My name is Cherry.
Not Cheryl, if that’s what you think you heard. Cherry. The night before I was born, my mother had a vivid dream about a pale pink cherry blossom tree silhouetted against a bright blue sky. My mother took her dreams as seriously as her complexion. Hence, Cherry.
I’m aware Cherry and Cheryl are similar names. Both have six letters and the first four of those letters are identical. However, the name that appears on my birth certificate is Cherry. Not Cheryl. No matter how much you want it to be. No matter how much I want it to be.
I once worked with a man who continually called me Cheryl even after I politely corrected him on several occasions. (Twenty-seven occasions.)
One day we had a “team-building” lunch at a Chinese restaurant called Wok n’ Roll. He said, with his mouth full, “Pass the spring rolls, will ya, Cheryl?”
It was the twenty-eighth occasion he’d called me Cheryl, in spite of repeated polite corrections, and it was at a difficult time in my life. I lost my mind and my temper and threw a spring roll at him.
It landed with a terrific splash in his glass of soft drink and he leaped back with the most appalled expression on his face. I apologized, but he did not forgive me or ever bother to get my name right.
My name is Cherry.
As previously stated. But it bears repeating. It sure does bear repeating.
The astoundingly popular British singer Ed Sheeran has a wife named Cherry. I wonder if her mother dreamed of a cherry blossom tree, or if perhaps her parents liked the Neil Diamond song “Cherry, Cherry.” I love that song. It came out in 1966, the same year Australia switched to decimal currency. Mum didn’t want to switch. There was a jingle to prepare us: In come the dollars and in come the cents, to replace the pounds and the shillings and the pence! I found the jingle catchy. My mother would press her hands over her ears. I’d sing louder.
She liked Neil Diamond, though. We danced to “Cherry, Cherry” in the kitchen while we peeled potatoes and shelled peas. I danced badly but enthusiastically. Mum danced beautifully. This didn’t happen every night, of course. Some nights we didn’t speak, let alone dance. We were philosophically opposed on multiple issues. We also could not have had potatoes and peas every night for our tea. Although it feels like we did.
I expect my mother’s fear of decimal currency was related to her dislike of math, which is a common fear often dating back to a cruel teacher. In fact, my mother was more mathematically inclined than she realized. She used probability every day of her life and called it intuition.
I was pleased to learn Ed Sheeran’s wife and I share a name because I’m an Ed Sheeran fan. To be clear, I don’t buy his CDs or go to his concerts. I just turn up the volume when his songs come on the radio, which I presume doesn’t produce any income for him. Sorry, Ed Sheeran.
Well.
Sometimes, when I’m nervous, I become overly, even inappropriately, chatty. I veer off topic. I say whatever comes to my mind, I become too literal, I try too hard to be accurate when no one cares as much as me about accuracy, and I can see by people’s faces that I am being “odd,” and I am forced to pinch the skin on my wrist to make myself stop talking.
My name is Cherry.
That’s all I needed to say.
Chapter 25
Leo waits at the Sydney domestic terminal taxi stand. He’s in a long line snaking back and forth as if for a Disneyland ride. The Lion King is over. His son just texted from the car on the way home to say the show was boring and Bridie forgot one of her lines. Brotherly loyalty.
His boss has texted twice and sent three emails. In one of them she said she hoped Leo’s mother had “recovered”; in another she said she hoped he was enjoying “his long weekend.” She also informed him that an already tight deadline had become even tighter: I know you’ll manage it, superstar! He feels the tightness of the deadline like a noose around his neck.
His seatmates, Max and Sue, had walked with Leo through the terminal and separated at the bottom of the escalators, as they had to go to the carousel to collect their bags.
“Memorable flight, eh? Don’t forget that hard hat, will you, mate?” Max had shaken Leo’s hand while Sue patted his arm and said, “Plenty more school concerts ahead of you, darling, you did the right thing taking your mum to the specialist. Don’t regret your life away.”
“Thanks, Sue.” He’d almost hugged her. She is more motherly than his mother. “Good luck with the cake!”
Max and Sue have to make a “Bluey” birthday cake for their grandson. Apparently Sue bakes, Max does “construction,” and they both decorate. They’d showed Leo some of their elaborate creations. The party kicks off at ten a.m. tomorrow! Leo is now fretting about their tight deadline in addition to his own.
He shuffles forward, wondering how much baking time the average cake requires. A guy in a high-vis vest with a whistle around his neck is wrangling the line. He says, “How many?” while holding up his fingers in a preemptive guess. “Two of you? Three?” He orders people to stand at different numbered sections. People stand at the wrong numbers and occasionally a driver leaps from his cab, yelling and gesticulating. The guy with the whistle yells back. High pressure. Leo would lose his mind.
“Excuse me?” Leo turns. It’s the young man with the sling. Also a day-tripper. They were on the same flight out of Sydney this morning. He’s memorable because of the injury.
“I think we were on the same flight.” He’s behind Leo in the line, but the line snakes back and forth so right now they’re next to each other, separated by the chain-link dividers. He’s in his twenties. Very cool-looking. Probably in web design or television production. Stylish glasses. They suit him. (Leo has 20/20 vision but sometimes wishes he needed glasses.) All his hair, of course, no doubt he takes it for granted. He looks tired. Dark shadows under bloodshot eyes. Probably out clubbing last night.
Leo knows what he wants to talk about.
“Delayed flight from Hobart,” agrees Leo.
“That lady say anything to you?” He lowers his voice on the word “lady.”
“Don’t take her seriously, dude,” says Leo, and is instantly appalled by his use of the word “dude.” Is he pretending he’s Keanu Reeves? He does, in fact, aspire to be more like Keanu Reeves. He seems very relaxed and possibly enlightened. Neve loves Keanu.
“No, I’m not,” says Cool Guy. “Just…you know, weird.” He gestures with his chin. “She’s back there.”
Leo turns. There she is at the back of the line, wheeling a small suitcase: innocuous, self-contained, sane. A grandmother who travels regularly. Not a fortune teller. Now that Leo is out of the claustrophobic airplane and back in the familiar bland world the sinisterness of her words has almost dissipated, like the way huge emotions produced by a movie or a concert fade.
He had discreetly observed her across the aisle after the flight attendant brought her back to her seat. She’d shut her eyes and had apparently fallen into a deep sleep because the landing wasn’t enough to wake her. Her closest seatmate, the man in the window seat, didn’t try to wake her either. As soon as the seat-belt sign went off he nimbly slid in front of her knees and out into the aisle. Just before Leo left the plane he glanced back to see if she’d woken yet, but her eyes were still shut as the passengers filed past, many of them giving her curious looks, but no one attempting to speak to her.
“Yeah, so she told me I was going to die in a fight when I’m thirty.”
“Don’t worry about it,” says Leo. “She told me I’m dying young too.”
The line is moving again so they are no longer parallel.
“Put it out of your mind!” says Leo over his shoulder as everyone steps forward. He’s nearly at the front of the line.
Cool Guy gives him a cool thumbs-up with his free hand. Leo wonders if it was his injury that caused the lady to choose that particular prediction for him. Did she honestly believe what she was saying? She seemed to believe it. He recalls the symbol on the lady’s brooch and how it had seemed weirdly relevant to him in some specific way: How could that be? Now he can’t even visualize it. Was it an infinity symbol?
She’s obviously too far away for him to see the tiny brooch from here. Theoretically, he could have leaned over, put on his reading glasses, and studied it when she was asleep on the plane, but he didn’t want to risk having an elderly lady open her eyes to the sight of a male passenger looming over her, staring at her chest.
