Ran into Steph while Christian and I were at Dolce Vita. She's leaving for the Dominican Republic tomorrow with the girls, which means she's probably on the lam and the authorities are after her. Possible bank robbery. She looked like Doris Day, and her tweed-like coat had very large black buttons. That's what the WANTED poster will read: "Very large black buttons. Presumed dangerous."
I met Samara at the Lotus Pond for lunch earlier in the day, eating too many turnip cakes and mock chicken. She slid a book across the table promising that I'd love it for the title alone if nothing else, and then we wandered over to the mall to sit in the photo-booth taking pictures of ourselves so she'd have one for her europass I.D. when she's in Germany. After that, we parted ways so that she could pick up tickets and I could administer medication to my Ailing Accomplice, who may have picked up this terrible Consumption from me and has taken to his bed with a fit of aching bodily ennui. I'm going over there after work tomorrow night to try and make him feel better; I forced an orange on him much as Christian forced weird ginseng medicine on me tonight, medicine which supposedly will speed up my recovery. At this point, having lived with the viral monsters for a week, well, I'm about ready to try anything.
The book Samara lent me, Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola: A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies Crossing Canada by Train by Paulette Jiles, is really good so far. Kicky and jaunty and whimsical in its prose, the kind of thing Joy would write ("She has plans of running away from everything and becoming a charming drunk. But how to go about it?"). A romance, a detective story, a postmodern analysis of the hardboiled genre and the trampy women stereotypes contained therein. It's full of deliciously inviting lines ("Also getting on the trrain are a group of Americans, apparently having fallen out of the United States the way minor angels fall out of clouds every time there's unemployment in heaven.") and there's the weird, unspoken parallel between Our Heroine's railroad detective con and Miss Marple solving murders on the Orient Express. It's a good counterpoint and antidote to the peeling madness of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, which I bought for four bucks at Dark Horse Books the other day and read last night in about an hour. The horrors of a medical system that refuses to deal with women's depression, particularly post-partum depression, with anything but the sustained emptying of the woman's thoughts and creative impulses. Edgar Allan Poe as a feminist mother and doctor's wife.