Free I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron

I immediately became nervous. I stood up and made some sort of excuse and walked as quickly as I could over the rocks and back to the house. Lillian was sitting out on the patio in a muumuu.
    “How was the beach?” she asked.
    “Fine,” I said.
    “Was anyone else there?”
    “A man,” I said.
    “Older?” she said. “Fat?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “That does it,” she said.
    She stood up and took off toward the beach.
    A few minutes later she came back. The intruder had vanished. She was in a rage. She was apparently in an ongoing war with the man. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stay off her beach. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stop trying to have conversations with her friends. She would tell him again, if he ever dared to come around and she caught him lurking there. She was furious that he’d disappeared before she’d had the chance to order him away. I couldn’t believe it. She was dying for a fight. She loved confrontation. She was a dramatist and she needed drama. I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.
    After my very bad interview with her appeared in
The Times
, Lillian and I became friends. “Friends” isprobably not the right word—I became one of the young people in her life. She wrote me letters all the time, funny letters, mostly typed, and signed Miss Hellman. She sent me recipes. She came to my apartment and I went to hers. It was hard to imagine Lillian had ever been a Communist, I have to say that. I’d grown up knowing a lot of left-wing people in Hollywood who lived well, but there was no trace of the Old Left in Lillian’s apartment at 630 Park Avenue—no Mexican art, for instance, or Ben Shahns; it was furnished in a style that fell somewhere between old WASP and German Jewish—brocade sofas, small tables made of dark wood, oil paintings of the sea, Persian rugs.
    She held small dinners for six or eight, and she always had rollicking stories to tell that I now realize were exaggerated, but which at the time were hilarious. She’d had a run-in with a saleswoman one Sunday in the fur department of Bergdorf Goodman. Jason Epstein had set her kitchen on fire making Chinese food. Lillian was fun. She was so much fun. She had a great deep laugh, and she always had a subject for general conversation. “My great-uncle has died,” she said one night at her table, “and the lawyer called to say, ‘He has left you a pleasant sum of money.’ How much money do you think is a pleasant sum of money?” What a game! What a wonderful game! We eventually agreed, after much debate, that $675,000 was our idea of a pleasant sum of money. She said we had guessed it on the nose. Was it true? Was any of it true? Who knows? I listened, enthralled, as she told me how Hammetthad once run off with S. J. Perelman’s wife, how Peter Feibleman (to whom she eventually left her home on the Vineyard) had hurt her feelings by trying to make a date with one of her good friends, how she’d once seen a young woman she thought might be Julia’s daughter. This last episode took place on a cliff, as I recall. Lillian and Dashiell Hammett had been standing on a cliff when a young woman came up to her, touched her arm, and ran away. “I’ve always wondered,” she said. “Because she looked so much like Julia.”
    Here is a letter she wrote me about delicatessens, my father, Henry Ephron, and me:
    I am sitting in P. J. Bernstein’s Delicatessen, a place I visit about once a month. I have long been sentimental about middle-aged ladies who have to use their legs and several of the waitresses, being Jewish, have pounded on this unspoken sympathy. One of them knows that I do something, but she does not know exactly what I do; that doesn’t stop her from kissing me as I order my knockwurst
.
    A few days ago, when she finished with the kissing, she said, “You know Henry Aarons?” “No,” I said, “I don’t.” She pushed me with that Jewish shoulder-breaking shove. “Sure you do,” she said,