The Year of Yes

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Huh-uh,” he said, and then looked at me as though wondering why I’d asked him a question. I convinced myself that he was just trying not to intimidate me with his brilliance.

  I gave him directions to my grandma’s house, left him on the front lawn, and brought him a cherry Popsicle. Yes. A. Cherry. Popsicle. Devoid of irony. Phallic symbol? What? I sat down beside him and sucked my Popsicle. He chewed his. He lectured briefly on the lack of “real women” in Boise and said that I was the first one he’d met.

  “Why?” I asked, fascinated that I’d managed to look like a real woman.

  “You’re wearing a dress,” he said, tossing his Popsicle stick into the bushes. He then turned to me, and tried to turn me on. The first kiss was speedy and baffling. The second was worse. His tongue pried at my lips, which I hadn’t known enough to open. Then, in an attempt to duplicate what I’d seen in movies, I opened my mouth wide, Muppet-style, and instantly gagged. Roger withdrew.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just had to kiss you. You’re, like, seriously hot.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, and then humiliated myself further by saying, “Could you just hold me for a moment?” This had been a line on a soap opera, and I knew very well that it didn’t apply to kissing. It only applied to sex. Nevertheless, out it came, and so one of Roger’s hands slithered up my dress.

  “You’ve done this before, right?” Roger said, and then buried his face in my breasts.

  “Duh,” I lied, trying to sound jaded and experienced, despite the taste of chemical cherry mixed with Roger’s cigarette breath. Despite my grandparents’ front lawn. “Roger? What’s your last name?”

  The answer was muffled by my dress getting caught on my ears as it went over my head. My grandparents’ front lawn faced a busy street, and cars periodically drove up the hill, shining their lights all over us. We were essentially reclining on a raked stage, but were we performing Romeo and Juliet or Measure for Measure? I was lost.

  “Don’t you want to know my last name?” I said, with the pitiful optimism of the teenage girl, who, from the outside, looks like a grown woman, and on the inside is about six.

  “All I know is that I really, really like you,” Roger said, a look of the utmost sincerity on his face. I melted. He liked me, he really liked me! A boy! A twenty-six-year-old boy, in fact! I’d looked at his license while he’d been peeing in my grandparents’ hedge. I sat up, eager to get him to document exactly what he found appealing, so that I could relay it to my girlfriends.

  “I’m getting blue balls, baby,” Roger continued, very tenderly.

  “You don’t even know me,” I said, blushing furiously. What were blue balls? No boy had ever seen me naked before. No boy had ever called me “baby” before. I sucked in my stomach and pressed my knees together.

  “Of course I do,” he said, reassuringly stroking my cheek. “You’re the pretty girl I met in the parking lot.”

  He thought I was pretty! The rapture!

  And so, with a sensation like a cross between splinters and water balloons, I allowed Roger to divest me of my hymen. At least—I consoled myself for the balance of the night, after Roger referred to me as Jennifer—I now knew how to kiss. No matter that I’d accidentally lost my virginity, too. It was sometimes necessary to make certain sacrifices in order to get the things you needed.

  The next day I bounced into rehearsal and jumped several lines in order to launch myself onto Lysander’s lips. I sucked the air from his lungs. I whirled my tongue like a lawn mower blade. I grabbed his thigh. I stroked his chest. I put all my new moves to good use, and then pulled back, pleased with myself. Lysander gasped. The director gaped. I grinned.

  Ha! I’d shown everyone exactly how experienced I was in the Art of Kissing. I was now officially ready for my title. French Kisser Extraordinaire. The Sultana of Smooch. I shook out my hair, and trotted gaily to my place at the edge of the stage.

  “Wasn’t that a little extreme?” the director hissed.

  “I thought it was appropriate,” I said, self-assuredly. “Hermia is very passionate!”

  “I only meant a stage kiss,” the director sputtered. “As in, fake!”

  And then, he dashed off to minister to Lysander, who was turning blue.

  Asthma attack. Severe asthma attack involving the summoning of paramedics. Lysander pointed at me in mute accusation as he was trundled away, a little mask on his face.

  I had almost kissed him to death.

  Kissing had retained a scary aura for me. Until now.

  WONDERWOMAN HELD MY FACE in her hands and kissed me, in the middle of the street. Her lips were big, soft, and warm. There was no stubble. She didn’t drool like many of the men I’d kissed, who seemed to have been hybridized to bull mastiffs. And she didn’t grab for an inhaler.

  “So?” she said. “Give me a review.”

  “Who taught you to kiss?” I said.

  “Practice,” she said. “It’s one of those things it’s good to be good at. Come here, and I’ll teach you a few more.”

  We went out a few more times, each time fantastic. We ate cupcakes at the Magnolia Bakery. We went shopping together and she advised me in dressing rooms. We danced in her living room to Crowded House. We did the New York Times crossword together one morning at brunch. Never mind that we hadn’t wakened together, and were meeting in a manner much more friend than lover. I was enamored. And so what if I was enamored in a largely platonic kind of way? Maybe this was what lesbian relationships were really like. Maybe this would be another one of those things I’d missed out on for no good reason. Maybe we’d soon go out shopping for one of those “best friends forever” necklaces where each of you wears half of the heart.

  “So, how do you feel about kids?” asked Wonderwoman, casually one night, over the top of her wineglass.

  “Why?” I said. I felt too young to feel anything but fear about the topic of kids. “You don’t have any, do you? I mean, I guess you wouldn’t.”

  She arched an eyebrow.

  “Lesbians can have kids, you know. I was just wondering what you thought.”

  “I don’t want them.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t have thought that.”

  I was strangely flattered. Did she mean that I seemed like I’d be a good parent? Which meant that I was a good person. Which meant that even now, she was falling in love with me. Never mind that I continued to feel vague on any real attraction. I still thought it might appear. I hoped it would.

  I was feeling, however, a warped nostalgia for beard burn. I’d never noticed before how soft women’s skin was. I’d always scoffed internally when men had said things about it, but now I realized that they weren’t kidding. When I’d been working for that same Shakespeare festival, that same summer, there’d been a light board operator, about twentythree, rail-skinny with long, scraggly blond hair and a bad attitude. He’d pulled me behind the light booth, reached out a hand to stroke my cheek, and said, with creepy lasciviousness, “It’s like silk.”

  Shortly thereafter, he’d asked me if I knew why one of his biceps was so much more muscular than the other one. I had no idea. “Because I jerk off with that one,” he’d whispered, and I’d run away in my corset and high heels, feeling dumb.

  I was feeling dumb again. I was feeling like I was missing something vital to the conversation.

  “Do you want to have kids?” I asked Wonderwoman, somewhat against my better judgment. The Tattooed Girl was strutting triumphantly across my field of vision, her Rosie the Riveter tattoo pumping its fist in the air and saying something about “Yo, yo, yo, let’s get this party started!”

  “Well, I’m on kind of a tight schedule,” she said. “Career-wise.”

  Wonderwoman was thirty-five. I’d snuck her driver’s license out of her purse when she was in the bathroom one night. I could feel my youthful womb hysterically rattling around like a maraca. There it was in my throat, then whacking against my liver. This thing, which to this point had only caused me cram
ps and discontent, had a purpose. Just like the breasts. Fertility. Something I didn’t particularly want to think about.

  “What do you mean?” I said, though I suspected I knew.

  “Okay. Hear me out. I want to have a baby, but I don’t have nine months to spare. So I was thinking that you could, well, I mean, we could—”

  The familiar stomach drop. The uterus, flinging itself into my rib cage. I completely understood why, at the turn of the century, people had thought that feminine insanity was caused by the uterus detaching and floating unhinged. Had I been able to simply hand her my womb, I would have. I wasn’t planning to use it.

  I could feel my lesbian solution to birth control dribbling away. Back to the world of panicky trips to drugstores, of waiting for pink lines to appear, of dreading and praying and peeing onto test strips. Back to boys.

  “I don’t want to have a baby, and it takes more than nine months, anyway,” I said. “It takes the rest of your life.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” said Wonderwoman. “More wine?”

  I had a sudden image of myself, reclining drunk and bleary on a mattress somewhere, while a turkey baster squirted something viscous in my direction.

  “I have to go,” I said, putting down my glass.

  “Shit. Ouroboros syndrome. Pretend we never had this conversation.”

  “Am I only a womb?” Granted, this was melodramatic. I was twenty-one. There was only so much maturity in me, and, while it was enough to conduct a semiadult relationship (sort of, anyway), it was not enough to have anyone’s baby. Suddenly, I wanted to clamp my hands over my crotch and hop in urgent circles, like a four-year-old who had to pee. That was all my nether regions were for! Not birth. Never. I wasn’t going to show my cervix to anyone’s video camera, and I wasn’t planning to ever talk about how far I was dilated. I didn’t want to know that I could stretch to extrude a cantaloupe. I didn’t want to think about it. Not one bit.

  “No, no, you’re misunderstanding. You’re more than a womb to me.”

  That was when the Bee Gees appeared, and did the hustle, right there, right in Wonderwoman’s living room.

  You’re more than a womb! More than a woooo-ooomb to me!

  “Why won’t you look at me?” Wonderwoman put her hand on my chin, and turned my face in her direction. I looked at her for a moment, and she was beautiful and successful, and I got along with her better than I’d gotten along with any of the boys I’d been out with, and then Paul Anka arrived with a Casio keyboard under his arm, and began a command performance of “(You’re) Having My Baby.”

  One of the serious disadvantages to having been born in the late seventies was the fact that whenever anything stressed me out, a mangled part of my brain would embark on a clock radio mélange of nightmarish soft rock.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “You’re so young. It wouldn’t really affect you,” said Wonderwoman. “I make enough that you could just stay home and write while you’re pregnant. It’d be perfect.”

  That wasn’t really what I heard. What I heard was Sheena Easton trilling “Morning Train,” a peppy song all about staying at home and doing nothing but eating bonbons while your man goes to work to support you.

  What I saw was Wonderwoman, conquering the world, wearing a leopard print power suit and matching spike heels. What I saw was myself, conquering nothing, wearing a tattered minitoga, pabulum on my shoulder, pained expression on my face, and bundle of joy clutched like a bomb against my ridiculously swollen breasts. My mom had been an A cup until she’d gotten pregnant with me and had become a D. They’d never really gone down. The photos showed her pregnant like a torpedo. I was built like my mom. It’d be the same damn thing. Too young, too young, too young. And too selfish, too.

  “I’m sorry. I have to go.” And, like an asshole, I ran.

  I thought the confusion between us was too large for anything to proceed. Maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe I was just a coward. This was very possible. We should have been friends to start with. Now, though, I had the sense that she’d just been marketing the best parts of herself in order to gain access to my childbearing capabilities. I didn’t stop to think that we were all marketing the best parts of ourselves, all the time. Anything real would have to contain both the best and the worst. Considering I’d never had a relationship I’d considered to be worth pursuing for more than a few months, I had no idea what that would be like. Maybe the Bee Gees would appear every night. Maybe I’d just have to get used to it. But for now, I was on the train, and I was going home to my tortured nonlove affair with Zak, who said, “I told you.”

  “It wasn’t that she was a girl, it was that she wanted me to have a baby.”

  “You’re. Not. Gay. Accept it, and move on.”

  “It was only about the baby,” I said.

  “You don’t have a baby,” said Zak, changing tacks. “He died this afternoon in a car accident.”

  But I was not in the mood to play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Who was afraid of Miss Woolf? Me. I had a feeling that a long and happy affair with someone like Vita Sackville-West was not necessarily in my cards, and it made me bitter.

  “I’m burning your baby?” said Zak. I was not in the mood to play Hedda Gabler, either. Hedda was a bitch.

  “I didn’t want it anyway!” I said, and crawled into my hut, like the wretchedly immature creature I was.

  A COUPLE WEEKS LATER, my friend the Actress came to town. She was an onstage goddess, one of the most stunningly talented people I’d ever met. She lived, to her frustration, in L.A., where she was making a reasonable if unsatisfying living doing film, television, and the occasional worthwhile theater assignment. She came to New York intermittently, because L.A. was not the town for a woman like her—wild, dreadlocked, and unapologetically exuberant.

  I owed the Actress. Just prior to the beginning of my Yes Year, she’d saved me from Martyrman. I’d met both of them at Sundance, and the fact that I’d immediately felt compelled to start lying to her about whether or not I was sleeping with him ought to have told me something. I’d still been a teenager, though, just out of high school, and he’d been tenacious. For over a year, we’d had a long-distance thing, him calling me every week or so and periodically coming from L.A. to visit me, while I dated all of NYU and bemoaned him to my roommates, too ball-less to break it off. One day, the Actress had called me up.

  “Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiivaaaaaaaaaaa! Diva! I know you don’t care if I sleep with Martyrman, right? I’m sick of looking for anything else in this stupid size-two town.”

  “Please,” I’d said. “Take him! Absolutely! Need his number?”

  “Does that mean he’s bad in bed?” The Actress sounded suspicious.

  “Not all that bad. Not all that good.” I had to be honest. She was a friend.

  “Oh well, screw it, I’m desperate.”

  She’d called me a couple of days later, and said, “Here’s the good news: It reminded me that I’m tired of men. I’m trying girls again.”

  He, on the other hand, had said nothing about it. I’d therefore felt at least tangentially justified later that month when I’d broken up with him at a bed-and-breakfast in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the useless folk-art capital of the universe. I’d happened upon him in the bathroom, putting talcum powder on his thighs, and that had been the end of whatever attraction I’d had left. Lubricated by an entire bottle of the bed-and-breakfast’s homemade apricot brandy, I’d swiftly ended things, using his liaison with the Actress as an excuse. Yes, this was beyond shallow, and yes, I felt guilty about it. I’d behaved rottenly, but then, so had he. He’d informed me, over and over, that I reminded him of his ex-wife, an Oscar-winning actress who’d left him for a grip. She, though brilliant, was fifty, and I was vain. After we’d broken up, he’d refused to take me back to New York, saying that (a) he just wanted to spend the rest of our romantic weekend together, and (b) he’d already paid for the B&B.

  I’d been too b
roke to escape by train, and so we’d ended up spending three torturous nights together on a feather bed, trapped by out-of-season rains, the only people within a hundred miles who weren’t in love. We’d hunched bitterly over the frilly breakfast table, flinging scones like hockey pucks. By the time we’d finally made it back to the city, I’d hated us both so much that I’d puked for four days. When Martyrman had gotten back to L.A., he’d called the Actress to tell her that she was the devil incarnate.

  “Diva, you owe me something better,” she’d said, when she’d called me to report.

  She came to New York, and we went out to dinner. I gave her a running monologue of my successes and disasters, and she said, “Well, chick, someone ought to purge you of that last thing. I promise, I won’t ask you to have my baby.”

  While I’d thought I was done with my Sapphic phase, the Actress was someone I was crazy about. It seemed like a great idea to have a date with someone I already actually enjoyed. And to sleep with someone who fell into that category? It’d be the first time in a long time.

  The Actress arrived at my apartment, the night of our rendezvous, with a full face of makeup. Foundation. Lipstick. All the various pencils and creams and paints that make a woman look like a woman from fifty paces, and like a mannequin at two. It was stage makeup. But what play were we doing? I was stunned. The Actress was a beautiful woman. Not conventional, but that was why I liked her. Why was she painting herself for me? I loved her already.

  I suddenly felt like every man I’d ever hated for judging my looks. Except that I wasn’t judging hers. She just thought I might, and was preempting it with eyeliner. It occurred to me that maybe I’d been wrong a few times. Maybe guys hadn’t even noticed the things that I was obsessing over. Maybe they liked me because they liked me. Maybe Great Lash, or lack thereof, wasn’t the deal breaker I’d thought it was.