Plot. Over dinner she asks him if he would prefer to have a marriage that settles into a good sex life without friendship or one that settles into a good friendship without much of a sex life.
This is hypothetical as neither are married and have explicitly stated that they both intend to get married, but not to each other. He throws the question back at her. They trade little portions of potatoes from their plates, roasted for au gratin, and say that they can’t believe how good they are, the potatoes.
Title. Cause for Alarm. Stolen from a postcard table in the lobby of a small theater featuring plays written, performed and about women. The postcards feature women too, in poses ranging from euphoric to distressed. The one you like pictures a woman leaning on a bar with her breasts falling out of a low cut dress. She is looking sideways, off the edge of the postcard, with a very worried expression. Like, what could be on the other side of this postcard that’s going to make me more miserable than I am right now? Her glass is empty. You take it and leave it laying on your desk for the next few months, until it finds it way into your garbage, along with a thank you card from a party last summer and an unbeatable credit card offer.
Character. She’s on her third bowl of cereal because the apartment is clean and her boyfriend hasn’t called her, and she’s not quite full to the point where she can feel her meal pushing its way upwards out of her stomach and into her throat, so she figures she can fit a little bit more and regret it later. She fills each bowl with 1/2 the amount of cereal that was in the last one, so by the third there’s only a tiny pile of flakes in the bowl and she can convince herself that it’s not so bad, her eating habits. What she hates most is a skinny cheerleader named Cheryl.
I'm going to write a story about that Barbados passage below.
