Writing+Workshop

=Writing Workshop= //Practice, Participate, Praise, Polish, Publish//



 

[|PRINT THIS PAGE]
  

SHOUTS & MURMURS
=**BANANAS** = ==== by [|Roz Chast]  NOVEMBER 8, 2010  ==== 

I’m a very big fan of fruit. It’s really tasty, and, from what I’ve read, it’s very good for you. Fruit is high in vitamins, aids digestion, blah blah blah. Most fruits don’t need to be cooked or doctored or salted and buttered in order to be palatable—you can just eat them “as is.” I have a lot of positive things to say about fruit, including the hand-to-fruit size ratio of most fruits, and how you can pack a piece of it in your purse or your murse or whatever it is you carry your junk around in. Also, when you eat a piece of fruit as a snack, instead of a package of Oreos, you feel good about yourself, almost like you’ve built a well in one of those African villages which needed a well, or like you’ve run a half-marathon. O.K., maybe not quite that great, but pretty great. But lately I’ve started to wish that there wasn’t such a fruit as the banana, or, more accurately, that people didn’t eat bananas in public. It’s not because of their phallic aspect. Who //doesn’t// notice that? It’s so obvious that even a seven-year-old can look at a person eating a banana and think, Heh-heh—hope you’re “enjoying” that “banana”! There’s really not much a person can do about that, unless you want to pull out a knife and fork and plate every time you eat a banana, and then you look like something’s the matter with you. Like maybe you’re so bothered by the phallic aspect that you have to cut it into prissy little rounds before you eat it. Talk about drawing attention to a problem! When I’m walking down some street in midtown and I see well-dressed men and women shoving bananas into their mouths with a chimpanzee’s complete lack of self-consciousness, I look at them and think, Well, it’s not the banana’s fault it looks that way. Anyway, the shape is not the problem I’m talking about. Or, if it is, it’s one of the smaller problems. The shape is almost more of a “humor” problem. I am disgusted by bananas’ texture. Compare the texture of a banana—mushy, baby-foodish, almost what you would feed a sick person—with the brisk athletic crispness of an apple. And, please, not one of those bulk apples you buy in a plastic bag. Those are mealy and they give all fruit a bad name. It’s no wonder so many kids don’t like fruit, if that’s the only kind of fruit they’ve ever had. I mean like a really good Macoun or Honeycrisp. My mother hated the texture of bananas, but my father liked it, and for years, when they would get into one of their banana-texture arguments, I would take my father’s side, just to annoy my mother, even though secretly I agreed with her. I can still picture the contemptuous face and the cutting remarks she would make when my dad went on and on about how bananas were nature’s perfect food. But I would never have admitted that I thought she was right. Yay, bananas! Boo, Mom! The main problem I have with the banana is its packaging. Whoever came up with it must have been running out of time and went with his or her first idea, which sometimes works out well, but sometimes you need to step away from the drawing board. So, in the place inside your head where you picture things, imagine someone starting to eat a banana. The person breaks open the peel, which always smooshes the top of the banana a little bit. That’s O.K. Whatever. But watch how the peel starts to drape over the hand. Now the banana is halfway eaten. The peel is now draping over the entire hand. Finally, the person finishes the banana and is left holding this disgusting peel, which is quickly turning brown and smelly! It’s not like an apple core, which you could throw out a car window and think, even though you’d be kidding yourself, Maybe an apple orchard will start here. Or an orange peel, which you wouldn’t throw out a car window, but at least it smells nice. You can even do crafts with orange peels. I knew a girl in college who used to cut an orange peel into tiny circles and string them together with a piece of blue embroidery thread and suspend them from a belt loop of her pants and wear them like that till they dried. This was the same person who believed that if you didn’t wash your hair eventually your hair would wash itself. Like the oils would cycle through your scalp in such a way that. . . actually, as I’m writing this, I realize it doesn’t make any sense, so never mind. No. The banana peel is garbage of the worst sort, the kind you must get rid of right away. You need to walk quickly to the nearest trash receptacle, throw it in, and then nonchalantly walk away, all the while giving off psychic vibes that you know nothing about it, that it’s somebody else’s peel. Because you are not the sort of person who eats a banana in public. <span class="dingbat" style="font-family: 'Courier New',Symbol;">♦