Heartburn Page 5

  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 inexcusable as these things went. What made it inexcusable, as far as I was concerned, was not that she was black and fat and looked like a poppy seed cookie, but that my father, in marrying her, got her to do for nothing exactly what she had been doing for a rather pleasant salary; this, it seemed to me, was going too far in the Keeping Help department. What made it inexcusable as far as my sister Eleanor was concerned was that she was sure Amelia was after my father’s fortune. Since the Mel who thought he was God had already bankrupted my mother, Eleanor was positive the other half of the Tampax money would vanish as well and end up invested heavily in Amelia’s only vice: wigs. “She’s got at least forty of them now,” Eleanor would say. “Imagine how many she’ll have after he’s gone.”

  Once I tried to engage Eleanor on the question of whether Amelia and my father had ever slept together, but she was in such a rage about the marriage there was really no dealing with her; she couldn’t even enjoy empty speculation about it. Which was a shame, because Amelia was much too good-hearted to have been a gold digger, and she made my father happy, which is more than I can say of Eleanor and me, who were busy leading our own lives. Amelia cooked my father perfect meals and then sat down and giggled merrily at everything he said. In fact, she giggled merrily at everything everyone said. This put the burden of being amusing on whoever was with her, but my father loved it. My father occasionally says things like “A flying nun covers a multitude of sins” and then looks for a laugh, and it was a great comfort to him that Amelia was always good for one even if everyone else in the room was trying to ignore him.

  What a cook she was! Everything she made was the lightest, the flakiest, the tenderest, the creamiest, the whateverest. She would stand at the kitchen counter—kneading dough for yeast rolls, making curls from carrots, rolling butter into balls—and tell me her secrets. She knew the mystery of my grandmother’s cookies (sour cream), and she insisted there was only one true road to piecrust (Crisco). She had burn scars from her fingertips to her elbows, and she could tick them off: this one from a chicken fry for her mother’s ninetieth birthday, this one from the first time she made potato pancakes, this one from a cast-iron pot she’d tended over a fire when she was growing up in the bayou. I owe her a huge debt—and her ending up with a big chunk of my father’s money and a roomful of wigs would have been fine with me. But Amelia died after a year of marriage, and the only thing she ever got out of my father was a very nice grave somewhere in Louisiana.

  Here’s Amelia’s cheesecake recipe; she always said she got it from the back of the Philadelphia cream cheese package. Make a nice graham cracker crust and pack it into a 9-inch pie pan. Then mix 12 ounces cream cheese with 4 well-beaten eggs, 1 cup sugar and a teaspoon vanilla. Pour into the pie shell and bake 45 minutes at 350°. Remove and cool 15 minutes. Then spread gently with 2 cups sour cream mixed with ½ cup sugar and bake 10 minutes more. Cool and refrigerate several hours before serving.

  I took the subway to group. I always took the subway to and from Vera’s; it cleared my head. I sat down, remembered to twist my diamond ring inward so the muggers wouldn’t see it, and tried to concentrate on how I was going to tell the group what had happened to me. I felt mortified. Two years earlier, I had walked off into the sunset—cured! it’s a miracle! she can walk!—and now I was back again, a hopeless cripple. I looked around the subway car. A Japanese man was taking pictures of the passengers. He was undoubtedly a tourist, but he was making everyone in the car uncomfortable. I tried not to look at him, but it was impossible. Once I saw an exhibitionist on the subway, and I tried not to look at him, too, but the funny thing about exhibitionists—and the reason I’m never really offended by them—is that you can’t help sneaking a peek now and then to see if the damned thing is still sticking out. I looked at the Japanese man in a way that I hoped implied that I didn’t really care if he took my picture, and that if he did take my picture I didn’t really care that he was shooting my bad side, but then I decided I did care. So I smiled. I look much better when I smile. In fact, when I don’t smile, I look as if I’m frowning even though I’m not.

  The Japanese man took my picture and nodded his head to me in a grateful fashion. I nodded back, and a man in a plaid shirt sitting next to me looked at me and winked. I immediately wondered whether he was single, and if so, whether he was a college graduate and straight. Then I thought of how awful it would be to be single again, how awful to be back on the market with the old New York ratio going against me, two hundred single women to every straight single man, packs of Amazons roaming the streets looking in vain for someone genuinely eligible and self-supporting who didn’t mind a little cellulite. It was such a depressing thought that I almost began to cry—but then I remembered the Japanese man with the camera. I did not want anyone, even a stranger on the subway, to take a picture of me crying.

  The man in the plaid shirt winked again, and I realized that even if he was single and a college graduate and straight, the odds were unlikely that I would ever get involved with an indiscriminate winker at pregnant women on subways. Anyone who winks at pregnant women on subways must have something wrong with him, it seemed to me. Of course, everyone has something wrong with him, that’s for sure, but this guy probably had something really wrong. Perhaps he’s a rapist, I thought, or a mugger. I figured that in my present physical condition I was fairly safe from rapists, but in case he was a mugger and knew how to recognize a diamond ring even when it was turned inward, I twisted the ring off in what I hoped was a thoroughly discreet manner, made an ambiguous gesture as if I were pulling at the skin on my throat, and cleverly dropped the ring into my bra.

  The subway came to Union Square and I got out. There was Ellis. Ellis is in my group. He was buying popcorn at the nut stand in the subway station, and when he saw me he looked so pleased that he threw the entire contents of the box of popcorn over his head, and just stood there grinning as it settled onto and around him. He was like a livi
ng version of a snowman in a glass ball you shake the snow inside of. I was glad to see him, too, but I couldn’t tell him that because another rule of group is that members are not allowed to have conversations of any sort outside the group room, so we walked together without saying a word all the way to Vera’s office.

  Vera was sitting at the low, round table, opening the containers of food the group members had brought for lunch. Vanessa was there, and Eve and Diana and Sidney and Dan—and they clucked over the photographs of Sam and asked when the new baby was due and looked truly horrified when I told them why I was there.

  “My husband is in love with someone else” is hard to say flat out. “My husband thinks he’s in love with someone else” is as close as I came before bursting into tears. Even Diana looked truly horrified, which surprised me because Diana always gets a little smile on her face when something awful happens to me. Years earlier, I had come into group one day and burst into tears, and Diana had gotten that little smile on her face; she was really disappointed to discover that the reason I was crying was that I’d been assaulted by a cabdriver; no doubt she’d been hoping for a more personal tragedy, with longer-lasting effects. Well, now she had one.

  Sidney handed me a box of Kleenex. Sidney never really says much in group—he just passes the Kleenex and looks solicitous. I wiped my eyes and managed to stop sobbing long enough to get most of the story out. Then I burst into tears again, and so did Diana.

  “Why does everything happen to Rachel and nothing ever happens to me?” she cried.

  “Stick it up your ass, Diana,” said Ellis.

  “You’d like to, wouldn’t you?” said Diana. “That’s the only way you like it, I bet.”

  “I like it all ways, which is more than I can say for your husband,” said Ellis.

  “Who brought the chopped liver?” asked Dan.

  “I did,” said Eve.

  “Did you make it?” asked Dan.

  “I bought it,” said Eve. “Is that all right with you?”

  “I was about to tell you it was delicious,” said Dan. “Now I don’t feel like telling you.”

  “Nothing’s ever enough for you, is it?” said Eve.

  “Every week you complain about the food,” said Vanessa. “When’s the last time you brought food to group? When’s the last time you brought anything to group?”

  “What did I do now?” said Dan.

  “What did you do now?” said Eve.

  “You know what this reminds me of?” said Vera.

  “The old woman from Vladivostok and the camel,” said Ellis.

  “Please don’t tell that one again,” said Vanessa.

  “I won’t,” said Vera. “But that isn’t even the point. Why don’t you want to talk about Rachel?”

  “I’m too threatened to talk about Rachel,” said Eve. “I believe in Rachel. I believe in Rachel and Mark. If they can’t make it, who can?”

  “Vera and Niccolo,” said Ellis.

  “They don’t count,” said Vanessa.

  Everyone nodded glumly.

  “Who’s the other woman?” said Diana.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “It matters to Diana,” said Ellis. “All Diana cares about is finding out people’s last names.”

  I told them a little about Thelma. I said she had a nose as long as a thumb and walked like a penguin; that made me feel better. I said Mark was a schmuck; that made me feel even better. I told the part about all three of them going to see the Central American charlatan and her dwarf dog, and I said how unfair it was that I couldn’t even date.

  “She must be feeling better,” said Ellis. “She’s making jokes.”

  “She makes jokes even when she’s feeling terrible,” said Vera. “Don’t let her fool you.”

  “Why do you have to make everything into a joke?” asked Diana.

  “I don’t have to make everything into a joke,” I said. “I have to make everything into a story. Remember?”

  “How do you feel?” asked Eve.

  “Hurt. Angry. Stupid. Miserable.” I thought for a minute. “And guilty.”

  “You didn’t do this,” said Eve. “He did.”

  “But I picked him,” I said.

  “Anyone would have picked Mark Feldman,” said Vanessa.

  “No last names in group,” said Vera.

  “Anyway, it’s not over,” said Eve. “He’ll be back.”

  “And then what?” I said. “It’s like a beautiful thing that suddenly turns out to be broken into hundreds of pieces, and even when you glue it back together it’s always going to have been horribly broken.”

  “That’s what a marriage is,” said Sidney. “Pieces break off, and you glue them back on.”

  “Look at it this way,” said Vanessa, “it’s not a total loss. At least you got Sidney to say something.”

  Sidney looked quite pleased with himself.

  “Are you done, Sidney?” asked Ellis.

  “Yes,” said Sidney.

  “Because if you are,” said Ellis, “I just want to say that I don’t think that’s what a marriage is.”

  “That is what a marriage is,” said Dan. “After a certain point it’s just patch, patch, patch.”

  “That’s not what Vera and Niccolo’s marriage is,” said Eve.

  Everyone nodded glumly again.

  “Sometimes I wish you and Niccolo would get a divorce,” I said to Vera. “Your marriage is very hard on the rest of us.”

  “I saw Niccolo last week,” said Vanessa, “and he told me that occasionally at the end of the day he and Vera get irritable with each other.”

  “I would kill for merely irritable,” I said.

  “Under what circumstances did you see Niccolo last week?” Diana asked.

  “He and Vera came to a screening of my new movie,” said Vanessa.

  “And when you become a movie star, Diana, I’ll come to a screening of your new movie, too,” said Vera.

  “Thanks a lot,” said Diana. Diana is a computer programmer.

  “What do you want?” said Vanessa. “Mark is going to turn up, and you have to know what you want when he does.”

  I thought about it.

  “I want him back,” I said.

  “What do you want him back for?” said Dan. “You just said he was a schmuck.”

  “I want him back so I can yell at him and tell him he’s a schmuck,” I said. “Anyway, he’s my schmuck.” I paused. “And I want him to stop seeing her. I want him to say he never really loved her. I want him to say he must have been crazy. I want her to die. I want him to die, too.”

  “I thought you said you wanted him back,” said Ellis.

  “I do,” I said, “but I want him back dead.”

  I smiled. It was the first time I’d smiled about the situation. I looked around the room, expecting everyone to be smiling back, but they were all looking in my direction as if something strange was going on. Ellis was the first to speak. “You haven’t by any chance hired an assassin without telling us first, have you?”

  I turned to look behind me. A man wearing a nylon stocking over his head was standing at the door, holding a snub-nosed revolver. He grabbed me around the neck, pulled me to my feet, and pressed the gun against my temple. “On the table,” he said. “Money, jewelry, anything you’ve got that I want. Hold anything back and I’ll kill the lady just like this—” And for an instant, he aimed the gun at the wall, pulled the trigger and fired. Everyone jumped at the explosive crack and turned to watch a framed photograph of Theodor Reik break into shards and fall to the floor. A second later, a framed Chivas Regal ad with a caption that said “The bottle is either half empty or half full depending on how you look at it” fell off the wall, too.

  “I always hated that picture,” said Sidney.

  “This is not the time to talk,” said Vera.

  She took off the strands of antique beads from around her neck, and her three lacy wedding bands, and put them into the middle of the ta
ble. Everyone started to throw money onto the pile. Vanessa unsnapped the gold necklace she’d been given after something (though not that much) had happened between her and John Wayne in Mexico. Diana made a great show of removing her plastic bracelets and throwing them ceremoniously into the taramasalata.

  The man in the nylon stocking pressed the gun into my temple so hard that I almost cried out. I closed my eyes. “Your turn, lady,” he said.

  I could feel the diamond ring I had slipped into my bra pressing against my breast. Mark had given me the ring when Sam was born. We had gotten to the hospital when the contractions were coming only five minutes apart, and Mark sat in the labor room, next to me, holding my arm, whispering, singing, making little jokes, doing everything right. I’d been absolutely positive that he wouldn’t—that he’d turn into the kind of hopeless father who goes through the whole business under the delusion that it’s as much his experience as it is yours. All this starts in Lamaze classes, where your husband ends up thinking he’s pregnant, and let me tell you he’s not. It’s not his body, it’s not his labor, it’s not his pain—it’s yours, and does any man give you credit or respect for it? No. They’re too busy getting in on the act, holding their stopwatches and telling you when to breathe and when to push and taking pictures of the kid coming out all covered with goo and showing them to your friends at dinner parties and saying what a beautiful and moving experience it was. Not Mark. He just sat there helping me to get through, and he stayed completely calm when the doctor said there was something wrong, perhaps the umbilical cord was around the baby’s neck; and he looked so impassive when he glanced over at the fetal monitor and saw that the baby had stopped breathing that I didn’t even realize how serious the situation was; he just kept on whispering and singing and making little jokes as they rushed me into the operating room and knocked me out for the emergency Caesarean.