because shtick is the last system to go

This time it’s constipation. My parents are out of town for a week, and this time my grandmother is so stopped up she’s worried sick. Well, she is sick, actually, but I’m not sure that constipation is one of the symptoms. And I highly suspect that she already had a large size value bottle of Metamucil stashed somewhere in her apartment, if somebody only bothered to look, if she only bothered to ask, even, but that's not nearly as dramatic. But anyway…

I call her this afternoon to say “hello.”

“I’ve been thinking about you,” she says. “Just now, even.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’m so glad you called. You see, it’s been two whole days and I haven’t gone to the bathroom and I was trying to figure out who could possibly get me some Metamucil and some of those suppositories.”

Of course I’ll get it for you, I tell her. She’s sick after all, dying even: her systems are starting to fail, one by one. But not to worry, she’s still got shtick.

“Of course I don’t tell your parents anything when they call,” she says. “I just tell them everything’s fine. But it’s not fine.”

“Of course not.” It never is when my parents are out of town; something always, inevitably must go wrong.

Outside the Walgreen’s in my grandmother’s neighborhood an obese woman in red reindeer ears stares at the silent bell by her side as she slumps into a metal folding chair and talks on her Bluetooth headset. In front of her is a sign that reads “Salvation Army”. She doesn’t even mutter some innocuous variant of “Season’s Greetings” as I go by.

The pharmacy attendant directs me to aisle 5. There he and I and the shelf stocker and the head pharmacist all discuss the nuances of my grandmother’s conditions, the ins and outs of constipation in a 91 ½ year old woman. Loudly.

Lazy reindeer woman glares at me as I pass her by on the way to my car. This time she rings her bell, a bell that now signals the collective guilt of all creeds.

“I don’t know what I would have done without you,” my grandmother says when I call to tell her the stuff is on the way. As if it’s some kind of drug deal: phylum husks and stool softener disguised in a Walgreen's white plastic bag.

“Be sure to drink lots of water,” I tell her before I hang up the phone. “And remember, my parents will be home Sunday.”

“You know, I don’t tell them how much I suffer,” she says. “I only tell you. You're the only one. I tell you everything. But after I’m dead you can tell the rest of them. Then you can tell your father and your uncle and everyone how awful it was for me.”