I took Nora Ephron with me to the nail salon the other day so I could have someone to chitchat with while I was getting my pedicure. She told me about a meatloaf that a New York City restaurant named after her—Nora’s Meat Loaf—and she gossiped about Lillian Hellman. Apparently Julia, of the Oscar-winning movie of the same name, was not a real person, but rather for a chapter in her book Pentimento, Miss Hellman made up the lifelong friend who fought against the Nazis. It so happened, said Nora, that one Muriel Gardiner wrote a book about her life as a member of the Austrian underground until the onset of World War II. Lillian Hellman stole her story. I was reading Nora’s book, I Remember Nothing. The comforting Christmas tree in the middle of the salon and these pages made me want to go home and make a meatloaf.
I’ve been practicing building my concentration skills, reading amid three TVs going while simultaneously an internet radio music channel voiced over the whole thing against the peripatetic salon backdrop, and Nora’s book provides light reading for the practice. Listening to Nora’s lively, humorous conversation is a good place to start upgrading one’s concentration skills. She’s easy to listen to. You’d think she was right there sitting next to you, getting her own pedicure, while you chatted about both the juiciest and the most annoying stuff.
Nora waxes nostalgic about the early days of email—Wow! I’ve got mail! It’s instant. An instant message!—a pleasant way to spend a few moments with a friend—to present day despairing of an overwhelming information glut warning you of the dangers of eating too many leafy green vegetables to offering you a way to extend your penis two inches, if you’ve got one, to letters from Carol Ling admonishing me that she hasn’t heard back from me regarding the resumé I sent her (she dreamed it) and that, consequently, I, the writer, am in jeopardy of losing my big chance to begin my bulldozer operator remote apprenticeship, for which I am a perfect match .
Nora continues . . . All writers have flops, you know, or what no one wants to publish—doesn’t quite fit—even though the writing excels. No writer wants to talk about these rejections. We’d rather shove them into a drawer and forget them. But, reshopped before the right editor, they may turn out to be extraordinary genius and the original rejecting editor has to eat her words. The movie Heartburn was such a flop at first, or so they thought, because an early critic panned it, and it sank. Nora blamed the casting; it couldn’t be her writing. A year later, another New York Times movie critic, Vincent Canby, wrote high praises about Heartburn and ultimately the movie was resurrected to great success. The casting was stellar.
Friends encourage me to submit my essays to literary magazines. I renege on their urging, though, because what are the odds my work would be chosen among the hundreds of submissions they receive each month; nevertheless, I decide to send my darling out into the world. What could it hurt? Like the first day of school: “Be sure and wear your sweater, honey, it’ll be OK.” Two or three months go by and I get a response: “We’re sorry, but your piece didn’t quite fit. Please don’t think it’s your writing; it’s just not a precise fit.” It’s like breaking up—“It’s not you; it’s me. . . .” All the editors are zillennials, well, most of them. What are the odds of my being a precise fit with zillennial mentality? I take heart in magazines rejecting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories even after the success of The Great Gatsby. A story simply wasn’t a good fit, or in the case of “I’d Die for You,” too dark, or in a more well known case, The New Yorker rejecting “Thank You for the Light” in 1936 but then electing to publish it in 2012. During those times the stock market had crashed and nobody wanted to read about rich people and partying or stories about suicide. The writing was good, though. That these tales couldn’t find a market in their moment, according to The Guardian, is not necessarily because of aesthetic shortcomings.
Although Nora Ephron goes with me to the nail salon, I am also two-timing her with another author, reading a book chronicling the experiences of three Dubliners in a day, James Joyce’s Ulysses, I don’t think James Joyce would be the most delightfully companionable person to accompany me to the nail salon. Because, well, would he even like to get a pedicure…? It would be hard for me to keep up with him, his language as peripatetic as the salon’s comings and goings—two or three languages within one short sentence, correspondences to and allusions to Hamlet, human sexuality, Dante, Don Giovanni, Jesus, antisemitism, Irish nationalism, Catholicism. . . . Maybe a subject or two would waft into the occasional listener’s scent —Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.—*, they’d look up, tilt an ear (if they could hear over the stream of consciousness white noise of the salon), but soon they’d go back to their smartphone. So I left James Joyce at home. Besides, I walked to the salon, and 500 pages is weighty to carry. Another Nora, Nora Barnacle was James Joyce’s wife.
Nora Ephron and I were born in the same year. I want to tell her that the older I get the harder it is to open containers. I tried to open a pint carton of cream this morning to pour into my coffee. The carton came with a twist-off cap. It wouldn’t twist. Finally, I flattened the top of the carton so making a level surface and took a pair of scissors with serrated edges on the insides of the handles, made for just this twist-off purpose, and twisted. Voila! The cap unscrewed. I hadn’t anticipated the flip-top cap beneath, the kind with the loop that you pull. So often these loops snap off and then what do I do? I’ve had cans of tuna fish where I’ve encountered such tops. The loop snaps off and then I’m stuck with a can I can’t open and I want to make a tuna sandwich. I have to employ a can opener for a can not intended to be opened with a can opener and/or a knife, being careful not to gash a finger in the process. I recently bought a small jar of nutmeg and, try as I might, could not remove the twist-off cap. It just wouldn’t turn, not even with a wrench. Later, someone said, put a rubber band around it. That might have helped. This jar had a flip cap affixed to the top of the twist-off cap. So I raised the flip cap, took a fork and, through the sprinkle holes, poked holes in the sealing paper underneath the cap. That worked. I was able to pull the loop on the cream carton successfully without it snapping off. It only took me 20 minutes to pour a dollop of cream into my coffee. If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s probably because I’m struggling to open a carton or a can or a jar of something somehow, somewhere.
Sometimes Nora Ephron goes with me to my doctor’s appointment. Another opportunity to practice my concentration. There’s a big TV on the wall, dialogue loud enough for hard-of-hearing seniors to get. Nora’s telling me about a Christmas party. Not a fan of daytime TV, I look up and note that Rachael Ray has put on a bit of weight. She might be making meatloaf. But, Nora’s telling me she and a group of friends got together every year for a potluck Christmas dinner. In advance they designated who was to bring the hors d’oeuvres, the desserts, who’s making the main course. Nora’s talking about food, so is Rachael Ray.
My friends and I used to get together for holiday parties. I lived in California, on the West Coast, and my family were all in Delaware, on the East Coast. So my friends and I became family. I loved hosting these dinner parties at my house: The kitchen had a spacious U-shaped counter and a luxurious six-burner stove with a double oven, so there was space for everyone to do what they needed to do to finish preparing or heat up their presentation. On the occasions we’d go to someone else’s house, my friend would drive me and as soon as we arrived, he’d make the grand announcement to the party, “I always love bringing Samantha to these events. She likes to eat.”
~Samantha Mozart
*James Joyce, Ulysses
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