The Year of Yes (14 page)

“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.

“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 cramps 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.