The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley

Author:Maria Dahvana Headley [Headley, Maria Dahvana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Family & Relationships, Love & Romance, Non Fiction
ISBN: 9781401308728
Google: dw4pAAAAYAAJ
Amazon: 1401308724
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2007-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

In Which Our Heroine Meets Jimi Hendrix…

MY MOM CALLED ONE MORNING in September to inform me that she had a new plan. “I’m sending your father to sea,” she said. “If I can get him on a boat, things’ll improve.”

My parents hadn’t lived together for years, but they were still married, and my mother hadn’t had any new relationships since their split. My dad was brilliant and lunatic, and hard as hell to get over. There was no way she’d ever get him on a boat, not if he didn’t want to float away, but it was a nice idea.

He’d apparently gotten worse in the months since I’d last seen him, planting a forest’s worth of pennies in his backyard, so that he’d “have something to look forward to,” and stringing his trees with bubblegum so that in the winter they looked like they were blooming with bright blue cocoons. The house I’d grown up in—according to my mom, who’d visited—was bedecked with shrines, and there was a tree growing into the living room.

The last time my dad and I had talked, he’d called me because he’d heard that I was dating Donatello. He wanted to inform me that he knew more about the world than I did, and though he was “not racist,” he wanted me to know that black people were “not like you and me.”

“Thank God,” I’d responded, uncharitably. I was out of compassion. My classmates bonded over the irrationality of their stewards, telling me their parents were crazy, by which they meant that their parents wouldn’t buy them a car. I kept my mouth shut. My dad was crazy in a very uncool way. He wouldn’t acknowledge his mental illness, and his years of denial had tapped my reserves of empathy. We’d never gotten along very well to begin with, and even though part of me wanted him to be the rational person he’d never been, the rest was resigned to living with our stilted, gnarled relationship, one that caused him to yell unjustifiable parental maxims periodically, and me to inform him that I was now an adult and could do whatever I damn well pleased. Mostly, though, we just didn’t speak.

On the same call, he’d tried to institute a long-distance curfew, something I’d never had, even when I’d lived at home. My dad, from what had become his survivalist encampment in Idaho, thought he had a mystical power over New York.

“You’re three thousand miles away,” I’d informed him. “You won’t know if I come home at night or not. I could stay out forever, if I wanted to. And maybe I will.”

He’d been to New York once, in the early sixties, when he’d been in the Navy. He’d ridden up and down on the subway all night, from the Bronx to the Battery, and never left the train. “I got the experience plenty,” he’d said. “I got the deal. It’s full of lazy homeless people and psychos. You don’t need to go to New York.

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