Little Weirds(4)

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.