“Okay, I’ll take it,” I said, still staring at myself in the mirror. “But does it make me look tall?”

“No.”

I was flummoxed. “I want—I need—to look as tall as possible.”

“Elise,” she said heavily, with the tone of someone about to tell me the cold, hard truth. Which was the tone Fran always used. “You’re not tall. You’ll never be tall. Five-hundred-dollar Eskandar sweater or no five-hundred-dollar Eskandar sweater.”

I felt the panic bubble up, then settle back down.

She put her arm around my neck; Bill Murray about to give Gilda Radner a noogie.

“So. Shorty,” she said. “What’s it gonna be? Do you want the sweater or not?”

I felt paralyzed.

“Think about it this way: You need the sweater. Every time you look at Adrienne and think how fabulous she is, you’ll look down at this sweater and think how fabulous you are.”

I nodded eagerly, hungry for this exact kind of existential self-actualizing wisdom—the kind I secretly longed for but never found in any of the books I worked on.

“You’ll think how fabulous you are for having a friend as smart as me. A friend smart enough to find you a sweater as fabulous as this.”

Despite the lack of deep meaning and philosophical resonance in her mini-speech, and the brilliantly soft hard sell she’d just done on me, disappointment quickly gave way to relief:

Five hundred dollars of (additional) credit card debt was nothing compared to the idea of spending the rest of my life alone.

10

Saturday arrived with unjust speed, and before I knew it, I was driving over to Gayle’s house in Georgetown en route to the airport. She got into Donald’s sleek black giant five-speed BMW 740, which I could barely handle without lurching and stalling—I feared my easy-to-maneuver stick-shift Jetta wouldn’t have as much legroom for the Attenuated One—looking fantastic, having picked out a visually pleasing outfit today despite her usually odd and often misguided love of clothes with texture and color.

Wearing a black ribbed sweater set (texture), and a long wildly patterned sarong skirt (color), she slid into the front seat and shut the door, marveling, as she did, at the perfect thunk! sound it made (“Those Germans,” she said admiringly, and with a near-perfect German accent, “certainly know how to design and build cars!” To which I added: “And crematoria”) and kissed me—peck, peck! European-style—on both cheeks.

“Look!” she said excitedly, pointing to the black blazer she carried, unworn, in her lap. “Cast-off!”

She was referring, of course, to the term she used for anything—and everything—she salvaged from friends’ for-charity piles. So passionate was she about anything free (coats, shoes, lunch, advice) that she once took every last second-rate cookbook a friend (the food critic of a big Maryland daily newspaper) was giving away. Prompting the critic-friend to speculate aloud to mutual friends that maybe Gayle had some sort of obsessive-compulsive collecting disorder.

She poked at me with her long slender fingers. “Don’t you remember this jacket?”