Chapter 17
Food Fight, Part II
Back in LA, after I’m let go from the School of Rock, I pick up a job at the Beverly Hills branch of Paper Source, a store that specializes in colorful cardstock, greeting cards, and craft supplies. It pays $11/hour, but you have to pay $4 a day for parking and endure the wrath of the regional manager, who occasionally drops in on the store and scolds me for sitting down while I work. (If I ever find myself the owner and operator of a retail store, there will be stools behind the register and a desk for those tasks that can be done sitting down.)
My spare time is dedicated to my second attempt at getting into graduate school for creative writing. Only this time I’m not taking chances, and I apply to a much wider range of schools. And though Matt and I are engaged, I’m still disenchanted with Los Angeles. So much so that USC is the only school I apply to on the West Coast. So much so, that in between my hours at Paper Source, I design a T-shirt in the style of the iconic I ♥ NY that reads instead: “I 
LA.”
I buy the domain name IStomachLA.com, get a vendor’s license, and though I know nothing about starting my own business, I convince my mom to invest $300 in the new company I’m starting. The cash pays for a first run of shirts and for some of the fees to apply for a registered trademark. The best-case scenario, as I see it, is to sell the idea to a company like Urban Outfitters. And the worst case? I can sell the T-shirts online when I’m in school.
In April, I find out I’ve gotten into a few different schools, one of which is the University of North Carolina Wilmington—one of my top choices. When I’m not accepted into USC’s program, UNCW becomes my very top choice.
Before we uproot our lives entirely, Matt (who is also very close to being ready to leave Los Angeles) and I figure we should visit Wilmington for the first time. But when we do the math, we realize it doesn’t make sense. We can barely afford one plane ticket, let alone two. So, instead, I go for the free option: watching old episodes of Dawson’s Creek, which was shot there. And through the lens of Dawson’s unrequited love for Joey Potter, I become completely sold on Wilmington. I imagine a sleepy little beach town with marshes, seagulls, and seafood restaurants on docks. I imagine a town where not every single person you meet is trying to do the exact same thing you are and where the dream of buying a small house is an attainable one. I send in the paperwork to enroll.
Meanwhile, the regional manager at the paper store yells (really, he yells!) at me yet again for sitting down on the job. I give notice the next day and go back to my original temp agency.
Again, they send me to CAA, the giant talent agency with all the young people in suits and the Lichtenstein on the wall, which has since relocated to an even grander edifice. Since I’m only a temp, they don’t want to bother issuing me a parking card, telling me instead to use the valet parking and get it validated at the front desk each evening. So, every day, I valet my tiny little car right alongside all the Mercedes and Jaguars. In the lobby one morning, I see Joey Potter (aka Katie Holmes).
For the rest of the day you can find me humming the Dawson’s theme song. Will it be yes, or will it beeee… sorrrry?
The plan had been for me to move to Wilmington and get situated, and for Matt to follow in six months. However, when one of his and Geordie’s scripts is named a semifinalist in the Nicholl Fellowship Screenwriting Competition—the most prestigious script contest in town—and for the first time since the Esquire film screenings, talent managers, producers, and agents are asking to meet with them, we decide that he should stay indefinitely.
I arrange to have my car transported from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh, where I’ll fly in and spend a few days with Mom and Bruce before picking up my car, a bit of furniture, and an air mattress. And then, with printed-out directions from MapQuest, I navigate my way to what will be my house for the year.
In July, through the university’s LISTSERV for students in the creative writing program, I’d discovered that a daughter of one of the poetry professors was looking for two roommates to fill a three-bedroom house a couple of miles from campus. Rent would be $325. (Matt and I are currently paying $1425.) I’d e-mailed her right away.
It immediately feels strange to be driving in a town with so much empty space and residential roads with 45 mph speed limits. And it feels even stranger when the directions tell me to turn right into what appears to be a very suburban-looking housing development, the kind where there’s a sign announcing your particular development’s name, e.g., Willow Crest or Eagle’s Landing. As a bit of a spoiler of what’s to come, my subdivision has been soberly deemed Sawgrass.
The poet’s daughter is already living there, though she lets me know ahead of time that she’s not going to be there when I arrive—she has left a key for me under the mat.
The moment I step out of the car is the strangest yet. The foreign sound of cicadas and the hot, humid night air hit me at the same time. In the photos, the house had appeared clean, plain, and generally inoffensive, but in person, it reveals itself as one of those charmless, white-carpeted, vinyl-sided houses with faux wood doors, bearing absolutely no resemblance to Dawson’s family’s cozy coastal split-level. I’m glad my new roommate’s not there to register my disappointment.
But I’m exhausted from the drive. I set up my air mattress, call Matt, and fall asleep listening to the whir of the air-conditioning and beyond it, the sounds of the Southern night.
To ensure I can make it to our family’s annual beach gathering, my mom has rented a house at nearby Topsail Beach, which is a short thirty-minute drive from UNCW’s campus. Matt’s flown in for the week as well, so we split our time between the beach house and my new place, where we’re getting me set up.
And though my life feels unmoored, family vacation is the same as always.
When Matt and I arrive to the house in the late afternoon, Bruce, who “doesn’t like the beach,” has gone to get his car’s oil changed. My brother and Jenny are at the beach. And Mom and Grandma, who have maintained their tradition of bringing coolers full of raw meat from home so as not to pay beach-grocery-store prices, are at work roasting two chickens for dinner that night.
Jinx, Grandma’s 115-pound Goldendoodle, who looks like an eleven-year-old boy in a dog costume, is also present, currently eating chicken gizzards Grandma has hand-mixed in with his dry dog food, which she calls gravel. (I’ve never actually seen Jinx eat the gravel, just the human food she’s put in around it.)
Jinx had been a gift from my uncle to keep Grandma busy after Grandpa died. Of course, no one had thought he’d get so big. Because of his size, Grandma’s never been able to control him, and so he’s gotten away with anything and everything. She was a pretty serious hoarder already, but after Jinx’s arrival, her house has been destroyed. Her couches and pillows are torn apart, empty food containers are strewn in the backyard, and shredded newspapers and books with teeth marks cover the floor.
On Grandma’s street, Jinx is notoriously the dog to watch out for, responsible for taking down more pedestrians than the ice-covered sidewalks of Pittsburgh. Grandma herself dislocated her kneecap because he pulled her down one day sprinting for a squirrel. But all of this is of no import to her. She loves that dog and will be damned if he doesn’t share her Wendy’s chicken sandwich and French fries.
Unmarried couples don’t share beds under Bruce and Mom’s not-your-run-of-the-mill-Christian roof, so I’m set to room with Jenny and my brother with Matt. However, since the kids’ bedrooms are tucked away downstairs, we disregard these rules, having a good laugh at the idea of Bill and Matt, six feet and six feet two respectively, sharing one full-size bed.
My non-relationship with Grandma is the same too. We haven’t spoken since Asheville four months ago. We don’t hug upon my arrival. In fact, we don’t greet each other at all. There’s no eye contact during dinner, and no one-on-one conversation between us.
After our meal of roasted chicken, Grandma begins boiling the carcasses for what will become chicken soup. Jinx stands by awaiting his inevitable gravel and chicken dinner. We kids grab some beers and suggest a friendly game of Scattergories.
Mom’s in with a disclaimer: “You know I’ll lose, though!”
“Scatta-what?” Bruce says before declining—he’s got some (Bible) studying to do.
The following afternoon, Matt and I come in from our morning session at the beach, sun-soaked and hungry, tired from getting knocked around by the waves. We head straight to the kitchen to make sandwiches with the supplies we purchased the day before at the little co-op grocery store in Wilmington: turkey, tomatoes, organic mayo, pickles, and thick-sliced bread. But in the kitchen, we find Grandma on hostess duty with a ladle and a bowl asking if we’re ready for soup, as if it’s been decided that soup is what we’re all having for lunch. I can see across from the kitchen bar that it’s Grandma’s standard-issue preparation. There are the telltale carrot circles, celery halves, and those wide, wavy egg noodles.
I have to hand it to her. It smells good, but I’m not ready to give Grandma the pleasure. Plus, I honestly want a sandwich, and I want to make it myself. And like a toddler asserting her independence, I tell her so.
One night, later in the week, I watch as Grandma spoon-feeds Jinx one of her gravel and real-food mixtures. But Jinx, much to everyone’s surprise, is refusing to eat any of it. “You always eat the marinara sauce at home!” Grandma says to him, and then to herself, “I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.”
I can’t help but think that if Jinx, who is at least twenty pounds overweight (which puts him in the obese range for his breed) could talk, he would say something like: “Grandma! Please. I love you and the food you make, but I’m not a bottomless pit here to absorb your Depression-era food hang-ups. And I get full. I am full! So, just leave me be for a little while!”
But then I suppose this is part of the reason why she loves Jinx so much, why he gets her full supply of smiles and hugs, because Jinx will never say that. If anything, he’ll just lie back submissively and expose his belly for her to give a good scratch.
One month later, I turn twenty-six on a weekday in Wilmington without any major pomp or circumstance. When I get home from school, I head upstairs to my room to open a package from Matt. He’s on a Jonathan Lethem kick and has sent me a couple of his books. My mom and Bruce have sent me a check for $250, and last but not least, there’s a box from Grandma. I open it and find a standard Grandma-style birthday card—a seventies-era image of birds sitting on branches. On the inside is a stock birthday-card greeting underneath which she’s handwritten Love, Gram. I dig through the newspaper and find, packed between layers of bundled-up plastic grocery bags, a jar of mayonnaise, about three-quarters full.
I would have been more surprised, but it’s not just any jar of mayonnaise. It’s an organic brand, and I quickly recognize it as the exact jar Matt and I had brought to the beach house now over a month ago. We must’ve left it there. And Grandma, being Grandma, must have collected it, brought it back to Pittsburgh, packed it up and sent it via USPS (non -priority) back to me, its rightful owner, four weeks later.
Grandma has sent me lots of strange things in the mail over the years—an eye shadow kit with fifty different shades to choose from, bundles of Easter seals, and cat-themed calendar tea towels from the 1990s—but this mayonnaise certainly takes the cake.
Without giving it a second’s thought, I put it back in the box, walk downstairs, and throw it into the trash.
Though I won’t ever eat Grandma’s cooking as blindly or as willingly as I once did as a child, in a few years’ time, our relationship will slowly return to normal. I’ll stop refusing her dishes out of spite. I’ll eventually even make some of her famous lady lock cookies alongside her in her own mess of a kitchen. I guess, somewhere along the line, I finally forgive her, and though she never tells me as much, I assume she forgives me too.
I also like to assume that the irony of that afternoon at the beach house wasn’t wholly lost on her either; that when I wouldn’t eat any of her chicken soup, Matt—whom she had so summarily rejected, whom she had so wrongly lumped together with my dad as a bad match for her offspring—had smilingly obliged her, taking a bowl alongside his sandwich and even giving her a definitive “Mmm. That’s good soup!”
While I’m not exactly proud of the way I handled (and would continue to handle) my frustration with my mom and grandma, I do think that it’s normal and natural to come to the point in your adult life where you don’t have to eat whatever your parents or grandparents are serving up. This is my take on the classic chicken noodle soup. I’ve made just a few simple changes, but I really, wholeheartedly believe in these changes—the first being the crushed red pepper, the second being the mushrooms, and the third being the grated Parmesan on top. Please don’t skip the Parmesan! It takes it from delicious to crazy delicious.
SPICY CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP WITH MUSHROOMS
Adapted from Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food
Serves 3 to 4
For the chicken and broth:
2 chicken breasts (bone-in and skin-on if you’ve got them)
2 quarts chicken broth
½ medium onion, sliced
2 carrots, chopped
1 celery stalk, trimmed and chopped
Salt
For the rest of the soup:
Salt
8 ounces dried orzo pasta
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 carrot, sliced into rounds
1 celery stalk, diced
8 ounces button mushrooms, sliced
Grated Parmesan cheese
Combine the chicken and broth in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and skim any foam from the top. Add the onion, carrots, and celery and simmer for 40 minutes—this length of time will work for both boneless and bone-in breasts. Turn off the heat; carefully pull the chicken out of the broth and let cool. Strain the broth through a fine-mesh strainer (discard the vegetables) and reserve it in another saucepan. Skim the fat from the broth and season with salt. Set aside.
When the chicken breasts are cool enough to handle, shred the chicken by hand into bite-size pieces (removing the skin and bones and discarding them in the process). Put the meat into a bowl and set aside.
To finish the soup, bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add the orzo and cook, as long as directed on the packaging, until al dente. Drain, then rinse the pasta under cold water. Set aside.
Heat the oil in a stockpot over medium heat. Add the garlic and sauté until fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the reserved chicken broth, the crushed red pepper, onion, carrot, and celery and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the mushrooms and simmer for 5 more minutes, or until vegetables are softened.
Add the shredded chicken and cooked orzo and turn off heat. Taste and season with salt as needed. Serve with grated Parmesan.