Lunch was going to be late. I looked up and saw a harried woman behind the counter facing a line that snaked halfway to the front door. To her left, a young man kicked open swinging doors with a steaming pizza tray in each hand. He rushed to drop them off before running back to the kitchen. There were usually two people at the counter and even more helping to get pizza from kitchen to customer as quickly as possible. Despite the staff shortage, the place was relatively quiet, or at least quiet enough so that Della and I could actually hear each other. We had a deal going: if I screwed up, she could call the next shot. If she screwed up, I got that privilege. Yesterday afternoon I’d walked her straight into a tall shrub. I was mortified, but all she did was laugh. Then she said, “Stromboli. Lunch. Pepperoni and hamburger. Your treat.”
So here we were. I was exhausted and rubbed my eyes to get some life into them. The pizza could wait as far as I was concerned, since I was not anxious to add heartburn to my list of early afternoon ailments. I’d been up and down all night, a typical insomniac’s evening, and the alarm had gone off just as I was starting to nod off. I’d downed several cups of coffee – heartburn be damned – before meeting Della here. It hadn’t worked.
“So,” Della was saying. I raised my head to meet her clear, but unfocused, eyes, “about this sleep study. We need a sighted control subject for the second phase.” Della was a regular at her local eye clinic and volunteered for every study for which she was even marginally qualified. The volunteer they’d lined up had just quit on them and Della had been on the phone all morning. I’d been in bed instead of our office, trying desperately for a little REM time. I’d dragged myself to the kitchen in enough time to make and drink a pot of coffee before taking the subway into Boston for our lunch date. “And by the way,” she added. “You sound terrible.”
“Another fun night,” I mumbled.
Della shook her head and “tsk’d” sympathetically. She also understood sleeplessness, although for different reasons. I’d been an insomniac all my life. Della slept like a log, at least until menopause kicked in. She now claimed to have the “hot flashes from hell,” bad enough to pull her out of a sound sleep into a sweat-soaked consciousness. “It’s a paid study, too,” she added. “Sleep and money, Maggie.” She stopped and thought as a sly smile spread across her face. “Actually, that sounds like a sleazy book I read once.”
“Behave,” I admonished. Della was right, though. These days I needed all the money I could get. Even her business was taking a hit. Who was going to hire freelancers when the company was laying off half of its employees? These were hard times. I had stayed home this morning because I could: I hadn’t met with a client all week. “How much?” I asked. Subtlety was not my strong suit when I was this tired.
“Enough to make it worth your while,” she said firmly. “You’ll spend a few days in the clinic. They’ll attach electrodes to your head and read brain waves throughout the night. They want to do some comparisons so they can set up benchmarks. What do you think?”
“S’cuse me,” a voice interjected from above. A moment later a pizza in a battered aluminum tray clattered onto our table. Half of the pie was covered with dots of pepperoni and hamburger. The other half held a smattering of green peppers, mushrooms, olives and diced artichoke hearts. A thick hand dropped a Diet Coke on Della’s side of the table and a tumbler of ice water on mine. “You’se all set?”
Della looked in the direction of the sound, at an exhausted young man in a stained apron. “Thanks, Henry” Della exclaimed. “You’re a sweetie!” Henry smiled and tweaked her short, white hair before stomping back to the kitchen. I looked down at the pizza, which had spun a bit on its way down so that my veggie side was now in front of Della. She bent down to take a sniff, then sprung back with a sour look on her face. “Yuck!” she exclaimed, then found the tray with her hands and spun it exactly half way around with her nose bent to the pie. “There!” she said. “Better.” Della’s pepperoni and hamburger was now in front of her. My veggies were in front of me. I sighed and dug in. Della reached for a slice, picking off pieces of pepperoni and eating them before crunching into the crust. “So,” she continued, between bites. “You in?”
I nibbled on cheese that strung across my vegetable-laden portion. “Sure, I’ll be glad to help out. When does it start?”
Della grinned and looked excited. “Actually, I’m meeting the study director later today. Want to come along? You can do the physical and sign all the papers. If you pass, we could start tonight.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Perfect,” she replied. She wiped her hands on a folded paper napkin and then felt around the table. “Hey, Maggie?” she asked.
I looked up, munching. “Yes?”
“Where’d Henry put my Diet Coke?”
