The one in which Rachel rambles on about elevators

I spend a lot of time in elevators. Enough time to realize I’m lucky. Enough time to Photoshop the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie poster to embody the descent into horrors that happens on a cursory elevator ride in my building (all images represent actual views of floors in my building from within the elevator).

You get in on the 9th, press the greasy cold button, and then, BAM! Someone on the 7th needs to get on and as the elevator doors swoosh open to reveal lumpy carpeting and wrinkled walls, you gasp in horror and think to yourself:

“I am lucky to not work on this floor. Very lucky indeed.”

You may actually say this out loud as well.

I have an interesting relationship with elevators. For one thing, it stretches pretty far back – all the way back to age 11 when my family moved from a first floor to a seventh.

You begin to appreciate elevators when you live on a seventh. You also begin to hate them.

Our 20+ year old building was like a dignified Englishman who daily smokes a pipe: stately on the outside, rotten on the inside. Unfortunately, in our case, the rotting extended to the elevator shafts. This led to multiple breakdowns and stalls (with and without people stuck inside). This also led to much huffing and puffing up seven flights of stairs. Even on grocery day.

Maybe my Mom had a hunch early on that she would live in a building with a moody elevator. Exploiting your four children as pack llamas certainly cuts down on the number of grocery runs up seven flights of stairs.

Besides the occasional breakdown, there was also the issue of moving. How do you fit a couch into an elevator? Or a bed? You don’t. That’s when you hope you have a lot of friends with the brute strength to lug a couch up seven flights. Because four whiny kids just don’t cut it.

Going for a bicycle ride in the potted courtyard below also presented a unique challenge. You learn at a tender age to hoist your bike onto its back wheel and imprison yourself behind it within the elevator (going against every instinct of survival in your body). Which makes for an awkward – albeit strangely intimate – ride down should any other apartment dweller climb into your elevator by chance.

This is when the art of “elevator talk” comes in handy. This ever-polite, pause-infused, head-nodding mode of speech becomes your sole defense mechanism as you feebly wave hello from behind the bike wheel. It’s that or pretend to deeply contemplate the grease on your chain. Like that fools anybody.

At least you can rely on an elevator for discretion.

On one particularly hot summer day in ’99, I decided to take “Oso,” the yellow lab we were dog-sitting, on a jaunt around the potted courtyard. I had the spent my morning lounging on the sofa with a book, oblivious to the heat waves flickering over the sidewalk outside. Oblivious to my body’s need for water.

After shuffling after Oso as he made his “rounds,” I sluggishly pulled him into the elevator to go back up. I remember leaning against the cool metallic panel of the elevator. And then I don’t remember anything else. Somewhere between floors 4 and 5 I fainted. When I woke up, I was on the floor. The elevator doors were opening. And Oso looked mournfully on.

At least, with a dog there is no need for “elevator talk.”