Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (15 page)

At this point, my brother and Jenny have been together for five years, and in that time, I’ve gotten to know her and her family quite well. Her dad, Wyatt, happens to be an incredibly warmhearted Episcopal priest, and so, in the hopes of satisfying
Mom and Bruce, Matt and I ask if he would marry us in a mostly Christian ceremony with just a few Jewish elements. Specifically, we’re planning on standing underneath a chuppah, on Matt wearing a kippah, and on breaking the glass at the end of the ceremony. Wyatt agrees.

Everyone seems happy with this arrangement until for some reason, a mere week before the wedding, my brother tells my mom that we’ve asked Jenny’s dad not to use the name Jesus in the ceremony. Though this is something we had discussed with Wyatt months ago and something that Wyatt had agreed upon months ago, since my mom is just now finding out about it, she is newly appalled.

When I call my brother and ask him why he would tell Mom this, especially a week before the wedding, an epic fight ensues between us, one of the results of which is that he and Jenny will no longer be doing us the favor of picking up our guests at the Wilmington airport and bringing them to the ferry terminal, a forty-five-minute drive that I didn’t want my friends to have to make via taxi. (Full disclosure: We were paying Jenny $500 to act as our wedding coordinator, which is part of the reason why I thought tasking them with airport pickups would be OK, the other part of the reason being that he’s my brother and she’s my good friend.)

Matt and I are obviously the next choices to fill in. So, we spend the day in two different cars, taxiing groups of people—many of whom are my parents’ friends—from the airport to the ferry. (Double full disclosure: The day of, my brother offers to help make the airport runs after all, but in my typical cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face fashion, I won’t let him.
Don’t do me any favors, Bill!
)

Everyone’s flights are on time. The only problem is that two of my friends, Liz and Ryan, who have come in all the way from London, have lost their luggage along the journey. The good news is that the airline locates the missing bags and we’re told that they should arrive at the Wilmington airport by eight that evening.

And since I’m driving back and forth between the airport and the ferry terminal for the next five hours and I haven’t seen Liz and Ryan in almost two years, they decide to hang out with me in the car as I chauffeur. And as I’m driving a borrowed SUV that seats seven, not only is there room for them to hang out, I’m happy to have the company.

By my last pickup at six-thirty, the car has become a mini-reunion of my college friends and their husbands. Everyone is so happy to see each other that no one wants to go to the ferry. They all want to wait with me, Liz, and Ryan in the short-term parking until eight when their bags hopefully arrive.

Meanwhile, my mom has spent the day cooking dinner to feed my nearest and dearest. I’d originally told her we could eat at sevenish, and when I call to tell her that the best-case scenario is that we’ll catch the eight forty-five ferry, she doesn’t sound too happy.

When the luggage does arrive and we do catch the eight forty-five ferry, everyone, particularly my London friends who have been traveling for more than thirty-six hours, is exhausted. They just want to shower and go to bed. I understand. I want to do the same. I tell them I’ll send my mom their regrets.

I arrive at my mom’s beach rental to deliver the news and find a somber scene awaiting me. The lights are dim. Bowls of dinner-party-ready food are covered in foil. I know she’s going
to be upset, but it’s now after nine o’clock. We’ve all had long days. I hope she can understand.

She can’t. She starts crying. “I made all this food.”

But I’m not in the mood to console her.
I
want to be consoled. For lunch I had a packet of peanut-butter crackers while driving.
I
want to cry, to be taken care of, to be the kid in this scenario. I want her to offer to fix me a plate of food, to thank me for picking everyone up, to apologize for originally rejecting Matt because of his Jewishness, to apologize for telling me my own dad couldn’t walk me down the aisle, to sympathize with me that Dad is who he is and that his mother is who she is; I want her to recognize the irony in the way she’s been calling for all of these Christian elements in the ceremony when she herself seemed to refuse the one Christian dictum I liked best: to
love all
. And maybe, just maybe—and I know this is pushing it—she could momentarily side with me and tell me how lame it was for Jenny to bail on me after we paid her $500.

But instead of crying, I opt for yelling. “What do you want me to do? They all needed to shower. They’re tired. This isn’t about
you
!”

To which, she turns around, cries more audibly, and runs off to her bedroom.

But I’m not done with this conversation. I follow her, determined, passing through the living room where my aunt and uncle are working on a jigsaw puzzle.

Inside her bedroom, she’s crying even harder. “We made all this food and now no one is going to eat it!”

“
I’m
here. I’ll eat it! I’ve hardly eaten anything all day!”

She retreats to the bathroom. But she can’t shake me that easily. I follow her again and watch as she slides down the bathroom wall and curls into a ball. “I can’t do anything
right,” she says through her tears. “I can never do anything right.”

She looks so sad and pathetic on the floor, head in her hands. And this is when I finally remember that my mom’s not like me.

She can’t go on and on, round after round of intense confrontation. I’m like the Russell Crowe character in
Gladiator
—thrown into the middle of the Colosseum taking on bad guy after bad guy until I’ve become a well-honed killing machine. First opponent was my mom; next was Grandma; then my mom again; then my dad; then my other grandma; then my brother and his girlfriend; and at this point, my fists seem to be permanently up, ready to fight.
Who else has something to say about this wedding? Huh? Do you?
[Swings around quickly in a boxer’s stance and with chin jutted.]
What about
you
?

But seeing my mom curled into a ball on the bathroom floor of this rented beach house is enough for me to call a truce already. “C’mon, Mom,” I say softly, kneeling down. “I’ll call them and see if I can round them up, OK?” She doesn’t say anything. “I’ll get them to come over, OK?”

She nods.

And soon, Mom’s back in the kitchen. She tosses her Caesar salad with dressing and takes the foil off the large bowl of Ina Garten’s roasted shrimp and orzo. A fruit salad with brown banana slices—clearly made by Grandma—also emerges. And soon enough, my friends and their husbands start to trickle in. Soon enough, it almost feels like a party.

Two days later, Matt and I are married.

If you look through our wedding pictures, it looks like
we pulled it off after all, that everyone came together in the end; that we managed to merge our two families’ faiths into one beautiful, harborside, dare-I-say Martha-Stewart-esque celebration.

But looks can be deceiving.

Just as my Martha Stewart-esque acorn squash soup fell short on taste, if you peer a bit more closely at our wedding pictures, you might notice the careful, calculated physical distance placed between the various relatives from my side of the family not speaking to one another; you might see the tension between me and my brother, or me and both of my grandmas. And though our priest ended up not mentioning Jesus by name, you might argue that
He
won out anyway, as the photos also reveal seaside gusts of wind so strong that the chuppah Matt’s mom made wouldn’t stay in place, nor would the kippah he tried to wear.

And even though it’s standard for everyone to comment otherwise, to gush as if the wedding day is a woman’s beauty zenith, you’d see how tired and worn-out I look. My skin is thin and dark under the eyes, and my dress is a bit too loose from my first-time-ever sudden loss of appetite during those last weeks before the wedding.

When I was a beginner cook, Martha Stewart’s recipe for acorn squash soup, with its simple list of ingredients and accompanying image of a pale orange purée in two matching white mugs, appealed to me.
I could do that
, I thought. And I did. Sort of.

As a twenty-six-year-old (read: beginner) bride,
Martha Stewart Weddings
, with its pretty brides, handsome grooms, happy guests, and charming DIY favors, appealed to me.
I could do that
, I thought. And I did. Sort of.

But recipes don’t come with years of hands-on kitchen experience. And wedding magazines don’t come with bold disclaimers on what a wedding really is: a high-stakes family gathering with multiple hosts. If anything, the disclaimer is: Get ready for the best day of your life!

But if it weren’t called a
wedding
, would you really think that hosting a dinner party for ninety-six people and budgeting for it and trying to look your prettiest while doing so would be one of the best of your lives?

No.

Besides, perhaps the best day of my life is yet to come.

What about the day when quitting my day job doesn’t sound impossible? What about the day we buy our first home? Or what about that one day we already had? We were in Big Sur for Sara and Sean’s wedding. We woke up on Saturday to a big country breakfast, then walked the beach with our friends—it was late October and all of us were bundled up in our corduroys and sweaters. Matt and I went back to our log cabin of a room to clean up and accidentally took a nap instead so that we had to get dressed in two minutes to make it to the ceremony on that bluff overlooking the Pacific where Sara told Sean, “I give you my heart, the greatest gift I have to give,” and afterward, as the sun went down, we ate dinner and drank champagne and danced in that crisp ocean-mountain air. My favorite picture of us is from that day. It’s taken from far, far away. We’re standing on the beach, and my back is to the camera and Matt is hugging me and someone’s dog is walking by.