About 13 years ago, I got stuck on a broken-down Amtrak train between New York and Boston. The train was struck by lightning. It was around 95 degrees outside and the thing that happens when your train loses power is you also lose air conditioning.
So they sent a “rescue” engine, but then the rescue engine broke down. We sat there for hours. And what really and truly happened, I swear, is that they had a Metro-North train stop alongside us so a few of their doors lined up with a few of our doors, and hundreds of passengers used seat cushions as bridges to cross onto the other train.
That train was full of drunk people leaving New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade. Us Amtrak refugees sat on the floor and were taken as far as the last Metro-North station in Connecticut. If we were going to Rhode Island or Boston1, we were told, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This week’s book is about a much worse train ride.
— Ashley
let me tell you about this book
I read this book in one day. I had nothing else to do that day, but my point stands.
Helen Oyeyemi’s last two novels — Peaces and Gingerbread — have both had a strange effect on me that I’m unsure how to describe.2 Obviously, I’m going to try. What I want to say is that they’re cinematic, but that’s not right. It’s just a bad shortcut for what I’m trying to say, which is that while reading the books I have this feeling, as if I’m watching a movie, that tells me this story needs to be completed in one sitting. It’s like a film in the way I feel compelled to consume it.
Peaces is a story about a couple who boards a train on a not-technically-a-honeymoon “honeymoon,” and it’s almost immediately very, very weird. (Actually, it was already pretty weird because one of them has a pet mongoose he treats like a person.) The train is essentially a fantastical mansion on wheels, traveling through an unfamiliar and surreal landscape. One of my favorite peeks Oyeyemi offers into their journey’s sights is an absurdly long billboard they ride along for at least half an hour that just says “LOLOLOLOLOLOL….”
The publisher’s blurb says, “As further clues and questions pile up, and the trip upends everything they thought they knew, Otto and Xavier begin to see connections to their own pasts, connections that now bind them together,” which is a very calm way of saying “some extremely spooky, menacing and mysterious shit goes down.”
So that urge to keep going until I’ve reached the end has a lot to do with curiosity. Practically every page brings a new piece of information to puzzle over. I kept re-reading passages in an effort to decode them or slot the pieces into the puzzle. Most of all, I just badly needed to know what it all was adding up to.
But there’s also a spell Oyeyemi casts. The way she so carefully writes about human emotion and expression and then just nonchalantly skates through the most surreal scenes is absorbing. You have to abandon your head and run with your heart — though your head will always be a ways behind shouting, What is going ON?
let me tell you about this cat
New Orleans is a haunted city so if you’re going to be a black cat here, Eglantine thinks, you’d better be elite.
On Mondays Eglantine works on her back. (Tuesdays are hiss days, Wednesdays are tail-puff days, Thursdays are slink days, and Fridays are for cultivating a vibe.) Her back arch is her weakness — she knows! — and it needs improvement if she’s going to make Featured Cat in the neighborhood this October.
For the next many Mondays, Eglantine is to follow a routine:
Downward cat pose held for 1 minute
Cinnamon roll pose held for 1 minute (10 if accidental nap occurs)
Back arch on flat ground x10
Back arch w/ sideways walk x8
Back arch on post x5
Leap onto post and into back arch x3
She completes this circuit thrice.
Her regimen also includes a strict diet of local porch kibble for breakfast, for strength, and seafood restaurant scraps for dinner, for the coat-enhancing Omega fatty acids. For lunch she nourishes herself on dreams of the spotlight (in a dense fog).
There is no formal audition to be made Featured Cat. When not training, Eglantine must always be performing, because scouts could be watching from behind any yucca. So if she leaps into an arch when you pass by, it’s not that she’s afraid of you or your big brute dog. She’s elite.
let me tell you about these earrings
These earrings are the type of accessory that you text a photo of to your friend and the friend replies “so cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute!” because, hello, they are so cute. In fact my friend may have actually said this but it’s too much scrolling back for me to check.
Anyway, if what you want out of a piece of jewelry is to beckon people to lean in and look closer and say “cuuuuuuuuuuute,” here you go. It’s not that you can’t see the lil lemons from further away — you can. It’s just that the teeny tiny details are really what make these summery treats worth a modest number (28) of your dollars.
Also true: my seatmate had tickets to see the Celtics vs. Lakers in the 2008 NBA Finals that night. I don’t think she made it to the game. The Celtics won the championship that year.
Her other work may have made me feel this way too but it’s been too long to remember???