Elizabeth Crane: Banana Love

SHE IS NEWLY MARRIED. SHE has many reasons to believe this marriage is an exceptionally good one. They jump up and down at the door when one comes back after an overnight trip out of town. They invent silly songs about making guacamole and asparagus pee and how the trash bags always break and about Zoloft and pretentious modern art and whatever else comes into their heads to sing about. They believe in god, they make love often, they hardly ever fight, and when they do fight there’s hardly any yelling and it’s always fair. They travel well together, although credit is due to the husband, she thinks, because she does not travel well alone. They split up the chores and say nice things all day every day. This is what marriage is to her so far. But, for comparison, she really has nothing. This is her longest romantic relationship ever. She has not been married before. She has observed marriage from the vantage point of daughter, friend, sister, and occasional reader of US Weekly. Some of these marriages seem successful, some obviously not. All of these marriages appear different, even the successful ones. It seems impossible to her to conduct any kind of scientific study based on any compilation of numbers. She’s heard the numbers, and read an article recently that claimed that some of the numbers have been wrong the whole time. It seems impossible to determine the definition of success by anything numerical, e.g., the divorce rate. Couldn’t there be some couple out there who divorced who did not consider their marriage a failure? Even if, she supposes, there were a study in which married participants charted the monthly number of miscommunications, lovemaking, compliments and/or loving sentiments, chores performed per spouse per day, quality time spent, agreement-to-disagreement ratio, etc., there would still be incalculable variants preventing a succinct definition of marriage that could be universally agreed on. Plus, it seems obvious to her that when a marriage ends, it is not widely regarded as having been a successful one, though she suspects this is a matter of perspective. She suspects, of course, that in many ways everything comes down to perspective. She has never been so interested in marriage until this time. She has previously gone out of her way to avoid conflict of any kind, with only marginal success. She has not been to outer space, which she feels is a location where there may be no conflict. She is willing, we should say, to entertain and perhaps even accept the idea that some conflict exists even in the best of relationships. If you told her a story that began, "Once upon a time there was a couple who agreed on every single thing that could possibly ever come up except for he liked bananas and she found them frightening," she would almost believe it. If the story went that they both liked dark chocolate (never milk), abundant cacti (never jade plants), cilantro (never parsley), Brooklyn (never Manhattan), the old seedy Times Square (never the new clean Times Square), hardwood floors with area rugs (never wall-to-wall carpeting), that eating microwave popcorn is like eating mulch, that sugar has gotten way too bad of a rap all around, that the word blog is too hard to say, that there are too many acronyms in the world these days for anyone’s good; that they agreed you don’t have to finish a book if you don’t like it, that a little bit of reality television never hurt anyone but that the History Channel is the best thing ever invented, that there should be a new American revolution in which they themselves lead an uprising that begins on the Brooklyn Bridge and gathers people all the way to California and back to the White House where they outnumber all the existing police, military, and national guard, or whatever and park on the lawn for however many weeks it takes for the government to pull out of the dumbass war (and for just one example, this was something they discovered they had in common when they started dating, when the wife happened to mention her plan by saying something like, "Wouldn’t it be nice if we could …" and the husband practically proposed right there and then, so freaked out was he at her articulating his deepest fantasy), that they agreed to change exactly the same number of diapers per child per day, they agreed to spend time with their in-laws even though the wife’s parents only ever served leftovers that could never be traced back to any definable origin and the husband’s mother was a vicious gossip and an occasional very bad klepto (she had a habit of swiping things that were too big not to notice, such as a particularly large piece of pottery the wife had brought back from a trip to Mexico, and would tend to do this while other people were in the room), and that this couple agreed, in the event of a disagreement, to disagree, she would believe this as well. She would not be surprised if the story went that this couple spent most days loving each other like lunatics but that every now and then the husband would forget and bring a banana into the house, sending the wife deep into the mental anguish of her childhood when she was forced to eat brown bananas because her parents would never waste anything, and the husband would apologize but also try to get her to work through the banana issue, and the wife would try to work through the banana issue but it would stretch itself out over the life of their marriage. It would not be unbelievable to our original woman that this other husband would start by bringing only something with something representing a banana, like maybe a Curious George book, which is not at all about bananas but occasionally will include a banana image. To which the wife would then say, "Okay, I see that’s not so bad," and then in the future sometime, not too soon, the husband would be allowed to move ahead into bringing something banana-flavored into the house, like banana bubble gum maybe, and the wife wouldn’t even have to chew it so much as tolerate it. And then the following year maybe a banana chocolate chip muffin, but only if it was banana-flavored and not made with real bananas because this wife knew that real banana baked goods were often made with overripe fruit. Maybe the wife would even take a bite of the banana chocolate chip muffin and say that it wasn’t bad before she said, "Let’s not bring anything else banana in here for a while." And so there would be years of banana-free living, at least at home, and even outside the home the wife would be careful to avoid possible banana sightings. At the grocery store, she would avoid the produce section altogether, leaving that disturbing errand to the husband, and if he happened to mention that he’d eaten a banana at work, she’d ask him to please not talk like that around her. "Even if it was a perfectly yellow, blemish-free fruit, I don’t need to be imagining what happened to the peel in your office. A banana peel has no place in a work environment." (And "The trash?" was not the right answer.) She would deny the very existence of National Geographic, "a periodical practically devoted to bananas," she called it, and she would avoid any movies involving simian creatures of any kind, from King Kong (all versions) to Gorillas in the Mist to the seemingly harmless George of the Jungle, and certainly Spanking the Monkey despite assurances from her husband that there was not even one monkey in the movie, much less a banana. Naturally, she would have nothing to do with Josephine Baker or even Carmen Miranda. If there was any hint that bananas might be present on any given occasion, she would have the husband investigate in advance, and it is important to note that plantains were also out of the question. Needless to say, in spite of the absence of bananas in either their fashion or their décor, she did not shop at Banana Republic. She did not need to be reminded. Occasionally, if she was in an especially good mood, she could tolerate her husband serenading her with a single chorus of, "Yes, We Have No Bananas." Once, however, on a seemingly innocuous visit to P.S.1 to see a show of New York artists, she stumbled upon a hideously realistic and rather large C-print of a peeled, entirely black banana, pretty much her worst nightmare, and had a panic attack right in front of it, blaming her husband, who should have known. In between each of the banana moments there would be years of their crazy, agreeable love for each other, but it would always come back up sooner or later, because the husband really loved bananas and didn’t want to keep his banana love a secret, eating them in the car in the dim light of the garage as he would, feeling shame about eating something no one should really have to feel shame about eating, like let’s say if he was eating his own poo there in the car, and so he would eventually and tentatively ask his wife if, because he was feeling this unfitting shame, maybe it wasn’t time to bring some sort of banana item into the house, like a frozen chocolate–covered banana, which in retrospect he should have known was a grievous miscalculation on account of we’re dealing with an actual banana which is hidden, and concealed underneath the chocolate coating could be an unthinkably brown banana. Which would lead to maybe their biggest conflict ever, with the wife saying, "No, it wasn’t that time at all," and, "How could you not see that?" The wife would continue, "Even a plain underripe real banana would have been better than a chocolate-covered banana." And the husband would try to understand and he would apologize but he would also say, "This is ridiculous!" because it’s been years of this banana thing for him even though "This is ridiculous!" is never a thing to say to your wife even when it is, and he feels and says that much more attention has been paid to her banana-avoidance issue than to his banana-loving issue, to which she feels and says, "Of course more attention has been paid to my banana-avoidance issue than to your banana-loving issue, because banana-loving is not an issue." And then they talk about going to couples counseling because each of them feels misunderstood, and then they do go to couples counseling and the couples counselor encourages them to remember what they had known decades ago, which is that there isn’t really a right or wrong when it comes to the subject of bananas, and the couples counselor, who is working on her thesis, can see that they agree on everything else and publishes a lengthy article about their astonishing compatibility on everything but this one thing, and the couple ends up laughing about it and they know for sure that the banana issue has been worked through because one day they have a potluck picnic and a neighbor brings a red Jell-O mold exclusively with bananas inside and the wife can pretty much see that these bananas, while mostly fine, are not entirely spotless, and what ends up happening is that when the neighbor comes in offering the Jell-O with bananas inside, the couple look at each other and then realize that not just the husband is reaching to take the Jell-O but so is the wife, at which gesture they simultaneously toss their heads back in laughter, at which time there would be a freeze-frame on them tossing their heads back in laughter, like really this whole story was a ’70s sitcom the whole time. Not forgetting our original wife, the newlywed, hearing this story, feels she doesn’t really know anything more than she ever did about marriage.