Heartburn by Nora Ephron Read Free Book Online Page B

bed and into the bathtub and staying
there
all day. I wondered if even considering these two alternatives constituted a nervous breakdown. (Probably not, I decided.) I contemplated suicide. Every so often I contemplate suicide merely to remind myself of my complete lack of interest in it as a solution to anything at all. There was a time when I worried about this, when I thought galloping neurosis was wildly romantic, when I longed to be the sort of girl who knew the names of wildflowers and fed baby birds with eyedroppers and rescued bugs from swimming pools and wanted from time to time to end it all. Now, in my golden years, I have come to accept the fact that there is not a neurasthenic drop of blood in my body, and I have become very impatient with it in others. Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.
    I picked up the remote control unit and turned on the television set. There was Phil Donahue. He was interviewing five lesbians, who had chosen the occasion of their appearance on Donahue to come out of the closet. I could just imagine the five of them, waiting through the years for the right offer, turning down Merv, turning down Kup, turning down Cavett, watching contemptuously as their friends chose mundane occasions like Thanksgiving with Mom and Dad for the big revelation, waiting for the big one, Phil himself, to finally come clean. I contemplated lesbianism. Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to the shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble. It occurred tome that if I stayed in bed much longer, I would be forced to watch a soap opera. That seemed redundant, so I got up and went to group.
    Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t mention my group. There’s a real problem in dragging a group into a book: you have to introduce six new characters, bang bang bang, six new characters who are never going to be mentioned again in any essential way but who nonetheless have to be sketched in, simply because I can’t really leave out of this story what happened to my group. Maybe you remember reading about it, I don’t know. You’d probably remember if you did—because Vanessa Melhado is in my group. The advantage of having Vanessa Melhado in my group is that at least I don’t have to introduce all six patients, since you’ve seen at least one of them in the movies. The other patients I’m going to have to describe by first name only: one of the many rules of group therapy is that you’re not to know anyone’s last name. With Vanessa, of course, you can’t help knowing, she’s too famous; and when my books started being published, everyone in the group learned mine; but until we all ended up on the front page together, we never knew anyone else’s.
    I hadn’t been to my group in two years; when I moved to Washington, I’d graduated. The group held a special session in my honor, and it was really quite lovely. Everyone managed to say nice things to me except Diana, and I managed to say nice things to everyone except Diana, and Eve brought
grieven
, which are pieces of rendered chicken fat cooked with onions, and Ellis brought champagne, and even Dan, who never brings food and when he does it’s only a tiny little container of cole slaw that doesn’t go around, even Dan brought a cheesecake I’d given him the recipe for.
    I got the cheesecake recipe from my father’s second wife, Amelia, who was my family’s housekeeper for years before she married him. Amelia, in fact, was what people were referring to when they said my mother was so gifted at Keeping Help. She was black—high yellow, to be exact—and ample (I think ample would be a polite way of describing her size) and covered with so many moles that she looked like a poppy seed cookie. And although it was clear that my father married her mostly to get even with my mother for marrying the Mel who thought he was God, it was still pretty