Heartburn by Nora Ephron Read Free Book Online

baby,” said my father.
    “Of course there’s something she can do,” said Jonathan. “She can come back to him. If we both stick with it, we can sit this thing out.”
    “Jonathan is the undersecretary of state in charge of Middle Eastern affairs,” I said.
    My father looked at Jonathan. “I suppose they don’t give that job to Jews,” he said.
    “That’s right,” said Jonathan.
    “You want to make a pact with someone,” said my father, “go call up the president of Egypt. Leave Rachel out of this.” Then he told Jonathan to have a nice flight back and showed him to the door. Then he telephoned Lucy Mae Hopkins, the maid, and asked her to move into the apartment for a while to help take care of Sam. Then he called the Chinese restaurant down the block and ordered shrimp fried rice, which is something I love to eat when I’m feeling blue, shrimp fried rice with Chinese mustard and ketchup. Then, after Lucy Mae and the Chinese food arrived, he announced that he was going back to the loony bin because there wasn’t room for all of us to sleep in the apartment.
    “Men,” he said as he left. “I hate them. I’ve always hated them. You wonder why I always hang around with womenand never with men, it’s because men do things like this.” He waved his hand vaguely at me and my stomach, and jogged off into the night.
    Of course, I knew he wasn’t going back to the loony bin at all; he was going to see Frances. Frances is my father’s mistress. She works at a paper company, and she has remained true to my father even though he keeps marrying other women and leaving her with nothing but commissions on his stationery orders. He orders an enormous amount of stationery, partly to keep a hand in with Frances, partly to have plenty of pieces of paper on which to write to me and my sister Eleanor about his will. Two or three times a month, my father threatens to cut me out of his will, and then he changes his mind, and each of these developments requires a letter. He also writes a lot of letters to Frances, promising that he’ll end up with her eventually; I know this because once he accidentally put a letter to her into an envelope to me and vice versa. Frances got very excited when she opened the letter meant for me, because it had no salutation and she thought he was cutting
her
out of his will, which she hadn’t realized she’d been written into in the first place. Why she puts up with him I don’t know. Why any of us puts up with him I don’t know. The truth is that if my father weren’t my father, he would be one of the men he hates; he is incorrigibly faithless and thoroughly narcissistic, to such an extent that I tend to forget he’s also capable of being a real peach.
    (Another thing I like to eat when I’m feeling blue is bacon hash. Cut some bacon into small pieces and start to cook it over a slow flame so that some of the fat is rendered. Then add diced cooked potatoes and cook slowly until the potatoes and bacon are completely crunchy. Eat with an egg.)

four
    T he shock of catapulting from the peanut-butter-and-jellyness of my life into High Drama was so great that the first morning I woke up, I was honestly stunned to discover it wasn’t all a bad dream. That’s a hopelessly banal metaphor, but that’s just what it felt like, one of those bad dreams in which you realize you’re having a bad dream and then you wake up in the dream to the same old bad dream—the dream equivalent of the cereal box with the baby on it eating breakfast next to the cereal box with the baby on it eating breakfast, forever and ever.
    By the second morning, I’d given up on that. I woke up and lay there, watching the baby inside me make waves on my belly, and wondered what would become of me. Mark would turn up eventually, of course—but what if he didn’t? What would I do? Where would I live? How much money would I need? Who would sleep with me? This last question interested me deeply, because I couldn’t