Cherry Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
For some reason apple pie became the quintessential American pie,
even though the first apple pies came from England hundreds of years before the
colonies were even conceived. Didn’t matter. Apple pies equaled national pride
and prosperity. The phrase “as American as apple pie” cemented the concept and
forevermore the apple pie represented what it meant to be a typical US citizen.
Well, lots of other things represented America too – flags and eagles and
baseball and blue jeans and hamburgers, but the apple pie really ‘took the
cake,’ so to speak. For his part Jake had always preferred cherry pie. But it
was the 4th of July and no one was serving cherry pie. There were
lots of apple options – Dutch, double crust, deep dish, cheese, ice cream,
whipped cream… there were a LOT of apple options. For a while it seemed like
the only thing people were bringing to the park was some sort of apple pie.
Somehow in the apple extravaganza that was going on, the main beverages of the
afternoon were lemonades and teas. Jake was more in the mood for a good cider,
fermented or not, to drink, but somehow that wasn’t 4th of July
enough. Seeing all those apple pies spread out over the picnic tables Jake was
struck with an urge to call his mother and wish her a happy holiday.
The park was full of people and bodies in motion – there were
families having picnics, teenagers, kids, people walking or riding bikes, a
trio of middle aged men playing disc golf, a large group of children playing
some sort of make believe role-playing game. Jake sat with his friends, but his
eyes and his mind were elsewhere. He was adrift at sea, unaware of the crowded
park or the muggy hot weather or the mosquito nuisance that had suddenly
appeared. Somewhere in his mind he was sipping a mojito and smoking a cigarette
– something he had been trying to quit doing without great success. He could
hear the sounds of children screaming and giggling. He imagined there was a
game of freeze tag being played. He wished he was a child again and could enjoy
such innocent fun. He remembered loving the merry-go-round – running as fast as
he could and jumping on at the last moment before tripping and then holding on
for dear life as he tried not to vomit. He was probably too old for a
merry-go-round now. He might not fit. He wasn’t even sure if parks still had
equipment like that. It was probably a thing of the past, just like everything
else that used to be good but seemed to turn out to be gone now.
Later Jake wandered off and watched a bunch of twenty-somethings
playing a game of flag football. Years earlier Jake had played football every
Saturday with a group of co-workers, friends, and their spouses. It was a
low-impact, highly uncompetitive co-ed game for the aging and out of shape.
Eventually time caught up to them all and they became too aged and too out of
shape for even that. Today’s game looked like fun. These kids looked like they
knew what they were doing – running proper plays with signals and audibles and
everything. They were good. There was probably no way even in their prime that
Jake and his friends could have kept up with these kids. Kids. Jake realized he
was calling them kids. He wasn’t so far removed from his twenties, and yet they
all looked like kids. They were such children. They probably had no idea how
young they looked.
Jake took the long way back through the park. It wasn’t that he
didn’t want to see his friends; it was just that he had no reason to see his
friends. It was just a typical get-together because there was a holiday
happening. It wasn’t that festive of an event. No one was that happy. It was
all just too ordinary. It was some people sitting around eating and
interacting, repeating themselves as they had always done in the past,
pretending as if their lives still interconnected and saying they should do
this more often in hopes that if they said it out loud then they might actually
believe it. Or maybe Jake was the bitter and alienated one. Maybe they all
really did like these events. Maybe they all liked being the exact same person for
years on end with no change or evolution. Maybe they all liked being ordinary.
It was hard for Jake to have perspective.
When he arrived back at the tables most everything had already
been packed up and several friends and their families had already left. Jake
sat down at a picnic table by himself and zoned out.
Nearby, smashed on the ground, next to a trashcan, was a full
cherry pie. Someone must have been carrying it and dropped it. Waste of a
perfectly good pie. A total shame, thought Jake. Ants had already found it.
That poor pie, he thought. Lost for no good reason. It looked homemade too, not
some plain store-bought concoction. Jake bet it would have been good, certainly
better than the apple pies that had been had earlier.
Stacy walked up to him. He saw her, but he didn’t say anything.
His eyes returned to the pie on the ground. She looked where he had looked and
stared in sympathy.
“I saw that earlier.”
“Total shame.”
“Cherry is your favorite.”
“You see what happened?”
“Yeah,” she chuckled a little bit while thinking about it. “Woman
with three screaming kids and a stack of plates and dishes and dessert
delights. It was quite the balancing act. For a minute I thought she was going
to make it. You would have liked it. One of the kids came running along
grabbing at her arm and yanked her purse off her shoulder. Everything shifted
and then – splat! Cherry pie all over the ground.”
“Nice.”
“Can I sit?”
Jake nodded.
“You were gone a long time.”
“Sorry. Did I ruin your good time?”
“Don’t be like that. People were worried.”
“I couldn’t sit around and pretend. I didn’t have the energy for
it. Not today. There was too much noise. I was going to snap.”
“Okay.”
“You tell any of them about the divorce?”
“I didn’t want to ruin their good time.”
“I told you we shouldn’t have come.”
“Then they would have known something was wrong for sure.”
“They all know something is wrong. You can see it in their eyes
when they look at either one of us.”
“Whatever. I’m not going to stress about that.”
“I don’t need people feeling sorry for me.”
“No one is going to feel sorry for you.” She stressed the “you,” annoyed; to emphasize that Jake had
forgotten to include her in the equation.
“Everyone is going to feel sorry. For us. For both of us. It’s going to totally suck.”
“We’ve been over this a thousand times.”
“I know. We don’t work. We’re both better for it. I know that. I
know.”
“I know you know.”
“Waste of a perfectly good pie.”
Stacy wiped a tear away and nodded in agreement. “Yeah. A
perfectly good pie…”
They sat together in silence for awhile. Stacy eventually leaned
over and put her head on Jake’s shoulder. They both cried a little and he
reacted to her body and put his arm around her. She reacted to his reaction and
leaned in more, letting more of her body weight rest on him.
“You want to not think about this anymore today?”
“Totally.”
“You want to go home with me tonight?”
Jake paused before he answered. He pulled away from her and looked
her in the eyes. He wished he knew what she was thinking. He wished he knew if
this was just holiday sadness or if it meant something more. She moved her lips
to smile, but didn’t quite make it. It was a sad smile that came after too much
hurt and too many tears, yet it was still incredibly beautiful. He had seen
that look a million times over the years. She was always so beautiful.
There was so much hurt between them, but for a moment it didn’t
matter. For a moment.
“I do. I really really do.”
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