Chapter Six: Fool's Game or Fair Game?

"But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night."

Robert Frost


Awaking, Daisy couldn't remember how Saturday Number 73 ended. That was a first. But it had ended, and this was Saturday Number 74. Or was it? Maybe it was Sunday. Lordy, could she be that lucky? Had she broken the curse of Rule Number Five?

Hell and double damnation! The clock was on the nightstand and not outside in the dirt next to Dixie.

Burying her head into the pillow, her frustrated and slightly frightened screams were muffled. She kept hollering into it until, recovering her wits, she began to think out the events of yesterday – today – the previous do-over…She pounded her head repeatedly against the pillow. Except to fuel her need to escape the tilt-a-whirl, did the difference even matter any more?

How could a dream last this long?

Okay, Daisy. Stop whining and think.

'You woke up at 4:52 on SDD-73 with a headache from almost remembering the chorus to that song – Right! It's the chorus, not the first lines, as much good as that revelation would do her, but maybe it was progress – like not remembering how the day, and her plan to kidnap Enos, ended…'

Back to thinking, dammit!

'You had a headache; there was no aspirin.' Looking for the first time at the wardrobe and the two dresses hanging from it, she allowed herself a moment of doubt that it meant anything. Maybe it had nothing to do with the dresses, maybe if she found aspirin in her nightstand…that's how she would tell if this was a new day.

Reaching gingerly out to the knob on the nightstand drawer, she hesitated a second and then yanked the drawer open.

So...no aspirin, it's not Sunday. But was there aspirin in the nightstand on Friday night when she went to sleep? She couldn't remember. Had she thought of that before? Must have. How could she do-over the same-damn-day seventy-three times and not explore a possibility so simple?

What she remembered of Friday night was Uncle Jesse giving her the wedding dress. A quiver had gone through her like a wave starting at her shoulders and straight down to her toes when he'd said that her aunt would be proud to have her wear it. She'd hoped to deserve that pride. At the same time, she'd smiled inwardly at how Enos would see her in that dress. And then Jesse's words on that day, which she hadn't been able to repeat since, came back to her. "Enos had to grow up fast when Otis died. He got serious about what he should do with his life, and you just stayed headstrong. Lavinia was always knittin' worry lines that you weren't takin' life serious enough."

Daisy noticed that she was more and more venturing into wool-gathering and mind wandering.

Back to the task at hand. 'You woke up at 4:52 on SDD-73 with a headache. There was no aspirin, the dresses were still hanging on the wardrobe, you went to the bathroom and stubbed your toe on the footstool, and you got a shiver.'

When she woke up, or at least by the time she looked at it, the clock was on the nightstand and said the time was 5:23. The first signs of dawn were streaming through the window – it was morning. She didn't have a headache because the song wasn't playing in her head. She hadn't reached for the aspirin except as a test. She hadn't gone to the bathroom and didn't stub her toe on anything…and no shiv…

If it walks like a duck…A dream within a dream? If this limbo she found herself waking to every day was actually a dream…if not a dream, what? Was this something else, and handcuffing him to Dixie…was the dream…

Pulling the pillow over her head, this time Daisy screamed as loud as she could into the mattress. There weren't enough swear words in existence to cover this cluster of a day – days.

ugh. Same ole' same-damn day. "Please, Aunt Lavinia, tell me what you want from me…I thought you loved me."


SDD-73 started out just like the first seventy-two. You know the drill, headache, no-damned-aspirin (she would likely call it that for the rest of her natural life), toe-banging, the chills, I mean the shivers – same thing isn't it?


Narrator Aside:

-{{There are only five rules in this game, and Lavinia controls them all. And yes, it is her, just in case you were wondering. Let's recap, shall we?

One: Daisy cannot hide in her room.

Two: Daisy cannot leave Hazzard County.

Three: No essential items, such as the wedding dress and the clock, can be permanently damaged as long as the day stays Saturday, February 2.

Four: Other rules will not allow her to take certain steps or skip them, but she has yet to get a handle on just which are which – bringing us to;

Rule Number Five: Daisy is not allowed to take the easy way out. There is no EASY way. Ain't gonna happen.

In this zone of twilight, everything else is fair game.}}-

Now, where were we?


Maybe it was starting again. Perhaps not; hard for Daisy to know for sure anymore. Just when she thought herself in control, Lavinia pulled the floor out from under her. She was falling into the abyss with no one to catch her.

She'd made attempts at telling her family about the day repeating itself. What she said, or how many times she said it, or how many different ways she tried didn't seem to matter. The explanation just made her sound as crazy as Cooter's cousin Letty, who went to sleep sane one night and woke up claiming she'd been abducted by aliens.

('Note to self: Go visit Letty when this is all over. Maybe she ain't as cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs as folks think.')*

Thinking there would be a 'when' at least meant she hadn't completely given up. On the other hand, she was drowning, with no one to save her, not even Enos. Except for the scripted version of their wedding day, he'd avoided her like Flash avoids a bath. But she couldn't decipher the why of it. That first day, the original day, he'd seemed okay, not overjoyed but not woebegone either, and genuinely determined to find a way to marry her.

Maybe he'd had second thoughts after leaving the Boar's Nest that afternoon. He'd seemed a little distant the first time she met him outside the clinic. She'd returned to searching for a way to cure those hives or at least the real cause, ever since – but always alone. That one time she showed up at his room at Mrs. Oxford's after he left the clinic was a day she didn't want to repeat.


Enos's room at the boarding house had a small kitchenette on the right side of the main room with a single bed in the center and a small sitting area with a sofa on the left side. His bed was neatly made, like the last time she had been there only a few hours earlier – when Rosco and the DAG found the money the real crooks had left to cement the frame-up…and the time before that when she'd had to stay the night under Enos's protection. She trusted him as she would no other soul, except her family. Even if…even if he didn't…if he didn't…love her anymore. He always had her back. Always.

5:00 pm. 'He should be here by now,' she'd thought, picking up the picture of her from the dresser. She wondered if there were other photos of her, of them, somewhere in that room. Was it conceited to give him pictures of herself, knowing he would want them…or just thoughtless? The photo in the frame was ten years old. She'd had others made and given them to him. Did he still see her as twenty-three? ("I mean, are you all grown up?" Uncle Jesse had asked.)

Next to the dresser was an old sampler she hadn't noticed before that read, "Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will."**

~000~

A gentle, familiar touch on her shoulder brought her out of a light, dreamless sleep."Daisy…Daisy…?"

"Oh. Hey, Enos."

She peeked at the clock on his nightstand (he had one that flipped the numbers and the date on little plastic cards – Saturday, February 2, 11:03 pm). "Guess I fell asleep."

She meant it for real and knew it was the same day because she awoke in Enos's room, not her own at the farm.

She saw hesitation in his eyes before he asked, "Daisy, what are you doin' here?"

"Waitin' for you, obviously." She hadn't meant it to come out that snippy. At least she didn't think she had.

Now he looked hurt or miffed, or…disappointed?

"What did the nurse say? About the hives?" she asked anyway.

Again with the hesitation…no…confusion…disappointment…? She didn't have a clue what that look was, adding to her mounting frustration as each day ahead played itself out.

He took a small amber-colored bottle out of his jean jacket and showed it to her. "She gave me this elixir. Said it would ease some of the itchin' so I can sleep."

Daisy took the bottle and removed the cap. "Smells a little like Witch Hazel."

"She said it had other stuff in it, and the doc might give me somethin' stronger, but I should be careful not to overdose usin' it. Not so sure I want somethin' stronger. She told me that if this potion doesn't help, I should come back tomorrow when the clinic doctor is in. For all the good that'll do."

Picturing that sultry, eyelash-batting receptionist ogling him from chest to…thigh, who had probably been the reason he was so late, she thought, 'Over my dead body.'

One of the lovely facets of Rule Number Four was that she couldn't follow him around spying on him with the clinic femme-fatale or Alice Jean Davenport or Mary Alice Cumberland (cheating witch that blond-in-a-bottle was) or any other female out there who thought they could have their way with him now that there might be a flaw in the slaw.

That flaw was more intimidating than she had been prepared for, and she'd become slightly gun-shy around him, her snarky little remark from earlier notwithstanding.

Enos sniffed the air and said with little of his normal enthusiasm, "Smells good. Like Aunt Livvy's chicken vegetable soup good."

Enos hadn't called her Aunt Lavinia, Livvy, since they were kids. Trying not to let on that she noticed, she said, "I made you some. It'll need heating up, though. But you've probably already eaten."

"No, I didn't feel much like supper. I am kind of hungry, and that soup smells good…like home."

They were sitting next to each other on the couch now. She reached out and put her hand on his. His response wasn't exactly a flinch, but he didn't take hold of it either. Feeling suddenly self-conscious, something she hadn't felt since they were kids, she withdrew her hand and set it awkwardly in her lap.

Then, going through the motions, she heated the pot, ladling steaming hot soup into two bowls, and set them on the little table with one lonely chair. Enos wordlessly pulled the other from behind the dresser and wiped off the dust with a damp rag before unfolding it. Setting the chair at the table, as always the quintessential gentleman, he waited for her to sit first. They ate without saying a single word to each other. There was an ember in that silence, hot and smoldering, and she wondered if she'd broken more than time.


References:

* Cocoa Puffs is a trademarked name for one of General Mills' Cereals – the commercial for the cereal features a Cuckoo Bird that proclaimed he was "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs"

** Quote attributed to poet, writer, philosopher Suzy Kassem. She would have been ten at the time frame of this story. But "time is an illusion' according to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. "Our naïve perception of its flow doesn't correspond to physical reality."