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

by Morris, Amelia

  “So, you’re here? In Pittsburgh?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK, I’m coming,” she said. “See you soon.”

  Epic failure that it was, the trip was still my graduation gift from my mom and Bruce. And now that it was over, it was time to properly introduce me to the real world. The day after I arrived back home, Bruce knocked on my bedroom door. In his hands were my car insurance and cell phone bills. Two things that were now mine.

  By midsummer, I’d gotten a job waiting tables at Aladdin’s Eatery, a casual Middle Eastern restaurant located in what is referred to as downtown (suburban) Mt. Lebanon. Not only did I get a cursory education in Middle Eastern cuisine (kofta is like a meatball, whereas shawarma is shaved meat) from Jessica, the twentysomething restaurant manager, I also quickly learned about the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from having a job where you’re on your feet for eight hours a day.

  It was a family-operated restaurant with two other better-established locations. The patriarch of the family oversaw all three, leaving his son, Fady, an ex–football player and a giant of a man, in charge of this one. Most nights, I closed with one other server and Jessica, whose idea of supervision was to smoke a cigarette with you before locking up. But some nights, Fady closed the restaurant, and you had to do everything on the closing checklist, e.g., vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms, restocking the takeout containers. If he found something you’d missed—usually a few grains of rice on the carpet—he’d point it out, reciting something his football coach used to tell him, “You do it right. You do it light. You do it wrong. You do it long.”

  More often than not, I had done it wrong and, consequently, long.

  In between lunch and dinner shifts, while eating my daily dose of employee-discounted hummus, pita, and Lebanese salata—a salad consisting of chopped red onion, tomatoes, cucumber, and parsley tossed in a dressing of lemon juice and olive oil—my idea of what it was to be a writer changed. Writers write, I still believed, but they probably wrote a lot more if they didn’t feel like total losers because they were waiting tables in the town they grew up in and living at home with their parents.

  Suddenly, being a student, an idea I’d snubbed my nose at just a year earlier, no longer seemed like a bad idea. I decided to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. Applications were due in December and January, but school wouldn’t start until the following August or September. I knew I couldn’t spend an entire year living with Mom and Bruce, sneaking glasses of red wine up to my room each night and then having to walk down the street to smoke one measly cigarette only to return and hear my mom shout, from two rooms away, “You smell like smoke!”

  Expensive lesson that it was, Costa Rica did teach me one thing: that I was a person who, if going to travel by herself, needed some type of structure—a group or a job or even a family.

  So, I applied to an English teaching program at a university in Argentina, which paid a small living stipend and offered free housing with local host families. When I was accepted at a school in Rafaela, Argentina, a medium-size town about a five-hour drive northwest of Buenos Aires, I formulated a plan to go there for the spring semester; while there, I would find out which MFA programs I got into, then, come July, after some traveling through South America, I would return home, pack up my things, and start graduate school in August. I’d applied to schools in New York, California, and England, so I also decided to sell my car, since I wouldn’t need it in any of those places. At last, I had a plan and, bonus, a sizable savings account.

  Before I left, my coworkers at Aladdin’s wanted to buy me a few drinks at the bar just one door down from the restaurant. Matt, who happened to be in town from New York, where he’d been crashing with friends and looking for a job ever since graduation, came as well. We all got along great, though Jessica didn’t seem to understand my relationship with Matt.

  “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you dating him?” she asked me while he was in the bathroom.

  It was a question I had fielded so many times over the years I could respond without thinking. “We’re just better as friends.”

  I arrived in Argentina in the spring of 2004. And as I would soon discover, the country was very much still in recovery from a major economic crisis. I had known nothing about this beforehand but almost every Argentine I spoke to, beginning with the gentleman I sat next to on my flight from Buenos Aires to Rafaela, would bring it up to me in some way.

  “Ah, you’re a Yankee,” he said to me after hearing me speak Spanish with my American accent, before launching into an explanation of how their peso used to be equal with the dollar.

  “We used to be one to one,” he told me with pride, holding up his two pointer fingers, clearly unhappy with the current exchange rate, which at the time was closer to one to three, as in one dollar equaled three pesos, as in a cup of delicious espresso at the airport cost me just thirty cents.

  My host family consisted of the matriarch, Silvia, and her three sons, Adrian, Fabian, and Hernán, who ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-three. And when I arrived at their humble two-bedroom, two-bathroom house, accompanied by the program director, who had picked me up at the airport, they were in the middle of throwing a big dinner party in my honor. As part of the celebration, they’d invited at least ten of their close friends, so that, after my twenty hours of travel, I got an introduction to the way Argentines greet one another, with a heartfelt hug and cheekbone-crushing kiss, about twelve times in a row.

  Any of my friends will tell you that I’m a bad hugger. According to them, I tense up as they approach with arms outstretched, don’t hug back properly, and pull away too soon. So I can only imagine what my Argentine host family thought during this extended meet and greet. But it was a perfect precursor to what was to follow. Because as much as I would try to be my regular, non-hugging, fairly isolated, non-meat-eating self, for the next five months, it was hardly an option.

  After meeting everyone, Silvia showed me to my room, which was also her room. They had set up a twin bed for me in the corner. So there went any opportunity to hole myself up and write in my journal for hours on end.

  Because of a questionnaire I had filled out as part of the application process, Silvia knew that I was a vegetarian whose favorite breakfast was cereal and milk. At dinner that first night, she kept pointing to dishes, nodding as she said, “sólo vegetales.” And in the morning, she told me that she’d bought me some cereal. She opened a cupboard and retrieved a plastic produce bag filled with about a cup’s-worth of what looked like puffed rice. I thanked her, eating it with a bit of milk poured on top, but as soon as I saw what my Argentine brothers were eating—thick slices of toast with dulce de leche spread on top—I told her that I liked toast too. And after a few days of salad and vegetables for dinner as the rest of the family ate ham and cheese empanadas and steaks off the grill, I wasn’t just hungry, I also felt rude.

  And so, at the end of the week, I told Silvia that I wanted to experience Argentina properly, and if that meant eating meat, I was up for it. Her face lit up immediately, and I braced myself for one of the top-ten strongest hugs of my life.

  Silently, though, I reassured myself that this was all just temporary. And as soon as I got back to the States, I could resume my vegetarian diet. Because, just like with Madrid and Costa Rica, I hadn’t necessarily signed up for an adventure. I had signed up for the opportunity to better my Spanish, to be able to put something on my résumé, and mostly, to have a place to lay my head that wasn’t the suburbs of Pittsburgh until graduate school started.

  But then, just a few weeks later, I got the news that I hadn’t been accepted into a single MFA program I had applied to. The decision letters arrived at Mom and Bruce’s, but I’d asked specifically that my brother be the one to relay the news to me. And he did so gently over e-mail. Are you sure? I wrote back, as if he might’ve read the letters incorrectly.

  Yeah, he wrote. I’m sorry.

  Once again, I needed a new plan.


  My host mom, Silvia, was the opposite of both my parents in so many ways.

  My dad started smoking in his late thirties, I assume around the time he started seeing Dolly, since he was not a smoker while with my mom.

  When I still lived in Saegertown, if I needed to talk to him, I would knock on the always-closed door to his study and call his name.

  “One minute!” he would say before opening the door, coming out, and shutting it behind him. “Yes, Honey Bun?”

  Of course, I could smell the smoke. I could always smell it, but it wasn’t until I’d found a pack of Marlboros in his leather coat pocket during the last year I lived there that I knew for sure Dolly wasn’t solely to blame for the pervasive stench. And though I was confused and upset, I never approached him about it. Not once.

  Silvia, on the other hand, had smoked since she was a teenager, and though her sons didn’t like the habit, she did so openly and unapologetically throughout the house.

  On the days my mom worked, she would come home deflated and exhausted, annoyed that Bruce hadn’t done anything for dinner, not even called for pizza to be delivered, whereas Silvia came home from work almost joyfully with an armful of groceries, which she would set down before pouring herself un Gancia—her favorite brand of vermouth—turning on some music, and dancing around the kitchen as she began to cook. Inevitably, as she danced, she would raise her arms above her head, revealing her tanned fifty-year-old belly, a small act but one that always surprised me sheerly because of its lack of self-consciousness. (As far as I knew, my own mother had no midriff.)

  While my dad was an outspoken atheist and Mom and Bruce were outspoken Christians, Silvia was neither. She didn’t go to church; she didn’t talk about God, yet every night, she slept beneath a giant crucifix, which hung on the wall above her bed. (This bed, by the way, was located a mere four feet to the left of my own—a proximity I got used to only because of how comfortable Silvia was with it: she undressed each night right in front of me and climbed under the covers with a sleepy “Buenas noches, hija.”)

  And while communicating was not a high priority in my family, Silvia was a sharer. She told me about her divorce, her current boyfriend, about her sons and their girlfriends. And when I became interested in the recent economic crisis everyone seemed to make a point of telling me about, she told me story after story; how she would be shopping at the grocery store and the price for milk would be changing as she shopped, how despite having a good job as a professor of engineering at a nearby college, she couldn’t plan for the future, how the government had frozen everyone’s bank account so that she couldn’t withdraw more than $200 dollars a week, and how she had no choice but to start living day by day—día por día.

  The longer I lived there, the more this kind of approach to life rubbed off. Because without making a conscious effort, I began to relax about my future, about the fact that my plans began and ended in Argentina, that I had nothing lined up and no school to enroll in once I got back to the States.

  And what do you know? Relaxing suited me. Because unlike my tense time in Madrid, during which I hardly added one new word to my Spanish vocabulary, a few months into my stay in Rafaela, I was speaking Spanish with ease—sometimes even writing in it in my journal. And unlike how I was in college, seemingly unable to date someone without thinking about our potential as a long-term couple who shared the same religious beliefs, I casually dated a few Argentine guys, one of whom drove me around town on the back of his motorcycle.

  Most shockingly, also without making a conscious effort, I finally stopped counting the calories I consumed each day. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t begin to fathom how many were in Silvia’s milanesa or her vanilla cake with dulce de leche, or the tiny buttery biscuits my youngest host brother, Adrian, and I snacked on together around four o’clock each day. Or perhaps it was because I was enjoying myself too much to ruin it with round-the-clock tabulating.

  But whatever the reason, the result remained the same: I left Argentina much less confused, with a stronger sense of self, and, ironically, with looser-fitting clothes.

  In fact, I had assimilated so well that at the end of the semester, when the program director asked me to stay on for the summer, I came very close to saying yes. But in the end, I had to admit that I missed my life in the States. Or, rather, I missed the life I could potentially have in the States. Matt was back in Pittsburgh. He and I had been writing letters to each other for the past few months, so I knew that he’d given up on finding a job in New York, but that as a young up-and-coming director “to watch,” Esquire magazine had chosen him to shoot a short film based on a story they owned the rights to, that he was being featured in the magazine, and was planning on moving to Los Angeles in the fall.

  Most of all, I knew I wanted to see him before he left.

  I may have come home with an Argentine frame of mind, but logistically, I was in the same place I’d started over a year earlier: the guest room of my mom and Bruce’s townhouse, and yes, waiting tables at Aladdin’s.

  No, that’s not entirely accurate. Things were worse.

  Having sold my car before I’d left, now I rode my orange mountain bike through the August humidity and the notoriously hilly streets of Pittsburgh to the restaurant and back, dressed in my polyester black work pants.

  In fact, things were much worse. While I was away, as it turned out, Matt had begun seeing Jessica, the manager at Aladdin’s Eatery—my manager. And while Matt’s and my bizarre seven-year courtship had occasionally included a third wheel, never before had the third wheel been me.

  Down and Out, Period. That was the current title of my Orwellian memoir.

  But there is a clarity that comes in hitting rock bottom—perhaps a very desperate kind of clarity, but a clarity nonetheless.

  I set three goals for myself.

  1. Make active steps toward becoming a paid writer.

  2. Get Matt back.

  3. Move out of my parents’ house once and for all.

  While in Argentina, I had devoured Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of Rilke’s letters giving advice to an aspiring young writer and fan of his who had contacted him seeking just that. Very much inspired by this idea and in the service of goal number one, I decided I would send postcards, thirty of them in thirty days, to be exact, with thirty different comedy sketch ideas to Saturday Night Live’s head writer, Paula Pell. Who knew? By the end, maybe she would offer me an internship or something.

  The whole thing makes me cringe now: the fact that at least some part of me thought this stunt was clever enough and that I was funny enough to bypass all of the hard work that comes along with becoming a comedy writer; my strategic choice to send the postcards to Paula Pell rather than Tina Fey (as I reasoned that Paula would have less fan mail and thus might be more affected by an aspiring writer looking to her for guidance); and, not least of all, the individual postcards themselves, some of which weren’t even sketch ideas but rather made-up, absurd accounts of what I’d done that day.

  After the very last one, I sent her a cover letter and my résumé inside a standard business envelope.

  Matt was having a better go of it: Esquire had chosen his film as one of their three finalists and would be throwing a party in New York, where they would screen all three and announce a winner. And as the date of this party fell on the weekend of my twenty-third birthday, I convinced Matt to take me as his date instead of Jessica. And though Matt didn’t win the contest, the trip was a success for me, standing forever as the marker of the beginning of our relationship as adults.

  And as for getting out of Dodge?

  Well, the good people at Esquire had found it in their hearts to have a West Coast celebration as well. And since a few agents in Los Angeles had expressed interest in representing Matt, he planned to drive out there in time for the party, and then to stay in Los Angeles and see if he could find work as a writer/director.

  I didn’t love the idea of following m
y brand-new boyfriend to Hollywood, but I also knew I wasn’t going to become a comedy writer living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, even if Paula did get back to me (a scenario I’d yet to rule out). So, I made the not-so-tough decision to hang up my hummus-stained apron (once again), hop into Matt’s Hyundai hatchback, and hit the road.

  Down and Out in Hollywood? No way.

  Silvia would make this cake for no reason other than because she wanted cake. She always made it in a sheet pan, spreading store-bought dulce de leche on top. But since dulce de leche is hard to find here, I make my own by simmering a can of unopened sweetened condensed milk in water for two hours. It’s strange, but it works, and it’s highly satisfying. I’ve also changed the form from a sheet cake to a layer cake. But I still think you should make it “just because,” in the middle of the week, in honor of Silvia, my Argentine mom, who unwittingly taught me to chill out.

  SIMPLE VANILLA CAKE WITH DULCE DE LECHE

  Makes one 9-inch layer cake

  For the dulce de leche:

  1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk

  For the cake:

  ¾ cup (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, softened, plus more for buttering the cake pans

  2½ cups all-purpose flour

  1 tablespoon baking powder

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1½ cups sugar

  4 large eggs

  1 cup whole milk

  1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

  Remove the paper label from the can of sweetened condensed milk and submerge the unopened can in a large, deep pot of water. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 2 hours, adding water as needed to keep the can completely underwater.

  While the can is simmering, make the cake.

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter two 9-inch cake pans, line the bottom of each with parchment paper, and then butter the paper as well.