The Year of Yes Read online

  I’D RESERVED THIS SATURDAY morning for staining the bathroom floor, my ears, my hands, and theoretically my hair, with henna, a hashish-scented paste resembling, when I was in a good mood, creamed spinach. When I was in a bad mood, it looked regrettably like the maggot-filled mud puddle my sister and I had, as children, once stationed my younger brother in for “spa treatments.” Because my hair was long, almost to my waist, the hennaing was a foul process of several hours. Length was not advantageous in New York City. I’d once felt a mysterious tugging while on the subway, only to turn and discover a man blissfully stuffing my ponytail down his pants. Now I usually wore it in a pile, dubiously secured with whatever bobby pins and takeout utensils I could unearth. I suspected that I looked like a small swami, carrying a coil of miserable infant cobras on my head. I convinced myself that this wouldn’t matter. I’d get that sidewalk table, and morph into the self I wasn’t. The reddened hair, I was certain, would make all the difference. Happiness would be mine!

  However, within seconds of my starting to rinse the henna, the shower plugged up, and Pierre LaValle’s version of Morse code started shaking the floor. Whenever Pierre heard something disagreeable from our apartment, he immediately began a militant march around his kitchen, banging his broomstick against the ceiling like a bayonet. This was supposed to signal that we should cease and desist. Unfortunately for Pierre, his banging had created a karmic perforation in his ceiling. I stomped on the floor of the shower a few times to signal that I was aware of the problem, then wrapped myself in a hand towel as Pierre grumbled up the stairs and pounded on our door.

  Though he had a sexy exterior, tall, dark, handsome, and extensively tattooed, Pierre’s personality was that of a snapping turtle. Despite his French name, he was a Puerto Rican boy from Miami. We speculated that he’d been raised not by wolves, but by retirees, playing canasta and developing a way with melba toast. He was twenty-five, but acted seventy. He was a chef, and going to business school on the side. Vic had a semisecret Scorpio-Scorpio crush on him, but I thought he was a pain in the ass. Pierre believed in shoe polish and expensive hair pomade. My muddied locks were twisted into stalagmites, and a glance in the tiny mirror had confirmed that I looked very swamp mummy. I didn’t think Pierre deserved pretty.

  I flung open the door, mud dripping down my face. Pierre, his trousers neatly creased, his hair perfectly spiky, blinked several times.

  “Can I help you?” I prompted.

  “Maria?” Pierre managed.

  “Yeah?”

  “Leak. I thought it was Zak, blowing up the toilet again,” he said, averting his eyes from the horror of my appearance. Zak and Pierre had hated each other on sight. Pierre believed that Zak was an anarchist, and Zak believed that Pierre was a pod person. Added to this, Zak typically ascended the stairs at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, roaringly drunk and stomping his combat boots. Pierre’s bedroom was just below Zak’s. He was regularly rudely awakened, which was his justification for vacuuming in the dead of night. Revenge.

  Pierre’s eyes flitted to my towel, then back to my aboriginal head. Henna had a distinctively contraband odor. He probably thought I was stoned.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Bo told me he replaced a valve.” Bo was the middle-aged, possibly mentally handicapped son of Gamma. His only claim to maintenance man status was his tritely sagging waistband. He used things like masking tape to fix broken pipes.

  “What’s up?” Pierre said. “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  What was his problem? Couldn’t he see that I was fully involved in glamorizing myself for my meeting with Mr. Right? I tried to radiate go-away vibes. Pierre shuffled his feet and gave me an attempt at a smile. My go-away vibes were never very successful. I relented.

  “Wanna come in, Pierre?”

  “That’d be great,” he said. I was instantly suspicious. Hanging with a hostile neighbor was akin to hanging with a vampire. You’d end up drained of blood, and it would be your own fault for inviting them across the threshold. I thought he might be trying to case my apartment for violations that would get me kicked out.

  Pierre sat down at our kitchen table, crossed his legs, and prissily plucked a strand of Big White Cat’s fur from his knee. I couldn’t turn my back on him, because the towel gapped. My clothes were in my hut. Granted, this was supposed to be the Year of Yes, but I hadn’t planned on beginning it this way. At least I could count on Pierre not to ask me out. According to Vic, he was “utterly unattracted” to me.

  “Want coffee?” Maybe I could placate him before he reported the fact that my floor tiles were stapled down, and my kitchen was illegally painted with a mural, the centerpiece of which was Zak’s contribution, a villainous comic book creature, and a morbid quote by Nietzsche: “Of all that is written, I love only that which is written in blood.”

  “So. You’re pretty much naked,” said Pierre.

  “That’s pretty much true,” I said. I eased myself onto the other kitchen chair. Big White eyeballed Pierre, gave an ecstatic chirp, and then hopped into his lap and wallowed whorishly. So much for my guard cat.

  “That’s an interesting thing you’re doing with your hair,” Pierre continued politely. I’d grabbed a box of plastic wrap and was twisting it around my head like a turban. The henna box had said that heat would help the dye to set. At least, I was reasoning, the plastic wrap would keep it from dyeing my entire face. My ears were already a lost cause.

  JUST THEN, MY BUZZER emitted a muffled quack. Who was ringing at my door? No one was supposed to be coming over. I stayed put. There was no way I was going to answer it. Probably one of the twins, prank buzzing.

  Pierre stood up and proceeded to admit whoever it was into the building.

  “It’s Mario,” he explained, flashing me a triumphant grin. I was instantly pissed off.

  “I’m not dressed!”

  “I called his pager before I came up. I knew you wouldn’t let him in, so I came upstairs to do it for you. I mean, your shower’s leaking into my copper pans. Everything tastes like soap. I can’t take it anymore.”

  Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard. Every day I found new reasons to dislike Pierre.

  Mario was the handyman that Bo usually brought in as a savior after he’d electrocuted himself a few times. He was a tall, skinny, Colombian guy in his early forties, with a crest of black hair, a motorcycle jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. He rode a Harley around the neighborhood. His only tools seemed to be a screwdriver and a hammer, and with these, he worked miracles.

  This did not mean that I wanted him to see me dressed in a hand towel.

  It was, however, too late. The Handyman walked in the door, looked me up and down, and gave a low whistle. I gave Pierre a glare that, if directed at any normal guy, would have induced internal bleeding. In Pierre, though, it only induced a smirk.

  “Hola,” said someone at about knee level. I looked down. A little girl was holding the Handyman’s free hand.

  “This is Carmela,” he said.

  Carmela was six. She had two haphazard black pigtails, and a small suitcase in one hand. I felt my stomach drop. As a result of a couple of kids’ plays I’d written, I’d developed a horror of small children. I would’ve taken an entire audience of New York Times reviewers over one critic dressed in OshKosh. The little girls were like Elizabethan audiences: They tended to boo and throw things. Had they rotten tomatoes at their disposal, we would have been pelted. The little boys typically slept through entire performances, only to surge forth, weeping, during the quietest scenes.

  Carmela dropped the Handyman’s hand, marched to the corner, sat down Indian style, and opened her suitcase. Something in her manner gave me the impression that she was carrying a disassembled sniper rifle. I allowed myself a fantasy. Maybe she’d take out the twins. Or the feral cats that hissed for hot dogs every time I passed through the courtyard. Or Pierre. Especially Pierre.

  “Later,” he said, spinning on his polished heel. The Handyman and I listened to him danc
ing his way down the stairs, and then turned to each other.

  “You gotta leak, mami? You need me to fix you up?”

  In fact, no. I just liked having strange men over to my apartment when I was looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Handyman must have seen the frustration on my face, because he jerked a thumb at the bathroom and departed. I fled into my hut for clothing and a newsboy cap to stuff my plastic head into.

  I could hear the Handyman banging about and swearing. Our bathroom was three feet by three feet and boasted a triangular sink the size of a measuring cup, and a shower stall constructed of what seemed to be cellophane. The water had only two temperature options: Vesuvius and Siberia.

  I cringed inside my hut, having severe second thoughts about the yes policy. The Handyman had asked me out before. In fact, the Handyman asked me out every time I saw him. He was that kind of guy. He was, indeed, a handyman, in both the usual sense and in the two-fisted-assgrabbing sense. He hadn’t actually grabbed my ass, but I felt that that was only because I’d never turned my back on him.

  Did I really have the balls to do this? Was it insane? Maybe I needed to be hospitalized. I had a brief fantasy of abdicating responsibility à la Blanche DuBois, deep-ending on the kindness of strangers. Attendants to bring me juice, and hold my straw while I sipped. Someone else to do my laundry. A white-sheeted bed with a real box spring. It had been years since I’d had a box spring. Unfortunately, Zak and I had recently watched the filmed version of Marat/Sade, the Peter Weiss play set in the asylum at Charenton. All those crazed inmates, flinging themselves about, babbling and scrabbling, speaking in Brechtian tongues. I’d been traumatized. Marat/Sade was appallingly similar to my own life.

  “Chica!” The Handyman came into the room, wrench in hand. “Chica, chica, chica, you gotta problem, but I’m gonna fix it for you no charge, ‘cause you’re sexy.”

  Let it be said that I had a severe allergy to the metaphoric conceit that women were as easy to (ful)fill as a hole in drywall. James Taylor’s “Handyman,” and the oft-covered gagger “If I Were a Carpenter,” were two of my most-loathed songs of all time. “Handyman” had verses talking about how not only would he fix your broken heart, you ought to refer him to your girlfriends, too. Obviously, all women wanted a man who could do double duty as a power drill. I found “If I Were a Carpenter” just as appalling. What kind of carpenter was this guy, proposing marriage and babies? How did that have anything to do with woodworking? Well. I’d once worked for two unsuccessful days in a theater set shop. There, “woodworking” had been a favored euphemism for “screwing” and/or “nailing” a chick. With your “tool.” In the company of men, many sex-related things developed a This Old House component. But really, if he were an actual carpenter, he’d knock up some bookshelves, not me. This carpenter seemed to just be a dude with a superficial hammer. I had my own superficial hammer.

  Carmela removed a bright purple walrus, a packet of crayons, and a mystery sandwich from her suitcase. When I asked the Handyman what it was, he told me that it was her favorite, mustard and marshmallow fluff. I slid a few pieces of paper across the floor toward her, and then went to my computer, thinking that at least I could do my homework. I was thigh-deep in a class called Image of the Other, and was supposed to be writing an essay on Josephine Baker’s subjugation via a miniskirt made of bananas. I’d been more inclined to write a comparative of Baker and Carmen Miranda. Why were these women wearing fruit, anyway? The class was largely composed of privileged white kids, and most of it was spent watching things like Cabin in the Sky and Imitation of Life, and listening to the frustrated sighs of the professor, a big name in the field of race and media studies. Classes like these were making me wonder why the hell I was paying an obscene amount of borrowed money for knowledge that I would never be able to apply to the real world. Sure, I’d seen Birth of a Nation in its twelve-hour entirety, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that caused a human resources manager to hire you on the spot.

  When the Handyman finally emerged, Carmela repacked her case, handed me her drawings, which were, somewhat traumatically, portraits of me, and marched out the door.

  “Everything fixed?” I asked the Handyman. My head was itching wickedly. I hoped I wasn’t going to remove my newsboy hat to discover all my hair fallen out.

  “The shower’s good, but I’m not,” said the Handyman.

  “How come?” I asked.

  “‘Cause you’re not walking out of here with me.” He winked. Clearly, he was blind. I was hideous. Maybe the wink was the result of something in his eye. Pierre arrived to check the progress of the leak, and was just in time to smirk at this.

  I’d show him. Day one of the Year of Yes, not quite like the fantasy version, but what the hell. Wasn’t that the point?

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?” said the Handyman.

  “Yes, I’m walking out of here with you. As long as you’re inviting me.”

  I had the satisfaction of seeing Pierre’s eyes bulge, and his tattooed koi flip their tails.

  “Let’s go, then, mamita,” said the Handyman, who did not even seem surprised, but instead offered me a cigarette, and put his arm around me as though we’d been together forever.

  “Give me a minute,” I said, and went to wash my hair. It had turned out, unsurprisingly, not at all red. Some of it was orange. Some of it was blackish. Some of it was green. It hung in long, straight, hideous strands. I squinted at myself for a moment in the mirror, and decided that I’d had enough. I got out my dull scissors, pulled a hank of hair over my shoulder, and hacked it off. Two feet of tresses dropped onto the bathroom floor. My head felt thrillingly light. I continued to chop, ending up just above my shoulders, and then, in one of those bad impulses you can never afterward explain, I cut myself some Bettie Page bangs. Crooked. Of course.

  As the result of a crippling first-grade year, which the teacher spent trying to make me a rightie, I’d never properly learned how to use scissors. Usually, when people saw me cutting, they thought I had cerebral palsy. I had to cut the bangs shorter. And shorter. The last time I’d had a haircut this bad, I’d been five, and my mom had gone away for the weekend, leaving my sister and me with our father. She’d come home to find my dad looking sheepish, and my sister and I sporting super-short, slanted bangs that made us look like we were recovering from brain surgery. Screw it. I kept snipping.

  I maneuvered my face into the one expression that made them look even: one eyebrow raised high, and the other crunched down. There. That was not so bad. I fluffed it up to the best of my ability, smeared on some red lipstick, and went outside to meet the first man of my new life.

  The Handyman didn’t comment on the haircut. Maybe it looked good. On the way out of the building, however, we encountered Zak.

  “What the fuck did you do to your hair?” he said.

  “Cut it,” I said.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because,” I said, getting defensive. “I should be able to cut my hair if I want to.”

  “It looks completely weird,” said Zak. He had never been known for his delicacy regarding feminine beauty and lack thereof. “And the front is crooked. Did you know that?”

  I rearranged my face into the expression.

  “How about now?”

  “Now your face looks weird.”

  The Handyman cleared his throat. I’d forgotten about him.

  “You know Mario,” I said.

  “Mario, the handyman,” Zak said, suspiciously. I could see the memory of the exploding toilet flashing before his eyes. “Why are you here?”

  “Mario the cowboy,” the Handyman corrected. “I’m taking your girl to dinner, amigo.”

  Zak looked as though he was going to choke on suppressed laughter.

  “My girl?” he said. “I’m just going inside.”

  “I’m just going out,” I said, only partially believing what I was saying.

  CARMELA WALKED TEN FEET
in front of us, pretending, no doubt, that she was a princess being attended by a couple of servants far below her station. She didn’t even look back to see if we were behind her. The Handyman seemed to know everyone on every street corner. He greeted women ranging from seventeen-year-old Polish girls to their gray-haired grandmothers. He donated a buck to the yellow-eyed Kielbasa Dude, a career drunk who perpetually hung out on Greenpoint Avenue clutching a booze-filled brown paper sack and a sausage. He waved at the proprietors of the bodegas. He nodded at the waitresses in the Thai Café, which, despite its unlikely location deep in Polish Brooklyn, made the best green papaya salad in the city. It was as though we were traversing a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood arranged specifically for the Handyman.