The Year of Yes

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  I’d been cutting half the population out, just because I had this silly idea that I was straight. What if the person who could make me happy happened to be in the half I’d discounted? Besides which, I was in college. Wasn’t it accepted policy that you were supposed to have a lesbian period? Maybe I was, in fact, a lesbian, and I just didn’t know it. What if Wonderwoman had seen something in me that I couldn’t see in myself?

  Yes, yes, yes. I knew that you were supposed to know you were gay for as long as you could remember, that it was supposed to be the reason you’d never gotten invited to the prom, that it was supposed to be the explanation for your kickball skills, but I thought maybe I’d been brainwashed into heterosexuality. If I just opened my mind, and informed it that dating women was much less confusing, suddenly there it’d be: a revelation. Girls! It’d be such a relief. I understood women! We liked expressing our emotions, and we liked pretty shoes! We liked to listen to female singer-songwriters, and we liked to read Alice Munro short stories. Surely, these commonalities were enough to build a stable relationship on. There were other things in my life that I’d thought would never appeal to me. Things like sushi, which, given Idaho’s inland status, I’d never tried until I moved to New York. I’d been sure that I’d have to choke it down. Instead, I’d decided it was all I ever wanted to eat. I was suddenly sure that sushi could happen again. In a manner of speaking.

  I’d had a little bit of experience with girls: a brief affair with Susan Sarandon. I thought that should count.

  My dad had introduced us. He was a reader, among other things, most of them more difficult to explain. (For example: “Why does your dad have so many dogs?” “Why does he dress as a sad clown named Scruffy, and dance the shuffle?” “Why doesn’t he go off to an office?” “What the hell is this implausible person, this thing you call your father, who is like no other fathers, who, at dusk, goes out with steaming buckets of dog porridge and a ladle, his hundred dogs whining at chain for his attention? What kind of life is this?” And later, in college, “Do you even have a dad? You don’t mention him.”) His books were bought at secondhand stores, discount aisles, estate sales. He had everything from H. G. Wells to Civil War histories, books on plague, cockroaches, and kayaks, National Geographics dating to 1913. A book on Trickster, the most appropriate thing in the collection. My dad was a connoisseur. And crazy, too, but that was ancillary. His shelves were worth climbing.

  When I was about eight, I found, in his stash of Field & Stream, the Playboy section. Susan Sarandon was on the cover. She was wearing glasses. I wore glasses. She was brainy. I wanted to be brainy. She was described as universally beloved (except by the Republicans). I wanted to be universally beloved (whoever the Republicans were). Susan Sarandon was not nude. It was a special on smart, sexy women. The article said that her IQ was as large as her physical appeal. I wanted to be exactly like her. Shortly before my discovery of the Playboy, my mom had given me a “you are what you eat” lecture. It’d been in response to my rabid overconsumption of frozen bean burritos, but the message had stuck, and now it rattled around in my head, driving me toward a logical consummation.

  I put my tongue out and licked Susan Sarandon, from top to bottom.

  Susan Sarandon, in case anyone is wondering, tasted like paper, and alas, I hadn’t become her.

  I was clearly overdue for another go at girls. I could be a lesbian. I said it to myself. I said it to Wonderwoman.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I could be a lesbian!” I repeated, joyfully. No more men! No more confusion! No more falling in love with my roommate (unless by roommate, I meant Victoria). No more worries at all! I had a somewhat convoluted notion of what it meant to be gay.

  “You have to be attracted to women,” Wonderwoman said.

  “I love women!” And I did. Women were beautiful, compassionate, and nothing I wanted to get naked next to, but why should that matter? So what if I wasn’t inherently attracted to women? People said that love was more about the human being’s soul than about what the human being looked like. Which was not to say that Wonderwoman looked bad. On the contrary. She was better looking than most of the men I’d gone out with: tall, dark, and handsome. Not equine, which is what handsome often meant when applied to women. Wonderwoman was more like a panther in human form. Not beautiful. Beautiful implied some level of vulnerability, and no matter Wonderwoman’s sense of humor, it was pretty clear that she was made of steel. She wasn’t vulnerable to kryptonite, either. If she didn’t like you, it was pretty obvious that she’d have no problem throwing you into traffic.

  I’d met her at my temp job at a publishing company, where she’d loaded me up with free books in the break room, free fruit from the delivery basket, and a free lunch on the day that she’d casually asked me what my girlfriend did.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” I’d said.

  “How is that possible?” she’d asked.

  “Well, I’m not—”

  She’d interrupted me. “Listen, would you like to have dinner with me?”

  “—not a lesbian. Actually.”

  I hadn’t been trying to be misleading. I hadn’t known she was gay until that moment. Wonderwoman didn’t fit my, admittedly narrow, picture of what real-world lesbians looked like. My lesbian friends in Boise complained that all lesbians in the West had their hair cut to resemble beavers. They said I could take that any way I wanted to, but that it was always depressing. Wonderwoman was the polar opposite. She wore high heels and tight skirts. She smiled like a very sexy, lipsticked shark.

  “This isn’t even my style,” she said. “I’m just tired of doing it the normal way. It’s not like I haven’t been set up with every friend of a friend of a friend. I’ve dated every woman in the tristate area.”

  Despite her Prada suit and alligator pumps, it seemed that Wonderwoman was a lot like me. More like me than any of the men I’d met. And with Wonderwoman, it had just occurred to me, I’d be freed from the paranoia of pregnancy that took up most of my time, post any naked interaction. A huge bonus.

  “Yes!” I announced.

  Wonderwoman looked confused.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Let’s go out!”

  “This is weird,” she said.

  “I’m converted!” I said.

  “Is this because you’re straight, but sick of men? I’ve made this mistake before.”

  “I’m opening my mind!” I’d turned into a revivalist minister. I was about to shout “hallelujah” and speak in tongues.

  In my defense, I’d gone out with a guy the night before, who had, in a show of support for a certain eighties hair-metal superstar we’d seen walking down the street, suddenly pumped his hands in the air and yelled, “Rock out with your cock out, muthafucka!”

  I never wanted to hear anything like that again. Griffin had a story in a similar vein, told him by a girl he’d subsequently decided never, ever to sleep with. This girl, apparently, had even worse luck than I did, because one of her lovers, at the moment of orgasm, had screamed, “Yo, yo, yo, let’s get this party started!”

  Griffin felt sad for him, considering, as Griffin said, “the party was ending. People were going home. The beer was gone, and the lights were out, and there was this guy, standing on the street, yelling into the darkness, missing his car keys.”

  I’d felt the same way with my Rock Out guy, except that, thank God, we’d been clothed. He was a refugee from an earlier time, and he felt compelled to mention his genitals to strangers. I was sure that no woman would ever do such a thing.

  “Okay,” said Wonderwoman, with some definite trepidation. Then she grinned and said, “What the hell. People say I never do anything unpredictable.”

  She put her manicured hand on the table. I put my scraggly hand on top of hers. And there we were, for a moment. She ran her thumb under my wrist.

  “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

  “Meow Mix.” How could I not? It was the premier lesbian bar i
n the city, and I’d never had balls enough to go there.

  “Meow Mix?” Wonderwoman was grimacing.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s trite. We could just go out to dinner,” she said.

  “Meow Mix.” I was fixated. I loved the name. I didn’t really notice that Wonderwoman looked worried, or maybe I just didn’t care.

  I went home and listened to k.d. lang and the Indigo Girls. I read Colette, Jeanette Winterson, and Gertrude Stein. Elise lent me the Adrienne Rich book she’d been given by an exboyfriend, who apparently hadn’t been reading closely enough. He’d read sexy passages aloud, and she’d just looked at him, wondering why the hell he was referring to his vagina. I suspected he’d been trying to suggest a typical male fantasy.

  Prior to Griffin, Elise had had a fairly long-standing relationship with a girl named April. They’d met while working at Williams-Sonoma, where April was using her employee discount to restock her gourmet kitchen with Le Creuset cookware. Somehow, they’d fallen into each other’s arms. How did that work? I was uncertain. I was fuzzy enough on how attraction worked with men. When I’d met Elise, she’d just been finishing up with April, who’d bought a bed-and-breakfast in Pennsylvania. The lesbian period had lent Elise a certain kind of glamorous, try-anything vibe. She was my guru.

  The good news was that most of the lesbian reference materials were already in my possession. Maybe, I thought, I was already a lesbian and I didn’t even know it. I picked up a few more things. A book of lesbian erotica that shocked the hell out of me. Videos of Chasing Amy, Bound, and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. I held a pop-culture lesbian marathon.

  I ASKED ZAK FOR POINTERS. His mom was a lesbian. Surely he’d know something. And he did:

  “Exactly like everything else,” he said. “If you don’t find the right person, everything goes wrong.”

  I wasn’t really paying attention. I was giddy on Sappho.

  “It’ll be fun,” I said. “Should I dress femme or dyke?”

  “I don’t think you’re gay,” Zak said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his forehead.

  “I might be bi,” I said. “I’ll try anything once.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said. “She probably doesn’t want to be an experiment.”

  “Who are you?” I said. “What have you done with Zak?”

  “I just think you have enough to deal with, without bringing in a whole new gender.”

  “Maybe you just don’t know that I’m gay.” I felt rebellious. Who was Zak to tell me what my sexual orientation was? What did he know? He’d only observed me through forty or fifty dates with men, and countless evenings over the kitchen table. “You don’t know me that well,” I said, pissily.

  He just looked at me.

  “I don’t know why you think you need to sleep with women. You could sleep with anyone you want to.”

  “Not anyone.”

  This hung in the air for slightly longer than either of us wanted it to, and then we went our separate ways. Discomfort. Denial. Discomfort. Denial. I ate Thai food alone, and justified myself to myself. It was not very satisfying. I choked on my chopsticks and ended up spitting Pad Thai across half the restaurant.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, dressed in men’s trousers and a skimpy white tank top, I made my way to Meow Mix. Wonderwoman was there, looking out of place in her corporate drag. I’d already acquired phrases like “corporate drag.” I rejoiced.

  The place itself was the kind of place everyone knew, and no one had ever been to. It was small and divey, with a jukebox and a lot of teetery barstools. That night, there was a cover band playing exclusively Smiths and Morrissey songs. The singer was a ringer for Morrissey, albeit female. All the women in the bar seemed to know the words to every song. Particularly, disturbingly, the chorus of “November Spawned a Monster,” which involved denying a kiss to an ugly girl.

  Meow Mix, and much of its clientele, reminded me of a trucker bar. In the universe that exists in certain flesh films and comic books, all lesbians look like Brigitte Bardot. Sort of blowsy, sleepy, cushion-lipped, big-breasted, and wearing the ubiquitous wife-beater tank top with no brassiere. Also dying to sleep with men, naturally, or at least let them watch, while putting up a little token lesbian kicking, screaming, and arm wrestling. In real life, this was rarely the case.

  I had only one friend who fit the myth. Zoë went to NYU with me. She’d been in the same class in which I’d met Zak and Griffin, and had arrived half an hour late on the first day. She’d undulated into the room, a native New Yorker, looking nine thousand times better than any of us. She’d perched her perfect ass at the circular table, taken off her jacket to reveal, yes, the accidentally see-through little boy’s tank top, over the best tits anyone had ever seen. She dug into her purse for gloss to lubricate her unbelievably full lips, and said, in her husky, sexy voice,

  “Oh my God, guys, am I late? I was at a callback for RENT.”

  Zoë had run the room for the rest of the year, and, indeed, ran most rooms she entered. Now she hosted parties at various clubs. I periodically ran across postcards advertising her hotness to the women of New York. Sometimes I dragged a friend to one of her parties, we halfheartedly drank martinis for an hour or so, felt tragically unhip, and galumphed into the night to hang out at some greasy spoon, eating what amounted to straight Crisco.

  But all that was changing. I leaned back against the peeling paint and posters. I hooked my thumbs in my belt loops. Wonderwoman looked skeptical. Other women arrived, and embraced and kissed her. Other women arrived, and did not acknowledge my presence. In the bathroom, someone looked at me with slitted eyes, and said, “She’s gonna knock you up, you know.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She wants you for your womb. Otherwise, she’d never go out with someone your age. Just FYI.” The woman shook her hands dry, and shoved her way out the door. I watched the thick chain around her waist shifting with her hips. A tattoo of Rosie the Riveter, fist upraised, was etched at the base of her spine.

  I dried my hands slowly, and departed. She, I thought, was just jealous of my glowing future as a lesbian. Of course Wonderwoman didn’t want me for my womb.

  On the street, after we’d walked away from Meow Mix, Wonderwoman leaned in.

  “So, I’m going to kiss you,” she said.

  “So do,” I said, in what I hoped was a flirtatious tone. I was neurotic, though. Wonderwoman was so confident. It was beyond my power to take the first-kiss initiative. I never did. I spent a lot of time waiting in vain for people to kiss me, applying lipgloss, attempting languid gazes. (“You look sick,” one of my prospective kissers had informed me, leaning in with concern. “Do you need to throw up?” I’d puckered my lips and continued the languid gaze. He’d run to get me a wastebasket.) What if I didn’t actually know how to kiss? What if all the men I’d kissed had misled me and, really, I was a slobbery mass of eel teeth, a gnashing, dribbling monstermouth? Historically, my first kisses had been disastrous. It never managed to be magical. Teeth always collided, noses always got smushed, and hands always flailed frantically. Sometimes it’d get better as the kissing went on. Sometimes it would get worse. Since this was my first with a girl, I was having to count it as my first, all over again. This was not a good thing.

  The first first kiss had been when I was a very uncomfortable sixteen-year-old, spending the summer living with my grandparents and working for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. I was playing Hermia in an apprentice production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The director had decided that the production needed to be very, very sexy to distract from the fact that we were very, very bad actors. He figured that we were teenagers and that all we were thinking about was sex anyway. This was technically true, but it did not mean that we had any experience. By “we,” I mean me. And I, of course, had been cast as the makeout queen of the production. I was costumed in a skintight pencil skirt, some tipsy high heels, and a pointy bra. The director gave me a breathless voice
and an oversexed vibe. But I was not oversexed. I was under. Profoundly under.

  All of my blocking involved writhing about the stage, crawling on my hands and knees, and wriggling my rump while reciting rhyming couplets. I invented excuses not to kiss in rehearsal (an obscure condition that caused me to need to breathe through my mouth, and to suffocate if smooched) because I’d become convinced that I wouldn’t know how to do it. Have my first kiss with the guy playing Lysander? No thank you. He was repellent, a black-clad, Carmex-addicted tech guy who hadn’t yet discovered deodorant. I imagined the kiss two million times, and had nightmares of battle cries and clashing tongues. The director got increasingly pissed off.

  “You’re young! You’re horny! You’re Hermia!” he barked.

  “I might have a stomach bug,” I whimpered. My only real acting skills were the ones I’d developed to get out of going to grade school. Maybe I couldn’t shed salty tears in an emotional scene, but I could turn green on cue. And that vomit? Real! It was very Stanislavski.

  “If you don’t do it tomorrow, I’ll personally slit your throat,” the director told me, even as I quivered with fake fever tremors.

  Beaten, I went out that night wearing a dress that was essentially a handkerchief. I stood, shivering, by a pay phone in downtown Boise, until a guy named Roger appeared out of the dark, asking me if I was lost.

  “Not really,” I said, eyeing him silhouetted against the streetlight, a vision of acceptable masculinity.

  “Need a ride?”

  “Okay.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” I lied.

  “You look younger,” he said, squinting.

  “I am,” I said accidentally, caught up in the cinematic nature of the conversation.

  He laughed, and bought me a soda. He had self-designed tattoos all over his arms. Barbed wire interspersed with peace signs and dolphins. I convinced myself that this was cool. He had a ponytail. To his waist. I convinced myself that long hair on boys was fine with me, even though I was having decidedly unromantic thoughts about how “Roger” and “Rapunzel” began with the same letter. He talked about sweat lodges and peyote. I convinced myself that he was Native American.