Heartburn Read online

  I was living in New York at the time, and I heard about most of this from my sister Eleanor, who was perfecting her sanctimoniousness under the aegis of my mother’s progressive insanity, but I saw a little of it firsthand when my mother arrived in Manhattan one day with a ten-speed blender she had purchased for me with twenty-six books of blue-chip stamps. She had carried it onto the plane and held it on her lap all the way to New York. The next day my apartment was burglarized, and they took the blender, complete with warranty. They also took my typewriter, the television set, and my gold bracelet. My mother surveyed the wreckage and then, instead of just going out to buy a new blender for sixteen dollars, went off to the nearby A & P and spent six hundred dollars on groceries, just for the plaid stamps. Then she returned to my apartment and began pasting them into stamp books. That’s what she was doing when the police finally arrived—sitting there at the table, laughing her gravelly laugh and licking every so often as the two policemen told us what they thought were a lot of rollicking stories about New Yorkers who’d been burglarized of all the presents under their Christmas trees. We all had a drink, and then we all had another, and four hours later my mother was singing “When that midnight choochoo leaves for Alabam’ ” and the policeman whose lap she was sitting on was taking little nips at her shoulder. Then she got up and did a tap dance to “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and passed out in the middle of it. It was a fabulous pass-out as those things go. She was in midair when it happened—she had both her legs up to one side, and she’d just managed to click her heels together when her eyes clanged shut and she slid on one side of her leg to the floor. I put her to bed.

  “Was I very bad?” she said on the way to the airport the next day.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Please say I was,” she said.

  My father was a specialty act himself, though not in any formal sense. He was a character actor—he worked under the name of Harry Stratton, the name he still uses—but he played the kind of characters who have no character: he played kindly lawyers and kindly doctors and kindly teachers, and he said kindly things to whatever leading actor was about to lose heart in his fight to discover penicillin or defeat the outlaws or rout the Nazis. He made a lot of money—so did my mother—and they invested it in Tampax stock, and one day they were rich, and a good thing they were, because my mother’s medical bills were enormous. She drank and drank and drank and finally one day her stomach swelled up like a Cranshaw melon and they took her to a very fashionable hospital for rich people with cirrhosis and the doctors clucked and said there was nothing that could be done. My parents had moved to New York by this time, and my mother’s hospital room had a view of the East River. She lay there slowly dying, with my father impatiently standing by. “Pull the plug,” he would say to the doctors, and the doctors would calmly explain that there was no plug, there was just the wasting away of life. A few of her former clients came to see her—the scar faces frightened the nurses and the midgets made whoopee on the electric wheelchairs—and now and then she came into focus and made deals. “I think we can get you a hundred thou on the next one,” she would say; she hadn’t handled a client in years, but she went rattling on about points and box office and below the line and above the line. The nurse would bring lunch. “I think I’ll take it in the commissary,” she’d say. One day my father called and said, “You’d better come. I think this is it.” Of course, he telephoned every day and said that, but it always sounded like wishful thinking; now, finally, I knew he must be right. I went straight to the hospital, and when I went into her room she was sleeping. Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked at me. “I just screwed Darryl Zanuck on the remake,” she said, and gave a little croak, which I didn’t know at the moment was a significant thing, the actual croak—I thought it was just her gravelly laugh—and died.

  “Mother’s gone,” said the nurse. Not “Your mother” but “Mother.” I stared at the nurse, stunned not so much by my mother’s death, which after all had been promised for months and, as far as my father was concerned, was long overdue, but by the nurse’s presumption. “You can call your mother Mother,” I snapped, “but you can’t call my mother Mother.” The nurse gave me one of those withering looks that are meant to make you feel as if your thoroughly understandable rage is mere female hysteria. She pulled the sheet over my mother’s face. “We’re going to take Mother away now,” she said in a tone so condescending that I became even more wild with anger. “She’s not your mother,” I shouted. “On top of which, she’s not gone, she’s dead. Do you hear me? Dead. And what you’re going to take away is her body, so call it a body. Call it a corpse, for Christ’s sake.” The nurse was now looking at me with an expression of complete horror, which I thought at the time was on account of my behavior, but it wasn’t really; it was complete horror at what was happening behind me, which was that my mother had chosen that moment to make a full recovery. The sheet began rising like a slow-motion poltergeist, and then, in a burst, my mother whipped off the cloth and shouted: “Ta da!” Then she fainted. “Fainted dead away” is what the nurse said, which just goes to show you another anomaly of hospital life, which is that they only use the word “dead” when it doesn’t apply.

  “We thought you were dead,” I said a few minutes later, when my mother came to.

  “I was,” she said, “I was.” She shook her head slightly, as if trying to remember a fuzzy dream. “I floated away in a white organdy dress and black patent-leather Mary Janes,” she said. “I looked like Baby Snooks. I tried to get something to wear that was more dignified, but the dignified clothes were being used on another set.” She nodded; it was all coming back now. “I looked down, and there was your father, clicking a clapboard that read: ‘Bebe’s Death, Take One.’ The camera started rolling. I was floating further and further away. I was definitely dead. Your father sold the Tampax stock and bought himself a Borsalino hat. ‘Print,’ he said. ‘It’s a wrap.’ ” She began tapping her breastbone defiantly. “I was the one who sat next to Bernard Baruch at a dinner party in 1944 and heard him say, ‘Buy something people use once and throw away.’ I was the one who stuck a Tampax into my twat in 1948 and came out of the bathroom and said, ‘See if this is traded over the counter.’ I was the one who made us rich, and now the bastard is going off and spending my money on bimbos while I’m stuck in goyishe heaven in an inappropriate costume. Fuck this, I said to myself, and at that moment I came back.”

  The next day, when I went to see her, she was sitting up in bed smoking Kools and doing the Double-Crostic. “I have experienced a miracle,” she said. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It means there’s a God,” she said. “If you believe in miracles you have to believe in God. One follows from the other.”

  “No it doesn’t,” I said. “It doesn’t follow at all. It doesn’t have to be the sort of miracle someone’s in charge of. It could just have been an accident of some sort. Or a dream. Or a misdiagnosis on the part of the nurse.”

  My mother shook her head. “I was dead,” she said. “You should have seen it up there. Fluffy white clouds, and little angels with pink cheeks playing tiny harps.”

  “Lyres,” I said.

  “Miss Smart and her college education,” said my mother.

  A week later, she checked out of the hospital, filed for divorce, and went to New Mexico to find God. And she did. She found God and she married him. His name was Mel, he honestly believed he was God, and as my first husband Charlie said at the time, “If there’s one thing we know about God, it’s that he’s not named Mel.” Mel took my mother for every penny she had, plus Charlie’s old Swedish-modern couch and a set of flatware I was very attached to. Then she died again, this time for good.

  I would like to ask her what a person who is seven months pregnant is supposed to do when her husband turns out to be in love with someone else, but the truth is she probably wouldn’t have been much help. Even in the old days, my mot
her was a washout at hard-core mothering; what she was good at were clever remarks that made you feel immensely sophisticated and adult and, if you thought about it at all, foolish for having wanted anything so mundane as some actual nurturing. Had I been able to talk to her at this moment of crisis, she would probably have said something fabulously brittle like “Take notes.” Then she would have gone into the kitchen and toasted almonds. You melt some butter in a frying pan, add whole blanched almonds, and sauté until they’re golden brown with a few little burned parts. Drain lightly and salt and eat with a nice stiff drink. “Men are little boys,” she would have said as she lifted her glass. “Don’t stir or you’ll bruise the ice cubes.”

  three

  Maybe you think I walked out on Mark awfully fast if I was really so in love with him, but I probably wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for my therapist. I left that part out, and I hate to bring it up because until now you’ve been thinking that Mark was the one with the unconventional shrink, and now you’re going to see we both were. Oh, well. I have a therapist named Vera Maxwell. She’s fifty-eight years old and quite beautiful, she has creamy white skin and curly black hair and she wears bright red lipstick and caftans. She’s famous, really, she goes on talk shows and has a lot of celebrity patients, and every so often she has to fly off to co-host Merv Griffin, or she has to take a phone call in the middle of a session from someone having a crisis at the Cannes Film Festival.

  Vera is a wonderful therapist. She is loving, caring, giving and unrelenting. Of course, when I first went to her, I was unhappily married to Charlie, and now nine years had passed and I was unhappily married to Mark, and that might not sound like progress. But trust me. You’ll have to trust me, because there’s no real way to convey what she does in her office that doesn’t sound like some sort of Yiddish mumbo jumbo. She tells the kreplach joke a lot, and the one about the man from Minsk meeting the man from Pinsk. I will tell you the kreplach joke, but the truth is you need an accent to tell it well; I would throw in a recipe for kreplach as well, but it’s a pain in the ass to make kreplach.

  THE KREPLACH JOKE

  Once upon a time there was a little boy who hated kreplach. Every time he saw a piece of kreplach in the soup he screamed, “Aaaaah, kreplach!” So his mother decided to teach him not to be afraid of kreplach. She took him into the kitchen and rolled out some dough. “Just like a pancake,” she said. “Just like a pancake,” said the little boy. Then she took a piece of meat and rolled it into a ball. “Just like a meatball,” she said. “Just like a meatball,” said the little boy. Then she rolled up the meat in the dough and held it up. “Just like a dumpling,” she said. “Just like a dumpling,” said the little boy. Then she dropped it into the soup and put it in front of the little boy, and he screamed, “Aaaaah, kreplach!”

  Anyway, the thing about Vera is that she’s very direct; she’s not one of those shrinks who sit there impassively and say “Mmmmhmmm” every so often. After Mark told me he was in love with Thelma Rice and left me to be alone for a while, I called up Vera in New York and told her what had happened, and do you know what she said? She said, “He’s disgusting.” That threw me a little, because even though I knew that Vera was no slouch at calling a spade a spade, it seemed awfully strong.

  “What should I do?” I said.

  “What should you do?” Vera replied.

  That may not look like a direct response, but it was. She said, “What should you do?” with her voice rising on the word “do,” and it was as if there was only one possible thing to do and how could I possibly wonder what it was. But I hung in there; I tried to get her to be a little more specific.

  “Yes, what should I do?” I said.

  “Is this what you want?” Vera said. “Is this what you want in a husband?”

  Well, of course it wasn’t what I wanted in a husband. On the other hand, what I wanted in a husband was Mark. At least that’s what I’d thought I wanted. Could I help it if Mark didn’t measure up to Vera’s ideas of a husband? Vera has a husband to match her ideas—his name is Niccolo, and he has a white beard and he wears crisp seersucker suits and straw hats that he tips, and Vera says that the sex she has with Niccolo is as good after twenty years of marriage as it was in the beginning, which is almost the most depressing thing she says since no one else can say that except Vera, but if Vera says it there must be something to it; and what’s more, what’s worse in a way, is that Vera says she is never bored by Niccolo and he is never bored by her because they never tell the same stories twice. She told me this one day when I was still married to Charlie.

  “Never?” I said.

  “Never,” said Vera, but if she ever did tell a story twice, she said, she would change it around a little so that Niccolo would still find it interesting. Myself, I never change a story. I never even change an inflection in a story once it’s working. Mark, on the other hand, changes his stories every time he tells them, by making them longer. He has a story he tells about his first day of work in the newspaper business. He went to his office his first day in the newspaper business in a brand-new white suit, and they told him he had to wash the carbon paper, and he believed them, and he went into the men’s room and turned on the water and the carbon splattered all over his brand-new white suit. It’s a good story. Mark told it to me the night we met. We all have stories like that, stories we rely on to establish our charm in the beginning of relationships. I tell one about wanting to play the ukulele in the school orchestra. They asked me what instrument I wanted to play, and I said the ukulele, and they said, but there’s no ukulele in the school orchestra, and I said, then what can I play that’s like the ukulele, and they said the viola. That story doesn’t sound so charming on the page, but I tell it very well. In any case, by the time Mark fell in love with Thelma Rice, the story about his first day in the newspaper business had turned into a novella.

  “Well, is it?” said Vera. “Is this what you want in a husband?”

  “I guess not,” I said weakly, and left for the plane.

  I worry about telling you this kind of story. Psychoanalysis has done strange things to my dialogue, and when I talk about it I sound a little like one of those starlets on The Tonight Show who’s just stumbled onto Eastern philosophy or feminism or encounter therapy or any other system of thought that explains everything in the universe in eight minutes. Pick a dream, any dream—I’ll analyze it and give you a pep talk. This used to cause a lot of friction between me and Mark. When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was really his father and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister. That’s almost the only good thing I can say about Our Lady of the Castanets: Mark’s going to her at least ended our conflict over psychoanalysis. In fact, he was converted overnight. “What’s really bothering you?” he would say. Or: “What does that remind you of?” Or: “That sounds hostile to me.” Or: “I’m not your mother.” All this happened before we got married, and I found it incredibly seductive.

  So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes. There I was, a regular at the Thalia, a connoisseur of the latest goat cheeses, an expert on alternate routes to Long Island—there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel. I don’t mean to make it sound as if it’s all about being Jewish, but that’s another thing about Washington. It makes you feel really Jewish if that’s what you are. It’s not just that there are so many Gentiles there; it’s that the Gentiles are so Gentile. Listen, even the Jews there are sort of Gentile. Not that I complained. I can work anywhere, I said bravely. I had a new husband, and then I had a new baby, and then I had another baby coming, and meanwhile I had my friends and a kitchen stove with six burners. Uncle
Seymour’s Beef Borscht made the best-seller list and two weeks later I was in the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, 26 across—Uncle Seymour’s niece, it said.

  Every so often I would fly to New York for one thing or another, and would go by to see Vera. I had really graduated from therapy by then, but I liked to stop in for an oil check from time to time. I would tell her I was okay, really I was, I was working hard, things were good with me and Mark, the baby was wonderful, and then, after the session, I would walk into Balducci’s and there would be the arugola and radicchio and fresh basil and sorrel and sugar snap peas and six kinds of sprouts, and I would think to myself: Even the vegetables in New York are better.

  It’s not just the vegetables, of course. I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance. The little dance my heart was doing as I looked out the window of my father’s apartment was not exactly a polka, but at least I was where I wanted to be. If I couldn’t have Mark, I could finally be back making sorrel soup. Take 4 cups of washed sorrel and cut off the stems carefully. (If you don’t, the soup will be hairy, and no one will know it’s the sorrel’s hair and not the cook’s.) Sauté the sorrel in 4 tablespoons butter until wilted. Add 2 ½ quarts chicken stock and 4 chopped peeled potatoes. Cook 45 minutes until potatoes are tender. Purée in a blender and add salt, pepper and hot red pepper flakes. Chill and add more salt and the juice of 1 lemon and 1 cup heavy cream. Serve with lemon slices.