Grandma’s life was cooking for people: whether it was a church breakfast for a hundred, a dinner party for twelve, or later, after Grandpa died, a simple meal for herself and her dog.
And Thanksgiving was obviously no exception. Sometime in the early afternoon, our grandparents’ car would pull into the driveway. And this is when Billy and I would do our best to hide, as what came next was a clown-car-esque removal of foodstuffs from Grandma’s trunk and/or backseat.
The worst thing to get stuck carrying was the turkey, which Grandma transported in the roasting pan with all of the grease sloshing around in the bottom.
“But Grandma, why do you have to bring the grease?” I would ask, whining no doubt.
“How else are you going to make the gravy?”
The items she brought over didn’t stop with dishes she’d prepared ahead of time, e.g., cranberry relish, ambrosia salad, and an assortment of pies. She would also bring ingredients, some of which weren’t even Thanksgiving-related.
“The yellow cake mixes were on sale at Giant Eagle,” she’d say to my mom.
And though there was no longer any free space in the kitchen for said boxes of cake mixes, Mom would simply nod. “Great.”
In his late sixties, Grandpa had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which meant that he could no longer eat much of what Grandma was cooking, or at least as much of it as he wanted. The bulk of my memories of Grandpa involve him sneaking food behind Grandma’s back, and/or Grandma scolding him for having eaten something he shouldn’t have, and/or the two of them bickering over how in the world his sugar could be so out of whack if all he had supposedly eaten that morning was oatmeal.
But Grandpa wasn’t the only one having to watch what he ate. See, the thing about the trio of Billy, Thanksgiving, and high school wrestling was that they were completely incompatible. That year, Billy was a senior wrestling in the 134-pound weight group. And though he, too, was a late bloomer and still growing at age seventeen, any fool could see that Billy’s body did not want to weigh 134 pounds. His cheekbones sunk into his face, and in his wrestling singlet, his hip bones protruded in a way that a female runway model would have admired. Therefore, Billy’s presence at the Thanksgiving table was a sort of torture for him and a buzzkill for everyone else.
Relatedly, since quitting gymnastics, I’d undergone a bit of a growth spurt. Over the summer, I had worn a size zero, but all of a sudden, in a matter of months, I was buying clothes in a size two or even four. Of course, I didn’t see it as a growth spurt at the time, and so I began to dabble in watching my weight as well. Emily and I together had decided to cut out soda, and because tennis wasn’t half as exhausting as gymnastics practice had been, I’d taken to going on long runs, specifically to burn calories.
To talk about Thanksgiving, I must also talk about Christianity. Because of Bruce’s leadership role in the church as a Sunday school teacher and occasional stand-in for the pastor, members of the church looked up to him. They came to him for help, for advice, for guidance, for friendship, and on Thanksgiving, they came for dinner. At fifteen, I found these loners who didn’t have families of their own and who usually had really sad stories behind their singular status to be major downers—even more so than Billy’s perma-diet and Grandpa’s diabetes.
And last, to talk about Thanksgiving, I must also talk about the way in which my mom and Grandma would both eat so much during the making of dinner that by the time we all sat down, they would be exhausted and full.
“Oh dear, I’m stuffed!” Mom would say, as she sat down at the table with outstretched hands, signifying we could now say grace.
And by we, I mean Bruce, who would then say a really long mini-sermon during which Billy and I, as a form of silent entertainment, would squeeze each other’s hands as hard as we could. Once grace wrapped, we could finally eat. And since Billy and I had recently emerged from the game room downstairs, we were ripe for questioning from any and all of the out-of-touch Christian strangers at the table.
“What grade are you in, Amy?”
“Tenth.”
“And what are you studying?”
“Just like the normal stuff.”
“You don’t have a major?”
“No, that’s college.”
“Oh. Well, any chance you’ll go into medicine like your mother or the seminary like your father?”
“My stepdad, and no, probably not.”
And then to Billy:
“My, you aren’t eating very much, are you?”
“No, I have to make weight.”
“He’s a wrestler,” Mom would say.
“Oh.”
At the far end of the table, you could hear Grandma scolding Grandpa: “Bob, that’s enough.”
And then, Mom sighing. “My goodness, I’m stuffed.”
Chapter 7
The Saturday Boy
When you’re fifteen, you don’t call it “dating.” You can’t drive and you don’t have an income, so you can’t really go on a date. Luckily for Matt, he lived within walking distance of one of Mt. Lebanon’s two malls and he had an allowance. Because, that winter, just a few months after we met, we went on a date.
It was a Saturday afternoon. I must have gotten a ride to Matt’s house, or more likely, to Emily’s house—as a way of not having to give my mom any extra, potentially embarrassing information—from which I walked down the street to Matt’s, but once I was there, the two of us, him in his trench coat and me in my Gap peacoat, walked to the mall together. It wasn’t snowing, but there was snow on the ground. I had to have known it was a date beforehand, but knowing you are going on a date and being on a date are two very different things, particularly for a fifteen-year-old girl. Suddenly, it was just the two of us on our own, with no friends nearby to ease the awkwardness. Suddenly, the idea that Matt liked me back was very clear and felt very weighty. And what did Matt have planned for our date? Lunch at China Gate, a sit-down, cloth-napkinned Chinese restaurant situated in a little nook on the top floor of the mall.
It’s only now, as I write this, that I realize this was my first date of my entire life. For all of my flirting with my brother’s friends in Saegertown, not one of them had ever taken me anywhere. And despite having danced a couple of slow dances with these boys at the homecoming dance, I hadn’t actually kissed anyone before.
And so, as we entered the mall, I felt the intimacy of it and panicked. I told Matt I wasn’t hungry. I told him I’d already eaten, in fact, and that maybe we should skip eating altogether. But he was already halfway up the weird annex-like stairs to China Gate. He was confident. He waved me on. He assumed I would chill out and at least order a wonton soup.
He assumed incorrectly.
I ordered nothing and ate nothing. But Matt remained undaunted, ordering himself a single egg roll and a bowl of hot and sour soup. Afterward, he led the way to the Godiva chocolate store two floors below and bought me the tiniest golden box with two perfect little truffles in it. I think most girls would have been completely won over at this point, but it was too much for me. I was getting an anxiety-induced headache and couldn’t wait for the date to be over. We walked back—my hands safely in my pockets lest he tried to hold one—past Matt’s house and directly to Emily’s, where at last I could relax a bit in the comfort of the presence of a third person.
It didn’t take long for our entire group of friends to find out that Matt had asked me out, and yet, we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, and of course, to make fun of him for it. And while I know that this is just the first of many examples of how I made high school difficult for Matt, I also know that something amazing happened after this. Because after this, I cast Matt into the realm of just friends. And because we were just friends, I no longer had to impress him or feel the need to be perfect around him. Instead, I could be myself. I could actually have a real conversation with him—you know, one where if you don’t hear the other person correctly, you can ask them to repeat themselves instead of just nodding a
nd smiling and moving forward as if you’d heard because you’re too uncomfortable to show even the smallest chink in your armor, even if it’s not a chink at all.
And so, we were friends. Friends who watched Party of Five and then called each other after to discuss what Charlie or Bailey had done this time. Friends who tied up our parents’ phone lines to such an extent that his mom or dad would inevitably jump on the line to say, “Time to wrap it up, Matt.” Friends who made each other laugh so hard during Western Civ. that Mrs. Caskey, our teacher, had to separate us. We were friends who made mix tapes for each other. Well, mostly Matt made them for me. I listened to them on the long runs I would take through Mt. Lebanon’s suburban streets, unable to ignore the fact that so many of the songs centered on the topic of unrequited love.
Junior year, we were friends who went to homecoming together, after which, when I ended up leaving with someone else, someone I had wanted to be more than friends with, we became friends who were on a break.
“We’re on hiatus,” Matt told me outside of our separate homerooms the following Monday morning before the morning bell.
It would be the first of many hiatuses. And of course I knew why, but I pretended I didn’t. “Oh, c’mon! Really?” I was comfortable with this distance, when there was an obstacle in our way—though preferably an obstacle I was in control of. Later, it would bother me to no end when I heard that Matt was hanging out with someone else, especially when that someone was very pretty, very tall, and known to miss school for modeling gigs in Italy.
We were even friends who kissed, really kissed, one day after school, after tiring of the hiatus, after I’d been missing my monthly mix tapes, after I’d panicked that I might lose him as a friend forever.
In college, years later, the guys in my social circle would often ask me if I was high or drunk because of the way I was talking and/or joking, and when they realized I wasn’t, that I was just being myself, they deemed me the “weird girl.” And I think it would have offended me if it weren’t for Matt, because those moments when I was apparently being my weirdest reminded me of how I was when I was with Matt. And the person I was when I was with Matt—apart from the times I really did hurt him—was my favorite person to be.
All I can say is that some people are ready at seventeen to start the rest of their lives with the person they love, but I was not one of them.
At our high school, for Valentine’s Day, you could arrange to send someone a carnation with a little message attached, both of which would be delivered to your homeroom on the morning of the fourteenth. I didn’t hold on to the carnation, but I do still have the message Matt sent me senior year. Perhaps in an effort to keep the messages appropriate, the school made them quite generic. “Happy Valentine’s Day” it read at the top of a blue strip of paper, underneath which you were given five options—“Love, Friends, Crazy, Thank You, or Other”—and the directive to “circle one.” But Matt hadn’t circled any of these options. Instead, he had written in his own message and circled that: “I hate you,” it said in the small printed handwriting I knew so well from all of our passed notes and mix tapes.
Though I’m no hoarder, I held on to this piece of paper for all of these years because, even though I couldn’t digest it at the time, I think some part of me knew the feeling was mutual. That I hated him too—with my whole heart.
Chapter 8
A Major in Creative Writing with a Minor in Tortured Self-Reflection in One’s Journal
At seventeen, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, let alone what to study or where. I only knew that I wanted to go to a good school that wasn’t too close to home. I know the fact that Dolly had never left western Pennsylvania was a major influence in this latter part of my decision-making—sticking around your hometown your entire life seemed a sure recipe for unhappiness. And so, I ruled out any colleges in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or Ohio.
Duke was my number one pick, as that’s where my brother was. But when I didn’t get in, I chose the next best sounding school on my list: Johns Hopkins University, a place I’d applied to merely because my dad had mentioned almost going there and a school Mom and I’d given a cursory, haphazard visit one late afternoon on a drive back to Pittsburgh from Durham.
But minutes after Mom and Bruce dropped me off at my freshman dorm, I fluctuated between feeling homesick and intimidated. All of my new classmates seemingly came from much cooler places than Pittsburgh—e.g., New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—and arrived with declared majors in International Relations, Political Science, and Economics. As for me, I was undeclared, having enrolled in classes that were basically a continuation of my senior year in high school: Calculus, American history, Spanish, and for fun, Introduction to Television.
I was e-mailing and calling my high school friends daily, including Matt, who was at NYU. I told them I wasn’t impressed, that I was looking into transferring. And if it weren’t for meeting a fellow freshman named Mary Anne during orientation, I just might have. Mary Anne and I hit it off immediately. We had so much in common. From our broken-up families to our stepsiblings to our Christian backgrounds to our loves of gymnastics. We even looked a bit alike.
By the end of September, according to our other new friends, we were “attached at the hip.” And what we didn’t already have in common, we quickly picked up from each other. Unfortunately for me, this meant speaking with a Midwestern accent, and more unfortunately for Mary Anne, this meant dieting.
By this point in my life, my focus on eating healthily had blossomed into a full-blown obsession; I had a food journal in which I would write down every item I ate along with its calorie count. And one day, while hanging out in Mary Anne’s dorm room, I noticed that she had started to do the same. I laughed out loud at her list of foods and their corresponding calories:
banana, 7
licorice, 20
cheese and bean burrito, 150
“Seven calories in a banana?” I laughed. She clearly wasn’t as well versed in this as I was. “I wish! Try a hundred!”
Later that year, she and I decided to do a three-day liquid diet together. (We were each five feet six and 125 pounds, which is technically underweight, but it’s always nice to be thinner, right?) When our friend Liz heard of our plan, she looked directly at me and said, “Wait a second. Aren’t you already on a diet?”
Mary Anne was majoring in Political Science and minoring in something called Writing Seminars, which through her, I discovered was basically JHU’s liberal-arts term for creative writing. The following semester, I took one of the classes Mary Anne had taken: Introduction to Fiction and Poetry. The entire semester, all we did was read various pieces of fiction and poetry and then write our own. It was borderline shocking to me that you could receive a grade for something that didn’t feel like schoolwork. And even more surprising that this could be my major. By the end of the year, it was decided. I was Writing Sems.
The one thing I could not emulate, as hard as I tried, was Mary Anne’s relaxed approach to the other major part of college: partying. In high school, I’d gotten drunk just once, off of a few Zimas (remember Zimas?) just to see what it was like. And I did so at the end of senior year, in the controlled environment of the basement of my friend’s house with her and her fraternal twin so that I could be sure to neither get date-raped nor make an ass of myself in front of a bunch of people.
So, it may go without saying that I was a bit of an outlier freshman year. While my classmates reveled in their newfound freedom, getting drunk, hooking up, and steadily gaining their freshman fifteen, I cautiously sipped on diluted drinks, dated a couple of guys, studied, made sure to get in a four-mile run five times a week, and went to church on Sunday mornings, with Mary Anne of course.
But at the beginning of sophomore year, Mary Anne met a senior named Cliff, who quickly became a serious boyfriend, and all of a sudden, I had all this time to myself. I remember deciding: I need a boyfriend too.
As goal-oriented as always
, I was dating one of Cliff’s fraternity brothers, David, within a few weeks. David was a junior with brown, curly, skateboarder-like hair. He was not your classic fraternity bro. He was quiet, soft-spoken, the kind of guy who, at a party filled with dudes calling “Next!” at the beer pong table, would be content leaning against a wall sipping on a beer all by himself.
Before he even tried to kiss me, he took me on a date to the Baltimore Museum of Art and then cooked me dinner back at the row house he shared with three other guys. Was the house rodent-infested, the chicken overcooked, and the accompanying rice sourced from a Rice-A-Roni box? Yes. But it was college. Guys didn’t cook girls dinner, at least not before they’d even made out with them. David was one of the good guys. And it didn’t take long before he and I were the ones spending every minute together.
Junior year, I studied abroad in Madrid for the fall semester, and though Mary Anne was still my best friend and David still my boyfriend, without either of them by my side, I had to rely on myself. I handled this mainly by obsessively writing in my journal, my main topics being my need to be a better Christian, my increasingly conflicted feelings over my relationship with David, and of course, my diet, which at this point was strictly vegetarian (a choice not inspired by a particular love for animals but rather because it seemed easier to eat healthily by cutting out a major food group). It was also not supposed to go over 1,400 calories per day.
Ironically, the farther away I got from Mom and Bruce geographically, the more into Christianity I became. The year before, Mary Anne and I had even joined JHU’s Christian Youth Group, occasioning their weekly Bible studies. But while Mare’s relationship with God seemed easy and stress-free, to read my journal, which interspersed Ani DiFranco lyrics with passages from the Bible, is to encounter the thoughts of one very confused twenty-year-old.
My casual, hesitant drinking freshman year had blossomed into a handful of very drunken nights sophomore year, which I’d found to be both extremely fun and a major source of stress for me. My body was a temple, right? And downing shots and smoking cigarettes was no way to treat such an edifice. Plus, as an underage sophomore, it had been illegal (a fact that didn’t seem to bother anyone else on campus). But now I was in Spain where it wasn’t. And yet still, I gave myself a hard time. Or, to quote my journal: “I’m an idiot. Drunk again.”
Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) Page 4
