Crazy Salad (26 page)

Most of my mother’s clothes were sent to charity. And the evening dresses, the beautiful chiffon Galanos dresses my father had bought her, were too big for any of us. But there was the mink. And there I was. The eldest. The most grown-up. It occurred to me I could cut it down to size or line another coat with it. Something. I took it.

A few weeks later, one of my sisters called. Did I take the mink? she asked. Yes. It’s not fair, she said. She didn’t even have a winter coat and I had hundreds and a big apartment and a rich husband and now I had the mink, too. You can have half of it, I said. She didn’t want half of it. She didn’t have the money for a winter coat much less the money to turn half a mink into something. What do you want? I said. She didn’t know. There were three more phone
calls, each uglier and more vituperative, thirty years of sibling rivalry come to a head over an eighteen-year-old mink. I have to make it clear that I was as awful as she was. I wanted the mink.

Finally, one day, we met in front of the Ritz Thrift Shop on Fifty-seventh Street. I was carrying the mink. She was barely speaking to me. We went inside, and a lady came over. We said we wanted to sell the mink. The lady took the fur in her hands and turned it over, peeling away the coat lining to look at the underside of the skins. She spent a good half second with it. “I won’t give you a nickel for it,” she said. The skins were worthless. Shot. Something like that. We walked out onto Fifty-seventh Street carrying the mink. It was suddenly a burden, a useless assemblage of old worn-out pelts. I didn’t want it. She didn’t want it. A year later, my maid asked for it and I gave it to her. Shortly thereafter, my maid’s apartment was robbed and the burglar got the mink.

I will never have one. I know that now. And like a lot of things I will never have, I have mixed feelings about it. I mean, I could have one if I wanted one. I could squirrel away every extra nickel and buy myself, maybe not a perfect mink, but something made of mink noses or mink eyes or whatever spare parts make up that category of coats they call fun furs. But I don’t really want one: a mink coat is serious, and I would have to change my life to go with it.

But I love her for having bought one. She had the only kind of mink worth having, the kind you pay for yourself. That is not the answer I was looking for, but it will have to do.

December, 1975

Nora Ephron
is the author of the bestselling
I Feel Bad About My Neck
as well as
Heartburn
,
Crazy Salad
,
Wallflower at the Orgy
,
I Remember Nothing
, and
Scribble Scribble
. She recently wrote and directed the hit movie
Julie & Julia
and has received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for
When Harry Met Sally …
,
Silkwood
, and
Sleepless in Seattle
, which she also directed. Her other credits include the script for the current stage hit
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
with Delia Ephron. She died in 2012.

FICTION
Heartburn

ESSAYS
I Remember Nothing
I Feel Bad About My Neck
Nora Ephron Collected
Scribble Scribble
Crazy Salad
Wallflower at the Orgy

DRAMA
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
(with Delia Ephron)
Imaginary Friends

SCREENPLAYS
Julie & Julia
Bewitched
(with Delia Ephron)
Hanging Up
(with Delia Ephron)
You’ve Got Mail
(with Delia Ephron)
Michael
(with Jim Quinlan, Pete Dexter, and Delia Ephron)
Mixed Nuts
(with Delia Ephron)
Sleepless in Seattle
(with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch)
This Is My Life
(with Delia Ephron)
My Blue Heaven
When Harry Met Sally …
Cookie
(with Alice Arlen)
Heartburn
Silkwood
(with Alice Arlen)

HEARTBURN

Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. The fact that the other woman has “a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs” is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel writes cookbooks for a living. And in between trying to win Mark back and loudly wishing him dead, Ephron’s irrepressible heroine offers some of her favorite recipes.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76795-4

I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK

Ephron chronicles her life as an obsessed cook, passionate city dweller, and hapless parent. She hates her chaotic mess of a purse. She searches for the divinely flaky cabbage strudel of her youth and finds it 23 years later. She endures the daily tribulations of feminine maintenance: removing unwanted hair, moisturizing patches of skin the consistency of a loofah, and recovering from treadmill injuries. Utterly courageous, uproariously funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth-telling, I Feel Bad About My Neck is a scrumptious, irresistible treat of a book, full of laugh-out-loud moments that will appeal to readers of all ages.

Humor/Essays/978-0-307-27682-7

I REMEMBER NOTHING

Ephron takes a hilarious look at the past, the present, and the future, bemoaning the vicissitudes of modern life, and recalling with her signature clarity and wisdom everything she hasn’t (yet) forgotten. Filled with insights and observations that instantly ring true—and could have come only from Nora Ephron—
I Remember Nothing
is pure joy.

Humor/Essays/978-0-307-74280-3

IMAGINARY FRIENDS

Although Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy probably only met once in their lives, their names will be linked forever in the history of American literary feuds: they were legendary enemies, especially after McCarthy famously announced to the world that every word Hellman wrote was a lie, “including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” The public battle and the legal squabbling that ensued ended, unsatisfactorily for all, with Hellman’s death. Ephron brilliantly resuscitates these two bigger-than-life women to give them a postmortem second act, and the chance to really air their differences.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3422-2

Vintage Books