November 2024: A Grown Up Author Goes to a Dinner Party – Jessica Zelli
A Grown-up Author Goes to a Dinner Party
He assembles the crackers on the plate; I feel like I am playing pretend. She is wearing an apron – Take notes!!! – and is choosing which casserole dish out of many in which to arrange the cacciatore.
On our way to the party, he had sent a message to us both suggesting wines. I stay in the car while you pop into the IGA. I whine along to a sad song about lost youth and touch raindrops on the window.
We get there and greet one another at the door with exaggerated voices. When we cluster in the kitchen, I feel like we are all anticipating something that isn’t the meal.
I clumsily create a tower out of vivid green cocktail onions, and feel like I’ve lost all sense of reality. Who am I, again? I’m stuck in a liminal space; I had been slouched over my computer, all day, feverishly pushing keys.
I wonder what we are waiting for. Our parents? I sneak off to the toilet, and while there, I scroll down a website talking about manuscript tips, what-not-to-do’s with synopses.
That afternoon, I had made a little list: Literary agents?
When we go to dinners, it’s the tension that kills me. We stand around imitating those who have gone before us because That’s just the way it is, but we never really think about whether it has to be like this, or if we all just decided that eating bland crackers and sweaty cheese is a good way to spend time together.
When you are a child, it looks effortless. You watch your parents lounge around — the talking, the hosting, the cooking, the eating, the talking some more. What, in the adult world, you had thought, is there to talk about so much?
I worry that I have been in the toilet too long.
I feel infantile when I rejoin the group. I wish I could just wander off, join the kiddie table. I crave chicken nuggets.
And all of this writing. I feel childlike handing over my work for inspection. I feel like a toddler proudly showing a tacky drawing with pieces of hard pasta stuck in place with glittery glue. Are you proud of me yet? I ask them, him, her, you — anyone, actually, because I’m thirsty for validation.
While waiting for the oven, we migrate to the living room. I feel like I can’t sit down. I perch on the edge of the lounge. Where am I even planning on going? I’m here now; I’m a grown-up, with a very real job and a very real house! Don’t we have mortgages to talk about?
She asks me: How’s the writing going? Oh my God. I used to be asked this very same question when I was fourteen.
I answer back truthfully, because I wear my heart on my sleeve: It’s serious. I push aside my crayons. Pick up my masterpiece with sticky fingers. Very serious.
Jessica Zelli
Right Left Write’s November prompt was Coming-of-Age.
Find out more about Right Left Write at www.queenslandwriters.org.au/rightleftwrite.
Right Left Write’s November theme was Coming-of-Age.