Banana Face
Patricia Mulcahy
Word Count 808
On a sunny beach in Puerto Rico, I am reading Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, which states that if we don’t accept death as an integral part of life instead of dreading it, life itself can turn into a kind of living death.
Distracted on the pristine, burning sand, I fail to address a question from my husband.
He grabs the book from my hands and declares unceremoniously: “You read to escape. What are you escaping now? We’re on a beautiful beach!”
Yes, but what better place to think about civilization’s repression and why we should get out from under it?
My husband goes on, unabated: “You think you’re a social person, but you’re really not.”
A few minutes later, he asks if he can have some of the banana I am eating. “Sure!” I say, then shove what remains of the banana in my husband’s face.
He is speechless.
For years, I wonder if the infamous banana incident constitutes violent behavior on my part, even if justified. I do love my husband, who is smart and funny and very enthusiastic about sex; but his encroachments into my food supply make me crazy. When we met in college, he was a modern dancer—slim and charismatic. By the time he started graduate school in philosophy, he had two wardrobes given how much his weight fluctuated depending on his study schedule. To keep it under control, he tried to hold back at meals.
Invariably he would reach across the table and dip his fork into my plate for a little extra bite, especially at dessert time. Sometimes he still nibbles to the point that I wonder if I should order another portion just for myself.
When I protest his incursions, he says I have a bad case of “big family syndrome.” He is an only child: Isn’t the fact that I am one of six, part of the reason he is attracted to me?
In a big family, Darwinian doctrine about survival of the fittest is no joke: No man can endanger my food supply.
After we get married, my husband and I move to New York City when he decides to acquire an MBA instead of a Ph.D. in philosophy. In our tenement apartment with the bathtub in the kitchen, we sleep on a mattress on the floor in front of the water closet. This will not be our future: A move to Texas to pursue major economic opportunity is imminent, my husband informs me one day.
What will I do there? Go to the mall? I’ve just started an entry-level job in book publishing, which my husband disparages as part of “a female galley slave industry.”
It only occurred to me later that my husband’s caustic comments about my reading on the beach reflected a profound worry that I might prefer a solitary activity to his company. Reading is not only my escape; it is also a means of making my own living, albeit a modest one.
We read to escape, we also read to live. In an offbeat memoir called The Cost of Living, the British writer Deborah Levy says: “We can’t mortgage our life to someone else’s fear.”
I suspect Norman O. Brown would concur.
Shortly after my husband’s comment about a move to Texas, he tells me casually that he slept with a woman in his Marketing 101 class. It was only a chance encounter, he emphasizes: Clearly, he loves me best. Implicit is that he is a catch, and that I would be a fool not to recognize this.
After I move out, my husband tells everyone it’s because I have become a “feminist,” as if the term positions me beyond the marital pale.
A few years later, I’ve moved to a studio apartment in Greenwich Village. I go on a blind date with a man who regales me with stories of his days as a stagehand on Saturday Night Live. We repair to a seafood restaurant. When I get up from the table to go to the restroom, half of my fish dinner is still on the plate.
When I come back, the plate is empty.
“You ate my dinner?” I ask, incredulous.
“I thought you were finished,” he says, abashed.
Without another word, I leave the restaurant in a daze and never speak to the fish lover again.
The next day I recall the words of a therapist I consulted after my divorce: “You tend to put people who’ve hurt you in a coffin, and then you nail it tightly shut.”
This is how I kill—but also how I stand my culinary ground.
These days, I am happy to offer dining companions a sample of whatever I am eating. I am ready to share, but never to accommodate food marauders.
I still love bananas.
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Patricia formed the editorial consulting service Brooklyn Books after over twenty years in book publishing. She started as a temp at Farrar Straus and Giroux and left as Editor in Chief at Doubleday. Her authors included bestselling crime writers James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly.