured out how to deal with it.

  Across from me, a girl with a silver sparkly scrunchie was looking at pictures, and even though I was far away and I couldn’t make out the face in the pictures, I could tell that it was her in the pictures because the person in the pictures also had a silver scrunchie. I really liked her for looking at her pictures of herself.

  I cried a lot on the airplane home, come to think of it. My life was not in place. Many things had jabbed at m
e during my trip. I was affected by seeing how other people lived and what they thought was normal. In my own life, a lot actually seemed off. I wanted things to be as easy as when I saw the lady buy the hot dog. I wanted things to be as satisfying as the baby with the big bag of chips and the sips of a drink that made it say “Ahhhh.”

  I thought about how I could not bring my eyes to meet the man who painted the blue flower.

  I looked into my heart for the first time in a long time and I saw a door to something. I thought my heart had been close but it had been farther than I thought, like when we went to the island and it was not as near as it seemed. But we got there. I thought about how I was wanting to get to my heart and wondering what shells it had all over it, what things lay ready for discovery for me and someone else. Or would I just be a nubby lighthouse saying “Don’t crash!” to other people who were only passing by? I thought about it on the plane, and about how I’d had my eyes cast down on the trip but I’d still seen a butt, and then I was on the plane and I was crying too hard on the plane.

  I tried to write down how I felt. I recently found the note I wrote to myself, and all it said was “I’m too overwhelmed to say any more and I’m too scared to say any more and I feel too foolish, but I must not forget this, so I’m writing this down and this is the best that I can do.”

  Hillside

  My house was built in 1912, which is so very long ago that I imagine the house was born as a tree and then grew wider and higher and breathed in so much air that it made pockets in the wood, pockets like caves that then made themselves into rooms with hard corners and floors.

  The house was born as a tree because that’s just the fact. The fact is that my house was born as many trees, and the trees lived for so long and had roots in deep dark brown earth. They had their own barks all over themselves. Animals climbed all over them too.

  They were part of a forest, an ecosystem that is perfect because of its wide variety of species, dominant because nothing is not allowed to be there. In the forest, everything that is inclined to thrive really does, and has a job, and some jobs are to grow things up and some jobs are to take things apart and everything is accepted because there is no notion—among bacteria and moss and busy mice—there is no notion of who deserves to do something or be in a place. There are only lives to be lived, and they are everywhere.

  That’s where my house was born. It was born as a million billion small medium and large live things, and then someone came and got some of those many live things and made them into pieces of an anticipated whole and then that all became my house. And for over a hundred years, people lived in the house. I don’t know who died here, or how many people might have been here at once, sleeping in the rooms. I don’t know what soups might have been made in the kitchen, or if there were ever robbers or maybe a surprise party, or where the sex happened, or if there were things like a bird in a birdcage or a piano in the living room.

  The house is on a steep hill, but I don’t have a view that looks out and down, like most people want to have. The road that I live on is a notch in the hill, like a part in a hairstyle. It is just a ridge in a slope. I have a front porch and for over a hundred years it has been looking across at the rest of the hill, and the hill rises right up in front of your eyes. It is covered in wild vines and bushes and cactuses and bougainvillea. There is a bedroom on the second floor of the house, right above the porch. It has very large and of course very old windows. If you stand in the hall and look through the room and right out the window, all you see is different greens, the wild ropes of leaves and the bends of willowy plant life, everything bowing, braiding, climbing on each other. You stand in my house and see a green overgrowth of ivy and saplings and flowers and eucalyptuses that, when they are wet or moved, sigh out with a minty blue fragrance.

  I bought this house for myself and my small old dog. I bought it during the one trillionth time that I’ve had my heart broken. I saw that someone had carved initials in the basement floor in 1969. I had heard that an old man had shown up here, walked into the kitchen, pointed to the refrigerator, and said, “Why is that not the stairs?” He told the real estate agent that this had been his grandparents’ house. What were all these people doing here?

  On a Sunday afternoon, I went outside in my slippers and picked my kumquats from two young, slight trees. I picked ten Meyer lemons and five oranges. I picked yellow Mexican marigolds that smelled so strong, and all I could hear was the air moving the plants, and what I could smell was the perfume of the marigolds on my hands mixed with the wild lemon and orange scents. It was quiet and peaceful and I spoke out loud to the mystery of people, to the traces of the lives that had lived here before me. I imagined them looking out at me from the kitchen windows as I pulled up my sweatshirt to use it as a basket for the fruit. I grinned and showed my bare abdomen to my house and dog, and filled my sweatshirt with oranges.

  I imagined a ghost of an actress from the thirties, a young woman filled with life and bitterness, who called nail polish “varnish.” I imagined her looking at me and all of the oranges and my stomach and saying, “She’s gonna bring all of that into here?”

  And I do bring all of that into here—that’s kind of the main thing I do in every situation. Like it or not, I bring it into the here and now. But the other thing is that I keep a pretty keen eye on everything that has gone into making whatever “here” is, like the trees and the lives.

  I feel very lonely sometimes, and I felt very lonely when I bought the house. But I walk through the back door into the kitchen and I say to the oranges that they have made me the happiest woman on earth, and I say to however many ghosts might be watching me that I am so glad to be in the house, and I let my loneliness be there too, here in a very old house in a notch in a living hillside, not looking out and down but looking straight into the energetic wildness that drapes itself all over itself and has many mysterious roots that shoot deep into the earth.

  Important Questions

  I’m humble enough to admit that I don’t know everything and I’m secure enough to ask questions.

  Examples:

  How can I shrink enough to be small enough to respectfully ride a lamb or dachshund?

  What would my body look like (specifically boobs, butt, hair) if I only ate food cooked by bolts of summer lightning?

  What happens if I put a spell on a tiny piece of paper, put that into a nectarine, and bury it? What kind of tree could result from this action?

  Does the violin know about the cricket? Has a cricket ever lived in a violin?

  What if, when I felt a little off, I could flip up the top of my head and sprinkle just a few flowers around my brain and then flip the top of my head back down?

  What if a moonbeam gets caught in my soup and I swallow it in a sip and then I always float a little bit off the ground because there is a moonbeam in my stomach?

  Can I wrestle on the lawn? Can I sleep on the lawn? Who invented lawns?

  Who is more chatty, a squirrel or a seagull?

  When I die, will I turn into a ghost or just be garbage until I am part of a garden?

  I Died: Sardines

  I died! Do you know? And can you believe it?

  I was in the kitchen with my father, on a Friday afternoon at maybe a little bit before four PM, and I opened a circular tin of sardines and furthermore I knew that there was a lemon in the refrigerator. These were the conditions. And I opened the tin of sardines very carefully so as not to spill the oil, and there they all were in there, perfectly nestled into each other, these plump, oily, salty little fishes. There they all were and I knew that I was about to make a sandwich for my father and that I was a lucky person and I saw it so completely and I will tell you what: I just died. I simply passed right away. By the time I went to get the lemon I was only a spirit. By the time I laid the little guys on the toast, the soft spines still in their bodies, the bread drenched in lemon juice, the whole thing dusted with fine black pepper, by the time I cut two fat fancy caperbe
rries each in half and laid them on top of it all, I was nothing but a holy holy girl ghost. And when I gave my father his very own sandwich and it was much more exciting than he was expecting, I was a new saint. And when I opened my pretty mouth to chomp the little sardine bodies and the bread and the lemon juice and pops of pepper flecks and slips of caperberries, I blasted back into life with such essential joy that (good sweet goodness gracious!) I just about died again!

  Sit?

  I saw a little boy put his puppy on a skateboard and say “Patrick. Sit?”