ALMOST CARRIE ~ Girlfriends

As I left my apartment Friday morning for work—not my Sex and the City job mind you, but a standardized patient shift (if you don’t know what that is, check out this post from 10.20.11)—I was particularly jazzed about my commute. My gig was in the Bronx, a good hour and forty-five minutes from where I live in Brooklyn, which meant leaving my place at 7:15 and walking to the train that’s 12 minutes away as opposed to the one that’s right outside my door. The long subway ride gives me a blissful stretch of purely indulgent, uninterrupted reading time (Friday’s selection: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City), and the long walk beforehand provides the perfect opportunity to chat on the phone with my sister.

High on Starbucks dark roast and the promise of a juicy conclusion to a conversation we’d started the day before, I placed my call at 7:24. The phone rang five times and then went to voicemail, which could only mean one thing that time of day—my sister was on the other line with my mother. The two of them have a new habit of talking every morning before work; they both have early-bird jobs—my sister works in a hospital, my mother in a middle school—and their schedules naturally align. By 7:24 however, my mother is usually dashing off, running to the car with her silver bracelets clinking and armloads of egg cartons and old yogurt cups that her students will magically transform into replicas of the David or Winged Victory (she teaches art).

Not wanting to be left out, and not wanting to waste a second of my walk, I hung up on my sister’s voicemail and called my mother. Yes, she said, she had been on the phone with my sister, but ended things with her in order to say Hi to me. When I asked her why she hadn’t left for school yet, she yelped about the time and geared up for an even madder dash than usual. Before she whirled away, she asked why I had rang. “I just wanted to be part of the fun,” I said. “Oh well, that’s true,” she answered. “We do have a lot of fun.” After that, I called my sister again, and the two of us recapped both of our individual conversations with mom.

This series of calls, the back-and-forthness of it all, the hanging up and calling back, the tell-me-everythings and the fill-me-ins, left me giddy, and I couldn’t help but picture one of those three-way split screen scenes, with Carrie fielding calls from Miranda on the left and Samantha on the right. It was, I thought as I sat down on the 5 train, like I just got off the phone with my best girlfriends.

This is new, all this phone time with my mother and sister. My father was the chatty one in my family; he talked on the phone with the same enthusiasm as a teenage girl. Now my mother, my sister, and I must take the reins and negotiate life without him. What was a family unit is now, quite suddenly, just three grown women finding their way. On Friday morning—for a moment at least—that seemed like quite a lovely thing.

Emily Sproch is a writer and a Sex and the City tour guide. Each Friday, she chronicles the fine line between reality and fiction in her column “Almost Carrie.”