With Anything But Pants

by MEREDITH CHAMBERLAIN

I've been looking for a trench coat. For the past six years. This search started in college, but I can't imagine why. I didn't go to one of those colleges where people watch a lot of French films and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I went to the kind where people watch a lot of NASCAR and do a lot of something called dip. I'm thinking back to 20-years-old and trying to imagine why I needed a trench coat so bad, if I wasn't yet aware of Anna Karina.

I suppose the trench coat has always meant sex. It's always meant mystery, possibility, and sex. The first one I bought, ebay; $40, I wore it with everything. With cowboy boots, with very high heels, with converse, with everything except pants. It was important that whatever I wore underneath did not fall below the hem. At any moment, I could be naked. I was 20-years-old and this was important.

People told me I looked British in this coat, and I smiled. One man asked me if I was working tonight in this coat, and I smiled, and then I understood, and quickly walked away. You may be drunk, mister, but you are not in 1965. Ladies of the night have not looked this classically stylish since the mid 1960s.

I still have this coat. It doesn't quite fit me anymore but I still have it. I have not grown taller, or wider, since buying it, but I have grown up. At 26-years-old, there is less of a need to be naked at a moment's notice. There is less of a need to wear trench coats that fall to your mid thigh. Let the hem drop, the mystery swell. That's what I did. That's what I tried to do.

Coat number two was plaid, wool, mid calf. It was meant to be my winter coat. Winter coats and I don't get along. I only want one—I only want one of most things—and you need more than one winter coat in New York. In my New York. In your New York, maybe you only need one winter coat. Maybe it's one of those sleeping bag coats. Not in mine. Would Joan wear a sleeping bag coat? No. I'm talking about Didion and I'm talking about Holloway.

This plaid trench took me to London for a semester, on late night strolls through Brooklyn, boarded the train at Grand Central for Connecticut cocktail parties, and weathered a meet my new boyfriend Thanksgiving or two. This grown up coat, I don't know that I ever grew into it. It's never kept me warm enough. I still have this coat but I still feel cold in it.

There have been others. Mostly second hand. Ones I bought with alterations in mind, but never made. Wore them around imperfectly for a few months, looked for something new. The one I bought for Halloween, paid $5 for at Goodwill, as if I knew it would be ruined, covered in blood, ten hours later. Never accept piggyback rides from slight men, that is my advice to you. The navy blue one; oversized, vintage, from the flea market. It looked like a swing coat, in my eyes. It looked like Violet Beauregarde, in yours. The black one I wore to the Opera. That short-sleeved Urban Renewal thing. And all those off the runway dreams that danced in my head.

I want a forever trench coat. One that I can put on now, make memories in. Put on at 65, think about them. It needs to be sturdy, timeless; it needs to fit. This coat needs to be an investment. Investments require plans. Plans are getting in the way of my trench coat and me. Plans are getting in the way of my forever.

Meredith Chamberlain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York City. She tumbls here.

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