Rosie by Anne Lamott

Okay?”
    Rae nodded, teary and miserable.
    â€œShit,” said Elizabeth, looking away, then back to her friend, whose day it was to have been. “Tssss,” she said, sideways out of her mouth, smiling. “Some great shortcut.”
    Rae followed Elizabeth’s instructions, wiping at her eyes. Five minutes later they were at their destination, the Union Square garage.
    Please pull for Rae’s success, please in your heart wish her well. But as they cruised looking for a parking space on the third,fourth, and fifth levels of the garage, Elizabeth swallowed another golf ball. And then Rae found a space, which she pulled into, one of many available on Level Five, with a big Cadillac on her side and a column five inches away from Elizabeth.
    Rae heaved a sigh of relief, looked at Elizabeth, and got out of the car. Elizabeth stared dully at the column. The girls scrambled out on Rae’s side, then looked in at Elizabeth, as did Rae. Elizabeth turned to them and asked wearily, “Why did you park so close to the column? I’m stuck.”
    â€œCan’t you climb over the stick shift? Sorry about that. Oh, God, I’m such an idiot. It’s just that I’m so nervous!” She went to the back of the car.
    Elizabeth felt very, very tired. She continued to look at the column and then, forcing herself, for all their sakes, to be a good sport, she finally climbed, cramped and awkward, over the stick shift, into Rae’s seat, and then out the door.
    The girls, holding hands, looked about ready to jump up and down. Rae, clutching her portfolio, looked orphaned and hunted.
    After numerous pats and kisses, Rae headed toward the gallery on Post. The girls skipped alongside Elizabeth, pausing to find openings in the human traffic, gaping at the fattest women, the tiniest men, the drunks, hoods, punks, dudes, whores, and glamorous women. People turned to admire Elizabeth, tall, striking, regal, haughty—even famous, maybe.
    Rosie and Sharon each bought a pencil from the legless pencil man who sat on a dolly in front of Macy’s, the same man, or so it seemed, from whom Elizabeth had bought countless pencils twenty-five and more years ago, when her shiny black hair was in braids, a girl as skinny as Rosie but taller, in white gloves and camel’s hair coat, headed for patty melts at Blum’s, or the City of Paris Christmas tree, or the dentist at the 450 Sutter Building. It was coming back as they walked down Stockton, triggered by sounds and smells, voices, cable cars, sweat, perfume, sweets, cigars, sirens, gasoline, car horns, an accordion. When the girls were lost in the moving crowd for a moment, Elizabeth’s heart stopped. There they were, seemingly oblivious to her, tiny butgrowing so fast. She remembered the harsh and distressed way her mother rubbed at her face with a lipstick-streaked Kleenex smelling of Chanel, remembered how she hated being swabbed off with her mother’s spit; how delighted, sentimental, and scared of the cable cars her mother was, mushy even, and panicked that Elizabeth would be crushed by one of them. “Rosie! Stay closer.” And the way her mother approached the escalators, as if she were leading Elizabeth through fire on a tightrope, stepping past the crack and the first step onto the second step as carefully as stepping over dog do because if your foot touched the crack, the escalator would suck you down, take you around on its treadmill until it spat you out, flat as a pancake with long vertical grooves running the length of your body, flat as a character in a cartoon who’s been run over by a steamroller.
    â€œMama, let’s go in a store. Okay?”
    Macy’s. The dreaded escalator. The girls, well-behaved, quiet, taking in the wealth, the blacks, the shimmers, hysterical on seeing girdles and bras. Elizabeth laughed at their silliness, and at a memory of her mother, tall and stout, grimly wrestling her way into a girdle,