The Year of Yes (10 page)

“I really thought you were an open-minded girl,” he said. “But you’re…how do you say? A Puritan. It was nice to meet you, but it’ll never work. Always good to find out quickly, don’t you think?”

“What’s the point of being with a person who can’t give you what you need?” I said. I agreed with him, at least on this subject. If the man needed to be bitten, he needed to be bitten. Who was I to stand in the way of his happiness? However, I was also adding some categories to my “never in a million years” list.

“Have a good life, Maria,” Baler said, unlocking his racing bicycle from the rack, mounting it, and riding fearlessly into traffic. I could only speculate that all those years bound up in bike shorts had resulted in a lack of penile sensitivity. But really, I was completely dumbfounded.

Could biting count as love? The last time I’d bitten someone, it’d been on the fourth grade playground, and it’d been about alienation. I’d been unclear on the rules for the game called Chase, and therefore I’d had a grand old time sprinting around the playground, flinging myself wholesale upon the boys, and biting and pinching them until they’d begged for mercy. After a few recesses of this, a knot of tight-lipped girls had informed me that only boys were allowed to chase. Girls were supposed to
run slowly,
and then be thrown to the ground and
kissed.
Not bitten. Run slowly? I hadn’t cared for the contradiction. If I was running, I’d wanted to win, and who wanted to be kissed anyway? Disgusting. I’d kept playing Chase my way, even when it’d landed me in Special Ed for observation. Eventually, though, I’d gotten bored with pursuing a pack of screaming ninnies while the rest of the girls watched irritably from the jungle gym. I’d spent the rest of grade school bosom buddies with one outcast girl who wasn’t allowed to wear pants, and another whose family raised bull terriers in a double-wide trailer. Screw fitting in.

My yes policy was getting a similar kind of response from my current female friends. They told me that what I was doing would mess up the balance of the universe. Women were supposed to say no, and men were supposed to chase them. When a woman finally said yes, it’d be such a big deal that trumpets would sound and men would fall down in gratitude. This balance felt like something out of
Lysistrata,
in which the women swore off sex in order to force their husbands to stop going to war. It made for amusing theater: a bunch of stammering actors staggering around, weighed down by four-foot phalluses, and a chorus of imperious
women yelling “no!” But if that was what real life had to be, I was unimpressed. I didn’t like the thought that a woman’s only power was in her ability to deny. As for balance, it wasn’t like there were millions of joyful people populating the streets. It seemed like there were far more rejected and disappointed people. The more I said yes, the more I realized that I’d never wanted to play by the rules anyway. Why had I even tried? I wasn’t built that way.

LATER THAT NIGHT, I ran the scenario by Zak and Griffin.

“He asked you to
bite
him?” Griffin was aghast.

“BITE?!” Zak was even more aghast.

“Bite! Bite! Bite!” Griffin moaned. “Oh God. I’m going to throw up. You
do
know that’s abnormal, right?”

“More than abnormal,” said Zak. “Insane. On a Marquis de Sade level. The guy needs to be locked up.”

“He was an interesting guy. Maybe I should have done it.”

“You could meet an interesting guy in the middle of the Sahara,” said Zak. “That’s nothing new.”

“There you’d be, on your camel, and some guy would appear in the distance, asking you to kindly bite his penis,” said Griffin.

“And she would,” said Zak. “That’s the thing about her. They’re not wrong.”

“It’d depend,” I said.

“On what, exactly?”

“Whether or not I was thirsty.”

There was a shout of horror from both Griffin and Zak. I went back to drinking my coffee mug of jug wine, and pretending that I wasn’t stressed out by the way things were going. What if only weirdos wanted me? Historically, that had certainly been true. Part of my heart, the part I was in denial of, suspected that no acceptable man would ever be interested. In Idaho, I’d been too fat, too brunette, too smart, and though there’d certainly been guys who’d chased me, most of them—with the exception of my first pseudo-boyfriend, Ira, with whom I continued to engage in drama—had been creepy. Ira, despite being somewhat acceptable, had met with my no policy for years. When he’d heard about my new yes policy, he was very excited, at least until I informed him that the yes he had in mind was not what I was practicing. Nevertheless, he still called me every couple of months, just to check.

IRA WAS A SPECIAL KIND OF STRANGE: a sarcastic, belligerent comrade-enemy. He loved me, but throughout high school he’d also written a newspaper column for the sole purpose of mocking me. Our two columns were published on the same page, Ira going so far as to post a leering headshot that spoofed my smiling one. We’d been dueling clowns, and the attraction/repulsion of this dynamic explained why Ira had never officially been acknowledged as my boyfriend. We’d gone to two proms together, but we’d never even kissed.

When I’d met Ira, I was in a blood-red velvet phase, and given to wearing a necklace made of a roach clip, which I’d
inherited from my mother’s wild period. Having no idea what a roach clip actually was, and thinking cheery thoughts of Gregor Samsa’s cockroach transformation, I’d felt my roach clip gave me a Kafka-esque cool. Early on, Ira had informed me that I was the “freakiest thing” he’d ever seen, but that he liked the necklace. Ira was a flushed, freckled redhead who had been born looking like a forty-year-old Orson Welles. He’d had stubble from the age of nine, and he spoke in the howling bellow of an accordion. I’d met him sophomore year of high school. He was a transfer student, and he’d made his situation even more wretched by tumbling off the stage on the first day of drama class. I’d taken pity on him. A few days later, I’d brought him home to meet my family.

My mom had gone pale when Ira had shambled in, grinning and twisting a lock of his long red hair. She’d grabbed me by the arm, pulled me into the pantry, and whispered, “You can’t date him.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a dog. You have to trust me. I know some things, and this is one of them.”

“He’s not a dog. He’s Ira.”

“He’s a dachshund,” she’d said, vehemently. “A redheaded dachshund.”

Okay. Whatever. Ira had neither been short-legged nor particularly long in the torso. I’d figured that my mom, somewhat kooky already (we all were), had just been exhibiting a repressed rage against men in general, but then at dinner she’d seen fit to tell a certain story. As follows.

ONCE UPON A TIME, in the 1970s, when my mom was twenty-one, she was living happily in a haunted A-frame in the Oregon woods with her dog Buddha, an enormous Great Dane-wolf-Labrador mix. Buddha was the size of a horse, but very charming and a good protector. My mom lived with the ghost, two cats, and Buddha in relative harmony, despite occasional paranormal episodes.

Until one fateful day.

My mom was driving home from a trip to the grocery store when she suddenly heard the sounds of violent car sickness coming from the backseat. Freaked out, she pulled her maroon Datsun over to the side of the road and opened the back door. There, in the middle of a half-eaten flat of strawberries, was a puking dachshund. The dog had apparently snuck into the car as she’d been loading her groceries. He had no collar, but the scraggly pink bows on each ear told her that he was an escaped lapdog. A refugee, thought my mom, taking pity on the fugitive.

“What’s your name?” she asked the dog.

“I-Rah!” the dog yipped. “I-Rah! I-Rah! I-Raaaaaaah!”

“Hello, Ira. It’s very nice to meet you,” my mom said, and brought him home.

Though she posted flyers, no one claimed ownership of Ira. The reason for this soon became clear. Ira was a demon masquerading as a dachshund. The moment he skittered into the A-frame, his fur stood on end, and his long ears stuck out from his head like coffin planks. He raced hysterically across the wood floors, chasing the ghost, which, offended, began a campaign of malicious acts. Ira never slept. His eyes rolled
wildly in his head, and he panted rabidly, charging through the house twenty-four hours a day, shrieking his war cry: “I-Rah! I-Rah! I-Rah! I-RAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

Shortly after Ira moved in, both cats moved out. Soon, Buddha started running miserably through the house, too, Ira nipping in pursuit. My mom was reduced to a completely sleepless existence, listening to dog cries, searching the house for Ira, and finding him snarling in corners, teeth bared. She had thought the ghost was benevolent, but Ira gave her the impression that it was a murderous wraith. She was terrified, and spent most of her time cringing in her bed, hiding under the covers as Ira trembled and screamed his way through the house, and the ghost spilled milk and banged pots and pans in the kitchen.

After six months of living in complete stress, my mom was near a nervous breakdown. She decided that, in order to survive, she would have to get rid of Ira. She couldn’t give him to the Portland pound, because they’d euthanize him. She didn’t want that to happen. She just wanted Ira to move out. He was not her dog. He was a hitchhiker who wouldn’t leave. She brushed Ira’s fur and gave him new pink ear bows. She coaxed him into the Datsun. They drove to a park in a fancy neighborhood. Mansion windows looked down onto the manicured greens. It was exactly the right place for a sweet, pampered little dachshund to find a new owner. My mom put Ira down in the middle of the grass.

“I-Rah!” he commented.

“I’m very sorry about this, Ira, but you and I are not a good match. I know you’ll find a happy home,” said my mom, and then she sprinted to her car. The last time she saw Ira, he was lifting his leg at a rosebush. When she got home,
the ghost and Buddha were peaceable again. The cats moved back in. Everything was happily ever after, at least for another couple of years, until she met my dad.

My mom never saw Ira again. That is, not until twenty years later, when I brought him home with me.

“I don’t mean to act weird around you,” my mom told human Ira. “But wouldn’t you act weird if a reincarnated dachshund came home with
your
daughter?” She paused, a look of revelation on her face.

“I just realized something. That’s why you like that old necklace. You liked it in 1972, too. You liked to chew it. You also liked to chew the
roaches.
”

My dad became suddenly engaged, and directed a threatening glare at Ira. I could date a dachshund, apparently, but not a pothead.

“You abandoned me in a park?” Ira asked, stunned.

“I’m very sorry,” said my mom, “but I’m sure you found a nice family.”

“You put pink bows on my ears?”

“I thought you’d appeal to a little girl.”

“I need a minute,” said Ira, and left the room to hyperventilate.

He got significant mileage out of the event, spending the next several years reminding me and everyone else of the trauma he’d endured when the mother of his first love had informed him that he was a reincarnated dachshund. Whenever Ira did something bad, out the story would come, as an excuse. He’d roll his sad eyes, and moan: “I can’t help it. I’m a dachshund. A
destitute
dachshund. I’m supposed to be a lapdog, and instead, I’m a scavenger. You should feel sorry for me.”

A year after I met him, Ira came to pick me up for the junior prom. By this point, my dad had decided that a pothead dachshund was better than nothing, and he’d pulled Ira aside and informed him that he had his blessing to marry me. Not that marriage was on the table at all. We were talking about desperation: two people who were enough at odds (largely due to me repeatedly refusing to kiss Ira) that Ira had vindictively given me a giant sausage instead of a corsage, and told me to use it to conquer my frigidity. My dad had informed Ira that he should marry me because “no one else will want her.” Obviously, my dad had been mistaken. Plenty of people seemed to want me, or, at least, want part of me. It was just that I was having a hard time wanting them. I was bummed about Baler. He’d been so appealing until he’d brought up his fetish.

My list of nos was growing. No masochists. No addicts. No one who moaned over NPR. It would have been nice to know what, exactly, I wanted, but at least I knew more every day about what I didn’t. I’d thought things couldn’t get worse after the strip club debacle. Ha! Still more proof that there were more things in heaven and earth, or, in this case, hell, than had hitherto been dreamt of in my philosophy.

A FEW DAYS LATER, I found myself in the Astor Place Barnes & Noble checkout line, eyeballing the selections of the short, balding guy standing in front of me. I was unimpressed. He had a stack of self-help books, and several generic CDs of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Bach, played by television network orchestras.

“What ees the things that you are purchasing?” he asked, reaching uninvited into my arms and plucking out my Patti Smith CD. “
Hmmmph,
” he commented, in his French accent. “I am not interested in zis thing.”

I picked up one of his books, a guide to losing weight through Feng Shui. Stop judging him, I thought to myself. Stop it. This was not as easy as it sounded. I had to physically hit myself upside the head, not the most discreet thing to do. He looked at me oddly.

“That’s fine,” I said politely, having shaken myself into submission. “I’m not interested in your things, either.”

“I am Jarzhe,” he declared.

“George?”

“Yes, Jarzhe.” He grandly pounced forward and kissed me on both cheeks. I’d never gotten used to the European method of greeting. It still seemed to me as though it was more a way to get a cheap feel than to say hello. Maybe it was his fingers fluttering at hip level. He seemed seconds away from a grab.

Suspicious as I was, as long as a guy didn’t introduce himself by groping me against my will, the yes policy remained in effect, and so I agreed to go to Starbucks with him.

WHEN JARZHE ASKED me to marry him, an hour or so later, he was on his third 105-degree, nonfat-half-shot of caramel, foam-free latte, and shaking like a leaf. Something bad seemed to happen to foreigners living in America. They’d become poster children for all the worst parts of our
society. Jarzhe had loudly and piteously rejected two attempts at his drink of choice, as “scalding to my mouth.” He had also, to my horror, clandestinely nibbled a biscotti and then put it back, saying, “
Pffft.
That is not biscotti.”