The Year of Yes

by Maria Dahvana Headley

“Nobody chases a conductor down the platform to ask him why he’s happy,” the Conductor said. “People chase a conductor to chew his ass. So, girl, you surprised me. I owed you something special. Simple.”

  If I delivered something special to everyone I probably owed it to, I’d be busy for a long time. Maybe, though, I could try to deliver a little more from here on out.

  “HOW COME YOU’RE SINGLE?” I asked the Conductor as we got dressed.

  “Women are like trains,” he said. “They go a million miles an hour, and when they get there, they turn right around, and, you’re goddamned lucky? You’re there waiting. Like you, girl. You’re moving fast, right? I’m not going fast enough to keep up with something like you. I just have to wait on the platform and watch you go by. But fuck, baby, that’s cool. Can’t drive that train. You can love things you can’t have, right? Watch ‘em go. Me and Stan, we’re happy together. I’ve been working the MTA for thirty years, and I like my life. Don’t need a new one. But maybe I changed your life a little, huh?”

  “You did,” I said. And I hugged him. He seemed surprised, but then he hugged back. Who would have thought that my guru would turn out to be a New York City subway conductor? A whole life of everything from Herman Hesse to Robert Heinlein, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, a childhood stocked with my mom’s “spiritual” bookshelf and all of its Castaneda, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and everything else of that ilk. All those things had left me cold. What really mattered? Kindness. The Conductor smiled at me, and we walked to the train.

  ON THE PLATFORM, THE CONDUCTOR handed me a pink frosted cupcake. He rummaged in his jacket and brought out a lone, somewhat crumpled birthday candle. He dug in another pocket, and found matches.

  “We got one more thing to do,” he said. “Don’t breathe.”

  He lit the candle. The flame trembled, trembled, almost died. I looked questioningly at the Conductor. Finally, the tracks started to rattle, and the lights of the train glowed in the distance.

  “Okay girl, now, you got to make a wish.”

  And so I did. Then, together, we blew the candle out.

  A few days later, my wish came true.

  Long Day’s Journey into Trite

  In Which Our Heroine Gets Her Heart Splattered into Five Gajillion Pieces…

  WHEN I WOKE UP with a nosebleed, I should’ve cut my losses and run. I’d been dreaming that New York City had flooded, and that the Actor and I were on a small boat, made of silken sheets and downy pillows, floating peacefully away. Freudian. Pitiful. I knew what my subconscious was trying to say about my situation, and I didn’t like it. Half through the dream, the water had turned to blood, and Ira, my high school lover-nemesis, had swum toward us, no longer in dachshund form, and instead wearing a shark fin. I’d been trying to save the Actor from Ira’s gnashing, braces-bedecked teeth, when the melodrama jolted me into consciousness.

  I’d bled copiously over the Actor’s pillow. This was incredibly unfair. I was displaying all of the downside of a cocaine addiction, with none of the satisfaction, considering I still didn’t do drugs. The nosebleed was my body’s trite physical response to emotional stressors. In alternate versions, I’d be lifting my skirt in the presence of someone I shouldn’t be sleeping with, and my period would gush forth, weeks ahead of schedule, with the tragic velocity of Niagara Falls. My body was bent on keeping me occupied with sopping up messes, and whether this was out of a subsumed desire to be solitary, or simply a rotten twist of fate, I inevitably ended up paying for someone else’s laundry.

  I felt paranoid that I was bleeding directly from the brain. The way my brain was feeling, this was definitely possible. I was hungover, but not hungover enough to be blind to the unflattering morning light, last night’s makeup jigging wildly across my eyelids, the pallid ugliness of the morning after.

  My bladder was about to burst, and I was paranoid about that, too. When I was a small child, my grandmother, in a misguided attempt to force me to pee prior to a short car journey, had drawn me a series of cartoon diagrams of exploding kidneys. The last panel in her diagram had featured the word “POW!” Since then, any time I’d been forced to hold it, I’d entertained panicked visions of my kidneys swelling like turgid water balloons and ultimately, horribly, blowing to smithereens. Never mind that this made no anatomical sense whatsoever. I’d been firmly branded with a belief that anything could happen.

  Unfortunately, I had no idea where the bathroom might be, nor, in fact, where my clothing had ended up. The room was small and lined with bulging bookshelves. I squinted to read titles. The Actor had a collection of everything I’d ever read or wanted to read. In nice editions. This pleased me. Most of my books had been bought used and decrepit from the Strand. Hell, the bookshelves themselves impressed me. At my apartment, books were stacked in endless piles, supporting the couch, supporting the television, an obstacle course for intelligentsia. My Complete Works of William Shakespeare also served as a telephone stand. If you walked through the living room in the dark, you were in danger of being bludgeoned by an avalanche of textbooks leftover from a class I’d errantly taken, the Anthropology of Witchcraft, topped off with a few contusions from Zak’s Ginsberg and Kerouac section.

  Outside the door, I could hear the pattering feet of roommates unknown. The hissing and burbling of an espresso machine. The sound cued a vague memory left over from the night before; the Actor undressing me in the kitchen, my black lace demibra being draped over, dear God, a piece of shiny Italian machinery: brass, dials, demitasse rack. Damn their cappuccinos. I thought for a moment, and recollected perching on the kitchen counter (Who was I to perch? I didn’t perch!), my legs wrapped around his waist. I concluded, woefully, that my panties were nestled somewhere in the vicinity of the refrigerator, just waiting to be discovered by the roommates I didn’t ever want to meet.

  These were not good panties upon which to base a first impression. I had, the night before, put on a dread pair of granny underwear. It was laundry day, and I hadn’t been expecting to take them off in the presence of anyone other than Big White Cat. I owned only two pairs of sexy panties, and the rest were scraggly refugees from high school, things bought for me by my mom. I’d gone through a rebellious tie-dye phase before leaving Idaho (my mom, having lived through the sixties, moaning that tie-dye flattered no one; me muttering that if she didn’t watch out I’d begin batiking my bras), so not only were the panties inherently ugly, they were a color the dye company called “atomic nectarine.” Anyone discovering both pieces could only conclude that I was schizophrenic, a sex-bomb from the waist up, and an aging hippie from the waist down. Or, possibly, they’d extrapolate from my underwear that the Actor had found one girl at a strip club, and another at a drum circle in Washington Square Park, and had managed to take us both home.

  I pulled the sheet tighter around my breasts. For a moment, I felt tearful, but then I looked over at the Actor and was floored by my insane good fortune.

  He was still sleeping, his face creaseless, his skin perfect. I lifted the sheet and looked at his spine. I counted his ribs. I memorized the tattoo diagramming his bicep, stripes and slashes, dots and dashes, things encoded, the geometry of yearning. He was beautiful. I, on the other hand, could tell that I looked like a lunatic, my face covered in streaming blood, my hair standing at acute angles, an escapee from some East Village asylum.

  I gazed at him: his dark nimbus of curls, his bitten bottom lip, and the pillow he held clenched to his chest.

  Love swelled within me, like an enormous, malarial mosquito bite.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, things had been fine. Taylor was scheduled to turn thirty at a bar on the Upper West Side, and I was dressing to defy the barometer. It was sleety, but neurosis about looking frumpy commandeered my hips into a miniskirt. Victoria took one look at me, sighed, and spun on her heel.

  Defiant, I tugged on some black tights and zipped my stiletto boots. I was determined to look ravishing. This was a group of peopl
e who had, all too often, seen me looking like something warmed over at a truckstop. Taylor had directed a play of mine my first year in New York, and I had lingering regrets over my deep naïveté during that experience. There had been a few incidents of me not understanding how to use the subway, not to mention the humiliating sobbing I’d done when the production was finished, not to mention the fact that I’d been reluctantly dating Martyrman at the time and he’d accompanied me to the final show, wearing a sport jacket and a striped polo shirt, and then insisted on partying afterward with the cast. I was always looking for an opportunity to show off my evolution into a sexy, confident New Yorker, and the birthday party would be an excellent chance. I put on a not-warm-enough jacket.

  Zak looked at me and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “What?” I said.

  “Someone you’re trying to seduce?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’ll probably work,” he said, and gave me a pat.

  “You think?” I was attempting liquid eyeliner.

  “Don’t bend over, though,” he advised, checking out the rear view.

  The skirt was getting shorter by the minute, but I was not wise enough to change.

  An hour later, as I walked up Broadway, the skirt inched its way up, and the tights inched their way down. Soon, the crotch of my hosiery would be visible beneath the hemline of the miniskirt. Moreover, my thighs were getting bound together by the waistband elastic of the tights, and it was becoming difficult to walk without hobbling. I ducked into a doorway, looked both ways, and attempted to remedy my situation. It was raining, after all, raining, and cold, and midnight. Who would be out?

  Just as I hoisted the skirt up around my waist and began yanking on the waistband of the tights, a roughly-sixteen-year-old pizza boy meandered around the corner. I could see him silhouetted in a streetlamp and, too late, I realized that I was standing in front of a pink neon manicure sign. The pizza boy stopped and stared. I stared back. My old self would have been embarrassed, but I discovered that I was now past the point of caring.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” I told him, and continued to fight with the tights.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m Joey.”

  “I’m Maria,” I said. “This’ll only take a minute.” The tights squeezed my thighs, like a demon boa constrictor attempting to wrestle me to the ground and gobble me up. It was a losing battle. I wasn’t strong enough to kill them.

  “Take your time,” he said. “I’m just going into that building. But I can wait.”

  I put my thumb through the tights, creating a massive run. I was late. I surrendered and shed them. Victorious, I threw the slain tights into a garbage can, pulled my skirt down, and rezipped my footwear.

  “Later,” I said to Joey.

  “Thank you,” he said, and saluted me. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed possible that he was blushing. It was the first New York male blush I’d ever witnessed, and it was akin to seeing a unicorn. I walked away, feeling better, even though my knees were chattering.

  THE BAR WAS NOT MY KIND OF PLACE. Drinks cost more than I had in my bank account, and everyone there knew each other better than they wanted to know me. I wandered from small conversation to smaller conversation, patrolling the boundaries for scraps of sentences that I might be able to lamely respond to. Taylor’s birthday was synchronized with those of several of his friends, so the group was large and diverse, full of theater people.

  I’d never been good at collective socializing. I tended to either be the girl who was dancing on the tables or the wallflower, and there was no happy medium. I made my way to the bar, where I was accosted by a tray of sorry calamari. “Happy Birthday” was sung and everyone cheered. The entire world seemed to be having a better time than I was. It was my usual problem. I kept a smile of joy and rapture on my face, even though I was freezing and alienated. I was perpetually trapped in corners with people I knew only slightly, discussing Bertolt Brecht and chaos, discussing the darkness at the center of the Norwegian night and how it pertained to Ibsen’s plays.

  I was also getting tangentially drunk on the Maker’s Mark I’d been nursing for hours. I drank bourbon because I didn’t know any better. A girlfriend had offered it to me at some point, claiming that it would cure cramps, and, in fact, it did, though the cure was sometimes worse than the disease. I’d never tried anything else on the hard liquor front. Zak and I were cheap. A few days before this party, he’d leaned over the kitchen table and looked into my eyes, as though about to impart some revolutionary analysis of male-female relations.

  “Big breasts do not mean big brain,” he’d informed me, quite seriously.

  “No shit,” I’d replied.

  “Would I joke about a thing like this?” he’d asked, and marched morosely into the bathroom to throw up.

  We’d subsequently managed to drink ourselves into the most depressing stupor either of us had ever experienced and had been forced to stay in our beds for three days, moaning intermittently for water, Victoria stepping smugly over us as she went about her nontoxic existence. This was the tenth time we’d vowed never to buy that wine again, but despite our prestigious collegiate status, we were as broke as the winos. We’d encounter them at the liquor store, smile in preemptive recognition of pain and suffering, go home and pretend that the vinegar we were drinking was something from a wine cellar, bearing hints of cherry and tobacco on the palate, instead of hints of bile and blood.

  In part, we were drinking too much because our time living together was coming to an end. Every time Zak and I walked down the street together arm in arm, or hugged, or had any damned contact at all, I shuddered with preemptive sorrow. I was trying to behave myself, but it was useless. Extremes of emotion were my nature.

  Zak was trying to separate, too. The night before, I’d been leaning against his knees as he sat in a kitchen chair. I’d been gesticulating as I talked, and he’d suddenly grabbed my hand and held it. I’d sat there for a moment, afraid to breathe, feeling as though maybe big things were changing, and then Zak had complained, “Don’t hold my hand so tightly.”

  “You handed me your hand,” I’d said.

  “I’m getting a cramp,” he’d said.

  I’d considered squishing his hand to bits, but instead, I’d just let him go.

  That was half of why I was at this party. New friends, I’d thought. Distractions! And, of course, in the back of my mind was the Actor. If Zak was leaving me, maybe I could engineer a super-friendship with the Actor, and save myself some sorrow. The knowledge that there would be no more Zak to commiserate with, no more Zak to pontificate with, and no more Zak to be secretly in love with was making me even more neurotic than usual. More neurosis meant more alcohol, which meant more stupidity.

  Drinking was another thing I wasn’t good at. I had the tolerance of a hummingbird. This may explain why, though I’d had only the one drink, I was not in full possession of my faculties by the time the Actor arrived.

  HE BLEW IN THE DOOR like a hurricane of handsome, bringing with him reflected streetlight and pounding rain. Perhaps it was only from my perspective that he seemed to be surrounded by a starry aura of perfection. I’d been hopelessly besotted with him for years. Every time I talked to him, my tongue knitted itself into warped and purled sentences. For all I knew he was gay. Indeed, I was in denial of rumors that he was. I’d never have him; therefore, I could love him from afar. I knew I wasn’t his type. If the rumors about the Actor’s preferences were true, there was no way he’d ever be attracted. If they weren’t, he was out of my league anyway. Adoring him was like adoring a celebrity. He’d never notice me.

  I could, however, be a groupie. Surely the not-even-close-to-famous would appreciate groupies, at least as much as more legitimate superstars did. I could do his bidding, bring him drinks, smile mysteriously and never, never oppress him. Alas, in reality, every time I encountered him I lost control. I chronically ended up behaving like a ninny, tripping over my feet, gi
ggling inanely, and choking on spittle.

  The last time I’d seen the Actor, at a crowded cocktail reception, the back zipper of my dress had spontaneously bared its teeth, growled, and opened wide, exposing me, naked from neck to rump, to an entire room full of people. The Actor had swooped in and saved me, my zipper purring like a kitten by the time he’d finished with it. He’d spent the rest of the evening with a protective arm around me, and while I suspected this was because he’d felt sorry for me—in a pitiful, asexual, little-sister kind of way—sometimes I’d dream that he harbored certain feelings. My adulation of him had increased exponentially, even as his mystical powers over fastenings indicated, again, that he was homosexual.

  I hadn’t seen the Actor in months, and I’d almost managed to forget about him. I’d known, of course, that he might be at the party, but I’d pretended that it was immaterial. Now that I saw him again, however, my crush was back in full, feverish force. I could feel myself trembling. I drank the rest of my Maker’s Mark in one swallow. I prayed for grace.

  “HEY, BABY!” HE SAID, opening his arms and hugging me tightly. He seemed, as always, genuinely happy to see me. I had long ago decided that this was because he was a generosity martyr. If our roles had been reversed, I’d have started evading him long ago, dodging into darkness, swiftly engaging myself in intense confabs, leaving him teetering on the corners of conversations. I couldn’t fathom why he tolerated me, given that I was quite sure my crush was glaringly obvious.

  The Actor was about five foot nine and wiry. He had a smile that claimed his entire face, and, that night, he looked like he might be wearing eyeliner. He was wearing a white, wife-beater tank top and a button-down shirt, of the sort that Puerto Rican granddaddies wore to play dominoes in my neighborhood. His skin was caramel-colored, slightly freckled. He had the kind of arm muscles that only came with centuries at the gym. His gym was in Chelsea, I knew, and no doubt populated by that most glorious genre of gay man, the ones that I often saw strolling down Eighth Avenue, laying possessive hands on one another’s taut asses. The ones that charitably called me “fabulous.”