JESSIE: Don’t exert right now, you’re still looking under the weather.

BELLA: I’ll go look for something to—make us a snack while the Moose Lodge—

JESSIE: Oh, yes, I’m sure the Moose Lodge will straighten things out so much better than at the police station: could result in publicity of the wrong kind. Hand me a sofa pillow. Yes, my hemorrhoids have returned. Embarrassing thing to discuss. A woman of sixty obliged to expose such an intimate part of the body, but Dr. Crane, oh, I don’t mind old Dr. Crane who delivered my children, but when I had to go, at his insistence, to New Awleans to that proctologist, specializes in, uh . . . such conditions—what severe pain, had to sit on a rubber-doughnut all the way and the examination was too embarrassing to describe. Had to strip myself naked and lie on a table that doubled me up so that this specialist could—oh, my God, I am telling you, Bella, he had an instrument with a light on one end of it, the end— inserted—and a magnifying lens on the other end through which he looked up into the colon, all the way up the colon.

BELLA: —Colon . . . Jessie, maybe you could go in the kitchen and look in the ice-box faw me, I just don’t have the strength to.

JESSIE: Oh, I imagine some people aren’t embarrassed by any kind of a clinical procedure but to me it was the most mortifying experience of my life. And must be repeated. [Pause. A look of fright widens her eyes.] Oh, I don’t know when afflictions like this come on you, it might be better to—I was about to say just go, but I am scared to, Bella. Are you?

BELLA [discovers a morsel on a plate and devours it]: Me? What?

JESSIE: Isn’t everybody? But sooner or later, it’s one way or another like it or not. You do go, Bella.

BELLA: Lights on in the kitchen. Who’s eating in there?

JESSIE: See it coming, another trip on that rubber-doughnut to the specialist, Bella, and the instrument up my—Moose Lodge? Don’t leave the phone till you get me Emerson Sykes. Who is that shouting Jesus like a hyena? What is going on there? A Holy Roller session?

BELLA: That must be Charlie’s girlfriend! Charlie’s engaged to a bawn-again Christian.

JESSIE: Is he? Well, personally, I would rather be dead than a born-again Christian!

BELLA: Are you a beer-drinker, Jessie? Cornelius keeps a supply in the ice-box. You know the way to the kitchen. Right through the dining room, Jessie.

JESSIE: Later, Bella, not now. Got to check with Emerson on the Moose Lodge situation.

BELLA: Joanie—

JESSIE: Oh, now, Bella, we’ve been through Joanie. Let’s not revert to that subject.