The Ultimate Girl Party

I’m of an age when my dearest, oldest friends are threatening to disappear on me. Fortunately, I have not lost any of my closest friends yet. But some of the Good Ones are up to 10 years older and I’m 77. And we joke sometimes that I have to start finding some Backups—although, in truth they sometimes wow me with their indomitable energy, so maybe the joke will be on me.

Meanwhile, I have lost or erased every single major guy relationship I had, including my second husband (the first and I are thankfully out of touch).

The weird thing about losing a history with a guy is, in my case, there were a couple that I couldn’t help feeling were unfinished business. I’d even still dream about them, forty years later. But now they’re gone, so are the nighttime wanderings of unsettled stuff. And I have sometimes thought, “Dang! He had the last word!”

But the Girlfriends! So many cherished memories over the decades. Therefore, I share the following true story to make a point about the depth of such bonds:

I was hurrying up Madison Ave to catch a bus.  I’d only been in New York for a few months, but I already considered myself pretty street-savvy.  I could hail a cab in rush-hour traffic.  I could negotiate the subways and find alternate routes if there was a slowdown. 

Actually, the only part of the city that intimidated me were the New Yorkers in the super-rich part of town where I was staying, taking care of a wealthy friend who was ill.  Their confidence, impeccable dress, and clear sense of ownership, not only of those streets but also of a life of privilege, often made me feel Pig-Pen in a Peanuts cartoon.

Today, as I headed north, there was an elderly woman walking up ahead of me, the type who made me nervous even though I couldn’t see her face.  She was a tiny Tower of Power, maybe 5 feet high, with steel-grey hair smoothly coiffed in a tight roll at the back of her head. She wore a perfectly tailored, expensive-looking bright red jacket with pointy broad shoulders, a narrow knee-length black skirt, and her thin legs were sheathed in dark nylons and her teeny, tiny ankles supported narrow feet wearing shiny black patent leather high-heeled shoes. Her matching pocketbook over her right arm could have held most of the World Book encyclopedia before it went digital.

She was stumping along at a good clip, like she’d walked that sidewalk all of her life.  As I drew near, I stole a peek at her.  I guessed she was pushing mid-80s and would probably live to at least 150.

I’m nearly six feet tall and tiny women, wealthy or not, and especially with her kind of pizzazz, have always sent me careening into doors and tripping over myself in a confabulation of elephantine insecurity.

At the moment, however, I was more focused on my bus, which was already stopped on the other side of 86^th, the double-lane, high-traffic cross-street that bisects Madison and zips into Central Park and over to the West Side.  There wouldn’t be another one for 20 minutes.  And the problem was that the light said, “Don’t Walk.”  Except that the street was momentarily empty, so when the woman headed decisively across against the light, I trailed along with my own temporary spark of brio.

Midway across, we were walking side by side, and then, because my legs are longer and the way seemed clear, I began to pass her.

“Hold it!” she barked. Her arm came out, slammed me in the gut and stopped me short. And a car came out of nowhere and blew by in front of us, raising the hair on my head, while she remained calm and immobile until the coast was clear.

Legs trembling, I meekly walked beside her as we continued the rest of the way across.

“So, my friend Myra is in a nursing home,” she then remarked to me, as if picking up a conversation we’d left off before we were interrupted, “And every time I go visit her, she takes me by the hand and shouts, because she’s deaf, ‘HEY STELLA! HOW ABOUT LET’S GO DIE TOGETHER!’"

'“She says it like, ‘Let’s go shopping,’ you know, old friends, like, we used to do everything together and why not this?”

Yes.

Why not this? One glorious, Celebration-of-Girlfriend-Love Exit Party?

As we reached the curb, my bus pulled away without me and I didn’t care because my legs still didn’t work right.  She turned and twinkled up at me for a moment: “Honey,” she said, “That’s what you and I were going to do.”

As I stammered out my thanks to her back, my fierce little anonymous lifesaver stumped on up the avenue.