Chloe Caldwell - Ill Tell You in Person

Ill Tell You in Person Ill Tell You in Person ... Coffee House Press An Emily Books Original Minneapolis and Brooklyn Copyright by Chloe Caldwell Cover design by Patricia Capaldi Book design by Connie Kuhnz Author photograph Anna Ty Bergman Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary dis-tributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or () -. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffee housepress.org. Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Caldwell, Chloe, author. Title: Ill tell you in person / Chloe Caldwell. Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, [2016] | Series: Emily Books Identifiers: LCCN 2016007063 | ISBN 9781566894531 (softcover) | ISBN 9781566894548 (eBook) Subjects: | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. Classification: LCC PS3603.A432 A6 2016 | DDC 814/.6dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007063 Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the editors of the following publications, where variations of some essays were first published: Vice, Salon, Medium,Hobart, and the Rumpus. In some essays, names and identifying details have been changed.

Thank you to the Marthas Vineyard Writers Residency, where pages of this book were written. Enormous thank you: Emily Gould for acquiring, encouraging, and constant support; Ruth Curry for the excellent and attentive edits and honesty. I am lucky to know you both. Thank you Chelsea Lindman, Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, Carla Valadez, Amelia Foster, Heidi Hogg, and everyone on the Coffee House team: what an honor to work with such intelligent, kind, and wonderful people. Thank you to my early readers and responders: Steph Georgopulos, Fran Badalamenti, Chelsea Martin, Elizabeth Ellen, Karina Briski, Elisa Albert, Erika Kleinman, and Diana Spechler. Thank you Mom, and thank you Dad.

I love you both. Printed in the United States of America For my friend Frances Badalamenti Do you remember the way the girls would call out love you! conveniently leaving out the I as if they didnt want to commit to their own declarations. , - ... I get it. Nothins ever happened to you and you write books about it. , Contents In Real Life ......

Prime Meats Yodels Hungry Ghost ...... Soul Killer The Music & the Boys Failing Singing Sisterless ...... The Girls of My Youth The Laziest Coming Out Story Youve Ever Heard Maggie and Me: A Love Story Berlin 2009 Reading Guide: Discussion Questions and an Interview with Chloe Caldwell Ill Tell You in Person In Real Life with my life? my notebook from reads. Music thera pist? Retail/venue owner? Substance- abuse counselor?Writer?But Im unfocused, unambitious, have an addictive personality, and what if no one cares? Ive spent the bulk of my years on planet Earth asking for forgive-ness rather than permission. Ive never had a plan B or F or even A. I dont know how to read maps.

Driving with my mom some years ago, I got lost, and rather than stopping or looking at a map, I kept going the wrong way. When you get lost, youre supposed to pull over and turn around, she said. I do when Im ready. One editor asked my agent last year what my five- year plan was. I laughed, even though I was the stupid one, not the editor (who rejected the book). As the clich goes, Ive always counted on either dying young or never dying at all.

I displaced my enormous anxiety onto dogs, elec-trical outlets, Mack trucks running me over, and, apparently, essay collections. I did not imagine my life past thirty, because I thought women in their thirties were magical unicorns, part of a club that didnt want me as a member. But Im still herenot unhealthy, not unhappy, a little unaffluent. When this book comes out, I will be thirty (and a half, if I can avoid those Mack trucks), and even writing this now, my current life contradicts some of the sentiments in the essays that follow, which I wrote at twenty- five, at twenty- seven, last month. For example, I now have a car and a savings account, and God help me if these additions to my life dont feel incredible magical- unicorn status, even. ...

Chloe Caldwell I felt my age for the first time last spring. I was sitting at a picnic table at the writing residency I was attending in Marthas Vineyard, and we were talking about having children. One woman, a murder-mystery writer, told us she was eight weeks pregnant. She explained she was getting used to the fact that she couldnt drink or eat oys-ters. She joked that she couldnt believe and didnt believe she was pregnant. The woman as she knew herself was changing, gone.

I cant do anything fun anymore, she said. We shared stories of being mistaken for being pregnant. (This has never happened to me. Instead, I get asked if I have children which I think is worse, since it means I dont look glowing and pregnant: I look like a stressed- out mother with toddlers.) Anyway, as we discussed this, I offered, When people ask me if I have kids, Im like, No! because in my head Im still twenty one years old. What was so disconcerting was the hearty laughter that followed. People laughed. My feelings werent hurt, but I was a little shocked.

I wasnt expecting them to say, Well, you do look twenty- one, or Yeah, me too, but I was surprised when they didnt. It was surprising that they saw me for what I am: An adult. A twenty- nine- year- old. I want to ask something like, is twenty- nine really that different than twenty- one? Of course it is. It makes perfect sense. I am twenty- nine, and I lived the fuck out of my twenties.

I even documented it to prove it. That night in the mirror, after taking off my makeup, I put my hair in braids. I was buzzed on wine, my eyes half- moons, and I thought I could see, for the first time, what I would look like as an old, decrepit woman. ... When I was eighteen and in my final year of high school, I broke into my older brothers bedroom, looking for leftover Halloween candy or quarters to steal. I ended up taking a random book off his bookshelf.

There was nothing special about the book that attracted me to itno reason for me to pull it down. The cover was white Ill Tell You in Person and orange, with an etching of a street and a palm tree. It was a page paperback: Like Water Burning: Issue One. The book was a small- press anthology, collecting eighteen pieces of writing. Of the eighteen, three of the titles in the table of contents had an asterisk next to them. The asterisk at the bottom of the page read: Nonfiction tastes best with a bottle of Charles Shaw Cabernet. Naturally, I turned first to one of the nonfiction pieces because it seemed special and juicy, and I dont believe in reading books in order, a quirk that frustrates most people who know me. I was painting long before I started writing and longer before Imet you, the essay I read first begins.

The essay was Mono No Aware by a writer named Miki Howald. It is an essay that is simul taneously a love story. The narrator, Miki, is an oil painter who works for the government. She falls in love with a boy who plays baseball and is soon leaving town. The essay is structured around the cherry blossoms outside her window.