BOWELS OF BECKET

The mistake of course is thinking I have turned my phone off at night. Sometimes I only THINK I have but then it beeps and I shoot out of bed--with DK, also suddenly awakened, saying "Christ! What was that?! What was that?!" even though it's a noise he has heard my phone make for years and which means incoming mail, which I mention. So. I see a mail from Bonnie, who has just heard from Terri, that Peg is constipated and in some pain. I then turn off my phone and go back to sleep. 

My phone beeps an hour later. The latest is there is Miralax on hand from Berkshire Place in the downstairs medicine cabinet but it says administer 17 grams, which they have to look up, because no one knows from grams, and they finally figure is about a heaping tablespoon, which you then mix with 4 - 5 ounces of a liquid. But which neither Bonnie nor Terri reckon will be good enough so Bonnie is going to ring Dominick, due the next morning. I turn my phone off AGAIN--switching it back and forth a few times to make sure--and go back to sleep. 

Again in comes an email. Good news. Dominick has been reached and he will stop by Rite Aid in the morning on his way to Becket and pick up Milk of Magnesia and about twelve million suppositories. 

I went downstairs and left my phone in the livingroom for the night, or what was left of it.

You will be pleased to know that Peg is no longer constipated.

Earlier that day she had houseguests, who'd arrived the night before. Paul and his wife Kim. Paul is the son of someone Peg grew up with in Minnesota, I think. Not sure. And not sure if Peg has met him before or if they only spoke on the phone, but, as with everyone she meets or speaks to or once sat next to for ten seconds on a bus to New York, she invited him to visit one day. And, he did. 

They are reportedly very nice. They were served curried chicken salad for lunch, pot roast for dinner, and coffee cake and scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast. I asked Terri how the visit had gone. Wonderful, she said, Peg had a lovely time, and she is sure they did too...only..well, it was a little strange, she says. Seems the wife had a brain aneurysm, Terri says.

"What! In the night?!"

"No, no," Terri says, years ago. Seems the doctor had told Kim that she was very lucky to be alive, and ever since then Kim has been terrified not only of dying, but of dying alone.

"So she has these--dolls," Terri tells me. Two dolls, big ones, about three feet long, that go everywhere with her, and sleep between Paul and Kim at night. She doesn't let them out of her sight. "They even sat on the butcher block while we're having breakfast," Terri says, "which was kinda weird, you know? Even your mom thought so." (No wonder she was constipated.)

I am very lucky, myself, it seems to me, to be sitting here in Suffolk only hearing about this, because I can't imagine I would have managed to be even vaguely polite about two giant fucking dolls in my face at every turn, like living in some ghastly Avenue Q onstage hell--incidentally a show I walked out of at the interval.