by Nora Ephron
After I found the book with the disgusting inscription in it, I called Mark. I’m embarrassed to tell you where I called him—okay, I’ll tell you: I called him at his shrink’s. He goes to a Guatemalan shrink over in Alexandria who looks like Carmen Miranda and has a dog named Pepito. “Come home immediately,” I said. “I know about you and Thelma Rice.” Mark did not come home immediately. He came home two hours later because—are you ready for this?—THELMA RICE WAS ALSO AT THE SHRINK’S. They were having a double session! At the family rate!! I did not know this at the time. Not only did Thelma Rice and Mark see Dr. Valdez and her Chihuahua, Pepito, once a week, but so did Thelma’s husband, Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs. Mark and Thelma saw Chiquita Banana together, and Jonathan Rice saw her alone—and that man has something to do with making peace in the Middle East!
When Mark finally came home, I was completely prepared. I had rehearsed a speech about how I loved him and he loved me and we had to work at our marriage and we had a baby and we were about to have another—really the perfect speech for the situation except that I had misapprehended the situation. “I am in love with Thelma Rice,” he said when he arrived home. That was the situation. He then told me that although he was in love with Thelma Rice, they were not having an affair. (Apparently he thought I could handle the fact that he was in love with her but not the fact that he was having sex with her.) “That is a lie,” I said to him, “but if it’s true”—you see, there was a part of me that wanted to think it was true even though I knew it wasn’t: the man is capable of having sex with a venetian blind—“if it’s true, you might as well be having an affair with her, because it’s free.” Some time later, after going on saying all these lovey-dovey things about Thelma, and after saying he wouldn’t give her up, and after saying that I was a shrew and a bitch and a nag and a kvetch and a grouse and that I hated Washington (the last charge was undeniably true), he said that he nonetheless expected me to stay with him. At that moment, it crossed my mind that he might be crazy. I sat there on the couch with tears rolling down my face and my fat belly resting on my thighs, I screwed up my courage, and when Mark finished his sixteenth speech about how wonderful Thelma Rice was compared to me, I said to him, “You’re crazy.” It took every ounce of self-confidence I had.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
He’s right, I thought. I’m wrong.
Well, we went around in circles. And then he asked me if I wanted to be alone for a while. I guess he wanted to drive over to Thelma’s to tell her he had held fast to their love. It didn’t matter. He drove off and I scooped up Sam and a suitcase full of Pampers, called a taxi, and left for the airport.
two
One thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you’re married, things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you’re single. You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married, and the hair grows in. I love the everydayness of marriage, I love figuring out what’s for dinner and where to hang the pictures and do we owe the Richardsons, but life does tend to slow to a crawl. The whole summer Mark was secretly seeing Thelma Rice while pretending to be at the dentist, I was cooking. That’s what I do for a living—I write cookbooks. And while I did discover a fairly revolutionary and absolutely foolproof way to make a four-minute egg, and had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don’t bump into vinaigrettes that good.) Before that, there had been a lot of time spent on swatches and couches and floor plans. It was almost as if Mark had a career as a columnist and I had a career as a food person and our marriage had a career as a fighter with contractors. First we fought with the Washington contractor, who among other atrocities managed to install our carpet on the sixth floor of a Washington department store; then we fought with the West Virginia contractor, who forgot the front door. “No one uses front doors in the country anyway,” he said when we pointed it out, which was also what he said about the paper-towel rack and the medicine cabinet. Then we hired Laszlo Pump, a Hungarian trouble-shooter, to clean up the mess the other two contractors had made, and that was when the real trouble began. Laszlo ripped out the living room wall and vanished. We called him at home and got his wife. She said his father had died. A week later she said his dog had died. A week later she said his analyst had died. Finally we reached Laszlo. He said he had cancer.
“He has cancer,” I said when I hung up the phone.
“Bullshit,” said Mark.
“People don’t lie about that,” I said.
“Yes they do,” said Mark. “Contractors do. They lie about everything. Look, we’ll go to his house. We’ll see how he looks. If he looks okay I’ll kill him.”
“We can’t go to his house,” I said.
“Why not?” said Mark.
“Because we don’t know where he lives.”
“We’ll look it up,” said Mark.
“We can’t look it up,” I said. “He has an unlisted address.”
“What are you talking about?” said Mark.
“It’s the latest thing,” I said.
“What kind of person has an unlisted address?” Mark said. “I’ll tell you what kind. The kind that doesn’t want to be dead. The kind that people are trying to kill all the time.”
“Why are you angry at me?” I said.
“I’m not angry at you,” said Mark.
“Then why are you shouting at me?” I said.
“Because you’re the only one who’s here,” said Mark.
I burst into tears. “I hate it when you get angry,” I said.
“I’m not angry at you,” said Mark. “I love you. I’m not angry at you.”
“I know,” I said, “but it scares me. It reminds me of my father.”
“I’m not your father,” said Mark. “Repeat after me, ‘Mark Feldman is not my father.’ ”
“Mark Feldman is not my father,” I said.
“Am I fat?” said Mark.
“No,” I said.
“Am I bald?”
“No.”
“Do I smell of Dr. Scholl’s foot pads?”
“No,” I said.
“I rest my case,” said Mark.
It always ended up like that in the end—us against the world, Washington’s bravest couple in combat with the entire service industry and their answering machines—but the point I want to make is this: I sat on that plane to New York in a state of total misery, yet part of me was secretly relieved to be done with swatches and couches and fights with contractors, and that part of me was thinking: Okay, Rachel Samstat, finally something is happening to you.
That’s my name—Rachel Samstat. It’s always been Rachel Samstat. I held on to it through both my marriages—through the first because I never liked my first husband’s last name enough to change mine to it, and through the second because I was by then known in a small and modest way as Rachel Samstat. The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty—they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally. Then, of course, the television show came along, which made the books sell even better.
How I got my own show is probably something you’re wondering. I’m not exactly a conventional television personality, although I suppose I’m somewhat conventional when it comes to public television, which is what my show was on, not network. “Too New York” is what the last network that was approached about me responded, which is a cute way of being anti-Semitic, but who cares? I’d rather be too New York than too anything else. Anyway, I don’t belong on a network. I have the kind of odd and interesting features that work out all right in life but not at all on the screen, so I’m far better off on public television, where the producers and ca
meramen are used to Julia Child and are pathetically grateful that I’m not quite as tall. Also, there’s my blink. I blink. “Hi, I’m Rachel Samstat”—saying that, looking directly at the camera, I blink fifty or sixty times minimum. It’s the looking at the camera that makes me do it; when I’m looking at a person, or a pork roast, my blinks go down to near normal.
After we taped the first show and discovered the blink, Richard, my producer, suggested I go see a professional television coach, who specialized in voices but was willing to undertake a little eyelid work on the side. She kept telling me she’d never had a failure, probably to encourage me, but the effect was to make me absolutely determined to be her first, which I was.
“I don’t think I can fix the blink,” she told Richard after several sessions, “but I can probably do a little something with the voice.”
“We like the voice,” said Richard, and thank God, because there wasn’t much left of me by then that someone hadn’t taken a swipe at, usually using the definite article. The voice. The blink. The hair. The chin. “She has a quality onscreen not unlike Howard Cosell,” someone high up at the station is supposed to have said, and even though I choose to think he meant it as a compliment—he meant I’m the sort of person you feel strongly about one way or another—Howard Cosell was not exactly what I had in mind. What I had in mind was Imogene Coca or Elaine May. Anyway, the important thing is that I do happen to have a funny voice, and it makes people laugh. It works on television, although there’s no way a voice coach would understand that, since her job is to teach everyone to sound like David Brinkley.
It’s really because of Richard that the television show came up at all. I was on a talk show promoting My Grandmother’s Cookies when Richard saw me. Actually, it was Phil Donahue he saw me on. Richard is hooked on Phil Donahue. He says that if Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue he would never have wondered what women want. There I was, fielding questions about piecrust and doing my Jewish prince routine, when Richard got the idea it might make a series—me and my relatives and my friends and a few famous strangers, talking about food, talking about the role food plays in life, doing a little cooking, a middlebrow Julia Child crossed with a highbrow Dinah Shore. How we got away with it I don’t know, except that we threw Proust and his madeleines into the opening credits, and I managed to get Isaac Bashevis Singer to make noodle kugel on the pilot. Also, the show cost next to nothing to produce, and what little it cost was underwritten by an oil company where someone I used to date is now in charge of parceling out money to public television. I dated him when he was Jewish—now that he works at the oil company you can’t exactly tell. He was so Jewish when I dated him that he taught Hebrew school, and I, who at that point had had no Jewish education whatsoever, learned about Purim and good Queen Esther and the wicked Haman from him one night in a dormitory at Harvard while he stuck one and then two and then three fingers into me. This was before the discovery of the clitoris, when there was far too much sticking of fingers into things and not nearly enough playing around with the outsides; still, it was a nice enough introduction to the origins of Hamantaschen pastries, and I retain a special and absurd affection for Purim in spite of the fact that I have always hated Hamantaschen. That isn’t true. Mark’s Aunt Florence makes good Hamantaschen. Aunt Florence, who raised Mark, is a great cook; her triumph, which she serves on Thanksgiving along with the turkey, is a brisket cooked with sauerkraut and brown sugar, and it sounds perfectly awful, I know, but it’s truly one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten.
I’d been planning to have Mark’s grandmother on the next thirteen-week cycle of my television show to discuss the brisket, as well as her tzimmes and gefilte fish, but I don’t really see how I’m going to be able to now that all this has come about. I don’t like blaming family members for what goes wrong with children, because someday when my kids are arrested for grand larceny I don’t want anyone looking accusingly at me, but Mark’s behavior was so obviously Florence’s fault that even Florence knew it. “It must be my fault” were in fact her first words on the subject when I called to tell her I had gone to New York because her nephew had fallen in love with Thelma Rice. “Don’t be silly,” I said in reply, but what I was thinking was: You bet your sweet ass it is. Jewish princes are made, not born.
RACHEL SAMSTAT’S JEWISH PRINCE ROUTINE
You know what a Jewish prince is, don’t you?
(Cocks her eyebrow)
If you don’t, there’s an easy way to recognize one. A simple sentence. “Where’s the butter?”
(A long pause here, because the laugh starts slowly and builds)
Okay. We all know where the butter is, don’t we?
(A little smile)
The butter is in the refrigerator.
(Beat)
The butter is in the refrigerator in the little compartment in the door marked “Butter.”
(Beat)
But the Jewish prince doesn’t mean “Where’s the butter?” He means “Get me the butter.” He’s too clever to say “Get me” so he says “Where’s.”
(Beat)
And if you say to him—
(Shouting)
“in the refrigerator”—
(Resume normal voice)
and he goes to look, an interesting thing happens, a medical phenomenon that has not been sufficiently remarked upon.
(Beat)
The effect of the refrigerator light on the male cornea.
(Beat)
Blindness.
(A long beat)
“I don’t see it anywhere.”
(Pause)
“Where’s the butter” is only one of the ways the Jewish prince reveals himself. Sometimes he puts it a different way. He says, “Is there any butter?”
(Beat)
We all know whose fault it is if there isn’t, don’t we.
(Beat)
When he’s being really ingenious, he puts it in a way that’s meant to sound as if what he needs most of all from you is your incredible wisdom and judgment and creativity. He says, “How do you think butter would taste with this?”
(Beat)
He’s usually referring to dry toast.
(Beat)
I’ve always believed that the concept of the Jewish princess was invented by a Jewish prince who couldn’t get his wife to fetch him the butter.
I was not raised as a Jewish princess. Sometimes I’m accused of being one because I’m not exactly the outdoor type, but I grew up a scrappy little athlete with a scrappy little mother who wanted me to have a flashy career like her own. I wonder what she would have made of my work. My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
My mother was an agent in Hollywood, a lady agent, a classic forties career woman: she had short hair and bangs, she wore suits with shoulder pads, and she talked in a gravelly voice. She handled what were known in the business as specialty acts, which is to say mostly midgets. After they stopped making movies like The Wizard of Oz, the midget market dried up and she moved into actors with scars. In the meantime, we had a lot of midgets hanging around the house, and as a result my mother often served food that was a little too bite-sized. My sister Eleanor gets very churlish about my mother’s cooking, and she always points out that my mother’s fling with rumaki lasted considerably longer than it should have; but Eleanor hates to give credit where credit is due, and the fact is that my mother had enormous flair when she was paying attention, and when she didn’t feel like paying attention she threw in a lot of butter. She could also Keep Help, which I was raised to believe was no small thing; indeed, I was raised to believe that almost the worst thing that could be said about you after you grew up was that you couldn’t.
Every New Year’s Day, my parents had a big party, and their friends came over and bet on the Rose Bowl and argued about which of the players on either team were Jewish, and my mother served her famou
s lox and onions and eggs, which took her the entire first half to make. It took her so long, in fact, that I really don’t have time to give you the recipe, because it takes up a lot of space to explain how slowly and painstakingly she did everything, sautéing the onions over a tiny flame so none of them would burn, throwing more and more butter into the pan, cooking the eggs so slowly that my father was always sure they wouldn’t be ready until the game was completely over and everyone had gone home. We should have known my mother was crazy years before we did just because of the maniacal passion she brought to her lox and onions and eggs, but we didn’t. Another thing my mother was famous for serving was a big ham along with her casserole of lima beans and pears. A couple of years ago, I was in Los Angeles promoting Uncle Seymour’s Beef Borscht and a woman said to me at a party, “Wasn’t your mother Bebe Samstat?” and when I said yes, she said, “I have her recipe for lima beans and pears.” I like to think it would have amused my mother to know that there is someone in Hollywood who remembers her only for her lima beans and pears, but it probably wouldn’t have. Anyway, here’s how you make it: Take 6 cups defrosted lima beans, 6 pears peeled and cut into slices, ½ cup molasses, ½ cup chicken stock, ½ onion chopped, put into a heavy casserole, cover and bake 12 hours at 200°. That’s the sort of food she loved to serve, something that looked like plain old baked beans and then turned out to have pears up its sleeve. She also made a bouillabaisse with Swiss chard in it. Later on, she got too serious about food—started making egg rolls from scratch, things like that—and one night she resigned from the kitchen permanently over a lobster Cantonese that didn’t work out, and that was the beginning of the end.
Shortly after that, she went into her blue-chip stamp phase. She wasn’t alone, of course. It was 1963, and there were a lot of American women who were saving blue-chip stamps and green stamps and plaid stamps and whatever stamps their supermarkets were giving out; still, ladies in suits with shoulder pads were supposed to have more sense. My mother, who had spent years avoiding supermarkets, made at least one trip a day to the local Thriftimart. (The scar-face market had gone pretty dry on her at this point, and she had very little else to do.) She would get into her 1947 Studebaker and set off for a day in the aisles. She developed passionate and brief attachments to new products. One month she fell in love with instant minced onions. Another month it was Pepperidge Farm raspberry turnovers. The next it was frozen chopped chives. She would return home with her bags of groceries, leave them in the kitchen for the housekeeper to empty, and go up to her bedroom, where the card table was equipped with one of those little sponge-and-jar contraptions you use when you have a lot of stamps to stick.