You made me a rap mixtape for my sixteenth. Ballet slipper pink balloons flooded my family’s den in Woodcliff Lake. A white cake settled into its blushing rosettes on the low table. The other girls whined when I snatched the unwrapped brick from your hand, clacked the cassette into the player. “Girls aren’t supposed to like rap. It’s about Black men and violence,” my cousin said. “Don’t you two know that?” My little sister said, “Better not let Mommy hear you listening to all those curse words.”
Senior year the two of us dressed like Wonder Mike and Big Bank Hank of The Sugarhill Gang for the talent show. Kangol hats, satiny track suits, gold chains pinched from our moms. We lip-synched Rapper’s Delight. We were on the mike and we were cool. After Principal Adams pulled the plug and said, “Ladies, my office,” we got a week’s detention. Your father came to pick us up on his way home from work, clipped a cigar as soon as we were out on the school steps. To you he said, “I think your mother and I danced to that one at Studio 54.” We laughed and laughed.
That first year in college you got deep into activism against racism and systemic injustice. I pledged a sorority. So many nights I stood in the hallway of my dorm, barefoot and spiralling the payphone cord around and away from my fingers while you went on about the Day of Outrage protests or some such. You met your boyfriend Lincoln at a Rainbow Coalition conference, said he challenged you to think deeply, become an advocate for racial equality. I wondered if your parents knew you were dating a Black man. When I asked if you’d heard the Beastie Boys’ new album, Paul’s Boutique, said the Curtis Mayfield and Rick James samples were radical, you said you’d listen.
That summer we went to see Do the Right Thing when it opened at the multiplex. I could sense you tense up when Sal is feeling provoked by Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem, drop your head into your hands when Raheem dies. When Mookie’s girlfriend Tina starts dancing to Fight the Power, I was out of my seat and moving right along with her. On the way home you asked did I get it. The struggle, the imbalance. I said the music was awesome. When I saw your disappointment, I said I was joking, that it was a film heavy and important. I asked if you wanted to come over for a swim in our pool – “My mom’s got the heater going” — but you said you were beat. I watched you hop the fence, skirt your own family’s pool, duck into your house.
Junior year I did a study-abroad in Paris. You stayed at your university interning for a local politician. We hadn’t talked much during sophomore year. “These things happen,” my mom said. I took the mixtape with me, listened to it training all over Europe. I sent you a postcard from Germany to tell you I’d heard a rapper perform in an underground club one night trying to sound all hardcore American, but he had no flow, couldn’t hit a punchline, couldn’t fill a room like our Big Bank Hank. You sent me a mixtape of a group called N.W.A. from Compton, California who were all about racial justice, sent me a note saying “Listen, really listen to their words.”
When we saw each other again that first summer after college, I wanted to tell you about last weekend at the Roxy with my new boyfriend, a guy from my art history program, how we’d dressed like Marky Mark and Ashy Ace, and danced up on a speaker in our baggy shorts, Calvin Klein underwear flashing out the top, backwards baseball caps. How the DJ kept looping the backing track to Good Vibrations long after we’d hopped down. How next week we were going to try it again at Area and maybe you wanted to come with and be our Hector the Booty Inspector. But you were full Delores Huerta by then, marching for farmers and immigrants, protesting police brutality.
It wasn’t just that day, but so many over the last decade that I wanted to talk with you, but knew that I paled to you in living with intention. My intentions to call you on your birthday went unmade, my intentions to add a note to your holiday card went unwritten. My intentions to invite you to the opening of my art gallery went unsent. My intentions to comment on your Instagram post about getting out the vote didn’t happen, nor did my intentions to repost it. Until my intentions to reconnect, catch up, disappeared.
Last week on my way to collect my daughter from school, I caught your interview on NPR: you’re running for mayor, your husband Lincoln your campaign manager. My mom tells me that you’re having your second child, thinking au pair this time instead of nanny, which I know from experience is the right move. As I waited in the pickup queue, I heard that a fellow parent, the man we knew as Big Bank Hank, had died. In that moment, I felt sad and I felt old and I felt the loss of us.
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Catherine Chiarella Domonkos’ words appear in Emerge Literary Journal, Streetlight, JMWW and Bending Genres among other literary places. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. For the complete collection, check out: www.catherinechiarelladomonkos.com