A Banana and My Libido | By Allie Vernon

My father told me that a boy only wants one thing.

When he pulled the car over, his eyes wide and crazy, I was riding shotgun, my feet up on the dash, scraping the outer layer of flesh from a banana with my teeth.

“He will tell you a lot to get it, but you can’t believe anything he says,” he added, throwing the banana peel out the window and handing me the droopy, half-eaten remains. “You eat this with your hands.”

I ate it carefully, placing small pieces in my mouth. I was in trouble and I didn’t know why. I was nine.

Tonight, I roll a silicone sex toy around in my hand, the one that looks like a play torpedo, and try to figure out how I got here. 34 and no orgasm, unless you count wet dreams; the name alone seeming to suggest that my libido never progressed past puberty. We agreed we’d try something new. It’s too early to need this.

“You ready?” My husband closes his eyes and picks a lubricant jelly from the assortment in his sock drawer, purchases we have made while looking for answers. “Oh boy, get ready for a classic. Coming all the way from Waco, Texas,” he adopts a slow drawl, undoubtedly offensive to any true Texan, “the land of the fixer upper, home of the five-bedroom farmhouse estate with a monthly mortgage the price of our car payment,” he squirts mystery goop into his hand, “the one and only, the tried and true, you guessed it—”

He looks up, noticing that I’ve forgotten to look interested. “What’s wrong?”

I leave the torpedo on the bed and hurry us to the shower where sex is efficient. Bent over, head up, the water coming down on my chest, I try to answer his question. I tag on a prepositional phrase of my own. What’s wrong with me?

Allie holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, and is currently pursuing her MA in English and her MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman University. When she is not writing fiction of her own, she is most interested in the cultural consequences of capitalism, as well as the way that we navigate gender expectations in literature. She also enjoys teaching. As an instructor of written inquiry in Chapman’s rhetoric and composition department, she is often intrigued by the multimodal implications of texts in our digital environment and discussing those implications with passionate students. When she is not busy doing the academic hustle, she likes to read sad books, ride her bike, and laugh at her husband.

Featured Image: “Banana-plane” by The Shaun Woods is licensed under CC BY 2.0