There are ingredients in the refrigerator for pizza. This is Mom’s unspoken, unspeaking way of telling me that I should make pizza for dinner. I typically make something for myself before she comes home, but some days she requests homemade pizza. It’s what we have that passes for tradition.
I assembled my first homemade pizza three years ago, when I was eleven. In a mandatory home ec class in middle school, we made French bread pizzas, twenty-one eleven-and twelve-year-olds slopping sauce onto bread, sprinkling plasticky shredded mozzarella over it, then shoving the whole dripping mess into the school’s ovens.
Somehow, this fascinated me. The too-browned, soggy results of the culinary experiment resembled actual pizza closely enough that I was captivated, stunned that something hitherto conjured only from a cardboard delivery box could be brought into existence with my own two hands. It was all I talked about for days, until Mom finally bowed to my insistence and allowed me to make pizza for lunch one Saturday.
The results were less impressive than in home ec, as impossible as that seemed, and Mom declared that we would henceforth “do this right.” She downloaded a guide to making homemade pizza, and my obsession was born. I wanted to go back to the beginning, to the raw ingredients. I learned how to use the big stand mixer and make my own dough. I sliced the slightly gelatinous bulbs of mozzarella. While at first I used store-bought sauce, I eventually unearthed a good and not-too-difficult recipe online and began making my own. I wanted to smoke my own meats for sausage and pepperoni, but Mom drew the line there.
From the ingredients she’s assembled, tonight looks like pesto and chicken pizza, one of my favorites. The dough ball is already thawed in the fridge; I like the sensation of kneading it, its elasticity, its pliability. I flour the counter and roll out a crust measuring about fourteen inches across. Just enough for two people. I crimp the edges with my fingers.
I slice mozzarella into discs. Shredding it gives a more even coverage, but I like the look of the slices after they’ve melted. I chop the chicken and scrounge in the fridge for the remains of an onion. Mom always forgets the onion. “You can just use onion powder,” she likes to say, but it’s not the same. Not at all.
I sauté the chicken and onion together in some olive oil, toss in some fresh grated pepper, and preheat the oven as high as it can go.
The pesto—not homemade, I regret; Mom still hasn’t bought a food processor—gets spooned onto the crust first. A little goes a long way. I want just a glistening sheen of green and black, not a sludge. Then I add the slices of mozzarella, aiming for maximum coverage without any sort of noticeable pattern.
The chicken and onions go on last. Almost last. After they’re distributed across the pie, something looks off, so I grate some parmesan and sprinkle it over the whole thing.
That works.
I crank out my homework while the oven finishes preheating. There’s little to do this late in the year, so it doesn’t take long.
My culinary pride and joy—a pizza stone Mom bought me for Christmas last year—rests hot and ready on the center rack of the oven. First I sprinkle it with a little cornmeal (to keep the crust from sticking) and then, with a pizza peel, I transfer my creation to the stone.
The pizza’s done by the time Mom walks in the door ten minutes later, the cheese bubbling and perfectly pocked with brown, the crust tanned and only the slightest bit yielding.
“Your timing is impeccable,” Mom says, pecking me on the forehead. I wait until she turns around to put her purse down before rubbing the kiss-spot on my forehead with the palm of my hand.
“It needs a couple of minutes to cool,” I remind her as I paddle the pizza out of the oven and set it on the counter. “Otherwise the cheese will go all over the place when I cut it.”
“Well, I’ll go wash up and get out of these shoes.”
A few minutes later, we’re at the table, eating in silence. I would rather be watching TV. Or eating alone.
But I just eat. Because there are things we do.
“This is really good,” Mom says, and I grunt, “Uh-huh,” because if I say nothing, she gets angry, and I don’t like to make her angry. Not because of anything she does or says when she’s angry, but just because making her angry makes me sad. She doesn’t deserve it.
“It really hits the spot,” she goes on.
“Uh-huh.”
There’s a familiar tone in her voice. It’s the I have something to say, but I don’t want to just jump right into it, so I’ll do chit-chat first tone. I know it well.
“Sebastian, could you at least look at me when I talk to you?”
With a slow, infinite effort, I lift my gaze to her. She smiles that gauzy smile.
“Was that so difficult?”
“Compared to what?”
The smile widens almost imperceptibly. “I think we should talk.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now? Have I been misled my whole life?”
“I’m thinking we should talk about what you’re going to do this summer.”
A shrug. “I’ll get by.”
“No. I don’t want you lazing around like last summer.”
“Last summer was pretty great. I didn’t laze. I was hanging out with Evan.”
“And what did you two accomplish?”
Touché.
“You’re fourteen now. Old enough to get a summer job.” Before I can protest too vociferously, she forestalls me with a raised palm. “Or do something productive. It doesn’t have to be a job. Just something worthwhile.”
“Evan isn’t getting a job.” Evan will be headed to something called Young Leaders Camp, a hellish mix of Model UN and overnight camp, spliced with the DNA of a tech start-up incubator. It’s what rich kids do with their idle time as they await their Ivy League acceptance letters and keys to the Congressional washroom.
This is an argument I know is doomed to immediate failure, and—truth be told—I only offer it halfheartedly.
Mom doesn’t disappoint. The words rich, family, and not the same are employed rather effectively in a mix of others.
“I want you to know how proud I am of you,” Mom says slowly, so slowly that I almost believe her. “You take care of yourself. You aren’t mixed up in anything crazy. I don’t have to worry about you.”
“But you’re in high school and you’re going to be a sophomore. You’re going to graduate sooner than you think. And I’m not saying that you need to figure your life out right here, right now, or even this summer, but, Sebastian… honey, you need to start at least thinking about it.”
I shrug. A shrug is, by definition, a noncommittal action, but I do my best to add further noncommitment to it. I don’t want to think about or start thinking about figuring out my life, for whatever it’s worth.
“You can’t drift your whole life. You can’t give up on your future because of what happened—”
And almost without realizing, I’m telling her to shut up.
And she won’t, so I’m telling her to seriously shut up, to shut her big fat stinking mouth, and she’s a blur through my tears and I can’t hear her voice through my own yelling—
—I don’t know when I started yelling—
—as I’m up from the table—
—running—
—bathroom—
—just in time—
—tears and snot and then leaning over the toilet, vomiting chicken and pesto and mozz and parm and the crust, all of it gone, a green-gray sludge floating there as I spit the last bits into the water, crouched down, clinging to the tank and the rim of the bowl as though I could fall in and drown.