Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (2 page)

The story goes that I lasted six weeks before telling my mom in the middle of one night: “Dad and Dolly have a baby.” My mom woke up Billy to confirm the news. He did.

The divorce was finalized very shortly after.

This narrative is the one I grew up with: My dad was the bad guy; he didn’t just cheat on my mom, he also had a baby with someone else; then he tried to hide all of this from her, forcing her to find out from her five-year-old daughter.

It doesn’t hit me until very recently—as I am pacing around my living room on the phone with my dad, discussing his course of action (err, inaction) as openly and as matter-of-factly as we’ve ever done—what a weird and horrible plan this was. The moment Dad knew he was having a baby with
someone else, why didn’t he tell Mom and/or file for divorce? If not for the sake of Mom or Dolly and their feelings, at least for the sake of simplicity?

And for the first time in my life, I ask my dad what he was thinking: “I mean, you couldn’t have kept Margaret a secret forever.”

“Well, you never know, an asteroid could’ve hit the earth,” he says in a jokey, Steve Martin kind of voice and laughs.

I don’t laugh. I don’t say anything, letting the silence fill the air between us.

I haven’t been to the house he shares with Dolly in more than seven years, but I doubt it’s changed much. I imagine him in his poorly lit, small rectangular office, speaking into the beige rotary phone that sits next to his computer, the screen of which is most likely displaying the current online chess game he’s playing.

And then he adds, quietly, “Plus, I didn’t want to hurt your mom.” There’s a rare sincerity to his voice. I believe him. And then, as I tend to do during most of our phone calls, I feel sorry for him.

I
’d always wanted a big, tight-knit family. The kind that might break out singing “We Are Family” on the dance floor at a wedding, or go on
Family Feud
together, or to Italian restaurants that serve giant family-style meals and then head home to watch a movie on
ABC Family
before going to bed, safe and sound in the comfort and security that only a cozy house full of family can bring.

My aunt told me I used to walk around with my forearm tightly wrapped around the necks of my dolls saying, “I’m going to have a big family when I grow up!” It was a deep yearning, so embedded that it still comes out from time to time now, most often and most embarrassingly while watching those horrible yet endearing Kardashian sisters on any one of their reality TV shows.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a brood of Armenian daughters?
, some part of me wonders.

I believe this desire for a big family originated with
Nick at Nite
, or specifically their re-airings of old episodes of
The Brady Bunch
. I particularly enjoyed the iconic one-minute opening sequence that explained in song how this mishmash of boys and girls somehow formed a family. The introduction culminated with your TV screen looking like a side of a
Rubik’s Cube, only instead of different-colored squares, the squares were filled with different individuals.

Have you ever held a puppy in your arms when it realizes that its owner has just pulled into the driveway after a long day at work? The dog is so excited and overwhelmed with emotion that when you go to set her down, her legs are already swimming through the air; she quite literally hits the ground running toward her owner. I imagine that was what I looked like when my mom took us to the Meadville Country Club pool in the summers during those golden, post-divorce years of joint custody.

My three main activities at the pool, ranked from most enjoyable to least enjoyable, were: jumping off the diving board, putting foodlike products from the snack bar (e.g., Strawberry Mentos and Flintstone orange-flavored push pops) on “our tab,” and getting stung on the bottom of my foot by dying-but-not-quite-dead bees that were floating in puddles of water along the edge of the pool, the last of which was made not so bad by one of the young lifeguards who would carry me as a fireman might carry a child out of a burning building to the first-aid station where he or she would then tape up my foot and give me a few more Strawberry Mentos before releasing me back into the fun zone.

Here’s the beautiful secret of joint custody: Nobody really has custody, so nobody’s really in charge, especially when
both of your parents are full-time, on-call doctors. Billy and I bounced from school over to Mom’s house, where we were greeted by our nanny, Janice, who let us watch all sorts of television (including the movie
Dirty Dancing
), back to school, to Dad’s house, or more than likely, to the doctors’ lounge at the hospital, where he would be waiting to deliver a baby and where we would be allowed to watch all sorts of television, back to school, and so on, happy as clams.

The creators of
The Brady Bunch
got one thing right: They got rid of the other parents. Mr. Brady is a widower and Mrs. Brady is,
uhm
, well it’s not clear. In fact, no mention is ever made regarding the circumstances in which her first marriage ended. But guess what? It worked. Because the important thing wasn’t the status or whereabouts of the girls’ biological father. It was that they were now a part of a new family, which consisted of a mom, a dad, six kids, and Alice—the housekeeper.

I watched episode after episode, on a TV anchored to the ceiling from the comfort of one of the doctors’ lounge’s twin beds, eating individually wrapped packages of saltines.

Little did I know that my family would soon be just one kid shy of
The Brady Bunch
’s six. Only my version would suck.

In our Brady-Bunch-esque opening sequence, the screen would be split into four rectangles: one for Mom, one for Dad, one for Billy, age nine, and one for me, age six. Billy and I would be smiling. Mom and Dad would look a bit underwhelmed.

Then, a fifth rectangle featuring Dolly would pop in.

And they knew that it was much more than a hunch.

Mom would then start looking at Dolly with a frown. But Dolly would look straight ahead, appearing relatively harmless, polite even.

In would come a sixth screen, newborn baby Margaret. Everyone would look a bit ill at ease. Perhaps we’d hear the screechy sound of a needle being abruptly lifted off a record. Then, Mom’s rectangle would spin right off the screen altogether, like a tossed playing card.

In another moment, two new rectangles would pop up: one for Paul—Dad and Dolly’s second child, born seventeen months after Margaret—and one for Travis, Dolly’s twenty-something son from a previous marriage. I’m not sure if anyone would still be smiling at this point.

We would then have to quickly flash to black before showing a new screen, split between my mom and her new husband, Bruce. Mom would look like she was smiling after a good hard cry. Next, in would pop Billy and me again!

That this group would somehow form a family…

Or, to explain it to those of you who haven’t memorized the theme song: Dad remarried the month after the divorce came through and became a stepdad to Dolly’s son, Travis, while Dolly became stepmom to Billy and me. Soon after, Dad and Dolly had a second child together. And soon after that, Mom met and married a nice man named Bruce and moved back to her hometown of Pittsburgh.

Of course, one thing I really do understand now that I’m older is my mom moving two hours away. As a kid, I didn’t get it. The two-hour car trip felt like a lifetime. Why couldn’t Mom and Bruce live in Meadville or, better yet, in nearby
Saegertown, where Dad and Dolly resided? But it makes so much sense to me now. In Pittsburgh, she wouldn’t have to live
and
work amid the swirling gossip of Dad’s affair-avec-love-child. In Pittsburgh, she could be surrounded by people who loved her—her mom, dad, and new husband. In Pittsburgh, she had a chance at a fresh start.

And as far as fresh starts go, she couldn’t have picked a better second husband. Whereas my dad seemed committed to doing whatever he wanted, no matter who he might hurt in the process, Bruce was focused on doing the right thing, to the best of his abilities, which were top-notch.

Bruce hadn’t just played college baseball and college football at the Naval Academy. He had been drafted by the Baltimore Orioles (he turned them down) and played backup quarterback to Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach before becoming first-string quarterback himself in his senior year. And he wasn’t just a Navy pilot, he trained under military instructors I’ve actually heard of, like John McCain, and could perform the kinds of aerial maneuvers I was previously only familiar with from
Top Gun
. And he didn’t just serve in Vietnam. He went and nearly didn’t come back. On a rescue mission, his helicopter (he could also fly those) was shot down in the jungle near the Laotian border.

He’d imagined a career in the Navy—becoming captain of an aircraft carrier was his dream—but his extensive injuries, which included a broken back, left him incapable of flying again and, therefore, of taking the kinds of jobs within the Academy he was most interested in. So, instead, he followed his faith. In typical Bruce fashion, he didn’t go about this lightly. He received a PhD in theology, writing his doctoral thesis on Puritan preaching. He then worked for the Fellowship
of Christian Athletes before pastoring churches of his own in Kansas City as well as Chicago. But to be closer to his ailing parents, he moved to Pittsburgh, where he stumbled into a job managing charitable trusts at a major bank. Of course, he made time for teaching an adult Sunday school class and also occasionally acted as a substitute or interim pastor at the various Protestant churches across town. It was there at one of these churches, the one my mom grew up attending, where he first met my mom.

Thus, the introduction of Bruce into our family brought with it the introduction of Christianity. Whereas Dad and Dolly went off to Canada, just the two of them, to get married in front of a judge, Mom and Bruce had a sizable church ceremony. I was eight and got to wear a puffy peach ball gown and blue eye shadow, and read a passage from the Bible, the one in First Corinthians about how love is patient and love is kind. And though I may have been too young to have cared about the details of Bruce’s illustrious biography, I did know that the wedding was a good thing, that my mom was marrying a good guy.

But with Mom living two hours away, our joint custody schedule would no longer work; we couldn’t bounce between the two houses every other day. Given all of the above information, it seems clear where Billy and I should’ve chosen to live.

Only by the time we sat down in front of a mediator at the courthouse, Billy was eleven—he would start seventh grade in the fall—and I was eight, and all we really knew was that our mom (who seemed to cry an awful lot for a grown woman) was moving far enough away that if we wanted to go with her, we would have to change schools, friends, lives, etc. So, instead,
Billy chose Dad, and though I don’t remember, I’m told I said, “Whatever Billy’s doing.” Which makes sense given that I was so obsessed with my big brother, I probably also added, “And if there’s time later, I’d love to talk to you about his wide range of talents. Of course, there’s his wrestling, but have you seen him play Tetris?”