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.
In the beginning, he liked the overalls. He loved them. Still thought they were somehow sexy. He loved how they fell away easily, just two unfastened snaps away from pooling around her ankles on the floor. In their first year together, that whirlwind year, she wore them with him to lounge around in with nothing on underneath. They spent their weekends together, in exile, huddled and hidden from the world, holed up in one or the other of their tiny Brooklyn apartments, clothing very much optional. He’d only venture out for croissants and coffee from the corner bakery. Otherwise, they’d cuddle together and read the fat weekend paper, the actual newspaper, its sections unfurled all around them like blueprints for some brazen upcoming heist, their bodies curled into each other on her thrift-shop sofa, their fingers dirty with pastry butter and printer’s ink. That was in the beginning, the first year, the good year. Then they moved in together. Then they got married. Now here they are, three years later, two years as husband and wife, on the edge of a week in which they’ll decide together if it’s even worth sticking it out. They never get the weekend paper anymore, he got an iPad, he’s cut out carbs, and they long ago left her thrift-store sofa at the curb.
She arranges the tarnished silver cutlery at the table settings. She pauses. Should she and he sit side by side or facing each other across the round table? The purpose of round tables, she read once, is that there’s no head, no hierarchy. On their first date, they sat at a tiny round table in a sushi restaurant below street level, the walls of the subterranean bar scribbled with Japanese graffiti. She sat in the booth and he sat in the chair facing and it was so dark in the bar that his face kept fluttering in and out of the light from the single sputtering candle. Am I going to marry you? she thought absurdly, watching him in the guttering flame. That night, after several orders of sake, he came around and slid into the booth beside her. They sat and ate like that, crammed together, shoulders touching. They shared one dessert. On a whim and long past drunk, she licked a curl of crème brûlée from his chin. His chin was stubbly. He blushed. She was brazen. She laughed. She knew right then he was the one. Better yet, she knew he knew she was the one.
They got married a year later, in the Hudson Valley, under an apple tree.
Actually not too far from here, she thinks.
As for tonight: facing each other, like diplomats at a negotiation.
She can smell the chicken roasting in the kitchen, almost finished.
Look at her. Being domestic.
She’d stuck the trussed bird in the ancient oven an hour ago, then unpacked her bag in the bedroom upstairs, along with the clothes she’d packed hastily for him. The note she’d left him on their kitchen table said eight p.m., but she knows that traffic from the city will be a nightmare. It’s creeping toward nine and getting dark, and he hasn’t called yet, hasn’t even acknowledged the invitation, not that her phone service is reliable way out here.
The whole thing being a surprise, of course. Her anniversary gift to him.
She’s not sure what she’ll do if he doesn’t show up. But then she’s not entirely sure what she’ll do if he does.
It’s getting dark enough that if he’s not at least off the thruway by now, he’ll have a hell of a time finding her. She herself had headed up during the day while he was at work, hopping a bus upstate, then getting picked up by that same smiling representative of the Edenic Foundation, the organization that’s hosting them this week, the organization to which she handed over a shockingly sizable portion of her TV acting check. She’d seen their ads in New York for years, in the subway, on billboards—Seven Days, Seven Questions, Forever Changed, the constant promise, the faithful motto—and on each ad there they were, the smiling faces of the beatific therapists, Drs. Kit and Bridget Arden, promising to save you, themselves a fiercely married couple, that’s how they described it on the TV morning shows and on podcasts, “not happily married, fiercely married,” they always said, clutching each other’s hands—and each ad tempted you with a getaway, a fresh start, a refuge for troubled couples just like you.
Copyright © 2023 by Adam Sternbergh
