Ripe Bananas by Marta Balcewicz
Associate editor Victoria Rego on today’s bonus story: Marta Balcewicz's "Ripe Bananas" pulled us in with its surreal silliness—a catalog of girlish whimsy adoringly observed by the protagonist's parents. But it won our hearts through its careful consideration of how a daughter becomes a mother and the never-ending project of ripening into responsibility.
Ripe Bananas
Before the baby arrived, Olamide would roll down the window each time we took her for a drive and let her legs dangle out as far as humanly possible. That was Olamide. With her legs hanging over the back door like pants on a clothesline, she’d scream, “Help! I’m being abducted! Help me, please! Kidnapping in progress!”
We—Olamide’s parents—would laugh. I, driving. Mom in the passenger seat, watching for passersby and reporting on their reactions. “Alarmed. Confused. This guy’s clutching his stomach, just losing it. Too funny.” That was for Olamide. The joy, the laughter. Our little girl.
There are other stories.
Olamide broke a classmate’s collarbone and his parents threatened to sue. In the meetings with the mediator and the lawyers, we said, “She was standing up for an ideal.” The Collarbone Ideal, we called it. “Your daughter’s got ideals up the wazoo,” the mediator had said, but he’d said it like it impressed him; ideals are a currency, he knew.
Olamide usually got the highest grades. She said she’ll be a surgeon, a plastic surgeon one day. At a dinner party once, our guests asked her to recite Baudelaire’s poetry—in French because of the lessons, the private ones and the ones at school. After two minutes of “Show us your French. Go on, honey! French!” all Olamide said was: “Au revoir,” slow and clunky, delivered like she’d never heard a Francophone say it, not even the cartoon skunk.
One last one. Olamide hurt her hand, was unable to explain how, said that just before she noticed the injury, she’d had a dream in which she’d caught a softball. She told this story to every specialist, every practitioner, each nurse, the people in the waiting rooms. She described the way the ball travelled at her, the way she really felt a tendon shift. Then one day, on our way to physiotherapy, she said the pain had suddenly gone and left her. “A dream so realistic it became a brief reality.” Fascinating, right? That was our child.
At the start of eighth grade, Olamide brought home a baby. Green gummy plastic, the texture of a dish sponge. “You’ll see that some babies are green, some purple, some orange,” the Home Ec teacher had said as he pulled them out of their packaging. “But they will all gradually turn yellow—if you do your assignments right.”
The assignments involved feedings, immunizations, time in the playground. In French: l’alimentation, la santé, la recreation avec le bébé.
We filmed Olamide, we were addicted to filming her with our smart phones. Swinging the baby from the monkey bars. Feeding it pap through the pinhole in its slightly parted mouth. One day we filmed Olamide shooting a vaccine into the baby, tapping the mainline with two fingers, elastic band cinching its arm. “This is how, right?” The video shows Olamide look up momentarily. “I saw how on YouTube,” she explains. The needle twitches. We titter. She scowls. That video is hard to watch.
By the middle of the school year, Olamide’s baby hadn’t yellowed. The color shifted slightly, from kale to a bright lime. Yet still, it was green, there was no way of saying it wasn’t. But Olamide—our baby—did change, an inverse to that stagnant shade. “Shove it with your videos,” she said to me one day. “You could help out a little instead of laughing and holding up your phone all day.”
“We’re not laughing,” we told her. “We’re proud of you. It’s cute.”
We excused her language, her mood. We assumed she was exhausted, a new parent and all. She rarely had time for games, for movie night, for walks. She stopped swinging her legs out the car window. At the grocery store, she’d load bananas into the cart. Always bananas, compulsively poking. “The softest,” she’d say. “I really need them to mash.”
By June, the baby hadn’t ripened, no matter how many swings on the swing, how many needles it got. Olamide’s teacher sent home a letter. Your daughter will fail, it said. She’s not doing her assignment right. Next morning, we petitioned the principal. “It’s ridiculous; it’s just plastic.” We showed him the videos, bare facts. “See how she nurtures it? All day, it’s all she does.” By end of day, Olamide was promised a D. D for “don’t worry, it’s still a passing grade,” for “darling, daughter, dear. Your Home Ec teacher is dumb.” I managed to pull a smile out of her with that one. “Good one, D-D-D-Dad,” she said then turned back to the baby.
The day before junior high graduation, we found a paper bag in the trash can. Taped shut and full of plastic. “It’s a breast pump,” my wife said. “Well, was.”
“Mangled?”
“With a hammer.”
The instructions were there too. “Soaked in milk,” my wife said, sniffing them. “Olamide asked for a carton at the store. The kind that’s full of fat. Two hundred per cent fat, she’d said.”
Next day, at the graduation, the baby sat in our laps, green as the springtime hedges and the school mascot, the Saint Anne Academy frog. Olamide’s name was called but our girl didn’t mount the platform. The principal waited. He studied the sky, tapped the lectern, said it’s a nice day, a nice day, then, “Olamide? You here?”
The parents looked behind their shoulders, eyes pausing on the green baby. The wiser ones turned away first. The principal moved on to the next name.
We assumed she’d emerge. Out of turn, our Olamide. Doing something unconventional, offbeat, and hilarious. Tearing down the joint. Making us proud with her renegade princess M.O.
Our princess.
All she left was a note.
We found it tacked to the hallway mirror, a short good-bye to leave room on the page for instructions: baby this, baby that, it’s your grandchild after all. I’m not cut out for motherhood, hell no. “I” being Olamide. Our Olamide. Bananas, penicillin, a bath every single night. Who gets that dirty? A good time in the park. Monkey bars. Seesaw. The universe on a platter. The whole universe, and still, all of it guarantees nothing. No change, that unshifting green. Signed, Olamide. Our world. Dear D-D-D-Daughter.
Marta Balcewicz's stories, essays, and poems appear in Catapult, Tin House Online, AGNI Online, Hobart, and elsewhere. She lives in Toronto and is the fiction editor at Minola Review. You can find her online at www.martabalcewicz.com
