Heartburn by Nora Ephron Page A

head.”
    “Just because you don’t think it’s funny doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s funny,” said Mark. “Maybe I can get a column out of it.” He began to nod slowly, the way he does whenever he gets an idea for a column and it’s just started ticking away. Mark writes three columns a week, and while most of them are about political life, just enough of them are about domestic life that I sometimes felt as if I were living with a cannibal; things barely finished happening before Mark was chewing away at them, trying to string them out, turn them upside down, blow them up into 850 words for tomorrow’s newspaper. Sometimes, when he was really worried about what to write about next, he would sit at dinnertime, his eyes darting desperately around the room. Was there a column in the salt and pepper shakers? In the paper napkins? In the Cuisinart food processor? “Have you noticed how hard it is to peel a hard-boiledegg?” he’d say. “Yes,” I’d say. “You think there’s anything to it?” he’d say. Or: “Have you noticed that English muffins don’t taste as good as they used to?” he’d say. “Yes,” I’d say. “You think there’s anything to it?” he’d say. I don’t mean to sound innocent and passive about all this; I loved looking for things for Mark to write columns about. I brought home anecdotes about parking lot attendants and supermarket checkers for him to munch on. In fact, it occurs to me that one of the reasons I sometimes felt that nothing had happened to me since my marriage was that every time something
did
happen, Mark got a column out of it and in essence made it all seem as if it had happened to him. You should see the column he got out of Mr. Abbey’s murder.
My
murder, my very own personal murder, and he ran off with it and turned it into an essay on homosexuals and urban crime and practically got us all killed by the Gay Rights League. He even raided Sam’s life. Sam was barely two years old, and the column about the time he swallowed the nail polish remover had run in 109 papers and the one about his first dead guppy was about to be anthologized by the Oxford University Press. Someday Sam was going to grow up and sit down to write about his life and there wouldn’t be anything left of it to write about.
    “You can’t get a column out of my group’s robbery,” I said.
    “Why not?” said Mark.
    “Because it happened to
me
,” I said. “On top of which, it was really awful.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Mark. “Did he hurt you?”
    “He twisted my arm,” I said.
    “Show Daddy where,” said Mark.
    “Oh, shut up,” I said. Then I smiled. I couldn’t help it. And so did he.
    “I’ll buy you another ring,” said Mark.
    “We don’t have the money for another ring,” I said.
    “That’s true,” said Mark. “We didn’t even have the money to insure this one.”
    We sat and looked at each other for a moment.
    “It’s sort of fitting,” I said.
    “Meaning what?” said Mark.
    “Meaning it was a symbol of how good things were, and now that things aren’t, it’s just as well it’s not here to remind me.”
    “I hate it when you say things like that,” said Mark.
    “I know,” I said. “Do you still love her?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
    “But you’re not going to see her anymore,” I said.
    “I already said that,” he said.
    “And the two of you aren’t going to see that Guatemalan frittata together anymore, either.”
    “Rachel.”
    “Just say yes or no.”
    “I told you I wasn’t going to see Thelma anymore, so obviously we’re not going to see Dr. Valdez together anymore, either.”
    “Good,” I said.
    “Thelma doesn’t really believe in that stuff anyway,” he said.
    “I wouldn’t either,” I said, “if all I had to go on was that refried taco who calls herself a therapist.”
    “Rachel.”
    “Yes.”
    “If we leave now we can make the last plane.”
    The last Eastern Airlines shuttle between