Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (7 page)

“OK, well, thanks for calling!”

That night, I met a guy named Danny who didn’t go to Hopkins and who I would end up seeing for the next couple of months. He was a few years older, sang in a band, wore thick-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans, and worked in a tattoo parlor—an original hipster. Across his stomach read the words:
HELL BENT
in gothic-styled block print, because he was, as he told me, “hell bent and heaven sent.”

So while the vast majority of my friends applied to graduate school and/or office jobs with health plans and retirement accounts, I went to Danny’s shows, hung out with his friends, and took my dad’s advice, making the most of my last year as a college student. I drank a lot, smoked a lot, and stopped going to church and youth group altogether. (I also went ahead and got my nose pierced.)

I was on a mission to self-destruct, though at the same time, I couldn’t go through with it fully. I mean, I was still
the girl who had experimented with alcohol for the first time by drinking three Zimas on a full stomach. Though I contemplated it, I couldn’t go through with getting a tattoo from my tattoo artist boyfriend. I also couldn’t blow off my writing classes. (I was at work on a novel that my favorite professor found “very promising.”) Plus, the previous year, as part of a criminal justice class I had to take for distribution credits, I’d read
The Corner
, a nonfiction account of life on the inner-city streets of Baltimore by David Simon, the creator of
The Wire
, which affected me so much that I promised (aloud and on multiple occasions) never to do drugs because I didn’t want “to contribute to that world in any way, shape, or form.” So as drunk as I would get, if anyone pulled out cocaine at a party, I would make a point not to participate. “Geez, guys. Have none of you read
The Corner
?”

By year’s end, I had come up with my own idea of what it was to be a writer. Writers
wrote
, I concluded. And most of them did so while living life just above the poverty line and somewhere in between states of drunkenness and sobriety.

Inspired by the title of George Orwell’s memoir,
Down and Out in Paris and London
(which, to be clear, I never actually read) and naïve enough to think that my experience in Madrid, where my housing and meals had been not only set up for me, but also paid for by Mom and Bruce, could somehow be replicated in the real world, I decided that after graduation I would travel. And of course, write.
Down and Out in Paris and London
, here I come!

Only I’d already been to Paris and London. This time, I wanted to go to Central or South America. When I said as much one day over winter break to my family, Bruce told
me he could put me in contact with friends of his who ran some sort of Christian outreach program in Costa Rica. Even though I’d begun to distance myself from all things Christian, I was still up for a trip to Costa Rica. And at the time, so was Mary Anne, whose plan was to defer a year before enrolling in a graduate program in Scotland.

Five months later, however, at graduation, Mary Anne and I were hardly speaking to each other. At the time, I’m sure I didn’t see it this way, but now it’s clear to me what happened between us. I’d gained back all the weight I’d lost that summer and more. Plus, after breaking up with Cliff, she quickly fell into a new relationship, while I was boyfriendless for the first time in three years. Essentially, I resented her for detaching herself from my hip, for no longer being on the same page as I was—basically, for not being
depressed
along with me.

It was clear that we were no longer going to be traveling together, yet if I didn’t go on this trip, my post-graduation plans would begin and end with returning to Mom and Bruce’s house in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, just like I’d done the summer before. Not able to accept that as my fate, I decided to go to Costa Rica by myself.

W
hile I was away at college, Mom and Bruce downsized to a two-bedroom condo, and so it was from Bruce’s newly set-up third-floor office where I hesitated for a few minutes before finally purchasing the round-trip ticket to San José, Costa Rica, leaving Pittsburgh in mid-June and returning six weeks later. I hesitated not only because I was going alone but because my plans included nothing more than spending some time in the city, volunteering, maybe making a friend or two, and traveling to the coast. It scared me, but what was scarier was
not
going. Because if I took away Costa Rica, all I was was an unemployed liberal arts graduate.

I arrived in the capital with the bare minimum: a backpack full of clothes, my journal, a Costa Rican guidebook, the address of a hostel, and the phone number of Bruce’s Christian friends. But the minute the taxi dropped me off at the hostel, I knew I’d overestimated myself.

The hostel in San José issued me a twin bed, which was part of a bunk bed, which was in a room with five other bunk beds. As far as I could tell, I was the only one traveling alone. Wasting no time, I retrieved the notebook with the phone number of the Costa Rican Christians from my backpack.

But when I called, I got a Spanish recording telling me to hang up and dial again. I figured I was doing something wrong, like not using the proper city code. I tried the number again, slightly differently. Still nothing. I tried again and again, finally asking the person working the front desk for help. Still, I couldn’t get through. In the common area, I logged on to one of the computers and sent an e-mail to the address Bruce gave me, explaining I’d arrived and that the phone number I had for them didn’t seem to be working.

In the meantime, I tried casually hanging out by the pool with a book in hand, pretending to be OK with the fact that I was there alone, as if I hadn’t just spent an entire semester at college drinking too much in order to avoid feeling a moment of such loneliness. I lasted maybe a half hour.

In need of some cash and food, I decided to venture out. A couple of blocks away, I found a bank, withdrew some
colones
, picked up groceries, and got whistled at by various passengers in cars driving by. Back at the hostel, I ate my dinner by myself and checked my e-mail. There was nothing waiting for me.

From the semi-comfort of my twin bunk bed that night, I put together a plan B. According to my guidebook, I could take a bus to any one of the beach towns. I decided that’s what I would do if I didn’t hear anything from the Christians in the morning. After all, if I was going to be alone, I might as well be alone at the beach, right?

But in the morning, before I even checked my e-mail to see if anyone had responded, I realized that I didn’t have my bank card. Instantly, I knew I’d left it in the ATM machine. And instantly, I knew the jig was up. Within the half hour, I packed up my things, checked out of the hostel, and hailed a cab to
the airport where I paid a 125-dollar fee to change my return ticket to the very next flight out of San José.

Of course, I could have gone back to the bank and tried to retrieve my card. I also had a credit card I could have used. Basically, if I’d wanted to make it work, I could have. But that’s the thing. I didn’t. In fact, the relief I felt upon changing my ticket and knowing I was going back home was overwhelming.

When I think of the mishap now, I can’t help but think of Freud’s theory on such mistakes, how they are manifestations of unconscious thoughts and impulses. I wasn’t ready to jump to this conclusion at the time, but the truth was that I simply wasn’t the kind of freewheeling, laidback, outgoing person who could travel around a foreign country by herself. I didn’t want to take a bus to the coast so that I could be alone at another hostel even if it was near the beach; I didn’t want to volunteer with Bruce’s Christian friends even if they did get in touch with me. The truth was that I didn’t want to be there, period.

At the Pittsburgh International Airport, I called my mom from a pay phone. It was late, and I could tell from the way she answered that I’d woken her up. I tried to sound sick. I told her I was in Pittsburgh, that I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Bruce’s friends, that someone from the hostel must have
stolen
my bankcard, and that I’d gotten food poisoning. I told her I hadn’t known what to do so I’d gone to the airport and gotten on the first flight home.

“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.