Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (6 page)

A
t seventeen, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, let alone what to study or where. I only knew that I wanted to go to a
good
school that wasn’t too close to home. I know the fact that Dolly had never left western Pennsylvania was a major influence in this latter part of my decision-making—sticking around your hometown your entire life seemed a sure recipe for unhappiness. And so, I ruled out any colleges in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or Ohio.

Duke was my number one pick, as that’s where my brother was. But when I didn’t get in, I chose the next best
sounding
school on my list: Johns Hopkins University, a place I’d applied to merely because my dad had mentioned almost going there and a school Mom and I’d given a cursory, haphazard visit one late afternoon on a drive back to Pittsburgh from Durham.

But minutes after Mom and Bruce dropped me off at my freshman dorm, I fluctuated between feeling homesick and intimidated. All of my new classmates seemingly came from much cooler places than Pittsburgh—e.g., New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—and arrived with declared majors in
International Relations, Political Science, and Economics. As for me, I was undeclared, having enrolled in classes that were basically a continuation of my senior year in high school: Calculus, American history, Spanish, and for fun, Introduction to Television.

I was e-mailing and calling my high school friends daily, including Matt, who was at NYU. I told them I wasn’t impressed, that I was looking into transferring. And if it weren’t for meeting a fellow freshman named Mary Anne during orientation, I just might have. Mary Anne and I hit it off immediately. We had so much in common. From our broken-up families to our stepsiblings to our Christian backgrounds to our loves of gymnastics. We even looked a bit alike.

By the end of September, according to our other new friends, we were “attached at the hip.” And what we didn’t already have in common, we quickly picked up from each other. Unfortunately for me, this meant speaking with a Midwestern accent, and more unfortunately for Mary Anne, this meant dieting.

By this point in my life, my focus on eating healthily had blossomed into a full-blown obsession; I had a food journal in which I would write down every item I ate along with its calorie count. And one day, while hanging out in Mary Anne’s dorm room, I noticed that she had started to do the same. I laughed out loud at her list of foods and their corresponding calories:

banana, 7

licorice, 20

cheese and bean burrito, 150

“Seven calories in a banana?” I laughed. She clearly wasn’t as well versed in this as I was. “I
wish
! Try a hundred!”

Later that year, she and I decided to do a three-day liquid diet together. (We were each five feet six and 125 pounds, which is technically underweight, but it’s always nice to be thinner, right?) When our friend Liz heard of our plan, she looked directly at me and said, “Wait a second. Aren’t you already on a diet?”

Mary Anne was majoring in Political Science and minoring in something called Writing Seminars, which through her, I discovered was basically JHU’s liberal-arts term for creative writing. The following semester, I took one of the classes Mary Anne had taken: Introduction to Fiction and Poetry. The entire semester, all we did was read various pieces of fiction and poetry and then write our own. It was borderline shocking to me that you could receive a grade for something that didn’t feel like schoolwork. And even more surprising that this could be my major. By the end of the year, it was decided. I was
Writing Sems
.

The one thing I could not emulate, as hard as I tried, was Mary Anne’s relaxed approach to the other major part of college: partying. In high school, I’d gotten drunk just once, off of a few Zimas (remember Zimas?) just to see what it was like. And I did so at the end of senior year, in the controlled environment of the basement of my friend’s house with her and her fraternal twin so that I could be sure to neither get date-raped nor make an ass of myself in front of a bunch of people.

So, it may go without saying that I was a bit of an outlier freshman year. While my classmates reveled in their newfound freedom, getting drunk, hooking up, and steadily gaining their freshman fifteen, I cautiously sipped on diluted drinks, dated a couple of guys, studied, made sure to get in a four-
mile run five times a week, and went to church on Sunday mornings,
with
Mary Anne of course.

But at the beginning of sophomore year, Mary Anne met a senior named Cliff, who quickly became a serious boyfriend, and all of a sudden, I had all this time to myself. I remember deciding: I need a boyfriend too.

As goal-oriented as always, I was dating one of Cliff’s fraternity brothers, David, within a few weeks. David was a junior with brown, curly, skateboarder-like hair. He was not your classic fraternity bro. He was quiet, soft-spoken, the kind of guy who, at a party filled with dudes calling “Next!” at the beer pong table, would be content leaning against a wall sipping on a beer all by himself.

Before he even tried to kiss me, he took me on a date to the Baltimore Museum of Art and then cooked me dinner back at the row house he shared with three other guys. Was the house rodent-infested, the chicken overcooked, and the accompanying rice sourced from a Rice-A-Roni box? Yes. But it was
college
. Guys didn’t cook girls dinner, at least not before they’d even made out with them. David was one of the good guys. And it didn’t take long before he and I were the ones spending every minute together.

Junior year, I studied abroad in Madrid for the fall semester, and though Mary Anne was still my best friend and David still my boyfriend, without either of them by my side, I had to rely on myself. I handled this mainly by obsessively writing in my journal, my main topics being my need to be a better Christian, my increasingly conflicted feelings over my relationship
with David, and of course, my diet, which at this point was strictly vegetarian (a choice not inspired by a particular love for animals but rather because it seemed easier to eat healthily by cutting out a major food group). It was also not supposed to go over 1,400 calories per day.

Ironically, the farther away I got from Mom and Bruce geographically, the more into Christianity I became. The year before, Mary Anne and I had even joined JHU’s Christian Youth Group, occasioning their weekly Bible studies. But while Mare’s relationship with God seemed easy and stress-free, to read my journal, which interspersed Ani DiFranco lyrics with passages from the Bible, is to encounter the thoughts of one very confused twenty-year-old.

My casual, hesitant drinking freshman year had blossomed into a handful of very drunken nights sophomore year, which I’d found to be both extremely fun and a major source of stress for me. My body was a temple, right? And downing shots and smoking cigarettes was no way to treat such an edifice. Plus, as an underage sophomore, it had been illegal (a fact that didn’t seem to bother anyone else on campus). But now I was in Spain where it wasn’t. And yet still, I gave myself a hard time. Or, to quote my journal: “I’m an idiot. Drunk again.”

Similarly, as a Christian, I knew I should be
dating
a Christian so that I could marry a Christian, and though David grew up Catholic, it was much more of a cultural identification for him. On this topic, I wrote a lot, most of the time not very coherently: “I don’t know what my problem is. I do kinda. I feel like I need to chill with my Christian friends more. Where are they?”

Occasionally, I made a bit more sense: “I need God in my life more and David just… Sometimes I feel like it’s hard
enough trying to figure myself out and what I want to do, let alone have a serious relationship.”

And as for my never-ending diet? Well, as fate would have it, my randomly assigned roommate in Madrid had had great success with Weight Watchers. Within days of living with her, she pulled out the Weight Watchers literature from her backpack and taught me how to
count my points
. For good measure, on the last page of my journal, I copied down a long list of foods and their corresponding point equivalent, e.g.:

This kind of monitoring left little room for flan and chocolate and churros, although I did make an allowance for tortilla española, clearly unaware of how much olive oil is used in the Spanish classic.

Despite the fact that I was living in Spain and took weekend trips to Paris (where Mary Anne was studying for the semester), Dublin, and Florence, I didn’t return to Hopkins very culturally enlightened or rejuvenated. Rather, the extra independence had left me in a peak state of mental turmoil.

Mary Anne and I, along with our mutual friend Sonya, found an off-campus apartment with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a gigantic balcony. It should have been a happy time—my first apartment! But instead, I spent the first month back in town isolating myself and breaking up and making up with David. Meanwhile, Sonya and Mary Anne spent it like two normal college kids, studying together during
the week and going out on the weekends. They even cooked together, making balanced dinners of rice, broccoli, and pan-fried chicken breasts. And though they always invited me to join in on whatever it was they were doing or cooking, I never did.

“I’m good,” I’d say, pouring myself another bowl of cereal, convincing myself that I was somehow healthier.

Sonya had even brought an appliance with her—a rice cooker—and always made sure to cook more than enough rice for dinner so that in the morning she could use the leftovers to fry up one of the dishes taught to her by her Filipina mother: rice and eggs.

But that year, I truly cannot remember making anything for myself to eat apart from cereal, microwaved oatmeal, or baked tortilla chips and guacamole. By March, however, exhausted by my own thoughts, I began emerging from my cocoon to go out with them on weekends. And since I had typically eaten nothing of substance for dinner, I would get drunk before we’d even left the apartment to meet up with the rest of our friends. And despite my so-called vegetarianism, at the end of these nights, without fail, I would buy a foot-long turkey hoagie with all of the fixings, which I’d eat in the living room of our apartment while rewatching our VHS copy of
Far and Away
.

To add to my list of internal conflicts, as part of his spring break, Matt came to visit me that semester during one of the weekends that David and I were back together. Mary Anne, Sonya, and I took him to a fraternity party. It was a horrible decision. Matt didn’t belong in this world of beer pong and flip cup, and it wasn’t just strange to see him there, it was painful.
Of course, what was even weirder was going home at the end of the night and setting up a bed for him on the couch while David and I slept in my room. So weird that I apparently couldn’t even wait until the next day to write about it in my journal: “Matt Bookman and David are out on the balcony talking right now. What?!”

By the end of the semester, much to my disgust, I had finally gained my freshman fifteen. (I’d just done so as a second-semester junior.) Hardly any of my clothes fit me, and I hated myself for it. I had lost control of this thing I thought I had a tight grip on, and on top of that, I was embarrassed that I cared so much, that being thin was such a priority in my life. I cried to my mom so much without giving her the reason why that she offered to pay for me to see a therapist. When a few weeks later I was finally able to tell her that the reason I was so upset was because of all the weight I’d gained, I was hoping she might tell me that I was being silly, that I looked great. But I should have known better. My mom is someone who takes back-to-back spinning classes and who clearly has her own bevy of body image issues. No, instead, she said, “You’re not
fat
. You’re not
skinny
either,” before offering to set me up with a personal trainer, a “friend of mine from the gym.” I agreed.

And it worked. While Sonya and Mary Anne stayed in Baltimore that summer, commuting into D.C. daily for their internships, I went home, got a job at a record store, and met with a personal trainer twice a week.

I entered senior year thinner than I was at the beginning of junior year, on antidepressants, and finally, firmly broken up with David—thanks in part to all of the phone calls to
Matt (who had spent his summer interning at a production company in Los Angeles) and to whom I wouldn’t necessarily explain the situation but who made me laugh and feel normal for at least the duration of our call. But back at school, I had a new problem. I had to figure out what I was going to do next year,
after
college.

That fall, I turned twenty-one, the last of my friends to do so. And before we all headed out to a bar to celebrate, I fielded a happy-birthday call from my dad, who used this as an opportunity to remind me that it all went downhill from there. “College is the best it gets. You may not realize it now, but you will,
you will
,” he said in his standard, quiet, melancholic phone voice.