Two Cherries – Henry Schwartz

April 30, 2026

Just the sight of an elaborate dessert makes me tear up, she said. Especially when I see someone get excited about it. A perfect banana split. Or one of those hot chocolates, with whipped cream and shaved nutmeg. If it’s a kid or an old person about to eat it, I just cry. Or someone who’s eating alone at a restaurant. Even the thought of it. I can never go to diners anymore. I wish we didn’t come here.

I asked her if she wanted to leave but she shook her head. We were in a booth in the back by the window. She looked outside and quickly looked back at the table.

I need to get used to it, she told me. One day, when I have kids, I don’t want to deprive them of dessert because their excitement makes me cry.

She tapered off at the end of her sentence, raising two fingers to her mouth. She sharply inhaled and smiled.

It’s always made me sad, but it ramped up once I got off my meds, she said.

I asked her when she got off them.

Two months ago, she said. I was in a relationship for three years and he only saw me cry twice. It was one of the reasons he broke up with me. He said I wasn’t in touch with my emotions, which reminded him of his mother, which made him worry about how I might be as a mother to his children one day. He was older, so that’s something he thought about a lot. Now I think about it a lot. I feel like I’ve aged so much since we broke up.

The only time he really saw me cry, she continued, was at the end of a movie.

I asked her which movie, but before she could answer, the waitress brought us two cups of coffee, a saucer of milk, and a tiny, baby blue ramekin of sugar cubes.

Wow, she said, pouring half of the milk into her coffee. I’ve never seen a ramekin this color.

She put all of the sugar cubes in her cup and then held the ramekin up close to her face, inspecting it, before flipping it over and studying the bottom.

Taiwan! she said. She put it down and took a sip of her coffee.

The Green Ray, she said. It’s about a woman named Delphine. She’s in her mid-30s, tan, skinny but not really pretty. The whole movie takes place on her vacation. En vacances, if you will.

She smiled and picked up her mug to take another sip, but then put it down, as if she remembered something. She looked out the window and I looked too. The street was empty. The stoplight outside switched from red to green. I looked back and she was looking at the ramekin again.

So Delphine, she continued, keeps trying to have fun on her vacation but can’t. She tries going to the countryside with her friend, then she tries going hiking in the Alps, but it’s not fun because she’s lonely. When she’s in the countryside, this little girl asks her why she’s not married, and Delphine gives a terrible answer that betrays her complete denial about her ex-fiancé who left her. Anyway, then she goes to the beach and overhears this old man explaining something called the green ray. It’s a meteorological phenomenon where the sun flashes green as it sets, just for a moment, as it hits the horizon line. Throughout the movie, Delphine’s always crying, at every inconvenience. The first time I watched it I kind of hated her.

I said I hadn’t realized she had seen the movie before.

Of course, I’d seen it years ago, she said, rolling her eyes. But my boyfriend hadn’t seen it. In fact, he hadn’t seen a single Rohmer movie before he dated me.

Delphine eventually gives up because her vacances are over, she said, and she’s in the train station reading Dostoevsky when this guy appears. He starts talking to her about Russian literature. Delphine’s acting laid back and composed, but we just spent the whole movie with her, and we know she’s a total fucking mess. It’s obvious that this guy’s perfect for her. So they get a drink and they talk about love, how French people always do, you know? I’m literally getting chills just telling you this. They go up to this gorgeous lookout point and watch the sunset, and it’s reflecting onto their faces, and it’s stunning, and Delphine’s crying in anticipation, and you’re waiting, hoping that she sees the green ray. You’re just begging for it to work out for her. And then it cuts to the sunset, and the sun flashes green before disappearing into the sea. Then the camera cuts to Delphine, and she goes, Oh! And she smiles, and the man from the train station smiles, and then the movie ends. For some reason, I sobbed when she saw the green ray. I couldn’t believe something so improbable and beautiful could happen. Even though I knew it was coming.

I asked what her ex-boyfriend’s reaction was to her crying.

He was confused, she said. He comforted me, held me, but he didn’t know why I was crying because he had fallen asleep. I hadn’t noticed because I lean forward when I watch movies.

I told her I loved The Green Ray.

Oh, I didn’t realize you had seen it, she said.

I asked her about the other time she had cried during the relationship.

At the end of Paddington 2, she said, I shed one single tear. Have you seen that one?

I told her that I had seen it and that I had also cried at the ending.

We watched it with my boyfriend’s—sorry, my ex-boyfriend’s—niece, she said, the day before Thanksgiving last year. We got so drunk that night, and he told me over and over that he wanted me to have his children. When we had sex that night, he told me how much he wanted to make me pregnant, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Paddington when he went to jail, and I was really turned off. The next day he forgot he said all that stuff about breeding. I don’t think he even remembered that I cried during the movie.

One time, when I was in preschool, I said, my mom took me and my sister to Baskin-Robbin’s, and when I licked my ice cream, it fell onto the ground.

She put her hand on her mouth again, staring down at the table, her eyes widening.

Obviously, I continued, I started crying. My mom looked at the ice cream on the ground and took me and my sister by the hand and made us sit at a booth inside. I remember looking down, away from my sister on the other side of the table, because I was so embarrassed. My mom left us there and went back to the cashier. I didn’t even bother looking at what she was doing. I was so ashamed. She came back over with a brand new ice cream cone and told me it was okay that I had dropped it, but that I had to lick it gently this time, so as to not dislodge it from the cone.

Tears had pooled in her eyes again. She looked out the window. I asked her if there was a reason that she kept looking out the window.

The first time I came here was with my boyfriend, she said, at five or six in the morning. We had just become an official couple that day and spent the whole night with his friends. It was the first time he ever let me meet them. We went to drinks at a wine bar, and then this fancy red booth steakhouse, and then a party, and one of those warehouse raves and then this afters thing. The whole night, he never left my side, for the first time. He was touching me in front of girls that he used to sleep with before he met me. He introduced me to everyone as his girlfriend. I’d never heard him say it before, and every time it felt like heaven. We sat at this exact table. We were still kind of tweaking and spent so long deciding what to get, and when the waitress came over, he asked her to bring anything. She came back with an ice cream sundae. It was the cutest little thing ever. Two scoops of vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, peanuts, and two cherries on top, instead of one. My boyfriend pointed at the sundae, laughing. I laughed too. I didn’t know what was so funny. I thought he was just high. I was only laughing because he was laughing.

Then she looked me in the eyes for the first time and smiled.