Heartburn

could remember the feeling, but I couldn’t really remember the words.
Which was not the worst way to begin to forget.

Vera said: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?”
So I told her why:
Because if I tell the story, I control the version.

Of course I’m writing this later, much much later, and it worries me that I’ve done what I usually do—hidden the anger, covered the pain, pretended it wasn’t there for the sake of the story.

Dmitri used to be the Yugoslavian ambassador to the United States. When his tour ended, he went back to Belgrade and opened a chain of laundromats. Then he moved back to Washington and went into high-priced sherbet. Mark always used to throw Dmitri in my face as an example of someone who managed to be interested in food and politics simultaneously, but the truth is that what Dmitri was really interested in was money; to the extent that he was at all political, it lay in his understanding that in a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.

So. Nathaniel was early. I could hardly blame him. Something was dying inside me, and he had to get out.

“If I am going to be your pediatrician,” he had said when Sam was born, “we are going to have to understand something. You are never to call me and say, ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’ You are never to call me and say, ‘This is probably nothing.’ If you think it’s worth a phone call, I want to hear about it. Got it?”

I have friends who begin with pasta, and friends who begin with rice, but whenever I fall in love, I begin with potatoes. Sometimes meat and potatoes and sometimes fish and potatoes, but always potatoes. I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.

It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.

I married him against all the evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn’t work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.

It seemed to me that the desire to get married—which, I regret to say, I believe is fundamental and primal in women—is followed almost immediately by an equally fundamental and primal urge, which is to be single again.