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

by Morris, Amelia

  “Yeah, sure,” he says.

  “OK.” I try not to sound panicked, but at the same time, I can’t imagine what that would even look like. Would he come clean with his smoking or would he continue to sneak cigarettes behind my back multiple times a day? Speaking of which, what would he do all day? Does he have a laptop? Or would he take over one of our computers in order to keep up with all of his online chess games? What would he even eat?

  “You’d have to come after Mom leaves is all. I think she’s planning on staying a couple of weeks.”

  “Oh, Becky gets first rights?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Those who have shared a kitchen with me are well aware that I like everything done in a certain way. Before beginning any recipe, the sink must be free and clear of dirty dishes; I wash up in between steps, never touch a cabinet knob with buttery fingers or, worse, raw-chicken fingers—something my mom did on a recent visit and got scolded for. Ideally, I clean as I go so that when whatever I am making is ready to eat, so too is the kitchen (for another round of spotless cooking with your host, Amelia!).

  Similarly, though this book isn’t due until December 1st, with the baby due January 7th, I set a deadline to turn it in a month early, at the beginning of November. That way, perhaps (just perhaps!), I can fit in the edits before the baby comes.

  This means that when my ninety-four-year-old grandma (my mom’s mom) comes to visit for a few days at the end of October, I’m not only seven months pregnant, but I’m in the home stretch of writing my first draft.

  In the past year, Grandma has slowed down a lot. She now needs a cane to walk and supplemental oxygen to breathe. She’s also recently moved to Taos, New Mexico, to live with my aunt and uncle, which is the reason she’s able to visit me now. Aunt Martha and Uncle Bob have a conference in San Diego to attend, and they decide to drive her to LA and drop her off with Matt and me while they continue on.

  And though I’m initially concerned about taking care of the trifecta that will be Grandma, the baby, and myself, I realize it’s a rare opportunity and must take it. What I forget is that my aunt and uncle play things a bit faster and looser than my immediate family does. They’re supposed to arrive on a Wednesday around dinnertime, but at seven p.m., I get a message that they’re running late. When they finally arrive, it’s almost midnight. After everyone hugs everyone and we get Grandma inside, Uncle Bob explains they can’t chat long. They need to make it to Venice, where they’re staying the night with Martha’s sister so they can get an early start tomorrow; but first we need to “quickly go over Grandma’s equipment.”

  For the next ten minutes, Matt and I receive a crash course on how to operate and troubleshoot oxygen machines, both Grandma’s portable and stationary ones, the latter of which is the size of an oven, though it’s thankfully on wheels. Once Uncle Bob has explained everything to us, he says, “OK, great. We’ll see you all next week!”

  “Sunday night?” I say. Their original e-mail inquiring about the visit had simply specified a few days, and I assumed the conference would end on a Sunday.

  “No, not until Wednesday,” he says.

  “Oh.”

  Ultimately, however, everything works out just fine. Grandma is surprisingly self-sufficient. She knows how to hook herself up to the stationary oxygen machine, which she uses to sleep at night, and she basically ignores the portable one during the day. In the morning, I make her toast with butter and jam. Matt goes to work. And I write for a few hours while Grandma reads and rereads the past six issues of Martha Stewart Living. Thanksgiving is just four weeks away, and she takes a particular interest in planning her side dishes for the upcoming holiday.

  In the afternoon, she comes to the park and sits on the bench while Mavis and I walk. When I have to run to the grocery store, she’s happy to push the cart. And when I need to recipe test a batch of lemon and fennel shortbread cookies, she’s the one grinding the fennel seeds with a mortar and pestle. One afternoon, I take her to the Griffith Park Observatory, where she poses (with Mavis) for a few photos with the Hollywood sign in the background.

  Bob and Martha have cut sugar and carbs out of their diets, and much to Grandma’s chagrin, they’ve tried to do the same with her. But enacting the age-old “our house, our rules” clause, we indulge her (and ourselves). We make pizzas and pastas all week long and finish each meal with scoops of ice cream for everyone. On her last night with us, Matt makes her a full-blown sundae with chocolate sauce and a cherry on top. I have a photo of her with it; she’s smiling so wide you can tell she’s laughing.

  Bob and Martha pick her up a day early, on Tuesday.

  I turn in my book six days later, the following Monday. That same day, my mom arrives in Taos on a visit she’s planned for months.

  On Thursday, Mom calls to tell me that she’s a little worried. Grandma took a fall, and though she didn’t break anything, she doesn’t even want to get out of bed today.

  On Friday, when I check in, Mom tells me how she keeps clutching at her heart and saying her chest hurts. But still, she doesn’t want to go to the hospital.

  On Saturday, Mom calls to tell me that they’ve set up hospice care for her and that the nurse doesn’t think she’ll last the week. Mom puts the phone up to Grandma’s ear and lets me talk to her for a bit. Grandma doesn’t say anything back, but I can hear her laugh when I tell her how Mavis peed out of excitement all over my shoes that afternoon.

  On Sunday, she’s too tired to talk.

  With both of her children by her side, she dies early Monday morning.

  I hadn’t spoken with my dad since my birthday at the end of September, so when I see that he’s calling me two days after Grandma died, I figure Bill has told him what’s happened and I don’t pick up. Dad and Grandma were practically archenemies, and the last thing I want to hear is him crack a joke at her expense. But when I listen to his voice mail message hours later, he sounds honestly sad and offers me a sincere condolence.

  I try him back the following morning and catch him at a restaurant waiting to pick up his hoagie. “Yeah,” he says, when I thank him for the nice message. “I’m really sorry. You know, she’d made it this long. I thought for sure she could have held out until the baby was born.”

  He can’t talk long because he’s on his lunch break, but speaking of the baby, he wants to get me something. He asks me what I need, and I tell him I’ll e-mail him the link to Matt’s and my registry. We hang up. I tell him I’ll call him on Thanksgiving.

  Grandma’s memorial service takes place in Pittsburgh a little less than two weeks later, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. As I’ll be thirty-four weeks pregnant and my doctor doesn’t recommend traveling out of state after thirty-five weeks, I decide not to make the cross-country journey. After all, I feel lucky to have spent a week with her so close to the end. I feel as though I got to say good-bye.

  But when I call my brother after the service to ask how it went, I have a few pangs of regret. He’s at Mom and Bruce’s with Katherine and my cousin Rob, whom I haven’t seen in years. They’ve ordered pizza and calzones from Grandma’s favorite Italian restaurant and are about to sit down to eat. The service was beautiful and the church was filled with at least two hundred people. “Oh, and Dad showed up,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I know,” he says, laughing. “Hold on, here’s Mom.”

  “Yeah, Ame,” she says. “It was really nice. He said that he knew they hadn’t been the greatest fans of each other, but he felt he had to come to pay his respects.”

  The following morning, I’m pouring my coffee when I just miss a call from my brother. Though it’s seven-thirty a.m., which is early for him to be calling, I don’t think too much of it. He’s probably just hit the road to drive back to Charlotte and wants to tell me something he couldn’t in front of everyone else. I call him right back.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” he says. “I got a call from Margaret this morning.”

 
; Margaret never calls either of us, but I know that she’s also pregnant, about eighteen weeks along with her first baby too. Oh, no, I think. Something’s happened to the baby.

  And then he says: “Dad died.”

  “What?” I say it so loudly that Matt asks me what’s wrong from the bedroom.

  But I can’t respond to him because Bill has continued talking, giving me the details he learned from Margaret, that he’d apparently been watching a movie last night and never came up to bed, that Dolly went downstairs to check on him and found him there, already dead. “I guess it was a massive heart attack.”

  “But you just saw him.”

  “I know,” he says, and I can tell he’s either crying or trying not to cry. “He looked like shit, but he was there.”

  But I don’t cry. Not yet. I save most of that for two days later when the Moses basket he bought us off our baby registry arrives with the attached note: Happy Babyday. I can be “on call,” you know!

  Dad’s funeral service is set for the Saturday after Thanksgiving, exactly one week after Grandma’s. After getting permission from my doctor to fly, I book my ticket to Pittsburgh, leaving Friday. Because of work, Matt can’t come with me.

  I haven’t been to either Saegertown or Meadville in seven years, and for Mom, who has offered to drive me the two hours there (and wait for me in the parking lot, as she doesn’t feel comfortable coming in), it’s been even longer.

  Everything feels remotely familiar, from the Sheetz gas station right off the Meadville exit where we stop to use the bathroom, to the Dairy Queen across the street where Mom often took us kids for an afterschool Oreo Blizzard before we got on the highway back to Pittsburgh on those every-other-Friday trips. I know all these places—I’ve even been to the funeral home before, but still I have to use my phone to navigate us there. On our way, we pass right by the YMCA where I took gymnastics so seriously three days a week for so many years.

  There’s a long hallway leading to the reception room where the service will be. He’d opted to be cremated, so in lieu of a casket, there hangs a poster-size fabric tapestry printed with a photo of him, which is surrounded by stock, almost pixelated images of his interests: chess pieces, that winged symbol for medicine and/or health care, some books on the Civil War, and album covers from a couple of his favorite bands—The Moody Blues and Cat Stevens. At the top it reads, William “Bill” Morris and then underneath in small font: Came from God, 1948. Returned to God, 2013. I can’t help but think Dad would’ve hated that wording. I personally hate the quotes around Bill. It would be one thing if people called him Petey or another name not immediately associated with William. But Bill? The quotes make it feel jokey, fake.

  The service is at two p.m., but I arrive there at noon in order to be there for the receiving hours. Bill and Katherine are already there, having driven straight from Charlotte the previous day. And though both Bill and I spend a little time with Margaret and Paul and offer our condolences to Dolly, without planning it, we find ourselves in the hallway receiving people while Dolly and her kids do so in the main reception room.

  The wrestling moms and hospital nurses remember me, but it’s been seventeen years since I lived in this town, and I can see the confusion on the faces of the rest of the people as they try to figure out who I am. Some people who know that Margaret is pregnant but maybe haven’t seen either of us in years look at my nine-month pregnant belly and say, “Margaret?”

  “Nope,” I say. “She’s the other pregnant daughter. I’m Amelia.”

  “Oh.”

  One man asks me flat out, “And how do you fit in?”

  “I’m his daughter,” I say. “From his first marriage.”

  Margaret, who took on the role of intermediary between Bill and me and Dolly, had asked me if I wanted to say anything at the service, and though part of me did, a bigger part of me wanted to assume my role as the little sister, leaving Bill to speak for the both of us.

  But when the service finally begins and I sit there listening to what everyone else has to say, I start to think that maybe the quotes around Dad’s name are appropriate. Dolly’s brother, Denny, speaks first and goes on and on about how Dad wouldn’t accept mediocrity, how he fought mediocrity. But how and from where, I wonder. Behind his computer in the safety of his study in Saegertown, Pennsylvania, population one thousand? And what’s so bad about mediocrity anyway? Denny wraps up by saying that he has yet to mention my dad’s dedication to his family but that he’s sure his kids will speak to that. This is my brother’s cue.

  But when Bill gets up there, he doesn’t. Instead, he speaks highly of Dad’s work as a physician, his talent as a chess player, and his intellect. I sort of know the guy he’s talking about.

  Margaret is next, and the “Bill” she describes is one who wouldn’t miss a soccer game. Whether it was an away game or at home, high school or college, he was there in the stands. The “Bill” she describes is one who advocated for her when she hadn’t gotten into her top elective, the chess club, for a second year in a row. He is someone with whom she watched movie after movie. But above all, he is someone who was a simple and straightforward presence in her life.

  The rest of the people who speak are not immediate family. They are doctors, nurses, and patients. They have stories highlighting his skill, his sense of humor, his strong (and usually controversial) opinions, and the overall high quality of care he was dedicated to giving. Though I don’t really know this “Bill” either, this is the one I enjoy hearing about most.

  It’s January 1, 2014, and I’m six days away from my due date. In the past few weeks, Matt and I have been busy preparing for the baby’s arrival. The car seat is installed. The crib is built, above which hangs a multicolored mobile. Mom has sent me the Babar rug, and it cheerfully lies on the floor. I’ve prewashed and put away all of the new baby clothes and swaddling blankets I received as gifts. I even have a package of diapers and baby wipes. The room looks picture-perfect.

  As long as you don’t open the closet, where we’ve haphazardly stashed baby gear we know he won’t need until he’s older, Matt’s camera equipment, our winter coats, the leaf to our dining room table, a wooden oversize chess board, yoga mats, boxes of my old journals, and other various possessions in need of a proper, or at least better-organized, home.

  I’d been meaning to deal with this closet for months now—nine months to be exact. I’d wanted a clean start, for everything to be just so. But as I stand in the nursery, I have a moment’s acceptance of the mess.

  Besides, I think, with the arrival of this baby will come the departure of anything being just so again; my picture-perfect nursery will soon come to life with piles of unfolded clothes, burp cloths, and swaddle blankets. It will go from static floor model to being lived in.

  And as I stand there, I catch myself thinking of my dad and of death, of how when you die, everything comes to an abrupt standstill.

  Whatever task you had put off until the next day or week or month, you won’t get to. Any unpaid bills or unwashed clothes are left for other people—the survivors—to take care of. And the tasks that other people can’t handle remain undone, forever.

  Later, when I logged on to Dad’s favorite chess site, I saw that he was in the middle of five different games, having moved as recently as the afternoon of the day he died.

  After more than ten years of writing and ten years of rejections, I’m aware I’ve developed a certain comfort level with failure, with the notion that I’m getting the raw end of the deal, that my talent is being overlooked. I know that I fall quickly and easily into a defensive mode, from where I’ll mechanically stick up for myself, or the dinner I just made, or a random American professional tennis player. It’s easy for me to paint myself as the victim, to think that I may never get the validation that I want.

  What’s harder to admit is that maybe I already have.

  What’s harder to admit is that just because my dad and I didn’t have a traditionally close relationshi
p or one similar to those of his other children doesn’t mean that we didn’t have a meaningful one, one that because of the distance between us, pushed me to work harder and do better, one that because of the distance between us made it all the sweeter when he told me he loved me or wrote to me that he was proud of me.

  I like to think that if he had lived long enough to read this book, there might have been this new understanding between us, that he might have finally gotten it—why I was angry with him for so many years and how he’d hurt me. Maybe he would’ve even apologized. But to be honest, I can’t hear those words coming from his mouth.

  What I can hear is him poking fun at the book’s cover design or correcting me on some trivial point. I can hear him jokingly comparing it to The Lord of the Rings: “Well, you didn’t create your own Elven language, but it was a decent read.”

  What’s sometimes harder to accept is that I’m actually doing well, that I have carved out a beautiful life for myself. And that sometimes, I don’t need to keep fighting.

  Annie Dillard writes: “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you.”

  You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and when it is finally handed to you, in whatever form it arrives, whether it’s a bowl of slow-simmered spicy pinto beans or your dream job or what looks like the beginning of a family with someone who loves you despite the countless times you pushed him away from ages fifteen through twenty-two, there is one last step. To claim it, to believe it belongs to you.