Cherries and Monsters by Anne K. Yoder

Lee and I made a pact to shave our heads but I have reservations. He reminds me of this as we are sitting in the shade, his back against the hard, smooth bark of a willow tree whose fuzz is falling all over us. I sit beside Lee on his woven blanket. “Only after you,” I say, as if I’ll go through with it. I had meant every word in the moment, but I’ve had too much time to think. My hair is long and hides a lumpy skull. Lee often caresses these lumps as we kiss, though I don’t think he’s aware of it.

“You look like you’re bleeding,” he smirks.

I pull away from him. My mouth is full of meat and pits. We are eating cherries and I am sure my lips are swollen and messy just as his are pink, thin, and clean. I swallow and lean over and smear his chest with it. His hair slides forward into the sweat on his forehead. In that moment I notice how his cheeks have lost their winter plump. He then picks up his lute and begins to strum.

Lee makes instruments by hollowing gourds and attaching strings. He’s handy like that. He also fixes old houses, and he’s a superb maker of mousses and soufflés, though pastries have never been his forte. He also manages a local art-house theater, which leaves his days mostly open.

I am out of work at the moment, and so we’ve been passing time like spendthrifts, day-lounging and making excursions all over the city, letting time pass as if it were renewable energy. We went to the zoo a few days ago, where we witnessed a baby otter’s birth — a bundle of blood, bone, and fur. Lee was invigorated by watching this life coming into the world, but I felt a repulsion at seeing how even this was a bloody mess.

That afternoon he stayed on later, past his usual start of shift, and we toasted the otter with wine at the zoo’s swankiest café. Even so, Lee’s made arrangements for someone to cover for him until he arrived. Lee’s responsible like that. When he’s on the clock he becomes very serious. He tackles scheduling like he’s making a playbook for a football team, with his film runners, his ticket-takers, box office, and cleanup crews working in sync. At least, this is what happens when the evenings proceed as planned. There are always sick calls and angry patrons who complain about any little thing. They are sitting under a draft or the sound is too loud or they can’t hear a thing over the loud sipping, ice-swiller in the next row. There are the patrons who don’t want to leave when the lights go up, who don’t want to return to their empty beds and dark apartments. And there are the staff members who shirk late-night duties, who become avoidant when assigned to scrub the soda-and-popcorn-thick floors. Somehow, though, I’ve never seen Lee handle these obstacles without confidence and ease.

Lee runs his hand along my waist and traces the ridge of bone that sticks out above my thigh. He says my legs are sexy and I am surprised. I am thicker and shorter than the person I was born to be: she has sharp man shoulders and narrow hips. I’m lucky, however, that my hands came out right. They’re dainty with long digits, not too bony. My wrists are delicate and taper to slight, slender arms. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I could be a jewelry model, though so far I’ve only been placed in ads for household products. Dish soap, all-surface cleaners. I’ve been making most of my income from these spots in commercials.

The first time Lee saw me it was from the shoulders down. It wasn’t an ad, though. I was doing close-ups on my friend’s internet cooking show that gets a gazillion hits per week. Looks can be deceiving, camera angles and filters can make so many hands look good, but mine need so little manipulation.

Your hands are resilient, Lee had said when he first discovered it was me.

Resplendent, you mean?

Whatever, he’d said. He said that what he remembered was that the way I’d rolled the chocolate croissants had made him ravenous.

I’m not even a good cook. Lee knows this now, at least.

We picnic every Monday afternoon. Today we took a long car ride to this isolated field far beyond the city’s limits. We’ve laid down a blanket in a field of grass on the edge of the wilderness. We’re so far out that I don’t get cell service, and can’t find our location on Google maps.

Lee said this landscape reminds him of the setting where Tarkovsky’s The Mirror was filmed, which was the film I saw when I first met Lee. I’d gone alone to a late showing. I was transformed by the film’s beauty, as close as a film can get to poetry, with its rain and sorrow and resplendent fields. I grabbed a drink at the bar after, where Lee was bartending, and I first saw him through this transformative lens. Never mind that he didn’t do the programming or even really care for Tarkovsky. He understood the beauty of decay but it didn’t fascinate him in the same way. I am a lover of the torrential rains and emotions evoked by such scenes, reminiscent of childhood, wilderness, and bewilderment. Still, Lee bought me a drink that night, and he remembers such things.

I am day-drinking mimosas and Lee is sipping seltzer and as always he has a bag of cherries. I am the more debauched of us daytime lovers, or I like to fancy that I am. I look in Lee’s bag and see he’s brought shears. I don’t mention that I see them. You never try to get me drunk, I accuse instead. He ignores me and asks if I have any gigs coming up. I say no, no calls of late. The work has been slow. I am still living off my earnings from earlier in the spring, when I’d done a string of commercials for dish soap and gardening tools and surface cleaner with bleach. I know the ads make me seem passive, and I suppose this itself isn’t terribly misleading, even if it’s not a version of myself that I’d like to make known publicly.

I am good at standing still. I am less so at domestic upkeep. The insinuation that I clean dishes regularly is a lie that’s supporting me. Dishes are also the last thing I should do if I want to continue to find work in my field. As it is I apply an abundance of hand cream to keep my fingers and palms fresh and I must keep my ‘natural’ manicure pristine.

“Your hands are brilliant,” Lee says. He’s trying to reassure me.

I thank him but am still worried about finding more work.

He asks why I don’t do more cooking shows in the meantime.

“They don’t pay anything…”

“For visibility’s sake,” he insists. He wonders why I am so dismissive of opportunities that might help me. He also still thinks I’m good at making pastries, and that my reluctance to do so in his presence is faux humility.

I work to keep the distance between us. Not the humility. I am no pastry chef. Lee can’t not see me as the croissant maker he wants me to be. Just like I can’t not associate him with Tarkovsky’s The Mirror. I suppose it has something to do with proximity, and how we first encountered each other. It’s as if our additional layers of knowledge about each other can’t entirely replace the first.

A good croissant maker has an intuitive knowledge of the correct butter to dough ratio. I admit that I was so inspired by re-viewing my own footage last night, and motivated by my friend’s calm assurance as she walked me through the steps that I tried to make pan au chocolat again. And yet when I removed the tray from the oven, the croissants were dense lumps, slightly charred. This morning I went to the French bakery down the street to replace them, and there were no croissants to be had! The pastry chef had been in a fight, the cashier said, and his palms had been slashed. The cashier then leaned over and mouthed, A lover’s spat. And so I picked up some orange juice and sparkling wine instead and told Lee that I was dieting so that my head, when shaved, would not be overpowered by my cheeks.

“When are we going to do it?” he asks and he takes out the shears.

“Like right here? Today? No way. I have to think about it.”

“You’re scared.”

“I know I will enjoy shearing you, like a sheep. I may even make yarn from your curls.” I imagined them falling to the ground in heaps. Lee’s shaved head would look better than mine, I was sure. He’d been steadily losing weight since winter, and his accentuated cheekbones made him look more serious, almost like an auteur.

“I’m far better at doing things in my head,” I say.

He nods. He knows this. I read books. I watch movies. I stare off and wonder where the universe ends. I like to think these big thoughts. Lee calls it escapism. I’m just more curious about the indeterminate and the in between. And I wished that our passion would overtake us like the pastry chef and his lover, that it would threaten to destroy us. I envisioned myself the palm-slasher of us two, but then I realized I’m the one who’s loath to take action. I’m also the one who depends on my hands.

Lee says he’d never do such a thing to me. I know this. That’s not the point. I want him to be capable of such violence. I fear our becoming inured to togetherness, of clichéd endings, afraid to take risks. Instead I have been thinking of places to escape to like Malta or Santorini or the Rhodope mountains. What matters most is that the location is distant, and that I don’t speak the language.

Lee says my demons will still catch up with me.

“So what,” I say. It would keep them at bay. He’s good at dealing with monsters. If he had more of them, he would put them to work. “I know this,” I say, too, then wonder why this should stop me. Is he advocating that he come with me? I am skeptical. I know there’s no such thing as forever when it comes to people, and that one day it will seem as if we were never here in the tall grass, eating warm cherries and drinking mimosas.

Lee responds that I focus too much on endings, and that this makes me lose sight of where I am. I deny it but it’s true. It’s probably why I’m not a good chef and it’s also why I turn to the end of books to see if they’re worth reading. I refuse to begin books that end with the resolution of an age-old family conflict. But give me an Anna Karenina who throws herself under the train or a melancholic wedding attended by a parson and a collie that takes place on a precipice overlooking the ocean where the couple exchanges vows of Fuck you now and forever and then jump after into the abyss — that is the kind of ending that I’d read a beginning to get to.

Lee insists that beginning with an ending is outrageous. Like eating my dessert first. “Which is the best way,” I say. He says it lacks any guarantee of the middle of things, which is where you spend most of your time anyway. Just like us now in the middle of the summer in the middle of nowhere. For him the end is a place you earn, after building to a climax.

Like an orgasm. I accuse him of being too machismo in his definitions. Like, just this afternoon on the woven blanket, when he flipped me onto my stomach and came inside me. I’d already come a million times. The erotic tension of the encounter carries me through it, not my waiting. I’m not that generous. But also, middles are different, for me, an ending can be many things, and are often a disappointment.

How did I ever think we had anything in common? I wonder. I am a fan of French talky films like Rhomer or Varda and he’s all for Hitchcock and Polanski.

He tells me this is why I’d make a terrible employee. That I’m just the type to be habitually tardy, take long breaks in the bathroom so I can get off or read. He says that he wouldn’t hire me — but that he’d keep fucking me.

I’m upset, offended. But then I realize he’s playing me. “Okay,” I say, “but I wouldn’t want the job anyway.”

My first job in high school was at the mall movie theaters, with stadium seating and plush rocking seats. I hated the job because I had to smile when I took tickets, I hated the customers who expected me to engage them, and I hated the sticky floors and butter popcorn scent that wouldn’t wash out of my clothes. I hated it most because I was assigned to clean the soda and cum spills out of the seats and from the floor in theaters 1, 2, and 3 twice a week. But I didn’t last more than that first week. I’ve never told Lee that I was fired, and I won’t do it now, even though I feel like it’s a badge of honor, an indication that I am unwilling to compromise my beliefs.

Our pact is trickier. I’ve made the promise for some stupid reason I cannot now discern and I hate going back on my word.

The day after or picnic, I’m called in for a follow-up audition to be a hand model in a national jewelry commercial. This would mean big money for me, and make a move to say, Buenos Aires or the Bohemian Forests, a distinct possibility. To move far away and start over — maybe I will take action at last.

The audition is for the following Monday. Daytime. I don’t tell Lee. We don’t talk much that week. He sends texts and I ignore them. I am self-pampering. I need to rest my hands. I am perhaps forcing an ending, I realize. I have a habit of doing this.

In preparation I file my nails and rub heavy cream over my hands and place them in gloves to steep overnight. I also stop by the nail shop in the morning on the day of to have my hands touched up. Jo-ana handles my fingers so lightly I feel like a doll.

During my auditions my hands are on call, and often placed under a hot light. I try on a tennis bracelet, an opal ring, a diamond-encrusted band. It’s really just hours of sitting and waiting for these long minutes of intense scrutiny. In the intervals I can’t even use my hands. I can’t text Lee when he messages me to ask where we’re meeting. Then later, if we’re meeting at all. I turn off my ringer and stare at the talking heads overhead on the TV.

Lee leaves a message on my phone that night. He says he’s hurt, and asks if we had a misunderstanding? He says he wants to see me.

I am still lying in bed late the next morning. The sun is out and I am staring at my phone waiting for a callback when I hear a knock on the door. I get up and open it a crack. First thing I see is Lee’s shaggy head.

“Let me in?”

I relent and open the door. I’m bleary-eyed.

“Where were you yesterday?” he asks.

“I had an audition. My hands were occupied.” I say, as if this were an alibi. “And I haven’t felt much like leaving the house.

“It’s just like you…”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re avoiding the pact.” Right now he just seems disappointed. Deflated.

I tell him about my audition, and that even though it’s just my hands on-screen, I’m not sure it’s the best thing to be doing.

“You need the money. Who cares what image you’re selling.”

This was true. I ask if he really thought I would hold up my end of the pact. He just stares at me.

“It’s a stupid idea to begin with.” I realize I like his head of hair and his scruffiness and his whiskers that rub my chin raw. I worry that my hairless head will look threatening and uneven, and that his head might reveal some odd wrinkles, or what if his hair is hiding a bad tattoo? Doesn’t this worry him?

“I’m ready,” he says. He takes off his backpack and pulls out his shears.

I grab them with my gorgeous hands and lift.

Anne K. Yoder is the author of two poetry chapbooks, and her fiction has appeared in Fence, New York Tyrant, and Make Lit, among other publications. She is a staff writer for The Millions and a member of Meekling Press.