Anthem
If we could turn back time, if we could find a way back to those heady months in 2015 and give all the stars to each other again, we would. Instead, one chilly evening in October, we’re on our way to Bobbie’s Back to the Eighties Fortieth Birthday Bash. We are here: married three years, together four and a half, just enough time to hit some bumps and a national crisis. The sun fades into the hills as we reminisce about being in love: glitter on the mattress, glitter on the lazy, late morning peanut butter toast. All over, alas, as we’re pragmatists now and nearly 40 ourselves after all. Our Corolla is nowhere near as big as a whale—seats just us two, our junk in the back. We drive the speed limit, have debit cards as gas money. Headed down an Arkansas highway, a city limits sign by the side of the road tells us how many miles to the Gravette community center. Love shack ahead? No. Our destination is a renovated Home Economics building complete with 1950s kitchen as exhibit, community reminder in which we hear the BANG BANG BANG on the closet door, baby. No glitter on this darkening, conservative highway. Just cow fields and hills on either side.
Sweet dreams are made of these: memories we each have of growing up in rural towns, before they became places of liability; the possibility of thin bands on delicate fingers intertwined. But everybody is looking for something to take back. Who are we to disagree? Those people, once in love and lost their senses—that’s us—never wondering what happens when the fever ends, wrapped up in a dream they had once thought would only always belong to other people. Some of whom might want to abuse them.
When we arrive, Bobbie and wife Jackie the Jackhammer wave us in, point us to the prom backdrop, to the glow bracelets, to the newly renovated wood floor that gleams like a fresh start. Like our conversation in the car was a prayer, the ‘80s anthems blaring from the silver-streamered DJ booth synthesize our first desperately romantic, Lifetime-movie-production quality, four-hour, uncomfortable-sofa-extravaganza kiss; first date in the Mexican restaurant where it wasn’t smart to hold hands; the lesbian-less proms and dances we did or didn’t attend; a kindred picture of one another as wild girls growing up in the woods of the deep South, the Midwest, just where girls like us aren’t supposed to be.
We have no choice among revolving lights, random balloons, dyed-blonde dyke DJ and girlfriend; people in white and brown leisure suits and one-strap, metallic powder blue or purple dresses; Fabio wigs, big bangs, mutton chops, bad shirts; the dancing takes us there, where the highway could not—to that place where we are intimately familiar but completely unknown to one another. Community center no longer what it seems in the nearing midnight hour, we feel beyond the reach of old power.
One low maintenance dyke James Dean sporting the denim jacket and plain white T-shirt, one punk snark lesbo prom queen rocking Doc Martens, tight-rolled jeans, powder blue faux-tuxedo-front t-shirt & whipped up Aquanet-tastic hair, clearing the floor. Fearless. Feels like flying. We don’t close our eyes even though far beyond our control, miles upon miles from this renovation, something is falling. Now we’re dancing. Friends take iPhone videos, record moments a closeted 1950s girl could perhaps never have imagined. We’re in control, just like a dream. Let the choir sing.