“It’s like… twelve shots of the same bunch of bananas?” I said, holding the strip of negatives up to the fluorescent lights above. “Maybe it’s a kid’s science project?”
L, looked up from the enlarger and shook her head. “If it is, she’s been doing that project for years. She brings in a roll of those every other week.”
“What? Twelve exposures of bananas on the same counter? Twenty-four a month?” I asked, getting my first taste of the mystery solving bug that comes with one hour photo lab gigs. It was my second week on the job at the photo lab and everything was still fascinating.
“Forty-eight prints. Tuesdays are free doubles. But yeah, all the same — we’ve all got theories. Try not to ask her when she picks them up. It gets awkward for the customers when they are reminded that we are not machines and have to look at their photos when we print them.”
“You’ve never asked? After years of bananas?”
“She won’t tell you, don’t bother asking.”
“Is she just messing with us?”
“That’s K’s theory.”
“Are you just messing with me?”
She switched her machine to standby and walked over, gray lab coat flapping behind, its rolled up sleeves, still too large brushed against my arm as she reached for the discard box on the shelf above the counter above the trimming area. It was the 90s and at 18, I had not put my finger on what it was that made me notice things like that about her. “There’s probably still some in here from last time,” she said flipping through the errors subtracted from the nightly counts as waste. “Here’s a full set I did some correction on — her film must’ve gotten some heat. Too magenta.”
I laid them out on the counter, in the print order marked across the back, and alternated between close examination and stepping back for a bigger view.
“Tripod or one of those automatic sports modes, do ya think?” I asked.
“I think she’s got a tripod. The lighting is slightly different in some of them,” she said, motioning to an off-frame area next to one of the shots. “I think there’s a window over here. But she’s got the overhead light on.”
I picked up frames 1 and 12 and squinted. “If they’re different days, 12 should be spottier. I can’t tell though.”
The machine behind me finished its cycle and the latest bunch of banana photos fell from the back end in a long strip ready to be trimmed and thoroughly scrutinized for glimmers of meaning.
I continued working at the lab for three years, and every other Tuesday the banana lady would drop off a twelve exposure roll of a bunch of bananas sitting alone on a counter. They were yellow, not green. All about the same ripeness, always, month to month, unlike me stagnating in the sad town my parents’ had moved us to when I was 16.
There was an exception about a year in. She dropped them off on a Thursday and I asked if she still wanted doubles, even though they weren’t free. She did. “But you can have a free 5×7 of your favorite shot. That’s the deal today.”
“No, thank you,” she said yanking the order slip out of my hand, glaring. The idea delighted me, at least. I imagined a poster-sized enlargement of the bananas hung over a fireplace in a gilded frame.
“Not appealing, huh?” I asked to her retreating back.
The boss’s daughter, a high schooler who worked a few nights a week, giggled. “It just slipped out,” I shrugged and we both dropped below the counter to compose ourselves in case another customer came in. (No one did.) She’d grown up hanging out in the lab with her parents while they worked, and I wondered if there’d ever been a time in her life when there hadn’t been banana photos popping out of the machine.
There were always the same number of bananas. A dozen. Was it the same dozen? Was she a scientist? A genius? Had she had a breakthrough in the problem of banana over-ripening?
Every other week I would steel myself for another disappointing round of “She doesn’t owe you anything except $4.99.” The over-sharing of other customers I had very little interest in made the bananas even more mysterious. Day after day, season after season, frame by frame the ordinariness of school events, the blandness of weddings, and the sameness of small red-faced pink babies that regulars seemed to feel I was obliged to know the names of, blurred together. Even my evening shifts which held the promise of shitty amateur smut (fine if mentioned ahead of time, $8 screening fee, if not disclosed in advance) had lost their entertainment value after the initial bleakness of customers’ content ceased being its own sort of shock. I’d even gotten to the point I could stomach snacking after a roll or two of the DA’s evidence rolls like the rest of the over-18 crew. But the bananas? Haunting. The absurdity of taking 312 nearly identical photos annually for so many years! Is she fucking with us? What a great joke — the intensity of it, if so. Or is she just fucked up? What sort of agri-conspiracy might she be snapping “proof” of? $129.74 a year, not including sales tax for what? That was almost an entire paycheck for me. What was going on?
One Tuesday late in my lab employment I had a rush order in the middle of a printing run, and had to stop at banana exposure 4 to load a different roll of paper, which was fine; Banana Lady’s order wasn’t due until the next day. But this meant the numbering on the back would go 1–4 then restart 1–8. Interrupted ordering, I noted on the back. Check with customer, I added. If she’s an artist, perhaps the numbering is inconsequential? But how many still lifes of just bananas does one need to paint?
The next day right on schedule the Banana Lady, petite and sour, stood at the counter to trade her order slip for the corresponding envelope. We were alone as usual; hardly anyone came in weekday afternoons but Wednesday was an especially slow day. “Before I ring you up, I wanted to let you know that I had to split the printing of your photos into two runs,” I said, pointing to the divider in the inner-envelope separating the first four from those printed later. I explained the numbering, and added, “If it’ll cause a problem, I can reprint them for you. It’ll only take 15 minutes.”
“No, it’s fine,” she said, folding the envelope closed and tucking it into her purse. “Why would it matter what order they were in?”
“Well, sometimes it matters. There’s a dentist who brings in client photos that we have to keep in order or his staff won’t know how to file them.”
“It’s nothing like that,” she said setting a ten dollar bill down on the counter and sliding it toward me with her finger. “I would prefer it if you didn’t look at my photos.”
“It’s unavoidable. We have to make sure there’s no dust specks and correct for different lighting types and lighten or darken them as needed. It’s not automatic,” I answered, handing back her change. “It’s only because they seem like an experiment or something, I wanted to make sure we were giving you what you needed.”
She took the change from me as if I’d sneezed on it, and squinting up at me says, “What I need is privacy.”
“We can only offer discretion. I could also sell you one of these new digital cameras. They’re starting to come down in price, and are really popular because you can print photos at home these days if you have a computer. We can talk you through it over the phone if you get stuck setting it up.”
“I like my camera. Just shut up, do your job, and mind your business!”
I saw magenta. The faux polite customer service membrane covering my slightly-post-teenage brain, starved of real challenge and years away from fully realizing the power of the long-game, disintegrated, exposing the toxic lizard nerve.
“Look lady,” I hissed, “I only offered to reprint your photos if you needed them a certain way. I’m not interested in your private life and affairs with produce.” If there had been witnesses I’m sure they would’ve reported a blink of a second eyelid and a forked-tongue flick.
Not a complete lie. I wasn’t interested, I was consumed. Everyone who’d ever printed one of her orders wanted so very badly to know what her deal was. The day manager had several years on my mere three and had managed to be cool about it. But I was spent. Screw her weird ass, I harrumphed as she stormed out, red-faced and gasping, having “never.” At that moment I decided nothing she could offer would be better than the potential explanations my imagination’s cooked up. Right.
Our exchanges after that were cold and silent and quick. As the day manager had predicted, she wouldn’t look at me, but she also wouldn’t stand for the low quality of the other local photo shops and so kept coming back. At the time I was bratty enough to feel smug about it, but 18 years later I’m still thinking about it several times a week. Bananas are everywhere, you know? And now, hopefully, you’ll join me because I’m still that petty.