The Year of Yes (13 page)

“
Chupa, chupa,
” trilled my elderly datesman, sashaying his way out the door. The women of the Laundromat rolled their eyes. I would need to find out what that word meant.

“Louie,” said the head Laundromat lady, her lips pursed disapprovingly.

“Yeah?”

“
Está loco.
” She nodded meaningfully. I had a piddling grasp of Spanish gleaned over two years of required high school classes. I proudly constructed my response.

“
Es él malo?
” I wasn’t sure what the word for “dangerous” was, so I tried to ask if he was bad.

“
Él es un niño,
” she responded, and shook her head. He was a child, I thought that meant. Well, that wasn’t terrible. Had she told me he was a child molester, it would have been different. Hopefully I hadn’t missed anything.

“
Qué es ‘chupa’?
”

“
Chupa!
” she chortled and went to the jawbreaker machine in the corner and put a dime in it. She brought the jawbreaker back to me, and displayed it between thumb and forefinger. It was enormous, and speckled with Jackson Pollock splatters. I hoped she didn’t want me to swallow it. Big as my mouth was, that would not be possible.

The Laundromat lady put the jawbreaker into her mouth and sucked it furiously. She pointed at her mouth. She exaggerated the sucking. She took it out.

“
Chupa,
” she explained.

I’d been followed around with a sound track of “suck, suck.” I tried not to think that that was appropriate.

“
Gracias. Qué es ‘paleta’?
” I might as well get the rest of the meaning.

She went to the Laundromat’s freezer case (due to lack of air-conditioning, all the Laundromats in the area also sold ice cream), and pulled out a popsicle.

Chupa la paleta.
Suck the popsicle.

Why was I even surprised?

THAT NIGHT, SEÑOR CHUPA and I walked together to south Williamsburg. I had to keep slowing down, because his legs weren’t long enough to keep up with mine. Without Marco, it was difficult to converse, but he managed to tell me several things which I partially understood, one of which seemed to be a declaration of his love for young girls. He informed me that he was seventy. I asked if he had children, and he said yes, eleven, though I wasn’t sure I understood that correctly.

“
Te amo,
” he said. “
Chupa, chupa.
”

I love you. Suck, suck. It was the perfect phrase. Everything you needed to know about relationships. No. No, no, no. I wouldn’t think that way anymore. Things could be worse. I could be kissing a vampire. I could be on my way to France with a psychopathic millionaire, or stripping for schoolboys. Instead, I was going dancing with a relatively polite old man. My life was pretty good, all things considered.

THE CLUB WAS LOUD, dark, and unmarked. I’d passed it a million times when I’d lived in the neighborhood. It normally boasted a couple of old guys playing dominoes outside, but tonight, it had a band wedged into the corner, playing salsa music. A bunch of people were spinning and stomping, shaking everything they had. These were the parties that had once kept me awake. Now I was one of the guests. I got into it. I spun and kicked up my heels. I
shook every bit of my rump. Finally, something that would put it to good use!

Señor Chupa looked at me skeptically, and waved some people over to watch me. It was very quickly clear that almost everyone in the room was related to him. It was also very clear that my dancing was the most horrifying thing any of them had ever witnessed. Señor Chupa looked put upon. He held out his arms, patiently, in the universal gesture for “Let Me Teach You, You Idiot.” I wasn’t an idiot! I shook it some more. Now people were laughing. I hadn’t really understood that salsa was something that had to be learned. I thought you just naturally knew how. Not so. Counting was required. Precise placement of arms and elbows and, most importantly, knees.

Señor Chupa handed me off, groaning, to another old man. This one was confident, until I stepped hard on his tiny, shiny foot. Another old man cut in, and spun me twice, before I whirled the wrong way and dislocated his shoulder. I was willing, but willing wasn’t enough. Finally, an old woman, who’d been giving me a dirty look for a while, waved the men aside and stomped over to me in her spike heels. She looked like a prison guard. If anyone could lead the unleadable, it was her.

“
Soy esposa de Louie,
” she informed me, tersely.

No wonder she’d been pissed off. Chupa had lied. He was married, and this was his wife. Fortunately, my Spanish was good enough to apologize.

“
Soy embarazada.
” I put my hands up in a gesture of supplication.

“
Embarazada?
” She looked enraged. “
EMBARAZADA?!
”

“
Sí, soy embarazada.
” Maybe she didn’t think I was sorry enough. “
Muy embarazada!!
”

It wasn’t until several people were screaming at Señor Chupa that it dawned on me.

Embarazada
did not mean embarrassed.

It meant pregnant.

“
NO! No soy embarazada! No! No!
” I couldn’t think of any other words, so I pressed the fabric of my dress against my stomach. I mimed holding a baby, and then mimed throwing it, which in my mind showed that it had never existed. There were gasps of horror. Oops. Charades. The deathmatch version.

“No?” Two women patted my stomach suspiciously.

“No!” I said. They motioned Señor Chupa’s wife over and conferred with her. Whatever they said made her shrug and gesture around at all the people, in a way that suggested perhaps some of them were themselves the result of Señor Chupa’s dalliances. Señor Chupa grinned, and winked at me. His wife clicked her tongue warningly at him, and he went back to his beer.

“Bien,”
said Louie’s wife, and then took my hands to dance with me. People started clapping in rhythm. I had a terrifying feeling that I was about to become a piñata, spilling not candy, but all the stories I’d been collecting my whole life. I imagined the people looking at a big pile of my miscellaneous sentences all over the floor, then picking them up to suck on. Why not? Eat my words. Swallow me whole.

Then I was spinning like a dreidel, going too fast to think.

“
Uno, dos, tres,
” chanted Señor Chupa’s wife, her feet tapping. The band was playing loud. The room was full of people I didn’t understand. Señor Chupa was clapping from the corner. His children were all around us. No doubt someone was making fun of me in Spanish, and I, well, I was
dancing.
Señor Chupa’s wife was leading, and I was going wherever she wanted to take me. She had her hand in the small of my back, and she pinched me whenever I got it wrong.

“
Gracias,
” I yelled.

“
De nada,
” she said, and spun me until I was too dizzy to stand.

SEÑOR CHUPA’S TWELVE-YEAR-OLD grandson rode my blister-footed self home at 3:00 a.m. He stood and pedaled his bicycle furiously through the streets of Brooklyn, whistling. The temperature had dropped, and there were four bright stars out. There was a breeze in the trees of McCarren Park. All the lights were green.

Maybe it was me, but it seemed like we were flying.

In Which Our Heroine Sticks with What She Thinks She Knows…

WONDERWOMAN TOOK OFF HER GLASSES and covered her face with her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “This is completely embarrassing. I like to make a regular meal of my feet. Sometimes I swallow both at once, and I have to just roll, like Ouroboros.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not gay right now, but give me a second.”

I was questioning something that it had never occurred to me to question. I’d never been asked out by a woman before. It seemed that I radiated straightness. Apparently something had changed, though, because here we were, sitting in a white-tableclothed restaurant, and Clara—aka Wonderwoman, for her distinct resemblance to Lynda Carter, my television idol for all of the 1980s, and for her occasional donning of a covetable pair of red stiletto boots—had asked me to have dinner with her. I’d thought the meal was an attempt to hire me away from my temp agency. I was flattered. Something must have shifted in my demeanor. Maybe it was dancing with the Prom Queen, who was admittedly male, but was not dressed like any straight man I’d ever met, or maybe it was hitching up Marie Antoinette’s skirt. Most likely it was salsaing with
Señor Chupa’s wife. My life was getting bigger and I liked it.

Maybe I liked Wonderwoman, too. It wasn’t everyone who could drop Ouroboros, an ancient symbol of either eternal renewal or mistakes made ad infinitum, into casual conversation. Ouroboros was depicted as a serpent biting its own tail. I felt very Ouroboros, very often. Maybe this would get my tail out of my teeth.

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 Geographic
s 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 in 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,