Another Day in Paradise

My husband says, “Why do you keep buying these goddamn bananas?”

He says it with the soft weariness of a man betrayed repeatedly by the same fruit. They sit there on the counter, bruised and slumped over each other like they’ve just received bad news. The peels are nearly black. One is beginning to open of its own accord.

“I like them,” I say.

He’s not satisfied. He never is, especially when it comes to produce.

“You don’t eat them,” he says. “I don’t eat them. We don’t eat bananas.”

“They remind me of something,” I say.

“What,” he asks, already defeated, “do they remind you of?”

I shrug. “Tropical things.”

“Tropical things?”

“You know. A warm place. Birds you can’t name. Drinks with umbrellas. Everyone’s legs are out.”

He looks at the bananas like they’ve personally wronged him.

“Like we were on vacation?”

“Yes,” I say. “Exactly like that.”

He breathes through his nose like he’s counting backwards from ten.

“We’re not on vacation,” he says. “We’re not in the tropics. We’re in a split-level in a suburb of Cleveland. It’s forty-two degrees and drizzling. The most tropical thing in this house is the air freshener in the downstairs bathroom.”

“I like watching them turn,” I say.

This stops him.

“I like how they start off green. So hopeful. Then yellow like a cartoon. And then suddenly they’re not trying to be anything anymore. They just sit there, smelling sweet and soft, like they gave up on being anything else.”

He shoos away a few gnats circling above the bowl.

“We could make banana bread,” I offer.

“We never make banana bread.”

“That’s true.”

He picks one up between two fingers like it’s contagious. A bit of peel comes off in his hand. He sets it down again. Wipes his fingers on his pant leg.

“I like the smell,” I say. “It’s sweet. And sad. Like something that’s lived.”

He sighs, loud and nasal, and rubs his forehead like the conversation has physically injured him.

“Next time,” he says, “get smaller ones.”

The toaster dings. Two slices of rye pop up, just shy of burned. He goes over, butters them like he’s done every morning for twenty years.

He hands me one.

We eat in silence, the bananas softening behind us, the gnats already back.

Then he says, not unkindly, “Another day in paradise.”

And we head out into it.