by Jenny Slate
A Fact
When gentlemen go to the doctor they need to take off their pants and show it all and turn around and cough to prove to the doctor that the balls are not dead in their bag.
(Having a body is bizarre.)
Geranium
A mistake has been made about wildness.
I was in another country. I was in a small town on a northern sea. All around me were sheep with big bells. They walked silently through the night, I could hear them passing, and they were not bleating and they were not straining against the dark. I could hear only their bells but I could imagine their bodies and their forward linear movements in the dark. I could smell their muddy wools.
Where I was, there was also a rose garden. There was a castle there built in the 1600s for a woman named Karen. How does that feel? Hey, Karen. It’s, like, 1617. I built you a castle with rose gardens. Inside the castle I couldn’t pay for marble so I painted the wood to look like marble. Karen? It was the best I could do for the person who I believe is the best.
You’re the best, Karen. I made you a castle.
The windowsills in the castle were deep and made of stone.
In my own life in another country and hundreds of years later, what had happened was this:
I was born at the time of year when small heroes bravely stick their neck-stems out for all of us, bet every molecule of blind faith on nature’s natural rhythms, and win for all of us, making us clap.
So, that happened first. Then I started to learn and I ate a lot of salty things and became obsessed with things like seashells and breasts and the word refreshment as a food and drink option that is supposed to make you feel a feeling, and I started to fall in love all over the place. I also rode bikes, failed at group sports, but succeeded in a love of water and swimming. I was scared of dogs and then obsessed with them.
I got in trouble for being wild.
I got in trouble for my feelings at school and camp and then always. I got in trouble for not paying attention to things that seemed boring to me but now are gorgeous to me, like clocks and compasses and calendars.
I had, always, a wild call that I wanted to ring out to the whole world. I knew it always.
I wanted to be an actress. I often felt like a bird in a house and I felt that people reacted to me that way so I started to try to find ways to do my wild work in inside spaces. I started to find spaces where I could bring wildness inside. I started to find a way to still be myself but be with the group.
I tried the start of a life with someone and it didn’t exactly take, but it didn’t exactly flee, and I had to let it go and be out there and hope some part of it would wander back to me like an animal that went out young and had to live in the wilderness and came back, and whenever it is that it would come back, this life, this love, I had to stare into its face and say, Is it you? And then we would be friends, at peace with the idea of being two creatures who started together but needed different environments.
But that is in the future and I am talking about the past.
Then I was all alone. I bought a house that was built roughly three hundred years after Karen’s castle was built. The house was empty and waiting for me when I eventually ended up in Norway, looking at roses and the cold seas and laughing about how actually old the name Karen is.
I was in another country. In conversation I made a wish, I said it out loud to a group of new friends. I said that I wished that red geraniums could be a houseplant. I said that I knew that they were for outside. But couldn’t they be for inside if I tried to truly understand them? We all sort of said that they probably could? But nobody knew.
The geranium is a hardy little mother. You can hardly kill it. It takes a lot to kill one.
I had never seen a geranium in a house as a serious thing that was really happening, on purpose.
We were invited to have dinner that night in Karen’s castle.
In every window of the castle, in every single window, on every single deep stone windowsill, was a red geranium. My heart stopped, or maybe it jump-started. I saw those geraniums and I felt my wild call ring right out, into up there.
I saw them and I was nothing but double doors to spirit, to everything, blasted open, tilted up. I thought, “Why would you not believe in this thing? Why would you not believe in such a small thing like putting this hardy red plant in your house?” I had called for what I wanted, based on who I was. And Karen’s castle had given me a big blazing sign that said, Yes ma’am.
At camp I used to pick off the red flowers from the geranium and sneak into the bathroom and rub the petals on my lips, making lipstick, tasting the plant. Even as a little girl who got in lots of trouble, I picked this plant out and said, I like to use this for my own beauty.
I am a wild thing but I wanted a home. I am wild and I want to be that and to belong to the greater group and have everyone know that my wildness is nothing but a bit of my colors and has nothing to do with whether or not I can be trusted. A geranium is a wild thing. It is so wild you can hardly kill it. But it does not take over your house if you put it inside.
A geranium in every single window of a castle is a wink to me, even if it is just a plant to you, maybe even a plant in the wrong place. Sitting in a kitchen in Norway, over breakfast, my heart broke at the idea of someone thinking that the plant was in the wrong place. I talked about that heartbreak. I felt my heart clutch itself. It was breakfast and I didn’t want to cry. There was a handsome stranger sitting across from me.
But I am wild, and a tear fell right when I tried to open my mouth. My body will always show what my real inner situation is. My body will never let me lie. I was almost gasping. I realized I am wild but I do not want to be sent to the wilderness and I looked across at my friend and at the handsome stranger and I made up my religion right in front of their faces and I said the first line of my own holy book:
I believe that wildness belongs in people.
I believe that wildness belongs in the home. I believe this and so I belong in myself and in my home. My gods are inside of me first and foremost, and the mother of all of them is the wild one.
There has been a misunderstanding about wildness. Bring it in, bring it in, bring wildness in, and care for it.
Place a shell in your shower. Get a whole plant in there. Put a geranium in your kitchen. Stand in your space and howl out. Bring it in or go out and see it. Wildness is the mother, the first thing, not a lurking predator. Wildness is holy.
I am a geranium that is hardy and wild, but I want to sleep in a neat little pot. I belong in a castle that was built with the determination and ingenuity of a person who was deeply in love.
I feel the warmth vibrating through the centuries and that’s why it is hard to kill me even with a frost. I feel the warmth from the heart of a woman named Karen, three hundred years ago, who got everything she wanted, who brought these plants inside maybe, who brought wildness into the place her love built just for her.
He put her name over the doorway.
A Tender Thief
One time, my dog sneaked six licks of coffee from my mug. I caught him on the sixth and I’m certain that he would have gone all the way. But I did catch him on the sixth. After he’d had his coffee he went and he stretched out on the armchair and spent a long time by the window, and I thought, “At least he knows how to have coffee properly, even though he is a thief.”
Night Treats for Her
Most nights, I stand in the middle of the kitchen in the middle of the night, completely asleep. I stand there naked like Persephone wandering between worlds. I am holding a spoon in the air, gripping a small jam jar and digging through jelly to find berries, spooning dark red preserves into my little mouth. I drink half glasses of cold milk and stick my dreaming hands in the raisin jar. I do leave a trail. I eat upwards of seven cookies. I will throw the tinfoil off of the cake and drop the crinkled silver sheet onto the floor and assault the cake itself, carving into it with a spoon that is slick and sticky with jam. Wh
en I am in the supermarket, I slow down cautiously in the jam aisle. I don’t even eat toast or muffins, which is what jam is really for. I could stop buying the jam, but then what would happen? I don’t know what to do about what I seem to need, how much sweetness, how many treats. I cannot rest without waking as my deepest self, the woman who is wailing for what is not provided as a normal morsel during the day. My nighttime menu knows its loyal customer: I drool for scoops of dripping colors. I want to bite into the things that they say are too sweet to have just on their own. The heart part of me walks the night, sweet and scary, consuming the things that are delicious yet apparently too concentrated to be encountered alone, as themselves. But they match me. I need to prove to myself that there is an appetite for sweet things that are lonely in the night. In the bright light of the day, I select the jar of jam. “It’s for her,” I say to myself as I shiver with anticipation. I imagine the moon rising, the loss of control against the deeper desires, a naked still dreaming darling darting through the rooms, an appetite finally met, the top twisting off the jar that is waiting in the dark.
The Root: A Made-Up Myth
I want to be a part of a system of power that does not disgust me. I have to give myself many pep talks. I am not sure of what to do most of the time, but I do not want to do what I was doing before. I need a new story, please. I suppose I have to give it to myself.
Before we all got here, there was a garden and the garden was good. I know that this is also the beginning of the Bible. The Bible is not the only book that is authorized to talk about good gardens. There are magazines about good gardens. There are TV shows. This is just another garden story.
The garden was growing and there were people in there and they were tending to the growth. It was living and they were living, and they were full of blood and bones and air and germs too, and it was fine. A cruel deity spied on everyone from a shitty patch of the sky, where it was more mud-colored rather than that celestial blue-black that helps our stars to stand out. He was a “he” and he saw all of the people as an “us” and so he was bitter and wrathful when he realized his loneliness. And he saw the mighty garden. He saw how fertile the soil was and how varied the garden-culture was, and he just twisted even tighter in his knobbed and dry identity.
He sent down a bad pod to shove itself and burrow in the garden. And while one man was harvesting more than he needed one day, he held the extra in his hands and he turned his eyes to the side toward something that whispered to him. It was the imposter pod. It had become a plant.
Think of it like this: The story is not that a woman named Eve ate an apple, but that a man bent down, his hands filled with the weight of having more than his share.
This made-up ancient man who I am putting in this useful story did not walk toward the community but instead he opened his mouth and the pod-plant slithered right in. A live vine went right into this human fellow. The vine sprouted greed and loneliness and panic in the man. The vine said, “You should have it all. It should all be you. Everyone else is trying to make you less of you and you need to stop them.”
The first man with the root of the alien vine in his body went out and opened his mouth again in front of others and the vine shot right into every single person that he spoke to and they all took the vine and the lie into themselves. The root got stronger and stronger. It became a system of grabby tendrils that made a net and everyone was in it. It controlled how they talked and walked and made love and made art. It was in the way they had their babies—and because after a while they didn’t even know that it was there, it was in the babies. And thousands and thousands of years later it was everywhere, in everything.
I open my mouth and reach an invisible hand down into the deepest part of me. I get into myself even though it is scary. If I deny that the root is in me, I will never change. I know that nobody is immaculate and so I don’t shame myself anymore—I just try to weed myself so that I don’t wither and weep. I reach down and start to pull the root.
I am pulling and it tortures me, make no mistake. When I yank the vine a bit, when I disturb the root in its little grave inside of me, it shows me all of the memories of all the times that I honored the pod like a drooling fool. Holy moly, this shitty vine grips tight to my soft pink brains and infuses my thinking. It says that I am a hypocrite and it says it in the voice of authority figures, ex-lovers, even my own mother. But I am allowed to rehabilitate and move forward, so I give myself reasonable counsel: “This is nothing but spooky stuff from a freaked-out root. This is what happens in an exorcism, babe. The bad thing wears the faces and forms of your failures and family and it says you are hurting me.” I keep an eye on my stamina and I pull slowly and consistently.
I watch the pod whisper to men that if they really pull it out, it will pull off their penises. I am just one woman pulling an ancient cultural root out of her spirit, and I am not a doctor or a shaman, but I can say, just as a citizen and an ally, that nothing will happen to your penis if you stop being a misogynist. It will still be the same penis. Maybe if you stop listening to the insidious whisper of a centuries-old pod, you will have less stress about your penis, though? Just a theory but I’d actually bet money on it.
It is strenuous and isolating to do this work within myself. I pull and the root tells me that I look ugly while I am pulling, and that nobody will want to have sex with me anymore. That is scary because I want to be nice-looking and have romances, but my job is to listen and hear how these are cruel threats and outright lies. My job is to pull. Every time one more inch is pulled out from inside of me, I feel relief. I start to look different. I look more specifically like myself. I look less like someone who hopes that a pod will accept her, and more like a flower who busted up out of the soil, in the middle of the night, fed by equal portions of sunlight and moonbeams. It actually feels more sexual than ever.
Eventually I reach so deep that I rip out the root. I dangle it in front of my face. It is a shrunken, sad root, quite small compared to my heart, dull in color and unable to pump life. I take one last good look at that poison pod and I just go ahead and fling it. I fling that pod back into that gloomy section of outer space that is for bad gods with sickly and sour spirits. I wipe my mouth off and I say out loud, This stupid old root was nothing but a cosmic clog.
I need a helpful myth to show me what came before. I need a new made-up story to deliver me into the real life that I would like to live.
Fur
I dreamed I lifted up my little breasts and lining their undersides was a soft white- and toffee-colored fur, not hair, and I thought: “Oh man, how am I going to deal with this?” and then I was sad that I couldn’t keep it.
It was my own fur, of course, but I knew that I would have to get rid of it.
My fur was so soft and clean. I felt it with my hands and it was as if I touched a dearness for and in myself as well as a sorrow that I had forgotten. And in the dream, I realized that women have simply never been told that they have soft white- and toffee-colored fur beneath their breasts.
Somehow my fur had crept in quietly and achieved its regrowth. It didn’t even notify me, maybe because it thought that I would put a stop to it. It was benevolent, the way it slipped in and went to work in and on me so that I could be whole again after feeling emotionally shorn and corralled.
In the dream, I put my fingertips into my fur and I stroked it against the grain of the growth and I let it spike up and turn down onto its pattern again. It knew where to go back onto itself on me and I felt a relief when I realized, I have been trying to destroy myself and I don’t want to anymore.
In the dream, I wanted so badly to have and keep my fur. I wanted so badly to not even know about the possibility that I could get rid of it.
When I am in my morning, I brush my teeth with no shirt on and look at my torso and touch that area on myself where the fur was in the dream, and I ask out loud, Who will let me be the real animal of myself? I am asking it out loud into the air but of course the only person
that I see is me in the mirror and so I become the first one to say yes to my bare self, which is proper and right.
All day long and in my life after I have this dream, I pet myself in the space that lives under my breasts and down to my waist and I feel calmed when I think of my fur. I sometimes imagine a man petting my fur. I will know him as the man who is allowed to be here because he is the one who will be at ease with my fur and pet me when I am nervous and not be mad at either of the following: that I have not removed my fur and that I live here in this non-dream world where it does feel that often people hunt me for my hide and I am nervous a lot.
Tart
There was a tart little taste in my mouth when I remembered the appointment at your office. Your office, which is a white rectangular room with pleasing, wide square windows of clear light. Your office, which is a space for plants that are green hang-down pals and indoor tree-things. And of course I am also a plant and so I like to be in there too, drinking small glasses of water, sitting around, taking in sun, absorbing our conversations.
But when I thought about the appointment in your office, I was not a plant but I was suddenly a cross little woman. There you would be, at the appointment in that space in the future, where you would be yourself and I could be anyone because it is the future, but there you also were back in time, in the past, when it was dark and we were angry, and the whole thing made me uncomfortable here in the present and I felt fussy.