Read Online Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) by Amelia Morris - Free Book Online Page A

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 wastime 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 andolive 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