You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein Read Free Book Online Page A

she’s considering getting a boob job and wants to get some ideas. She’s in her late thirties and very pretty, although she occasionally seems shrouded in a kind of mysterious ennui, although I suppose it’s really not all that mysterious because, let’s face it, waxing other people’s pussies can’t exactly add years to your life.
    Anyway, I tell her it’s not possible. My butt looks the same, I’m sure. But she is adamant. “Everything looks tighter,” she insists, and then she gives it a little slap.
    Later that night at home, I start telling Mike what Rivka said. He’s in bed reading and seems not to be paying attention to what I’m saying about my trip to the waxer (fair enough), but he perks up when I mention her comment, and for the first time puts down his reading.
    “It’s true,” he says.
    “What do you mean,” I press.
    “It looks tighter. It feels tighter.” He goes back to his reading.
    Well, fuck me.
    This is both the best news and the worst news.
    Do I have to keep going now? I don’t want to. I don’t want to worry about my ass while I march in place. I want to go forward, and forget all about it.
    1  He has never confirmed or denied any of this.
    2  If you don’t know what Hampton Chutney Co. is that is fine. It is a small restaurant in New York City where they serve chutney.
    3  I’d naively always thought that being on the elliptical meant I was exercising. It does not. Women who are in great shape, the women who really work out, consider being on the elliptical something akin to a nap.

Poodle vs. Wolf
    O ne late night when I was working at SNL , I wandered out of my office for a break and saw that some random TV in the hallway was tuned to an interview with Angelina Jolie (I think it was with Charlie Rose, who was shamelessly hitting on her, as is his wont when he interviews a pretty lady). I wandered over to watch, as did Emily, one of the senior writers there at the time and an all-around hilarious and fabulous lady. We both stared at Angelina in awe.
    “Isn’t it amazing,” Emily asked, “that we’re the same species she is? It doesn’t even feel like we are the same species.”
    “I know,” I said. I continued the riff: It’s like with dogs. A poodle and a wolf are both technically dogs, but based on appearances, it doesn’t make any conceivable sense that they share a common ancestor. We decided that some women are poodles and some women are wolves. And no matter what a wolf does (puts on makeup, or a thong), it will still be a wolf, and no matter what a poodle does (puts on sweatpants), it will always be a poodle.
Classic Poodle-Wolf Moment #1
    I am on my way to meet my friend Tracy for breakfast and decide to wear my new dress, which I love, a black dress with white butterflies and pockets 1 from Agnès B., which is a pricey French retail chain that represented the highest echelons of fanciness to me as a kid. I had never gone in, ever. But a couple of months earlier I was drawn in by the butterfly dress, and looking in the mirror I thought I looked really pretty and girlie, like Zooey Deschanel but from EUROPE, and decided to spend an ungodly amount of cash on this poodle feeling I had.
    So I enter the subway in my butterfly dress and start to walk slowly to one end of the platform, waiting for men’s heads to turn while I practice saying in my head, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” even though no one is looking. And then this other woman walks in right behind me, and everything changes.
    She is clearly a dancer, or a former dancer, but who cares, look at her, she has long perfect legs that are all one tawny color, not a speckled mixture of wintergreens and veiny blues like mine are, and she is wearing short jean shorts and a plain denim shirt, and her hair is sloppily piled on top of her head with a cheap clip. She is stunning. You can feel everyone’s energy shift as all men on the platform cycle through their quick glance-up/glance-away thing that