Little Weirds by Jenny Slate
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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 hostess: 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.