The Most of Nora Ephron

by Nora Ephron

  At the age of fifty-five you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin.

  This saggy roll just above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts.

  Write everything down.

  Keep a journal.

  Take more pictures.

  The empty nest is underrated.

  You can order more than one dessert.

  You can’t own too many black turtleneck sweaters.

  If the shoe doesn’t fit in the shoe store, it’s never going to fit.

  When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

  Back up your files.

  Overinsure everything.

  Whenever someone says the words “Our friendship is more important than this,” watch out, because it almost never is.

  There’s no point in making piecrust from scratch.

  The reason you’re waking up in the middle of the night is the second glass of wine.

  The minute you decide to get divorced, go see a lawyer and file the papers.

  Overtip.

  Never let them know.

  If only one third of your clothes are mistakes, you’re ahead of the game.

  If friends ask you to be their child’s guardian in case they die in a plane crash, you can say no.

  There are no secrets.

  —August 2006

  I Hate My Purse

  I HATE MY purse. I absolutely hate it. If you’re one of those women who think there’s something great about purses, don’t even bother reading this because there will be nothing here for you. This is for women who hate their purses, who are bad at purses, who understand that their purses are reflections of negligent housekeeping, hopeless disorganization, a chronic inability to throw anything away, and an ongoing failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory (the obligation, for example, that it should in some way match what you’re wearing). This is for women whose purses are a morass of loose Tic Tacs, solitary Advils, lipsticks without tops, ChapSticks of unknown vintage, little bits of tobacco even though there has been no smoking going on for at least ten years, tampons that have come loose from their wrappings, English coins from a trip to London last October, boarding passes from long-forgotten airplane trips, hotel keys from God-knows-what hotel, leaky ballpoint pens, Kleenexes that either have or have not been used but there’s no way to be sure one way or another, scratched eyeglasses, an old tea bag, several crumpled personal checks that have come loose from the checkbook and are covered with smudge marks, and an unprotected toothbrush that looks as if it has been used to polish silver.

  This is for women who in mid-July realize they still haven’t bought a summer purse or who in midwinter are still carrying around a straw bag.

  This is for women who find it appalling that a purse might cost five or six hundred dollars—never mind that top-of-the-line thing called a Birkin bag that costs ten thousand dollars, not that it’s relevant because you can’t even get on the waiting list for one. On the waiting list! For a purse! For a ten-thousand-dollar purse that will end up full of old Tic Tacs!

  This is for those of you who understand, in short, that your purse is, in some absolutely horrible way, you. Or, as Louis XIV might have put it but didn’t because he was much too smart to have a purse, Le sac, c’est moi.

  I realized many years ago that I was no good at purses, and for quite a while I managed to do without one. I was a freelance writer, and I spent most of my time at home. I didn’t need a purse to walk into my own kitchen. When I went out, usually at night, I frequently managed with only a lipstick, a twenty-dollar bill, and a credit card tucked into my pocket. That’s about all you can squeeze into an evening bag anyway, and it saved me a huge amount of money because I didn’t have to buy an evening bag. Evening bags, for reasons that are obscure unless you’re a Marxist, cost even more than regular bags.

  But unfortunately, there were times when I needed to leave the house with more than the basics. I solved this problem by purchasing an overcoat with large pockets. This, I realize, turned my coat into a purse, but it was still better than carrying a purse. Anything is better than carrying a purse.

  Because here’s what happens with a purse. You start small. You start pledging yourself to neatness. You start vowing that This Time It Will Be Different. You start with the things you absolutely need—your wallet and a few cosmetics that you have actually put into a brand-new shiny cosmetics bag, the kind used by your friends who are competent enough to manage more than one purse at a time. But within seconds, your purse has accumulated the debris of a lifetime. The cosmetics have somehow fallen out of the shiny cosmetics bag (okay, you forgot to zip it up), the coins have fallen from the wallet (okay, you forgot to fasten the coin compartment), the credit cards are somewhere in the abyss (okay, you forgot to put your Visa card back into your wallet after you bought the sunblock that is now oozing into the lining because you forgot to put the top back onto it after you applied it to your hands while driving seventy miles an hour down the highway). What’s more, a huge amount of space in your purse is being taken up by a technological marvel that holds your address book and calendar—or would, but the batteries in it have died. And there’s half a bottle of water, along with several snacks you saved from an airplane trip just in case you ever found yourself starving and unaccountably craving a piece of cheese that tastes like plastic. Perhaps you can fit your sneakers into your purse. Yes, by God, you can! Before you know it, your purse weighs twenty pounds and you are in grave danger of getting bursitis and needing an operation just from carrying it around. Everything you own is in your purse. You could flee the Cossacks with your purse. But when you open it up, you can’t find a thing in it—your purse is just a big dark hole full of stuff that you spend hours fishing around for. A flashlight would help, but if you were to put one into your purse, you’d never find it.

  What’s the solution? I’m no longer a freelance writer who sits home all day; I need stuff. I need stuff for work. I need cosmetics to tide me over. I need a book to keep me company. I need, sad to say, a purse. For a while, I searched for an answer. Like those Hollywood women who are willing to fling themselves into the Kabbalah, or Scientology, or yoga, I read just about any article about purses that promised me some sort of salvation from this misery. At one point I thought, Perhaps the solution is not one purse but two. So I tried having two purses, one for personal things and one for work things. (Yes, I know: The second purse is usually called a briefcase.) This system works for most people but not for me, and for a fairly obvious reason, which I’ve already disclosed: I’m not an organized human being. Another solution I tried involved spending quite a lot of money on a purse, on the theory that having an expensive purse would inspire me to change my personality, but that didn’t work either. I also tried one of those Prada-style semi-backpack purses, but I bought it just when it was going out of fashion, and in any case I put so much into it that I looked like a sherpa.

  And then, one day, I found myself in Paris with a friend who announced that her goal for the week was to buy a Kelly bag. Perhaps you know what a Kelly bag is. I didn’t. I had never heard of one. What is a Kelly bag? I asked. My friend looked at me as if I had spent the century asleep in a cave. And she explained: A Kelly bag is an Hermès bag first made in the 1950s that Grace Kelly had made famous; hence the name. It is a classic. It is the purse equivalent of the world’s most perfect string of pearls. It’s still being manufactured, but my friend didn’t want a new one, she wanted a vintage Kelly bag. She’d heard that there was a dealer in the flea market who had several for sale. The flea market is open on weekends only, so we spent several days eating, drinking, sightseeing, all of it (as far as my friend was concerned) mere prelude to the main event. How much is this purse going to cost? I asked. I practically expired when she told me: about three thousan
d dollars. Three thousand dollars for an old purse, plus (if you’re counting, which I was) plane fare?

  Well, finally we went to the flea market and there was the Kelly bag. I didn’t know what to say. It looked like the sort of bag my mother used to carry. It barely held anything, and it hung stiffly on my friend’s arm. I may not be good at purses, but I know that any purse that hangs stiffly on your arm (instead of on your shoulder) adds ten years to your age, and furthermore immobilizes half your body. In a modern world, your arms have to be free. I don’t want to get too serious here, but a purse (like a pair of high heels) actually impinges on your mobility. That’s one of many reasons why you don’t see the guys-with-purses trend catching on. If one of your hands is stuck carrying your purse, it means it’s not free for all sorts of exciting things you could be using it for, like shoving your way through crowds, throwing your arms around loved ones, climbing the greasy pole to success, and waving madly for taxis.

  Anyway, my friend bought her Kelly bag. She paid twenty-six hundred dollars for it. The color wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but it was in wonderful shape. Of course it would have to be waterproofed immediately because it would lose half its value if it got caught in the rain. Waterproofed? Caught in the rain? It had never crossed my mind to worry about a purse being caught in the rain, much less being waterproofed. For a moment I thought once again about how my mother had failed to teach me anything about purses, and I almost felt sorry for myself. But it was time for lunch.

  The two of us went to a bistro, and the Kelly bag was placed in the center of the table, where it sat like a small shrine to a shopping victory. And then, outside, it began to rain. My friend’s eyes began to well with tears. Her lips closed tightly. In fact, to be completely truthful, her lips actually pursed. It was pouring rain and she hadn’t had the Kelly bag waterproofed. She would have to sit there all afternoon and wait for the rain to end rather than expose the bag to a droplet of moisture. It crossed my mind that she and her Kelly bag might have to sit there forever. Years would pass and the rain would continue to fall. She would get old (although her Kelly bag would not) and eventually she and the bag would, like some modern version of Lot’s wife, metamorphose into a monument to what happens to people who care too much about purses. Country songs would be written about her, and parables. At that point I stopped worrying about purses and gave up.

  I came back to New York and bought myself a purse. Well, it’s not a purse exactly; it’s a bag. It’s definitely the best bag I have ever owned. On it is the image of a New York City MetroCard—it’s yellow (taxicab yellow, to be exact) and blue (the most horrible blue of all, royal blue)—so it matches nothing at all and therefore, on a deep level, matches everything. It’s made of plastic and is therefore completely waterproof. It’s equally unattractive in all seasons of the year. It cost next to nothing (twenty-six dollars), and I will never have to replace it because it seems to be completely indestructible. What’s more, never having been in style, it can never go out of style.

  It doesn’t work for everything, I admit; on rare occasions, I’m forced to use a purse, one that I hate. But mostly I go everywhere with my MetroCard bag. And wherever I go, people say to me, I love that bag. Where did you get that bag? And I tell them I bought it at the Transit Museum in Grand Central station, and that all proceeds from it go toward making the New York City subway system even better than it is already. For all I know, they’ve all gone off and bought one. Or else they haven’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m very happy.

  —September 2002

  Christmas Dinner

  WE HAVE A traditional Christmas dinner. We’ve been doing it for twenty-two years. There are fourteen people involved—eight parents and six children—and we all get together at Jim and Phoebe’sfn1 during Christmas week. For one night a year, we’re a family, a cheerful, makeshift family, a family of friends. We exchange modest presents, we make predictions about events in the coming year, and we eat.

  Each of us brings part of the dinner. Maggie brings the hors d’oeuvres. Like all people assigned to bring hors d’oeuvres, Maggie is not really into cooking, but she happens to be an exceptional purchaser of hors d’oeuvres. Jim and Phoebe do the main course because the dinner is at their house. This year they’re cooking a turkey. Ruthie and I were always in charge of desserts. Ruthie’s specialty was a wonderful bread pudding. I can never settle on just one dessert, so I often make three—something chocolate (like a chocolate cream pie), a fruit pie (like a tarte tatin), and a plum pudding that no one ever eats but me. I love making desserts for Christmas dinner, and I have always believed that I make excellent desserts. But now that everything has gone to hell and I’ve been forced to replay the last twenty-two years of Christmas dinners, I realize that the only dessert anyone ate with real enthusiasm was Ruthie’s bread pudding; no one ever said anything complimentary about any of mine. How I could have sat through Christmas dinner all this time and not realized this simple truth is one of the most puzzling aspects of this story.

  A little over a year ago, Ruthie died. Ruthie was my best friend. She was also Maggie’s best friend and Phoebe’s best friend. We were all devastated. A month after her death, we had our traditional Christmas dinner, but it wasn’t the same without Ruthie—life wasn’t the same, Christmas dinner wasn’t the same, and Ruthie’s bread pudding (which I reproduced, from her recipe) wasn’t the same either. This year, when we opened negotiations about when our Christmas dinner would take place, I told Phoebe that I’d decided I didn’t want to make Ruthie’s bread pudding again because it made me feel even worse about her death than I already did.

  Anyway, we settled on a night for the dinner. But then Ruthie’s husband, Stanley, announced that he didn’t want to be there. He said he was too sad. So Phoebe decided to invite another family instead. She asked Walter and Priscilla and their kids to join us. Walter and Priscilla are good friends of ours, but four years ago Priscilla announced that she didn’t like living in New York anymore and was moving, with the children, to England. Priscilla is English and therefore entitled to prefer England to New York; still, it was hard not to take it personally. But she and the kids were coming to Manhattan to join Walter for Christmas, and they accepted the invitation to our Christmas dinner. A few days later Phoebe called to tell me that she’d asked Priscilla to do one of the desserts. I was thunderstruck. I do the desserts. I love doing the desserts. I make excellent desserts. Priscilla hates doing desserts. The only dessert Priscilla ever makes is trifle, and when she serves it she always announces that she hates trifle and never eats it.

  “But she will make her trifle,” I said.

  “She won’t make her trifle,” Phoebe said.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “I will tell her not to make her trifle,” Phoebe said. “Meanwhile, are you good at mashed potatoes?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Bring mashed potatoes,” Phoebe said, “because Jim and I don’t have any luck with them.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  Several days passed while I thought about what desserts I would bring to Christmas dinner. I read the new Martha Stewart baking book and found a recipe for cherry pie. I went on the Internet and ordered pie cherries from Wisconsin. I bought the ingredients for the plum pudding that no one eats but me. I was thinking about making a peppermint pie. And then a shocking thing happened: Phoebe e-mailed to say that since I was doing the mashed potatoes, she’d asked Priscilla to make all the desserts. I couldn’t believe it. Stripped of the desserts and downgraded to mashed potatoes? I was a legendary cook—how was this possible? It crossed my mind that Phoebe was using Ruthie’s death to get me to stop making desserts. She’d probably been trying to do this for years; it was only a matter of time before I would be reassigned to hors d’oeuvres, displacing Maggie, who would doubtless be relegated to mixed nuts.

  I took a bath in order to contemplate this blow to my self-image.

  I got out of the bathtub and wrote an e-mail in reply to P
hoebe. It said, simply, “WHAT?” I thought it was understated and brilliant and would get her attention.

  Minutes later the phone rang. It was Phoebe. She wasn’t calling about my e-mail at all.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I just got an e-mail from Priscilla in England saying that she’s not making dessert. Instead, Walter has gone to London and bought mince pies. He’s bringing them to New York. I hate mince pies. I absolutely hate them. Didn’t you once make a mince pie that no one ate?”

  “It was a raisin pie,” I said. “And I liked it.”

  “Mince pies!” Phoebe said. “Who’s going to eat mince pies?”

  “What are you going to do?” I said.

  “I’ve already done it,” Phoebe said. “I e-mailed her back and told her the mince pies were out of the question and that she should order a Yule log and a coconut cake from Eli’s and just have them delivered to me. Mince pies. Really.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said. “I think we must be talking about the cruelest woman on the planet.”

  “Who?” Phoebe said.

  “You,” I said. “Why am I not doing the desserts? I liked doing desserts. Last year my peppermint pie was a huge hit.”

  “I remember that pie,” Phoebe said.

  “This year I ordered cherries from Wisconsin,” I said. “The shipping alone cost fifty-two dollars.”

  “If you want to bring dessert, bring dessert,” said Phoebe.

  “But we don’t need dessert because there are mince pies and a Yule log—”

  “And a coconut cake,” said Phoebe. “We’ve got to have a coconut cake. But you can bring anything else you want.”

  I hung up the phone. I was reeling. To make matters worse, I’d already gone out and bought four pints of peppermint stick ice cream for the peppermint pie I was now not going to make unless I wanted to prove that I was the all-time world champion in the can’t-take-a-hint department of life. I stood there, missing Ruthie desperately. If she were alive, none of this would ever have happened. She was the glue, she was the thing that gave us the illusion that we were a family, she was the mother who loved us all so much that we loved one another, she was the spirit of Christmas. Now we were a group of raging siblings; her death had released us all to be the worst possible versions of ourselves.