by Nora Ephron
I have thought about their remarks, tried to put myself in their place, considered their point of view. I think they are full of shit.
—May 1972
The Mink Coat
I think it was about 1954 when my mother got her mink. A Beverly Hills furrier had run into some difficulty with the Internal Revenue Service and he was selling off his coats. My mother would never have bought anything wholesale—she disapproved of it on grounds that I never understood but later came to suspect had something to do with being the daughter of a garment salesman—but there was a distinction between buying wholesale and getting a good price. She got a good price. It was an enormous mink. A tent. It came to her ankles, and at least two people could have fitted under it. The skins were worked vertically. I did not know this at the time. I did not know much of anything at the time, much less anything about the way mink skins were worked. A few years later, when I knew, all the furriers in America decided to work the skins horizontally; when I heard about it, I instantly understood that it would not make her happy to be wearing an Old Mink. But she always pretended that things like that meant nothing to her. She was a career woman who was defiant about not being like the other mothers, the other mothers who played canasta all day and went to P.T.A. meetings and wore perfume and talked of hemlines; she hated to shop, hated buying clothes. Once a year, after my father had nagged her into it, she would go off to a fashionable ladies’ clothing store on Wilshire Boulevard and submit to having a year’s supply of clothing brought to her in a dressing room larger than my current apartment. She grumbled throughout. I thought she was mad. Now I understand.
My guess is that my father paid for the mink, wrote the check for it—but he did not buy it for her. My parents worked together, wrote together, and there was no separation between his money and hers. That was important. Beverly Hills was a place where the other mothers wore minks their husbands had bought them. They would come to dinner. The maid would bring the coats upstairs and lay them on my mother’s bed. Dozens of them, silver, brown, black, all of them lined with what seemed like satin and monogrammed by hand with initials. I would creep into the bedroom and lie on the bed and roll over them and smell the odd and indescribable smell of the fur. Other children grow up loving the smell of fresh-cut grass and raked leaves; I grew up in Beverly Hills loving the smell of mink, the smell of the pavement after it rained, and the smell of dollar bills. A few years ago, I went back to Beverly Hills and all I could smell was jasmine, and I realized that that smell had always been there and I had never known it.
My mother wore the mink for years. She wore it through the horizontal period and into another vertical period, but it never became fashionable again; by the time vertical skins were back, furriers were cutting minks close and fitted. Eventually, she stopped wearing it and went back to cloth coats. She and my father had moved back to New York and she had less patience than ever for shopping. And then she was sick and went to bed. One Thanksgiving she was too sick to come to the table. My mother loved Thanksgiving almost as much as she loved making a show of normal family life. I knew she was dying.
The months went by, and she hung on. In the hospital, then out, then back in. She was drugged, and wretchedly thin, and her throat was so dry, or so clogged with mucus, that I could not understand anything she tried to say to me. If I nodded at her as if I understood, she would become furious because she knew I hadn’t; if I said, “What?” or, “I don’t understand,” she would become furious at the effort it would take to say it again. And I was furious, too, because I was there for some kind of answer—what kind of answer? what was the question? I don’t know, but I wanted one, a big one, and there was no chance of getting it. The Thorazine kept her quiet and groggy and hallucinating. When the nurse would bring in lunch, soft food, no salt allowed, she would look around almost brightly and say, “I think I’ll take it in the living room.” I would become so angry at her at moments like that, so impatient. I wanted to say, damn you, there is no living room, you’re in a hospital, you’re dying, you’re going off without having explained any of it. And she would look up and open her mouth just slightly, and I would put another spoonful into it.
Then it was September. Fall. The room had a nice view of Gracie Mansion and the leaves were turning. It was a corner room on the sixth floor, which is, for those who care, a little like being seated at the right table. She did care. She managed, almost until the end, to keep up appearances. If the nurse was new, she would raise herself a bit, lift her arm in a dear and pathetic waft, and introduce us formally. “Miss Browning,” she would say, “my daughter, Mrs. Greenburg.” (My mother and the fish market were the only people who ever thought of me as Mrs. Greenburg.) Then she would collapse back into the pillow and manage a bare flicker of a smile. I found it unbearable to be there and unbearable not to be there. I was conscious that I was going through an experience that writers write about, that I should be acutely aware of what was happening, but I hated that consciousness. And I could not look at her. She would moan with pain, and the nurse would reach under her, move her slightly, and the sheet would fall away and I would catch a glimpse of her legs, her beautiful legs now drained of muscle tone, gone to bones. The hallucinations went on. Then, one day, suddenly, she came into focus, knew exactly who I was, and like a witch, what I was thinking. “You’re a reporter,” she said to me. “Take notes.”
Two days after she died, my sisters and I spent an afternoon—how to put this?—disposing of her possessions. It was an extremely odd day. People kept dropping in, somber people, to pay their respects to my father; in the bedroom were the four of us, not at all somber, relieved, really, that it was finally over, and finding a small and genuine pleasure in the trivial problem of what to do with her things.
Most of my mother’s clothes were sent to charity. And the evening dresses, the beautiful chiffon Galanos dresses my father had bought her, were too big for any of us. But there was the mink. And there I was. The eldest. The most grown-up. It occurred to me I could cut it down to size or line another coat with it. Something. I took it.
A few weeks later, one of my sisters called. Did I take the mink? she asked. Yes. It’s not fair, she said. She didn’t even have a winter coat and I had hundreds and a big apartment and a rich husband and now I had the mink, too. You can have half of it, I said. She didn’t want half of it. She didn’t have the money for a winter coat much less the money to turn half a mink into something. What do you want? I said. She didn’t know. There were three more phone calls, each uglier and more vituperative, thirty years of sibling rivalry come to a head over an eighteen-year-old mink. I have to make it clear that I was as awful as she was. I wanted the mink.
Finally, one day, we met in front of the Ritz Thrift Shop on Fifty-seventh Street. I was carrying the mink. She was barely speaking to me. We went inside, and a lady came over. We said we wanted to sell the mink. The lady took the fur in her hands and turned it over, peeling away the coat lining to look at the underside of the skins. She spent a good half second with it. “I won’t give you a nickel for it,” she said. The skins were worthless. Shot. Something like that. We walked out onto Fifty-seventh Street carrying the mink. It was suddenly a burden, a useless assemblage of old worn-out pelts. I didn’t want it. She didn’t want it. A year later, my maid asked for it and I gave it to her. Shortly thereafter, my maid’s apartment was robbed and the burglar got the mink.
I will never have one. I know that now. And like a lot of things I will never have, I have mixed feelings about it. I mean, I could have one if I wanted one. I could squirrel away every extra nickel and buy myself, maybe not a perfect mink, but something made of mink noses or mink eyes or whatever spare parts make up that category of coats they call fun furs. But I don’t really want one: a mink coat is serious, and I would have to change my life to go with it.
But I love her for having bought one. She had the only kind of mink worth having, the kind you pay for yourself. That is not the answer I was looking for, but it
will have to do.
—December 1975
Parenting in Three Stages
Stage One: The Child Is Born
I want to begin by saying that when I gave birth to my children, which was not that long ago, there was almost no such thing as parenting as we know it today. There were parents, of course, and there were mothers and fathers (and mothering and fathering), but the concept of parenting was in its very early stages, if it existed at all.
Here’s what a parent is: A parent is a person who has children. Here’s what’s involved in being a parent: You love your children, you hang out with them from time to time, you throw balls, you read stories, you make sure they know which utensil is the salad fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework. Every so often, sentences you never expected to say (because your parents said them to you) fall from your lips, sentences like:
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THAT COST?
BECAUSE I SAY SO. THAT’S WHY.
I SAID NOW.
STOP THAT THIS MINUTE.
GO TO YOUR ROOM.
I DON’T CARE WHAT JESSICA’S MOTHER LETS HER DO.
A TIARA? YOU WANT A TIARA?
Back in the day when there were merely parents, as opposed to people who were engaged in parenting, being a parent was fairly straightforward. You didn’t need a book, and if you owned one, it was by Dr. Spock, a pediatrician, and you rarely looked at it unless your child had a temperature of 103, or the croup, or both. You understood that your child had a personality. His very own personality. He was born with it. For a certain period, this child would live with you and your personality, and you would do your best to survive each other.
“They never really change,” people often said (back in those days) about babies. This was a somewhat mystifying concept when you first had a baby. Exactly what was it about the baby that would never change? After all, it’s incredibly difficult to tell what a baby’s exact personality is when it’s merely a baby. (I’m using the word personality in the broadest sense, the one that means “the whole ball of wax.”) But eventually the baby in question began to manifest its personality, and sure enough, remarkably enough, that personality never changed. For example, when the police arrived to inform you that your eight-year-old had just dropped a dozen eggs from your fifth-floor window onto West End Avenue, you couldn’t help but be reminded of the fourteen-month-old baby he used to be, who knocked all the string beans from the high chair to the floor and thought it was a total riot.
Back in those days—and once again, let me stress that I am not talking about the nineteenth century here, it was just a few years ago—no one believed that you could turn your child into a different human being from the one he started out being. T. Berry Brazelton, the pediatrician who supplanted Spock in the 1980s, was a disciple of Piaget, and his books divided babies into three types—active, average, and quiet. He never suggested that your quiet baby would ever become an active one, or vice versa. Your baby was your baby, and if he ran you ragged, he ran you ragged; and if he lay in his crib staring happily at his mobile, that was about what you could expect.
All this changed around the time I had children. You can blame the women’s movement for it—one of the bedrock tenets of the women’s movement was that because so many women were entering the workforce, men and women should share in the raising of children; thus the gender-neutral word parenting, and the necessity of elevating child rearing to something more than the endless hours of quantity time it actually consists of. Conversely, you can blame the backlash against the women’s movement—lots of women didn’t feel like entering into the workforce (or even sharing the raising of children with their husbands), but they felt guilty about this, so they were compelled to elevate full-time parenthood to a sacrament.
In any event, suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying; it was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting. Parenting meant playing Mozart CDs while you were pregnant, doing without the epidural, and breast-feeding your child until it was old enough to unbutton your blouse. Parenting began with the assumption that your baby was a lump of clay that could be molded (through hard work, input, and positive reinforcement) into a perfect person who would someday be admitted to the college of your choice. Parenting was not simply about raising a child, it was about transforming a child, force-feeding it like a foie gras goose, altering, modifying, modulating, manipulating, smoothing out, improving. (Interestingly, the culture came to believe in the perfectibility of the child just as it also came to believe in the conflicting theory that virtually everything in human nature was genetic—thus proving that whoever said that a sign of intelligence was the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously did not know what he was talking about.)
And by the way, all sorts of additional personnel were required to achieve the transformational effect that was the goal of parenting—baby whisperers, sleep counselors, shrinks, learning therapists, family therapists, speech therapists, tutors—and, if necessary, behavior-altering medication, which, coincidentally or uncoincidentally, was invented at almost the exact moment that parenting came into being.
Parenting carried with it the implicit assumption that any time is quality time if the parent is in attendance. As a result, you were required to be in attendance at the most mundane activities—to watch, cheerlead, and, if necessary, coach, even if this meant throwing your weekend away by driving three hours and twenty minutes in each direction so that you could sit in a dark, hot locker room next door to a gym where your beloved child was going down to resounding defeat in a chess tournament you were not allowed to observe because your mere presence in the room would put unfair pressure on him or her. (The willingness on the part of both parents to be present at any place at any time had the interesting side effect of causing schools to rely on parents to oversee all sorts of events that used to be supervised by trained professionals.)
Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them; understanding was the key to everything. If your children believed you understood them, or at least tried to understand them, they wouldn’t hate you when they became adolescents; what’s more, they would grow up to be happy, well-adjusted adults who would never have to squander their money (or, far more likely, yours) on psychoanalysis or whatever fashion in self-improvement had come along to take its place.
Parenting used entirely different language from just plain parenthood, language you would never write in big capital letters in order to make clear that it had been uttered impulsively or in anger. So it went more or less like this:
I’m sure you didn’t mean to break Mommy’s antique vase, sweetheart.
We should talk about this.
I know how frustrated and angry you must feel right now.
Why don’t you go to your room and take a time-out and come back when you’re feeling better.
If you want, I’ll call Jessica’s mother to see what her reasoning is.
If you finish your homework, we can talk about the tiara.
Stage Two: The Child Is an Adolescent
Adolescence comes as a gigantic shock to the modern parent, in large part because it seems so much like the adolescence you yourself went through. Your adolescent is sullen. Your adolescent is angry. Your adolescent is mean. In fact, your adolescent is mean to you.
Your adolescent says words you were not allowed to say while growing up, not that you had even heard of them until you read The Catcher in the Rye. Your adolescent is probably smoking marijuana, which you may have smoked too, but not until you were at least eighteen. Your adolescent is undoubtedly having completely inappropriate and meaningless sex, which you didn’t have until you were in your twenties, if then. Your adolescent is embarrassed by you and walks ten steps ahead of you so
that no one thinks you are remotely acquainted with each other. Your adolescent is ungrateful. You have a vague memory of having been accused by your parents of being ungrateful, but what did you have to be grateful for? Almost nothing. Your parents weren’t into parenting. They were merely parents. At least one of them drank like a fish. Whereas you are exemplary. You’ve devoted years to making your children feel that you care about every single emotion they’ve ever felt. You’ve filled every waking second of their lives with cultural activities. The words “I’m bored” have never crossed their lips, because they haven’t had time to be bored. Your children have had everything you could give—everything and more, if you count the sneakers. You love them wildly, way more than your parents loved you. And yet they seem to have turned out exactly the way adolescents have always turned out. Only worse. How did this happen? What did you do wrong?
Furthermore, thanks to modern nutritional advances, your adolescent is large, probably larger than you. Your adolescent’s weekly allowance is the size of the gross national product of Burkina Faso, a small, poverty-stricken African country neither you nor your adolescent had ever heard of until recently, when you both spent several days working on a social studies report about it.
Your adolescent has changed, but not in any of the ways you’d hoped for when you set about to mold your child. And you have changed too. You have changed from a moderately neurotic, fairly cheerful human being to an irritable, crabby, abused wreck.