I Feel Bad About My Neck (10 page)

The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less

If I can just get back to New York, I’ll be fine

I’m five years old. We’ve just moved from New York to Los Angeles, and I’m outside, at a playground, at my new school on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. The sunlight dapples through the trees, and happy laughing blond children surround me. All I can think is, What am I doing here?

What my mother said

My mother says these words at least five hundred times in the course of my growing up: “Everything is copy.”

She also says, “Never ever buy a red coat.”

What my teacher said

My high school journalism teacher, whose name is Charles O. Simms, is teaching us to write a lead—the first sentence or paragraph of a newspaper story. He writes the words “Who What Where When Why and How” on the blackboard. Then he dictates a set of facts to us that goes something like this: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento on Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be anthropologist Margaret Mead and Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago.” We all sit at our typewriters and write a lead, most of us inverting the set of facts so that they read something like this, “Anthropologist Margaret Mead and University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the faculty Thursday in Sacramento at a colloquium on new teaching methods, the principal of the high school Kenneth L. Peters announced today.” We turn in our leads. We’re very proud. Mr. Simms looks at what we’ve done and then tosses everything into the garbage. He says: “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school Thursday.’” An electric lightbulb turns itself on in the balloon over my head. I decide at this moment that I am going to be a journalist. A few months later I enter a citywide contest to write an essay in fifty words or less on why I want to be a journalist. I win first prize, two tickets to the world premiere of a Doris Day movie.

I swear to God Janice Glabman will never laugh at me again

I go off to college. I weigh 106 pounds. I come back from college three months later. I weigh 126 pounds. I was once thin and shapeless. Now I am fat and, ironically, equally shapeless. Nothing fits, except for my wool plaid Pendleton pleated skirt, which makes me look even fatter. It’s tragic. My father takes one look at me as I get off the plane and says to my mother, “Well, maybe someone will marry her for her personality.”

I go back to college. I stay fat. There’s a machine in the dormitory cafeteria called The Cow, and when you press a nozzle, out comes the coldest, most delicious milk you’ve ever tasted. Also there are sticky buns and popovers and scones. I have never been exposed to such wonders. I love them. I have seconds. I have thirds. There’s butter everywhere you look, and of course, that cold, delicious milk. We’re not talking low-fat milk, my friends. This was so long ago no one even knew about low-fat milk.

Anyway, months pass. I come home for the summer. I’m as fat as ever. None of my clothes fit. I already said that, and it’s still true. And because it’s summer, I can’t even wear my wool plaid Pendleton pleated skirt. So I go over to my friend Janice Glabman’s to borrow some clothes from her. Janice has always been overweight. I try on a pair of her pants. They’re too small. They’re way too small. I can’t even zip them up. Janice laughs at me. These are Janice’s exact words: “Ha ha ha ha ha.” The next day I go on a diet. In six months my weight drops back to 106. I have been on a diet ever since.

I have not seen Janice in more than forty years, but if I do see her, I’m ready. I’m thin. Although I now weigh 126 pounds, the exact amount I weighed when I came home from college having become a butterball. I can’t explain this.

I am not going to marry Stanley J. Fleck

I’m working as a summer intern in the Kennedy White House, and I’m engaged to be married to a young lawyer named Stanley J. Fleck. Everyone I know is engaged to be married. My fiancé is visiting me in Washington, and I give him a tour of the White House, which I have a pass to roam freely. I show him the Red Room. I show him the Blue Room. I show him the beautiful portrait of Grace Coolidge. I show him the Rose Garden. At the end of the tour, he says, “No wife of mine is ever going to work at a place like this.”

Sunday in the park

I’m in a rowboat on the lake in Central Park. Fortunately I’m not rowing the boat. I’m still in college, but soon I won’t be, soon I’ll be living here, in New York City. I look up at all the buildings surrounding the park, and it crosses my mind that except for the man rowing the boat, I don’t know anyone in New York City. And I barely know the man in the boat. I wonder if I’m going to end up being one of those people you read about in newspapers, who lives in New York and never meets anyone and eventually dies and no one even notices until days later, when the smell drifts out into the hallway. I vow that someday I will know someone in New York City.

I’m going to be a newspaper reporter forever

It’s 1963. I’ve written a piece for a parody of the
New York Post
during a long newspaper strike. The editors of the
Post
are upset about the parody, but the publisher of the
Post
is amused. “If they can parody the
Post,
they can write for it,” she says. “Hire them.” When the strike ends, I’m given a one-week tryout at the
Post.
The city room is dusty, dingy, and dark. The desks are dilapidated and falling apart. It smells terrible. There aren’t enough phones. The city editor sends me to the Coney Island aquarium to cover the story of two hooded seals who’ve been brought together to mate but have refused to have anything to do with each other. I write a story. I think it’s funny. I turn it in. I hear laughter from the city desk. They think it’s funny too. I am hired permanently. I have never been happier. I have achieved my life’s ambition, and I am twenty-two years old.

I may not be a newspaper reporter forever

One night I go to a bar near the
Post
with one of my fellow reporters and the managing editor. It’s been raining. After quite a few drinks, the managing editor invites us to his home in Brooklyn Heights. When we get there, he tells me to stand on the stoop in front of the house. There’s an awning over one of the windows. As I step into position, he lowers the awning, and about ten gallons of water drench me from head to toe. He thinks this is hilarious.

My life changes

I write a magazine article about having small breasts. I am now a writer.

What my mother said (2)

I now believe that what my mother meant when she said “Everything is copy” is this: When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

I think that’s what she meant.

On the other hand, she may merely have meant, “Everything is copy.”

When she was in the hospital, dying, she said to me, “You’re a reporter, Nora. Take notes.” It seems to me this is not quite the same as “Everything is copy.”

My mother died of cirrhosis, but the immediate cause of her death was an overdose of sleeping pills administered by my father. At the time this didn’t seem to me to fall under the rubric of “Everything is copy.” Although it did to my sister Amy, and she put it into a novel. Who can blame her?

How she died: my version

My mother is in the hospital. Every day, my father calls and says, this is it, they’re pulling the plug. But there is no plug. My mother comes home. Several days pass. One day my father says, I’m going to give the nurse the night off. Late that night, he calls to tell me my mother has died. The funeral home has already come and taken away her body. I go to their apartment. It’s four in the morning. I sit with my father for a while, and then we both decide to take a nap before the next day begins. My father reaches into the pocket of his bathrobe and pulls out a bottle of sleeping pills. “The doctor gave me these in case I was having trouble sleeping,” he says. “Flush them down the toilet.” I go into the bathroom and flush them down the toilet. The next morning, when my sisters arrive, I tell them about the pills. My sister Amy says to me, “Did you count the pills?”

“No,” I say.

“Duh,” she says.

I was married to him for six years

My first husband is a perfectly nice person, although he’s pathologically attached to his cats. It’s 1972, the height of the women’s movement, and everyone is getting a divorce, even people whose husbands don’t have pathological attachments to their cats. My husband is planning for us to take a photo safari through Africa, and I say to him, “I can’t go on this trip.”

“Why not?” he says.

“Because it’s very expensive and we’re probably going to split up and I’ll feel horribly guilty that you spent all this money taking me to Africa.”

“Don’t be crazy,” my husband says. “I love you and you love me and we’re not getting a divorce and even if we do, you’re the only person I want to go to Africa with. We’re going.”

So we go to Africa. It’s a wonderful trip. When we come back, I tell my husband that I want a divorce. “But I took you to Africa!” he says.

You can’t make this stuff up

I’m working on a magazine story about a woman who was fired from her job as president of Bennington College. I have read a story about her in
The New York Times
that says she’s been fired—along with her husband, the vice president of Bennington—because of her brave stand against tenure. I suspect her firing has nothing to do with her brave stand against tenure, although I don’t have a clue what the real reason is. I go to Bennington and discover that she has in fact been fired because she’s been having an affair with a professor at Bennington, that they taught a class in Hawthorne together, and that they both wore matching T-shirts in class with scarlet
A
’s on them. What’s more, I learn that the faculty hated her from the very beginning because she had a party for them and served lukewarm lasagna and unthawed Sara Lee banana cake. I can’t get over this aspect of journalism. I can’t believe how real life never lets you down. I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.

Everything is copy

I’m seven months pregnant with my second child, and I’ve just discovered that my second husband is in love with someone else. She too is married. Her husband telephones me. He’s the British ambassador to the United States. I’m not kidding. He happens to be the kind of person who tends to see almost everything in global terms. He suggests lunch. We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh, Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”

“It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”

I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking, someday this will be a funny story.

I was married to him for two years and eight months

I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I’m a total mess and I will never be the same. I can’t stop crying. She looks at me and says, “You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.”

On the other hand, perhaps you can make this stuff up