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Granny is a mallrat. Hours are spent at gallerias, outlet stores and stripmalls searching for the perfect blouse-and-skirt-combo to wear to her office job.

She doesn't actually have an office. Or even a job, having retired years ago so that she could be "kept" by her husband. But she loves clothes and all the accessories which go with them, and insists on sharing the shopping experience with others. This week she shared it with me, since the only other person who'll go with her is my mother and she won the coin toss.

Upon entering the store, Granny ran toward the peach-and-cranberry cashmere sweater with mother-of-pearl buttons. Following her, I readied some snarkier-than-last-time responses for what constitutes our shopping tradition: Granny coos about the prettiness of the clothes, followed by lamenting on why I don't wear such clothes, and culminating in a diatribe on how nobody will marry me if I don't share her love of all things pantyhose, scarf and 3-inch heels.

Petting the sweaters like the rabbits they once were Granny began: "Ooooh, I love these! They're so soft and luscious. Look at these colors. How come you don't wear these colors? You always look so drab. You know, your cousin Christine is on birth control."

I choked on my readied snarky response. Had I heard correctly? As she raced over to some very nice chocolate-brown wool slacks on the other side of the department, Granny assured me that, "And if you want to go on it too I'll pay for it."

I was stunned. Not only did Granny not follow protocol, but her conversational innappropriateness had skyrocketed. Since when does she delve into bodily-function matters? She is supposed to complain how it's too bad I'll end up old and alone because I don't like gabardine. She yaps, I yap back and then we have lunch. That's what we do at the mall!

I marched over to her (now in the shoe department, trying on fire-engine-red stilettos), insisting "I am gainfully employed and therefore quite able to pay for my own birth control. How did you find this out about Christine anyway? She doesn't tell you anything. Is this henwork?"

(Granny hangs out with a bunch of women I call "hens" since they cluck all day about various ailments they each suffer, how their kids don't call, etc. Sometimes, when conversation is getting stale, they do covert op work involving their individual families in order to bring new topics of discussion to the table. I suspected Christine would be the subject of next week's meeting.)

Granny almost toppled off her hooker heels: "Number one, we don't like when you call us that. And second, Christine came over for lunch and when she was in the bathroom I got this terrible headache and couldn't get to the aspirin since it was in the bathroom where Christine was and I'm not so rude as to ask her to get off the toilet so I could get aspirin so I looked in her purse for some and there I came across the birth control pills." She sneered in smug triumph, daring me to question her account of how she acquired this most personal of information.

I took the dare. "You keep the aspirin in the kitchen cabinet above the toaster." (She forgot that every time I see her I get a headache and always ask for aspirin.)

The smirk left her face. She thought awhile, trying to cook up another scenario, almost had one, but thought better of it. She kicked off the shoes and ordered, "Let's go to lunch."

Neither of us spoke as we headed toward the store exit. Just before we left, Granny paused, wrapping herself in a periwinkle-blue cashmere cape: "Ooooh, I love this! It's so soft and luscious. Look at this color. How come you don't wear this color? You always look so drab. You know, nobody's going to marry you if you don't dress nicely..."

Learn more about this author, D. Raposa.
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