Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

  Luckily there is a supermarket in the present, and supermarkets please me. Luckily, I am of sound enough mind, even in my puckering tartness, to drive a car to the supermarket, buy egg-yolk-colored daffodils, and cream for my coffee and get myself into a livelier tempo in general.

  I pushed the cart. I said things to myself like, “Stop looking for things to be sad about, that’s not what it actually is anymore,” and of course I was right, that’s not exactly it. There is nothing sad anymore, there are only tiny and tart truths. I saw that I was wise to instruct myself in this way. So I said, “And furthermore, start looking for eggs.” I did. I found myself some eggs, and tender butter-leaf lettuce and a prissy endive and some jokey Kirby cucumbers and some standard butter and a new giant olive oil because I was anticipating filling my mouth with salty, lemony, glistening leaves.

  The sourness about the appointment got in line with the rest of my feelings. It made itself into a goldenrod color in my chest. “Oh, I see,” I said. It wanted to be beautiful, this sourness. It was ready to be a part of something useful. Oh, I do see.

  I got what I needed in that moment and I went home to do more of what was required.

  I picked two Meyer lemons off the tree outside of my house where I live alone and where you do not live with me. There are other ways to say that but since I was still a bit sour I had to frame it up like that, make a statement in black-and-white. But it can never hold, that black-and-white way. I never want it like that. I’m just too much of a color wheel now to limit myself to statements like that, and I know it, so I buck up and I say, “Well, what can you do? What will you do now with all of this tartness and all of this yellow?”

  I would never be this whirling wheel of colors if we had not changed the shape of who we are together. I knew that, but still, there was a bit of bitterness left in the rotation.

  In the night, while I ran the bath and waited for it to fill up as a warm place for me, I chopped up the lemons, orange-yellow rinds and all, all color, all juice, all flavor, all pucker and pleasure. I held that whole fruit and I said, “I will use the whole of it because nothing is un-processable, and I will not discard any parts, because there is a wholeness here if I can be resourceful and think about things differently,” and then I did that, and I baked a tidy little lemon tart. I sweetened it. While it was becoming a treat in my oven, I took my body to the bath and I did my best to wash any grit away from myself.

  I brought the tart to your office and we sat there and we each ate one long yellow triangle piece. You stood up and took my picture while I sat back like a good little plant holding a piece of a lemon tart on my tender green leaf-hand. I thought maybe the tart was too tart-tasting. But I had been right about the amount of sweetness to add so that we could sit there and have it and have a conversation and not have our mouths screwed shut from any sourness.

  One can put sweetness into something, on purpose. I can never take away the color of the feeling. Yellow is yellow so what are you going to do with it? It was in me and it was almost acidic and corrosive and I held it long enough inside of myself so that it went from a burning canker to a glowing color and the color was yellow and so I followed the color from one of its forms to the next. I ended up with a treat. I shared it. It was not easy, but it was certainly not hard.

  Then again, it was certainly its own zone, it was certainly disorienting, to do this process of tart to sweet, because when I came home I felt bananas. And just to see if I was onto something, I put on some music and I put on the oven and I threw some bananas into a batter.

  I’m sure you can’t bake it all away, but you can transform the reality while still accepting the essential elements that make it what it is. You can make good smells in the place where you live, smells that are better than sitting around with stress breath and cigarette smoke. Who knows? Who knows how to do anything, but it’s not nothing that I know all my feelings and I have trust in their changeable nature and I am an expert at making treats out of tribulations.

  It’s in the oven. The dog is asleep next to a large strawberry pillow that he likes as a friend. I will have the bread soon enough. I wonder what you will do with the picture you took of me. I wonder what you will do with the rest of the tart. I guess the trick of the treat is that I left it there for you because I had too much of the troublesome ingredient with me for so long and I needed to make it into something else and give it away. It is too much for one person, isn’t it? And if you eat it, maybe you will know how full of it I felt, but also how much sweetness I have been holding for you, inside of myself, in so many colors and forms.

  Clothes Flying On/Day Flying Open

  Hello, I am a woman and I have been awake for at least two hours, during which I have spoken on the telephone, fixed breakfast for the old dog, made strong coffee and put it in the white and blue coffee cup that is so delicate and short that it is really a teacup but is indeed for my coffee. I took many sips.

  Hello, I have been up for a while and I stood in my nightgown on the front porch and sniffed the air like taking in wafers of just-born light and I haven’t even thought of brushing my teeth but I have actively and absentmindedly fussed over my new triangle haircut. I left my coffee on top of a china cabinet, next to a plant, and I will not see it again until I move it this afternoon and that has nothing to do with whether or not I am tidy. I am certainly tidy and that tidiness comes from deep inside of me because I know where everything is always, starting from inside of myself. Very tidy.

  Hello, I changed from the white cotton nightgown with light blue embroidery on the collarbone into a very smart outfit for living in the day: a cream-colored skirt, with a grid of white, and pleats all the way around, an accordion of cotton. The pleated skirt is the color of tea with lots of cream. Traditionally speaking, it is the color of tea with too much cream and sugar in it. The skirt is the tone of a slightly warm dessert-drink hiding in a cup, a secret gentle creamy treat for me while everyone else drinks a darker, more serious, scalding thing.

  Nobody knows how extra sweet it is in my cup. I hide my delights in plain sight—I turn the normal thing into a much tastier option.

  But do you know this: The outfit went right onto me. The outfit flew onto me. I put my hands in the air and I stood there and it flew on. I stood with my hands over my head like a young bride in her new country and I felt the air hit the fine soft skin that stretches down the inside of my arm and into my warm armpit and down my rib cage, where there is the circle of my little breast just waking up. And I felt, I must get on with it! I must admit to my lust for knocking this morning into a full-on day!

  Hello, I live in a constant state of growth and regeneration without being obsessed with the threat of decay.

  Well, what? It’s my business how the heck I get dressed and how I remember it.

  Something pushes me right out of the bedroom before I can turn around and reconsider almost everything about myself because that’s what I do: I tear everything down sometimes in a fit of rip-roaring instinct, because I’m a terrifying, wild little thing. And sometimes I enact destruction just to reenact my faith that things can be built up again. But I’m trying to stop the first part of that and just have the faith. And I went downstairs and I thought, Okay, here I go!

  Hello, I sit at my desk in these clothes, in this body, and the sweater slips down my shoulder and I turn my head right away and give myself between nine and thirteen kisses on my bare skin, and my eyes flick up from these kisses and look out the window, and outside the window there is a squirrel drinking in my fountain, underneath a grapefruit tree.

  I think about how we are both having our mornings and that they are equal. I do feel it all and then some. I have just been kissing my own skin but now I feel the wet water in the squirrel’s mouth. I feel the swollen grapefruit bear its heaviness, its tear-shaped pods of sweetness and tartness in one pink liquid, capsules surrounded by membrane, covered in a thick pinky orange rind. I put myself in everything that I see and I want it to put itself in me
and watch that web of interaction spin out between us.

  I am in contact with something and I accept something these days: I accept that somewhere there is the fastest animal and somewhere there is the brightest coral and all around are the energy streaks of lives of people who are now dead and somewhere is the most ripped up canyon and I can sense its depth and my very own heart jerks and shifts with all the waves going berserk in the ocean. The magnolia blooms are so beautiful, the flowers are like fish in a tree. Sometimes do you ever get jealous of the plants, that they only have to grow and not know about it, and they don’t take anything personally?

  What can I do? I can only breathe in deeply. I can only bellow in a church that is deep inside of myself. I can only blast a shell-shaped horn that would shake down the oldest buildings. I can only leap for joy in my sacred inner caves and ring out the message: I am alive. I woke up again. I might as well be sprouting leaves, I might as well be covered in little clams.

  Look at me. Yes, I am a woman who woke up and got dressed and sat down here. But look again, look from the seat inside of myself that I let you sit in for just a few moments: I am a woman in dessert tones at the start of a bleating little day. Mouth full of clover. Oh, holy shit, I am a big fat fruit on a tree, dangling in the air just so, living in a state of fullness and exhilaration. I am connected to eternity and I am part of everything and although I am with all of it, I am still different from anything and everything.

  I am an example of a specific way of spending time and feeling existence in this world.

  I Died: Bronze Tree

  I know that I can’t change it: I died.

  I died as a very old woman.

  I died after living more of my life with you than I lived with just myself.

  I did die, and everyone wants to talk about that because it is the final thing, it is the only real completeness I guess, but completeness was never a prize, in my eyes. Connection always was, deepening, tending, asking, cycling through, all of the things that we did together before we died our deaths.

  I died but it was so small compared to how I had lived so much and for so long with you, alive. One death was so small compared to all the things that we did in our life, things that we did all the way through, right to our ends.

  I died seven years after you did—you went before, because that is the statistic that I know. I died knowing that that was the statistic, but still unsteady, wobbling on the unbelievable truth that you had left me. And you’d gone just when I was really about to become someone that needed a hand on me, not just to go down a stair but also to be on my soft old skin, to calm the hum of my bones that vibrated too roughly for such an elderly frame, because you know me, I just had so much energy that it was both a power and a liability.

  I died but my blood was still fresh and fast, my heart was an up-close light, but my mind had wandered away by the time I died. My mind was lightly stepping in concentric circles, farther and farther into the navy blue air-sea behind me, where I moved in my own rhythms, whirling my long-ago past with my house’s hallways now, mixing up rooms, putting odd things in my purse, insisting that someone dead had called on the telephone, insisting that there were “bugs with long feet and long tails” that came at sundown or that you who were already dead needed me to do something for you like mail a postcard to a teacher. I frightened people because I was in fact touching the frayed space between dimensions, talking to you from my side, which is not allowed. I would travel long distances in my mind, and it would make my face go blank. That was the compromise for living in the inner world, that my face in the outer world sort of paused.

  I died and I was a spirit-rebel at the end, sneaking through the curtains in the worlds of spirits. You would have been proud. You always hated authority. You were always parking in front of the hydrant and then being royally PO’d when you’d have a ticket on the car or no car at all anymore. You always thought that breaking the rule was not just an act of defiance but of instruction, saying, “This rule is not life-affirming and so I will show you that it is just fine to live life without the rule.”

  But it never worked.

  I died and before that, in the last dimly lit years, when I could have sworn that the house would fill with a thick sea-fog, when I saw a blue whale float by my doorway as I lay in bed, it was odd because you were not there but I was having an experience with you, about you.

  There was no other time in my life when I looked for you and thought you were there, thought you must be upstairs or about to walk through the door, but you really just weren’t there anymore. There was no other time when I’d shopped for groceries and bought grape jelly, which only you like, and brought it home just to realize the horror of what I’d done, buying purple jelly for a person who is not there.

  I died and my sneaking and confused speaking and many demands after my journeys in my mind were not a surprise to our son and he never cut me off or called me crazy. He made me write it down. He took pictures of me. And he was glad to have them.

  I died and our son sat in the living room of our house by himself and thought of a woman that he was not bold enough to love as you had loved me and I had loved you, and sitting there in a T-shirt and looking so much like you, he resolved to go out there and try to get her, to celebrate us by having his own love.

  I died and I’d loved having a son with you. I had loved making both of you the same sandwich, I had loved saying to you through hidden laughs, “Go in there and tell him that he really needs to practice that cello, not just noodle around on it,” and you’d pawed at me and I’d loved it and then you said, “You go in,” and then I’d really lost my patience with both of you, which I also secretly liked, being cross about a cello, and by the time our son was bathed that night and you’d read to him and I’d listened to the story from our own room across the hall, I couldn’t wait for you to come lie next to me in our soft clean bed.

  I didn’t let you read your book that night. We never had air-conditioning. I would get up and check on the fan in our son’s room. I would get up just to smell you and give you kisses on your back in the shape of what I could remember of Orion. I could remember mostly just the belt, which is dear but not very impressive. Over and over again on your back every night, the belt. One, two, three cosmic smooches from me to you until you died and then I died, but sometimes in the time before I died and after you died I kissed three stars into the air of where your body used to be in the bed, thinking thoughts like, “If I can’t have him then I will bring the sky down into the bed, one kiss at a time, and then it will be like I am in the cosmos with him.” It was a fun activity that helped me fall asleep.

  Sometimes, when my brain really started to ferment in its own syrup, when the inside of my mind would sprout powerful nightshades and blooms from a vital dementia, I would be sitting in a room full of people at a party, people talking about movies and new purchases and people having various relationships, and my face would arrange itself as if I were listening but really I was staring into a long black cone that would form in front of me when I was sitting still. I tried often to move around and do busywork but I was old and I was tired and I ended up sitting down a lot and then that’s when the cone would come. The cone was a slowly turning tornado made out of something smooth and dark, and instead of coming down from the sky to lift up a car or just eat up a town, it stretched perpendicular to the horizon, with its base where the ocean turned into a line, and its very tip flicked out like a tongue and spun and spun and spun. The dark conical vacuum circled my face and sucked and sucked and whispered, “Let it out, let me take your sorrow to the darkest distance, let me take it off your hands,” and it didn’t seem friendly but I never knew how hard it would be to live with the loss of you, and I wanted to let go of the pain even though it was the last thing that felt alive from you, and so I, surrounded by people just doing their party-talk, let the cone take pain from me. “Tell me,” it coaxed.

  I spoke in my mind but also into the cone, “I miss being a wi
fe. I miss saying my husband. I am tired of being in a constant state of recovery. I don’t know how to be alone. I feel weak and fragile and crazy and deeply ugly. I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to do.”

  And the cone had its fill and finally collapsed into a long flat triangle and flew away like one wing of something, like a sail with no ship. I couldn’t tell if the cone was a friend or an enemy and my guess is that it was neither but it did cause great trepidation in me, like when people have tigers as pets and they love them so much and then the tiger just randomly kills their partner and they are heartbroken but not really angry at the tiger, but also they must kill the tiger?

  It’s confusing. I was often confused. The cone left. The party was still there. Someone had dipped a cracker into something. They put the cracker on a small square napkin and put the napkin in the palm of my small old hand and said, “Try this.” I looked bewildered. Someone said, “You like this, Mom. You’ve had it before.” I thought, “I have never had this before. This is the only time this has ever happened to me. The rest of the time I was with my husband and I was myself.” That’s sort of how things started to go before I died.

  I died and our son sat in the living room that I had kept nicely until the last devastating moments that were devastating and also frightening, not because of illness but because I lost the will to be tidy and admitted to being tired in a way that was different than the fatigue I dramatically complained about for my entire life. Before, when I would complain of being tired it was always a subliminal plea to be treated nicely, to be loved, to have you all know how hard I’ve worked for you and that I wanted to be admired and thanked. My mother did that. You always hated that I did it. I admitted to starting to die when I stopped caring for my rooms, stopped doing that thing where I brought branches and leaves and flowers in to make the house alive. It was a statement that something was over. I made it to our son silently, through stopping my patterns. I made it to you in my voice inside of me, telling you, “See you soon, I think.”