From 150 dates in a year to one true love forever

I’d never been a person who could just let a telephone ring. I always thought that the person on the other end might be someone I’d been dying to talk to for my entire life. Say, William Shakespeare calling from beyond the grave. Never mind that this had never happened. Lately, it had been the Sears collection department, searching for another Maria Headley, who owed them $15,000. She’d apparently binged on appliances, and was even now hidden in some dank cave full of stand mixers. Even though I wasn’t the right Maria, I always ended up talking to Sears for at least half an hour. I’d grown up on one of the last party lines in the known universe, and phone privileges still seemed precious to me.

“Good morning!” I trilled. It wouldn’t do to have Will Shakespeare thinking I was cranky. Particularly on Valentine’s Day. What if he thought I preferred Kit Marlowe? I suspected that the last good man on the planet had died 413 years before I was born, but some part of me was still waiting for Mr. Shakespeare to whisper some sweet iambic pentameter into my ear.

Alas, no. Instead, I heard the husky voice of the Director, an acquaintance from a writing workshop I’d attended the year before. The Director was in his mid-forties and divorced. He was an intelligent person, with extensive knowledge of two thousand years of theater history. There was just one problem. Sweater vests. I couldn’t date a man who wore sweater vests, any more than I could date a man who was a mime. Everybody had phobias. Sweater vests threw me back, not to my charming grandpa, as they would some people, but to my skeezy high school geometry teacher, who had recently gone on trial for attempting to calculate the surface area of his female students’ breasts. (My phobia of mimes was simpler: I was a playwright, and words were my business. I took miming as a personal insult, but more on that later ...)

The Director, with his sweater vests, with his husky voice, was not my first choice for someone I wanted to speak to at 7:30 in the morning. I liked him, but I didn’t like him like that. We were supposed to see a play that night, and he was suggesting we meet up earlier. I said sure, but that I was still in my pajamas. He said he was really looking forward to seeing me, I said great and tried to say good-bye, and then, something went very wrong.

“I’m listening to NPR,” he suddenly stammered. “Do you want to come over and make out?”

Well. I was finally going nuts. It was about time. Other people in my family were nuts. Why had I thought I’d been skipped?

“I didn’t quite hear you,” I said, just to make sure I was really losing it.

“I’m listening to NPR,” the Director repeated. “Do you want to come over and make out?”

It wasn’t a delusion. He’d offered me a radio rendezvous. Making out to Morning Edition. I had one question.

WHOSE LIFE WAS THIS?

Excerpted from “The Year of Yes: A Memoir” by Maria Dahvana Headley. Copyright © 2006, Maria Dahvana Headley. All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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