Goldberg Variations by Susan Isaacs

Author:Susan Isaacs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Fourteen

Daisy

The bed in the guest room had the expanse of a small galaxy. I lay near the edge of the mattress so as not to wake in the middle of the night feeling lost in the cosmos. Just before I fell asleep, I had a thought. Thoughts were rare for me at bedtime. Even though I was of the generation that kvetched endlessly about insomnia, I was pretty much immune.

I was a congenital early bird—and a New Yorker—yet forced to keep California time. So I was obliged to keep my wits about me far longer than Homo sapiens were designed to do. By the time I set my iPhone on the nightstand, my mind had already shut down for an hour or more. Nothing could stop me from sleeping. It didn’t matter what relationship horror was going on in my life. So what if some psychopath producer was still awake in Pacific Palisades plotting to get me fired because another psychopath at Searchlight had gotten his hands on the manuscript of the new Foer novel three hours earlier than he had? Neither pain nor fear could disturb the flatline of my consciousness.

That night, though, as my eyelids went from drooping to closed, the thought not only burst through my brain but was potent enough to survive until the following morning. It was this: I could run Glory. Not that I wanted to.

I was awake before the alarm bonged, mostly because I was hungry. Naturally, when I saw the time—six forty—I got that potential starvation! distress signal that comes when you’re in a strange place without access to food. I checked the night tables on both sides of the bed on the off chance I’d find a discreet card with a beveled edge saying, Press the # sign and order whatever you’d like for breakfast. You will have it within minutes. Barring that, maybe there was a foil-wrapped chocolate I’d overlooked. No. Then I went through the previous afternoon’s goodie basket hoping that, buried under the stuffing that looked like fettuccine cut from gold paper, was some treasure: I conjured up a little pouch of sugared pecans. But of course all I found under all that paper fettuccine was a Styrofoam oval stuck in there to make my grandmother’s notion of a snack—three crackers, a bit of cheese, twenty-seven-grain cookies, a couple of almonds—look as bounteous as one of those cornucopias in an old Dutch still life.

So I showered and got dressed in my white jeans. They had seemed a great idea in Manhattan. But in New Mexico they just screamed Wrong! Probably it wasn’t New Mexico. More likely it was anticipating Gloria’s eyes traveling from my red-and-white striped shirt to my jeans to my red ballet flats (an outfit that had evoked a “Love the look, sooo crisp” from an assistant art director at a brunch in L.A.). Then I imagined my grandmother averting her face so as to be spared the nightmare sight of Too Buxom Babe in Horizontal Stripes and Age-Inappropriate Shoes.

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