Free Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) by Amelia Morris

application process, Silvia knew that I was a vegetarian whose favorite breakfast was cereal and milk. At dinner that first night, she kept pointing to dishes, nodding as she said,
“sólo vegetales.”
And in the morning, she told me that she’d bought me some cereal. She opened a cupboard and retrieved a plastic produce bag filled with about a cup’s-worth of what looked like puffed rice. I thanked her, eating it with a bit of milk poured on top, but as soon as I saw what my Argentine brothers wereeating—thick slices of toast with dulce de leche spread on top—I told her that I liked toast too. And after a few days of salad and vegetables for dinner as the rest of the family ate ham and cheese empanadas and steaks off the grill, I wasn’t just hungry, I also felt rude.
    And so, at the end of the week, I told Silvia that I wanted to experience Argentina properly, and if that meant eating meat, I was up for it. Her face lit up immediately, and I braced myself for one of the top-ten strongest hugs of my life.
    Silently, though, I reassured myself that this was all just temporary. And as soon as I got back to the States, I could resume my vegetarian diet. Because, just like with Madrid and Costa Rica, I hadn’t necessarily signed up for an adventure. I had signed up for the opportunity to better my Spanish, to be able to put something on my résumé, and mostly, to have a place to lay my head that wasn’t the suburbs of Pittsburgh until graduate school started.
    But then, just a few weeks later, I got the news that I hadn’t been accepted into a single MFA program I had applied to. The decision letters arrived at Mom and Bruce’s, but I’d asked specifically that my brother be the one to relay the news to me. And he did so gently over e-mail.
Are you sure?
I wrote back, as if he might’ve read the letters incorrectly.
    Yeah
, he wrote.
I’m sorry
.
    Once again, I needed a new plan.

    My host mom, Silvia, was the opposite of both my parents in so many ways.
    My dad started smoking in his late thirties, I assume aroundthe time he started seeing Dolly, since he was
not
a smoker while with my mom.
    When I still lived in Saegertown, if I needed to talk to him, I would knock on the always-closed door to his study and call his name.
    “One minute!” he would say before opening the door, coming out, and shutting it behind him. “Yes, Honey Bun?”
    Of course, I could smell the smoke. I could always smell it, but it wasn’t until I’d found a pack of Marlboros in his leather coat pocket during the last year I lived there that I knew for sure Dolly wasn’t solely to blame for the pervasive stench. And though I was confused and upset, I never approached him about it. Not once.
    Silvia, on the other hand, had smoked since she was a teenager, and though her sons didn’t like the habit, she did so openly and unapologetically throughout the house.
    On the days my mom worked, she would come home deflated and exhausted, annoyed that Bruce hadn’t done anything for dinner, not even called for pizza to be delivered, whereas Silvia came home from work almost joyfully with an armful of groceries, which she would set down before pouring herself
un Gancia
—her favorite brand of vermouth—turning on some music, and dancing around the kitchen as she began to cook. Inevitably, as she danced, she would raise her arms above her head, revealing her tanned fifty-year-old belly, a small act but one that always surprised me sheerly because of its lack of self-consciousness. (As far as I knew, my own mother had no midriff.)
    While my dad was an outspoken atheist and Mom and Bruce were outspoken Christians, Silvia was neither. She didn’t go to church; she didn’t talk about God, yet every night, she slept beneath a giant crucifix, which hung on the wall aboveher bed. (This bed, by the way, was located a mere four feet to the left of my own—a proximity I got used to only because of how comfortable Silvia was with it: she undressed