The Most of Nora Ephron

by Nora Ephron

  But not to worry. There’s somewhere you can go for help. You can go to all the therapists and counselors you consulted in the years before your children became adolescents, the therapists and counselors who’ve put their own children through college and probably law school thanks to your ongoing reliance on them.

  Here’s what they will say:

  Adolescence is for adolescents, not for parents.

  It was invented to help attached—or overattached—children to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when they leave the nest.

  There are things you can do to make life easier for yourself.

  This advice will cost you hundreds—or thousands—of dollars, depending on whether you live in a major metropolitan area or a minor one. And it’s completely untrue:

  Adolescence is for parents, not adolescents.

  It was invented to help attached—or overattached—parents to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when their children leave the nest.

  There is almost nothing you can do to make life easier for yourself except wait until it’s over.

  Incidentally, there’s an old joke that was probably invented by someone with adolescent children. Not that I’m good at telling jokes. And if I were, you still wouldn’t know how good this joke is, because it takes quite a long time to tell it and requires one of those Yiddish accents people use when telling jokes about old rabbis. But anyway, this married couple goes to see a rabbi. What can I do for you, the rabbi says. We’re having a terrible problem, Rabbi, the couple says. We have five children and we all live in a one-room house and we’re driving each other crazy. The rabbi says, Move in a sheep. So they move a sheep into the house. A week later they go see the rabbi and tell him that things are worse than ever, plus there’s a sheep. Move in a cow, the rabbi says. The next week they go to complain once again, because things are so much worse now that there’s a cow. Move in a horse, the rabbi says. The next week the couple goes to see the rabbi to tell him that things are the worst they’ve ever been. “You’re ready for the solution,” the rabbi says. “Move the animals out.”

  Stage Three: The Child Is Gone

  Oh, the drama of the empty nest. The anxiety. The apprehension. What will life be like? Will the two of you have anything to talk about once your children are gone? Will you have sex now that the presence of your children is no longer an excuse for not having sex?

  The day finally comes. Your child goes off to college. You wait for the melancholy. But before it strikes—before it even has time to strike—a shocking thing happens: Your child comes right back. The academic year in American colleges seems to consist of a series of short episodes of classroom attendance interrupted by long vacations. These vacations aren’t called “vacations,” they’re called “breaks” and “reading periods.” There are colleges that even have October breaks. Who ever heard of an October break? On a strictly per diem basis, your child could be staying at a nice Paris hotel for about what you’re paying in boarding expenses.

  In any event, four years quickly pass in this manner. Your children go. Your children come back. Their tuition is raised.

  But eventually college ends, and they’re gone for good.

  The nest is actually empty.

  You’re still a parent, but your parenting days are over.

  Now what?

  There must be something you can do.

  But there isn’t.

  There is nothing you can do.

  Trust me.

  If you find yourself nostalgic for the ongoing, day-to-day activities required of the modern parent, there’s a solution: Get a dog. I don’t recommend it, because dogs require tremendous commitment, but they definitely give you something to do. Plus they’re very loveable and, more important, uncritical. And they can be trained.

  But that’s about all you can do.

  Meanwhile, you have an extra room. Your child’s room. Do not under any circumstances leave your child’s room as is. Your child’s room is not a shrine. It’s not going to the Smithsonian. Turn it into a den, a gym, a guest room, or (if you already have all three) a room for wrapping Christmas presents. Do this as soon as possible. Leaving your child’s room as is may encourage your child to return. You do not want this.

  Meanwhile, every so often, your children come to visit. They are, amazingly, completely charming people. You can’t believe you’re lucky enough to know them. They make you laugh. They make you proud. You love them madly. They survived you. You survived them. It crosses your mind that on some level, you spent hours and days and months and years without laying a glove on them, but don’t dwell. There’s no point. It’s over.

  Except for the worrying.

  The worrying is forever.

  —August 2006

  The D Word

  THE MOST IMPORTANT thing about me, for quite a long chunk of my life, was that I was divorced. Even after I was no longer divorced but remarried, this was true. I have now been married to my third husband for more than twenty years. But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.

  Of course, there are good divorces, where everything is civil, even friendly. Child support payments arrive. Visitations take place on schedule. Your ex-husband rings the doorbell and stays on the other side of the threshold; he never walks in without knocking and helps himself to the coffee. In my next life I must get one of those divorces.

  One good thing I’d like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger; it’s not directed at the person you’re currently with.

  Another good thing about divorce is that it makes clear something that marriage obscures, which is that you’re on your own. There’s no power struggle over which of you is going to get up in the middle of the night; you are.

  But I can’t think of anything good about divorce as far as the children are concerned. You can’t kid yourself about that, although many people do. They say things like, It’s better for children not to grow up with their parents in an unhappy marriage. But unless the parents are beating each other up, or abusing the children, kids are better off if their parents are together. Children are much too young to shuttle between houses. They’re too young to handle the idea that the two people they love most in the world don’t love each other anymore, if they ever did. They’re too young to understand that all the wishful thinking in the world won’t bring their parents back together. And the newfangled rigmarole of joint custody doesn’t do anything to ease the cold reality: in order to see one parent, the divorced child must walk out on the other.

  The best divorce is the kind where there are no children. That was my first divorce. You walk out the door and you never look back. There were cats, cats I was wildly attached to; my husband and I spoke in cat voices. Once the marriage was over, I never thought of the cats again (until I wrote about them in a novel and disguised them as hamsters).

  A few months before my first husband and I broke up, I had a magazine assignment to write about the actors Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom and their fabulous marriage. I went to see them at their Fifth Avenue apartment, and they insisted on being interviewed separately. This should have been some sort of clue. But I was clueless. In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about fifty years old. Anyway, I interviewed the two of them in separate rooms. They seemed very happy. I wrote the piece, I turned it in, the magazine accepted it, they sent me a check, I cashed the check, and a day later, Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom announced they were getting a divorce. I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had they gone forward with a magazine piece about their marriage when they were getting a divorce?

  But then my own marriage ended, and about a week later a photographer turned up at my former apartment to take a picture of my husband and me for an article about our kitchen. I wasn
’t there, of course. I’d moved out. What’s more, I’d forgotten the appointment. The reporter involved with the article was livid that I hadn’t remembered, hadn’t called, hadn’t told her, and was no doubt angry that I’d agreed to do the interview about my marital kitchen when I had to have known I was getting a divorce. But the truth is you don’t always know you’re getting a divorce. For years, you’re married. Then, one day, the concept of divorce enters your head. It sits there for a while. You lean toward it and then you lean away. You make lists. You calculate how much it will cost. You tote up grievances, and pluses and minuses. You have an affair. You start seeing a shrink. The two of you start seeing a shrink. And then you end the marriage, not because anything in particular happened that was worse than what had happened the day before, but simply because you suddenly have a place to stay while you look for an apartment, or $3,000 your father has unexpectedly given you.

  I don’t mean to leave out the context. My first marriage ended in the early 1970s, at the height of the women’s movement. Jules Feiffer used to draw cartoons of young women dancing wildly around looking for themselves, and that’s what we were all like. We took things way too seriously. We drew up contracts that were meant to divide the household tasks in a more equitable fashion. We joined consciousness-raising groups and sat in a circle and pretended we weren’t jealous of one another. We read tracts that said the personal is political. And by the way, the personal is political, although not as much as we wanted to believe it was.

  But the main problem with our marriages was not that our husbands wouldn’t share the housework but that we were unbelievably irritable young women and our husbands irritated us unbelievably.

  A thing I remember from my consciousness-raising group is that one of the women in it burst into tears one day because her husband had given her a frying pan for her birthday.

  She, somehow, never got a divorce.

  But the rest of us did.

  We’d grown up in an era when no one was divorced, and suddenly everyone was divorced.

  My second divorce was the worst kind of divorce. There were two children; one had just been born. My husband was in love with someone else. I found out about him and his affair when I was still pregnant. I had gone to New York for the day and had had a meeting with a writer-producer named Jay Presson Allen. I was about to go to LaGuardia to take the Eastern shuttle back to Washington when she handed me a script she happened to have lying around, by an English writer named Frederic Raphael. “Read this,” she said. “You’ll like it.”

  I opened it on the plane. It began with a married couple at a dinner party. I can’t remember their names, but for the sake of the story, let’s call them Clive and Lavinia. It was a very sophisticated dinner party and everyone at it was smart and brittle and chattering brilliantly. Clive and Lavinia were particularly clever, and they bantered with each other in a charming, flirtatious way. Everyone in the room admired them, and their marriage. The guests sat down to dinner and the patter continued. In the middle of the dinner, a man seated next to Lavinia put his hand on her leg. She put her cigarette out on his hand. The glittering conversation continued. When the dinner ended, Clive and Lavinia got into their car to drive home. The talk ceased, and they drove in absolute silence. They had nothing to say to each other. And then Lavinia said: “All right. Who is she?”

  That was on here of the screenplay.

  I closed the script. I couldn’t breathe. I knew at that moment that my husband was having an affair. I sat there, stunned, for the rest of the flight. The plane landed, and I went home and straight to his office in our apartment. There was a locked drawer. Of course. I knew there would be. I found the key. I opened the drawer and there was the evidence—a book of children’s stories she’d given him, with an incredibly stupid inscription about their enduring love. I wrote about all this in a novel called Heartburn, and it’s a very funny book, but it wasn’t funny at the time. I was insane with grief. My heart was broken. I was terrified about what was going to happen to my children and me. I felt gas-lighted, and idiotic, and completely mortified. I wondered if I was going to become one of those divorced women who’s forced to move with her children to Connecticut and is never heard from again.

  I walked out dramatically, and I came back after promises were made. My husband entered into the usual cycle for this sort of thing—lies, lies, and more lies. I myself entered into surveillance, steaming open American Express bills, swearing friends to secrecy, finding out that the friends I’d sworn to secrecy couldn’t keep a secret, and so forth. There was a mysterious receipt from James Robinson Antiques. I called James Robinson and pretended to be my husband’s assistant and claimed I needed to know exactly what the receipt was for so that I could insure it. The receipt turned out to be for an antique porcelain box that said “I Love You Truly” on it. It was presumably not unlike the antique porcelain box my husband had bought for me a couple of years earlier that said “Forever and Ever.” I mention all this so you will understand that this is part of the process: once you find out he’s cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you’ve degraded yourself so completely that there’s nothing left to do but walk out.

  When my second marriage ended, I was angry and hurt and shocked.

  Now I think, Of course.

  I think, Who can possibly be faithful when they’re young?

  I think, Stuff happens.

  I think, People are careless and there are almost never any consequences (except for the children, which I already said).

  And I survived. My religion is Get Over It. I turned it into a rollicking story. I wrote a novel. I bought a house with the money from the novel.

  People always say that once it goes away, you forget the pain. It’s a cliché of childbirth: you forget the pain. I don’t happen to agree. I remember the pain. What you really forget is love.

  Divorce seems as if it will last forever, and then suddenly, one day, your children grow up, move out, and make lives for themselves, and except for an occasional flare, you have no contact at all with your ex-husband. The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it’s over.

  Enough about that.

  The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.

  And now it’s not.

  Now the most important thing about me is that I’m old.

  —November 2010

  Fantasies

  ONE OF THE trump cards that men who are threatened by women’s liberation are always dredging up is the question of whether there is sex after liberation. I have heard at least five or six experts or writers or spokesmen or some such stand up at various meetings and wonder aloud what happens to sex between men and women when the revolution comes. These men are always hooted down by the women present; in fact, I am usually one of the women present hooting them down, sniggering snide remarks to whoever is next to me like well-we-certainly-know-how-sure-of-himself-he-is. This fall, at the Playboy Writers’ Convocation, an author named Morton Hunt uttered the magic words at a panel on The Future of Sex, and even in that room, full of male chauvinism and Playboy philosophers, the animosity against him was audible.

  I spend a great deal of my energy these days trying to fit feminism into marriage, or vice versa—I’m never sure which way the priorities lie; it depends on my mood—but as truly committed as I am to the movement and as violent as I have become toward people who knock it, I think it is unfair to dismiss these men. They deserve some kind of answer. Okay. The answer is, nobody knows what happens to sex after liberation. It’s a big mystery. And now that I have gotten that out of the way, I can go on to what really interests and puzzles me about sex and liberation—which is that it is difficult for me to see how sexual behavior and relations between the sexes can change at all unless our sexual fantasies change. So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies tha
t are deeply ingrained, not just in society but in literature. The movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don’t know whether it can ever clean up the mess in our minds.

  I am somewhat liberated by current standards, but I have in my head this dreadful unliberated sex fantasy. One of the women in my consciousness-raising group is always referring to her “rich fantasy life,” by which I suppose she means that in her fantasies she makes it in costume, or in exotic places, or with luminaries like Mao Tse-tung in a large bowl of warm Wheatena. My fantasy life is unfortunately nowhere near that interesting.

  Several years ago, I went to interview photographer Philippe Halsman, whose notable achievements include a charming book containing photographs of celebrities jumping. The jumps are quite revealing in a predictable sort of way—Richard Nixon with his rigid, constricted jump, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in a deeply dependent jump. And so forth. In the course of the interview, Halsman asked me if I wanted to jump for him; seeing it as a way to avoid possibly years of psychoanalysis, I agreed. I did what I thought was my quintessential jump. “Do it again,” said Halsman. I did, attempting to duplicate exactly what I had done before. “Again,” he said, and I did. “Well,” said Halsman, “I can see from your jump that you are a very determined, ambitious, directed person, but you will never write a novel.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you have only one jump in you,” he said.

  At the time, I thought that was really unfair—I had, after all, thought he wanted to see the same jump, not a different one every time; but I see now that he was exactly right. I have only one jump in me. I see this more and more every day. I am no longer interested in thirty-one flavors; I stick with English toffee. More to the point, I have had the same sex fantasy, with truly minor variations, since I was about eleven years old. It is really a little weird to be stuck with something so crucially important for so long; I have managed to rid myself of all the other accouterments of being eleven—I have pimples more or less under control, I can walk fairly capably in high heels—but I find myself with this appalling fantasy that has burrowed in and has absolutely nothing to do with my life.