1
It’s hard to take a woman named Daisy seriously. Trust her, she knows.
She smooths out the ripples in the tablecloth by hand. Everything has to be just right. With her palm she can feel the splintery tabletop under the cool, soft cloth.
She feels anxious, nervous—she’s surprised to feel nervous. After all, it’s just him. It’s just them, the two of them, three years together and two years married. But there’s something thrilling to her in this kind of work, in the act of preparation. She knows this feeling well from all her years onstage: the moment just before the show begins, before the rush to the wings, the hush and the darkening of the lights—the moment that’s ripe with anticipation and possibility, when the stage manager comes and knocks on the dressing room door, giving the five-minute call.
Five minutes, please.
Thank you, five, you answer back.
She loves that moment. The moment before the moment.
She inspects the table and gets back to the work at hand.
Maybe it’s that jaunty i, she thinks, planted smack in the middle of her name—Daisy—that so successfully drains it of all seriousness. Or maybe it’s the temptation to dot that i with a cheery, round-petaled flower—the Daisy-with-the-daisy-on-top. She did that when she signed the contract on this cabin, finalizing the agreement, a grown-ass woman of thirty-two, as a little joke to herself, she couldn’t resist. After she wrote out their life stories, their problems, their issues, their histories, after she detailed their hopes and dreams as a couple, after she filled out the forms and answered the questions and signed all the waivers—so many waivers—after she paid her hefty deposit and handed it all over to the foundation’s representative, who smiled and stuck her forms in a file folder and stashed it away, then shook her hand and promised her she’d just made the most important decision of her life.
Seven days. Seven questions. Forever changed.
That’s the pitch.
She straightens the tablecloth.
We’ll see.
None of the other floral names have this crisis of legitimacy, she thinks. Lily sounds stoic and elegant, Rose is luxurious and regal, Iris unflappable, Ivy intriguing, but Daisy—Daisy is a bimbo, a bumpkin, a ditz, the simplest and most common of flowers. And, sure enough, whenever she goes to an audition, hair done, makeup on, dressed in her best please love me outfit, her name is inevitably the first thing that anyone remarks on, that trusty icebreaker. She enters, smiling, eager, Hello, hello, they peer at her headshot, they glance up at her, and all too often someone says it: Daisy—like The Great Gatsby? Or, even worse: Daisy—like Daisy Duke? From that old TV show? Every once in a while, she’ll get a real old-timer, someone who sings tunelessly, Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do—I’m half crazy, all for the love of you!
She usually just laughs, nods, gives them the same practiced smile, she’s skilled at that—she’s an actor, after all. Sure, I’ll be your Daisy, any Daisy you want, she thinks, and then she gets down to the serious business of selling herself, of saying someone else’s words like they’re her own, of losing herself, of being who they want her to be, of dazzling them.
She’s skilled at that, too.
She picks up the two ornate silver candleholders she found packed away in a cupboard in the cabin’s kitchen, hidden among cobwebs and mismatched coffee mugs. The candleholders feel substantial in her hands, like trophies. She catches her reflection in the rippled glass of the cabin’s window and she imagines her award-show speech, the one she’s practiced in every bathroom mirror since she was a little girl. I just want to thank everyone who believed in me—who believed in a girl with a dream from Wisconsin. She clutches the candleholders, regards them with convincing surprise. What, two? For me? Please. I’m just happy to be nominated.
Then she sets them down in the center of the table, their intricate silver sides inlaid with the ancient wax of a hundred previous evenings. She wonders how many of the cabin’s prior occupants did exactly what she’s doing now: setting the table, lighting the candles, hoping against hope for a miraculous change in their lives. She wonders how many other troubled couples have stayed in this cabin before, have booked this retreat before, have escaped to this lake in these woods before, to look for some kind of rejuvenating spark that will salvage their relationship.
She’s not sure how old this cabin is, but it must have been on the edge of this lake forever, she thinks. It seems less like it was built here than that it grew up out of the forest floor. It’s old enough to have warped wooden floorboards and a kitchen full of drawers that don’t quite close and leaded glass windowpanes that distort the view of the lake beyond. Outside she sees the sky is entering that moment of darkness that blurs the horizon line; black pines in silhouette ring the far edge of the lake. As she watches, she realizes that it’s quiet, so quiet that she strains to listen to the silence—a silence beyond anything she’s ever experienced back in Brooklyn. If there’s another soul on the lake at this hour, she thinks, they’re keeping themselves well hidden.
She imagines herself as a different woman, long ago, someone wearing an apron and bonnet, living in this cottage by her wits and rustic skills, lit only by candles and kerosene lamps. Instead, she’s got her dirty-blond hair pinned up messily and she’s dressed in denim overalls, an actor’s trusty rehearsal uniform, baggy and comfortable. She calls these overalls her fuck it outfit—fuck it, she thinks every time she puts them on. There’s literally nothing you can’t get done in overalls—that’s her motto.
Copyright © 2023 by Adam Sternbergh