Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (4 page)

M
oving to Pittsburgh meant that I would attend one of the best high schools in the state as a sophomore. And just in case that’s what I decided to do, at the beginning of the summer, my mom made an appointment for us to meet with the guidance counselor there to plan my class schedule.

And this is when I discovered that excellence in Saegertown translated to mediocrity-at-best in Pittsburgh. As it turned out, at my potentially new school, I would be a year behind the majority of incoming sophomores in both Spanish and science.

It was a bitter pill to swallow. In Saegertown, Billy was in the running for valedictorian (he would eventually graduate that year as salutatorian), and I had assumed I would follow in his footsteps. Unwilling to completely accept my new fate, I got a language tutor, and at the end of the summer, I took a test to skip a year of Spanish. I tried to do the same with science, but ultimately, I couldn’t find a class or teacher willing to go over a year’s worth of biology in two and a half months.

Although I suspected as much, I came to the same realization in terms of my beloved sport: that my high skill level within Meadville’s YMCA gymnastics program equated to
nothing special at the private Pittsburgh gym I attended, and a few weeks into the summer, I made the sad decision to retire my leos, or for the layman: quit the sport. This left a time slot open to focus more seriously on tennis, a game my mom loved and one we played often as a family.

Between Spanish tutoring, tennis lessons, the giant backyard trampoline I’d spent my entire life’s savings on the previous summer, and hanging out with my one good friend, Emily, whom I’d met through the aforementioned Pittsburgh gymnastics school, summer flew by.

There was just one more hurdle to get through before I began my new life. I had to tell my dad that I wouldn’t be coming home.

I waited until the last moment, a few days before school started in Saegertown and Dad was set to pick me up to take me back home to rejoin his family, as well as Billy, who’d spent most of the summer at his girlfriend’s family’s house. And though I knew it would be a difficult conversation to have, I also knew my dad. I knew he wasn’t a fighter.

Or was he?

I don’t think that loving people is an easy thing for my dad. At least it never appeared that way. To hug him is a thing of great awkwardness for all parties involved. His personality is tailor-made for the Internet age—he belongs alone in his office with the computer in front of him, communicating through message board forums on a chess site. He is not a father who calls you to check in. He is not a father who calls you
at all
. He is simply not someone who has made it a habit to show his emotions in any visible way, though when he does,
he really does. I immediately think of a funeral my brother and I went to with him when we were young. It was for an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old kid named Adam who had died in a car accident, whom we all knew through the world of high school wrestling. We went to the funeral, the three of us, and Dad could
not
stop crying. It was the second time I had ever seen him cry—the first time being at the courthouse when Billy and I met with that mediator—but it made that first time seem like a fluke. This was not a quiet kind of crying. It was loud and unavoidable. People were staring, including me. His face was distorted. His skin was pink; his eyelashes dark black and shiny; his nostrils rounded and flared. “He was just a kid,” he kept saying, over and over.

My announcement that I wasn’t coming home unleashed this version of my father.

In those few days before school began in Saegertown, my dad called nightly and begged me to come home. I don’t remember the exact details of these conversations as well as I remember the setting, the finished basement of our house in Pittsburgh, the so-called
game room
, where I’d sit on the beige, scratchy, tweedlike couch that Mom had brought from our house in Meadville, and cry.

It’s hard not to do what your father tells you to do, especially when what he’s asking is for you to come home. The only reason I was able to stand firm was because I knew that when I hung up, I would head up the stairs, which opened into the hallway that led to the kitchen, where Mom and Bruce would be sitting, and whose faces resembled what I imagine those of a couple waiting for the verdict from an adoption agency might look like.

Though school had yet to start in Mt. Lebanon, it had started in Saegertown, so I felt I was in the clear. Inertia was now swinging me toward my new life. So, when my paternal grandma, who also lived in Pittsburgh, called me and wanted to have lunch, I didn’t think too much of it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I happily recommended Burger King, as they had a chicken Parmesan sandwich I really liked at the time.

Even though her age was only a few years shy of my maternal grandma’s—Grandma Felt—Grandma Morris always seemed decades younger. Grandma Morris dyed her hair brown, while Grandma Felt had let hers go gray. Grandma Morris lived in an apartment with mirrored walls and a balcony. Grandma Felt lived in a home that always seemed to be collapsing in on itself. Grandma Morris went to Las Vegas monthly. Grandma Felt went to church weekly.

So when Grandma Morris picked me up and took me to lunch, she did it in her typical youthful way, whipping around the bends in the road, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the open window ledge. I ordered my sandwich and should have known that something was up when Grandma didn’t order anything for herself. There’s something about going to lunch with someone who doesn’t order anything that instantly puts the two of you at odds. Suddenly, you’re not communing as equals but self-consciously consuming food while being watched.

And thus began my earliest lesson that just because she goes by the innocuous name of
Grandma
doesn’t mean she has your best interests at heart. See, Grandma was there on
business. Grandma did not understand why I hadn’t returned to Saegertown like I had every other autumn. Yes, she understood I had a poor relationship with my stepmom, and yes, she agreed that I had been treated unfairly. But, did I realize that I was breaking my father’s heart? Did I know that he called her crying last night? Why was I choosing to split up the family like this? And by the way, did I realize that his heart was
breaking
?

Truth be told, I
had
sort of felt like I was breaking my dad’s heart. And, when I thought about it for a second, I was going to be starting high school the following week at a place four times the size of my last high school, where I had the sum total of one friend.

And so, at the pay phone stationed right outside of Burger King, with change provided by Grandma, I called my mom at work. The receptionist told me she was seeing a patient and asked if she could call me back. “It’s kind of important,” I said.

When my mom came to the phone, she was a bit out of breath, and I could hear the worry in her voice. “What is it, Sweetie?”

“I think I want to move back with Dad.”

And then I heard something different in her voice, something very desperate. “Just wait until I get home. Just please don’t make any decisions until I get home. OK? We’ll talk about this tonight, OK?” I don’t know what she thought—that I would call Dad and get him to pick me up before she even came home from work? But I did wait.

That night, once Bruce came home from work, we all discussed it, as a family. And away from Burger King and the
dominating presence of my grandmother, the decision was clear. I was staying. School started on Tuesday, and I would be going—all five feet two inches, barely one hundred pounds of me.

Oh, and did I mention that I was a very late bloomer who had just gotten her hair cut boy-length short and who, since then was often mistaken for a young boy? Or, in the words of my homeroom teacher, “Welcome to your new school, Sir!”