Heartburn Read Free Page A

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—throughthe 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