The Eden Test by Adam Sternbergh EPUB & PDF– eBook Details Online
- Author: Adam Sternbergh
- Language: English
- Genre: Domestic Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
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.
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