vanity mirror crack'd

From her Olympic-sized bed, my great-aunt Clorinda says she will never forget the sound of her face meeting the pavement outside of her Washington Square apartment building. This was just yesterday and now, sporting two stitches in her lip and sagging purple udders under her eyes, she's officially over it. If she knew what they were, she would be giving shout outs to all the passersby who stopped to help, pulled out tissues to sop up the blood, got ice from nearby restaurants. And especially big props to Terry, the doorman who scraped her off the sidewalk and helped her up to her apartment.
You may be thinking, reading this snippet, that I am being insensitive about a potentially grave matter. But please keep in mind that I am largely paraphrasing my aunt's exact sentiments, her proclivity for wrapping up her personal trials in pithy comments. Remote control in hand, she is now talking about her friend Barbara who lives in the building. Barbara is a very nice and sweet octogenarian who, sometimes in recent months, calls me on my cell phone to let me know that Clorinda has been taken to the hospital, or to ask me which hospital she has been taken to. Over a ruffling bag of ice on my aunt's lip, I learn that Barbara and her husband have "oodles" of money, but they don't spend it and Clorinda doesn't know WHAT they do with it. After her first hubby died, Barbara married a nice Jewish boy from Park Avenue. When his mother died, she inherited all of her second husband's mother's bling. She never wears any of this jewelry, which my aunt thinks is an absolute shande. When Clorinda was working, she always wore all her jewelry and she always looked good because she had a great figure and 7 or 8 Hermes scarves with which she always accessorized her outfits. She was always slim.

How long do I suppose these hideous bags will be under her eyes, she wants to know. Too bad it's not Halloween, she says, I could go around haunting houses.