Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!)

by Morris, Amelia

  Speaking of the pasta, dump it into the boiling water while the broccolini is steaming.

  Chop the Brie, rind and all, into 1-or 2-inch pieces.

  Once the broccolini is al dente, drain excess water from the pan and set aside.

  Once the pasta is al dente, drain and then return it to the hot pot. Add your chopped Brie and then your steamed broccolini. Give it 2 or 3 big pinches of salt and a few turns of the pepper grinder. Mix everything together until the Brie is completely melted and evenly distributed. Taste for salt (it usually needs a bit more).

  Chapter 19

  Great Expectations

  It’s a Saturday afternoon in Wilmington, and I’ve written and read as much as I’m going to for the day. My roommates both seem to be out and about, leaving me the house to myself, and as I haven’t made any friends yet—at least none that I feel comfortable enough calling up—I don’t have plans.

  I want to cook something again; it’s the end of October and the air is just cool enough for a hot meal. But I don’t own a single cookbook, nor do I subscribe to a single food magazine. So, I drive to the grocery store and head directly to the checkout, where I settle on a recipe for acorn squash soup from Everyday Food, that booklet-size Martha Stewart publication. With the recipe in hand, I gather the necessary ingredients. (This is, by the way, how I will grocery shop for at least the next three years—not on whims or driven by what produce looks good at the moment, but with a specific recipe in mind and, usually, in hand.) The grocery store also sells and rents DVDs. For $2.99, I go out on a limb and buy a copy of The Baxter based solely on the cover image of Michael Showalter and Michelle Williams.

  Though my house lacks charm, the kitchen is bright, big, and open to the living room. I crack a window to let in some of the autumn air, turn on some music, and get to work.

  Apart from struggling to halve the squashes with a small steak knife, I find myself working through the rest of the recipe with relative ease, albeit a slow ease. I roast the squash halves in the oven until they’re tender. For the first time in my life, I chop an onion and discover that they really do make you tear up. I find the biggest sauté pan we have and sauté the onion in butter. I add the squash, which I’ve released from its skin, some chicken broth, thyme, and half-and-half. I borrow my roommate’s blender and ladle the mixture into it in small batches, cautiously aware of the rookie mistake of overloading it. And by the time the sun has set, I’ve made acorn squash soup.

  I put The Baxter in the DVD player, serve myself a bowl, bring it to the couch, and press PLAY. To be honest, the soup pales in comparison to my three-dollar movie (which is still a favorite). I don’t yet know to salt as I go, that undersalted soup is one of life’s most avoidable travesties. I also don’t know that a soup like this could really use some homemade croutons as well as a dollop of crème fraîche on top. I don’t even pair it with a large citrusy salad. But it’s my second completed recipe and my first completed homemade soup. I’m simply happy that it’s edible, that it exists, that I made it through.

  If only I could approach other firsts in my life as openly and forgivingly.

  Bruce isn’t a very chatty person. On the rare occasion when he picks up the phone, we hardly make it through routine pleasantries before he says, “Well, dear, let me grab your mother.”

  But a few days after the acorn squash soup, I’m talking to my mom when she abruptly says, “Wait a second. Here’s Bruce.”

  And then, in the same tone he used to give the lecture on how to effectively ask for a raise, I’m told how he and my mother are going to send me a check for my entire wedding budget. This way, I can decide exactly how to spend it; I won’t need to run each individual thing by them. And if I don’t spend it all, the leftover money is Matt’s and mine to keep. Of course, if I go over budget, that’s my responsibility as well.

  “Wow,” I say, “thank you! That’s very, very generous.”

  He puts Mom back on the phone, and I thank her too. Then, before we are about to hang up, she whispers to me, “Don’t worry. I’ll pay for your dress separately.”

  In chess, taking this money would be equivalent to taking the poison pawn, the pawn your opponent wants you to take—he or she is choosing to sacrifice material for better position. Because by taking this money, not only do I consciously and/or subconsciously feel indebted to them, but I also mistakenly see it as a form of capitulation, that they had come to accept that it was my life and that I should do with it what I please.

  One of the reasons I’d chosen not to get married in Pittsburgh was to keep the inevitable head-butting with my mom to a bare minimum. And yet, with this gracious offer of theirs to not only foot the bill, but to do so in bulk and with seemingly no questions asked, I suddenly find myself talking to my mom about my various plans and ideas for the celebration. I tell her about Bald Head Island, how there’s this grassy area right next to the harbor with the lighthouse in the background. And then without even thinking, I mention how I feel bad that Bruce can’t walk me down the aisle.

  “What do you mean? Why can’t he?”

  “Because of, well, Dad.” It feels like such a strange thing to explain to her—had she forgotten about Dad’s existence, which as she very well knew was currently a bit tenuous since he’d just undergone heart-valve replacement surgery? I’d spoken to him a few times since, and though he sounded like himself, it was a dialed-back, much weaker and sweeter version.

  And then, in a move I thought I’d invented, Mom becomes so angry with me that she hangs up.

  When I call back the next day, Bruce tells me that she still isn’t ready to talk to me about it, which unfortunately leaves him to act as the mediator between us, which means that I must now explain to Bruce, my stepdad, who has been nothing but good to me my whole life, who has been nothing but good to my mom my whole life, and who of course is paying for the wedding, a fact which also stands as a tacit reminder that my own father is not paying for the wedding, that given all this and despite my dad’s lousy track record as a parent, I would still like that he be the one to walk me down the aisle.

  The beauty of my relationship with my dad is that at some point, I learned to accept him for who he is. Put another way, I learned to keep my expectations low. Very low. If he calls me on my birthday, he’s good to go for the rest of the year. If he sends me an e-mail that’s mostly about Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, but that includes one question about my life, I reread the question aloud to Matt, followed by a “Isn’t that sweet?”

  And the lack of expectations works both ways, which is nice. Or at least that’s what I’d thought.

  A month later, when I call to let him know we’ve confirmed the venue and date of the wedding, and he mentions that he would like my half sister Margaret to be a bridesmaid, I assume he’s joking.

  “Ha! Yeah, that’d be funny. And maybe Dolly can do a reading?”

  “I’m serious, Amy,” he says. “It would mean a lot to her.”

  Though I can hardly believe what I’m hearing, my response comes quickly, almost as if I’ve been practicing it for years. “If you had wanted Margaret to be a bridesmaid in my wedding, then you shouldn’t have let Dolly actively keep her away from me and Billy when we were living together in the same house. I mean, I have no relationship with her. I don’t even have her phone number. How would I even ask her?”

  “You need her phone number? I can give you her phone number.”

  But my mom and dad aren’t the only ones who would like to rewrite history, or at least, to have my wedding represent a different history. Remember Grandma Morris? The one who took me to Burger King with the hopes of convincing me to move back to Saegertown over a chicken Parmesan sandwich?

  Of her three sons, my dad is both the oldest and the one she seems to favor, and by favor, I’m referring to the fact that he is the one she is most consistently on speaking terms with. After my parents’ divorce, she was quite vocal in blaming my mother (to her face) despite the evidence to the opposite (r
emember newborn baby Margaret?). In short, to say she’s divisive is probably the kindest way to put it. My own brother Bill hasn’t spoken to her since the early aughts. (And how I envy him.)

  The previous year when I was still living in Los Angeles, she FedExed me what she referred to as her memoir, which she told me was an amazing story, a story I wouldn’t believe and that we could “make millions” from if I sold it to Hollywood. Though, to be clear, she hadn’t yet written the screenplay. What she’d sent me was thirty-five Xeroxed pages from her journal, which I did read. And though I had to admit that yes, Grandma has a flair for the dramatic—she and my grandpa were one of those couples that twice married and twice divorced each other—and sure, there was a reoccurring on-again, off-again lover named Jim, who took her to Mexico against her will (though it’s not clear exactly how he did this and it could be interpreted as a vacation gone wrong kind of scenario), in the end, I did not turn the story into a screenplay, shop it around town, and sell it for millions. And when I broke this news to Grandma, she was miffed.

  “Whatever. I think it’s a big mistake, but… whatever.”

  And when I don’t include Dad’s name on the wedding invitations (opting for Mom and Bruce’s along with those of Matt’s parents, who are paying for the rehearsal dinner) since it was politically easier not to, she is really upset.

  A couple of days after the invitations go out, Grandma calls me on the hour, every hour from ten in the morning until eight at night for two days straight. It’s so precise it’s as if she’s set an alarm clock. She leaves messages that vary in content and level of melodrama. One lists all of the people whose hearts I’ve broken, including those of her neighbors, whom I’ve never met and who seem to be in the room with her as she leaves the message, “Stan and Pat are sitting here shocked. He is your father.” One message is just to remind me that she’s been crying all day. Another informs me that my dad will never see the invitation since she’s called Dolly and had her intercept it.

  By the end of the second day, she’s changed her tune a little bit, since she’s come up with a solution: “You need to go to Kinko’s and ask them to add his name. I know they can do this at Kinko’s and I can see where there is space and where Dr. William Morris would fit.”

  I don’t call her back.

  But Matt does.

  Matt, known for his levelheaded rationality, tells me he can handle this. He tells me how he’ll lovingly explain the situation to Grandma, how my dad himself doesn’t care about being left off the invitation, how it’s just a formality anyway, but most important, how he’s looking forward to seeing her at the wedding!

  But Matt underestimates Grandma Morris.

  He calls me as soon as he gets off the phone with her. “OK,” he says, after taking a deep breath. “She’s extremely serious about this Kinko’s thing.”

  At this point, my brother and Jenny have been together for five years, and in that time, I’ve gotten to know her and her family quite well. Her dad, Wyatt, happens to be an incredibly warmhearted Episcopal priest, and so, in the hopes of satisfying Mom and Bruce, Matt and I ask if he would marry us in a mostly Christian ceremony with just a few Jewish elements. Specifically, we’re planning on standing underneath a chuppah, on Matt wearing a kippah, and on breaking the glass at the end of the ceremony. Wyatt agrees.

  Everyone seems happy with this arrangement until for some reason, a mere week before the wedding, my brother tells my mom that we’ve asked Jenny’s dad not to use the name Jesus in the ceremony. Though this is something we had discussed with Wyatt months ago and something that Wyatt had agreed upon months ago, since my mom is just now finding out about it, she is newly appalled.

  When I call my brother and ask him why he would tell Mom this, especially a week before the wedding, an epic fight ensues between us, one of the results of which is that he and Jenny will no longer be doing us the favor of picking up our guests at the Wilmington airport and bringing them to the ferry terminal, a forty-five-minute drive that I didn’t want my friends to have to make via taxi. (Full disclosure: We were paying Jenny $500 to act as our wedding coordinator, which is part of the reason why I thought tasking them with airport pickups would be OK, the other part of the reason being that he’s my brother and she’s my good friend.)

  Matt and I are obviously the next choices to fill in. So, we spend the day in two different cars, taxiing groups of people—many of whom are my parents’ friends—from the airport to the ferry. (Double full disclosure: The day of, my brother offers to help make the airport runs after all, but in my typical cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face fashion, I won’t let him. Don’t do me any favors, Bill!)

  Everyone’s flights are on time. The only problem is that two of my friends, Liz and Ryan, who have come in all the way from London, have lost their luggage along the journey. The good news is that the airline locates the missing bags and we’re told that they should arrive at the Wilmington airport by eight that evening.

  And since I’m driving back and forth between the airport and the ferry terminal for the next five hours and I haven’t seen Liz and Ryan in almost two years, they decide to hang out with me in the car as I chauffeur. And as I’m driving a borrowed SUV that seats seven, not only is there room for them to hang out, I’m happy to have the company.

  By my last pickup at six-thirty, the car has become a mini-reunion of my college friends and their husbands. Everyone is so happy to see each other that no one wants to go to the ferry. They all want to wait with me, Liz, and Ryan in the short-term parking until eight when their bags hopefully arrive.

  Meanwhile, my mom has spent the day cooking dinner to feed my nearest and dearest. I’d originally told her we could eat at sevenish, and when I call to tell her that the best-case scenario is that we’ll catch the eight forty-five ferry, she doesn’t sound too happy.

  When the luggage does arrive and we do catch the eight forty-five ferry, everyone, particularly my London friends who have been traveling for more than thirty-six hours, is exhausted. They just want to shower and go to bed. I understand. I want to do the same. I tell them I’ll send my mom their regrets.

  I arrive at my mom’s beach rental to deliver the news and find a somber scene awaiting me. The lights are dim. Bowls of dinner-party-ready food are covered in foil. I know she’s going to be upset, but it’s now after nine o’clock. We’ve all had long days. I hope she can understand.

  She can’t. She starts crying. “I made all this food.”

  But I’m not in the mood to console her. I want to be consoled. For lunch I had a packet of peanut-butter crackers while driving. I want to cry, to be taken care of, to be the kid in this scenario. I want her to offer to fix me a plate of food, to thank me for picking everyone up, to apologize for originally rejecting Matt because of his Jewishness, to apologize for telling me my own dad couldn’t walk me down the aisle, to sympathize with me that Dad is who he is and that his mother is who she is; I want her to recognize the irony in the way she’s been calling for all of these Christian elements in the ceremony when she herself seemed to refuse the one Christian dictum I liked best: to love all. And maybe, just maybe—and I know this is pushing it—she could momentarily side with me and tell me how lame it was for Jenny to bail on me after we paid her $500.

  But instead of crying, I opt for yelling. “What do you want me to do? They all needed to shower. They’re tired. This isn’t about you!”

  To which, she turns around, cries more audibly, and runs off to her bedroom.

  But I’m not done with this conversation. I follow her, determined, passing through the living room where my aunt and uncle are working on a jigsaw puzzle.

  Inside her bedroom, she’s crying even harder. “We made all this food and now no one is going to eat it!”

  “I’m here. I’ll eat it! I’ve hardly eaten anything all day!”

  She retreats to the bathroom. But she can’t shake me that easily. I follow her again and watch as she slides down the bathroom wall and curls in
to a ball. “I can’t do anything right,” she says through her tears. “I can never do anything right.”

  She looks so sad and pathetic on the floor, head in her hands. And this is when I finally remember that my mom’s not like me.

  She can’t go on and on, round after round of intense confrontation. I’m like the Russell Crowe character in Gladiator—thrown into the middle of the Colosseum taking on bad guy after bad guy until I’ve become a well-honed killing machine. First opponent was my mom; next was Grandma; then my mom again; then my dad; then my other grandma; then my brother and his girlfriend; and at this point, my fists seem to be permanently up, ready to fight. Who else has something to say about this wedding? Huh? Do you? [Swings around quickly in a boxer’s stance and with chin jutted.] What about you?

  But seeing my mom curled into a ball on the bathroom floor of this rented beach house is enough for me to call a truce already. “C’mon, Mom,” I say softly, kneeling down. “I’ll call them and see if I can round them up, OK?” She doesn’t say anything. “I’ll get them to come over, OK?”

  She nods.

  And soon, Mom’s back in the kitchen. She tosses her Caesar salad with dressing and takes the foil off the large bowl of Ina Garten’s roasted shrimp and orzo. A fruit salad with brown banana slices—clearly made by Grandma—also emerges. And soon enough, my friends and their husbands start to trickle in. Soon enough, it almost feels like a party.

  Two days later, Matt and I are married.

  If you look through our wedding pictures, it looks like we pulled it off after all, that everyone came together in the end; that we managed to merge our two families’ faiths into one beautiful, harborside, dare-I-say Martha-Stewart-esque celebration.