The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley Read Free Book Online Page B

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 papersack 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.
    I walked next to him, and wondered how I’d managed to live in Greenpoint for as many months as I had without getting to know anyone. I recognized the cast of characters, of course, but the Handyman knew them by name. I’d been pretending I didn’t really live in my neighborhood. Most of my time, by necessity, was spent in Manhattan anyway. Greenpoint was where I slept. When I slept. The neighborhood had, in my opinion, very little to recommend it. Greenpoint, obviously named early in an optimistic century, had nothing green to boast of, unless you counted the complexions of its residents, upon catching a whiff of the famous Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant. Or, perhaps, the neighborhood’s moniker referred to Newton Creek, which divided the northernmost tip of our neighborhood from Queens, and which was euphemistically classified as “precluded for aquatic life” due to the massive Exxon oil leak that had, for years, been drooling into the creek’s already sewage-contaminated