Heartburn by Nora Ephron Read Free Book Online Page A

imagine that I’d ever be my normal shape again. I will be seven months pregnant forever, I thought, as the tears started to drip slowly into myears, and after that I will be eight months pregnant forever, and after that I will be nine months pregnant forever. The only men I’d have a shot at would have to be used to thoroughly misshapen women, and that pretty much ruled out everyone but doctors. Under other circumstances, doctors would never have crossed my mind. I went out with one when I was in college. I was suffering from a finger that got abscessed when I stuck a ballpoint pen into a hangnail. He took one look at it and said, “Abscesses. Diabetes.” This terrified me, because it’s always seemed to me that there’s a lot of diabetes among Jews, even though it’s hard to pin anyone down on the question. Once, in fact, I tried to; I met a diabetes specialist, and I said to him, “May I ask you a question?”
    He replied: “You want to ask me if Jews have more diabetes than anyone else.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Everyone asks me that,” he said. “They don’t. There’s a sect in India that has more diabetes than Jews.”
    This reminded me of those feminists who are always claiming that male domination is not the natural state because there’s one tribe in New Guinea where the men lie around weaving and the women hunt bears. Anyway, I didn’t have diabetes, I merely had an abscessed finger. I have never since been remotely interested in doctors. But who else would bother with me? There I was, seven months gone, swaybacked, awkward, bloated, logy, with a belly button that looked like a pumpkin stem and feet that felt like old cucumbers. If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters. The beginning is glorious, especially if you’re lucky enough not to have morning sickness and if, like me, you’ve had small breasts all your life. Suddenly they begin to grow, and you’ve gotthem, you’ve really got them, breasts, darling breasts, and when you walk down the street they bounce, truly they do, they bounce bounce bounce. You find yourself staring in the mirror for long stretches of time, playing with them, cupping them in your hands, pushing them this way and that, making cleavage, making cleavage vanish, standing sideways, leaning over, sticking them out as far as they’ll go, breasts, fantastic tender apricot breasts, then charming plucky firm tangerines, and then, just as you were on the verge of peaches, oranges, grapefruit, cantaloupes, God knows what other blue-ribbon county-fair specimens, your stomach starts to grow, and the other fruits are suddenly irrelevant because they’re outdistanced by an honest-to-God watermelon. You look more idiotically out of proportion than ever in your life. You feel such nostalgia for the scrawny, imperfect body you left behind; and the commonsense knowledge that you will eventually end up shaped approximately the way you began is all but obliterated by the discomfort of not being able to sleep on your stomach and of peeing ever so slightly every time you cough and of leaking droplets from your breasts onto your good silk blouses and of suddenly finding yourself expert in mysteries you hadn’t expected to comprehend until middle age, mysteries like swollen feet, varicose veins, neuritis, neuralgia, acid indigestion and heartburn.
    Heartburn. That, it seemed to me as I lay in bed, was what I was suffering from. That summed up the whole mess: heartburn. Compound heartburn. Double-digit heartburn. Terminal heartburn. The tears poured from my eyes as I lit on the image, and the only thing that might have made it even more satisfyingly melodramatic and masochistic would have been to be lying in the bathtub; nothing like crying in the tub for realself-pity, nothing like the moment when every last bit of you is wet, and wiping the tears from your eyes only means making your face even wetter.
    I considered staying in bed all day. I considered getting out of