Sister Mischief

Tonight, I’m on a midnight jaunt out to Lake Calhoun, my TC oasis, the sandy beaches where I once tore naked across the shore, sand now indistinguishable from snowdrifts. As I come at it from the Excelsior side, I see a litter of fishing huts still settled out on the lake, and a few trapped buoys protruding from the ice like birthday candles. After I chain my bike to a tree, the only sounds are cars passing and my feet miffing the snow. If anyone needed evidence to be convinced of my hard-wrought Midwesternness, here it is: I can bike in virtually any weather. The long winter’s only half-gone now, and everything is frozen solid despite the best efforts of climate change.

I got new headphones, a surprise from Pops. They cover my whole ears and make me feel like a magical cyborg, a girl robot wired into the root system of the music. I just feel like there’s so much work to do, so much time and so little all the same. And then other times I make myself remember, Yes, I do have time. Time to be seventeen, to catch up to everything sixteen ran out on, time to create and re-create myself and everything I create. Some things you do in high school don’t turn out as well as you’d planned — your first self-mixed drinks, believing that detagging yourself from incriminating Facebook pictures erases them, at-home hair color or any tattoo — but the truth is, some of the things you do at sixteen turn out better than you’d planned. Like growing older on the holy soil of Minnesota. Like girl rappers in Minneapolis.

We were at a family friend’s cabin in Wisconsin, I forget whose, for Mom’s last Thanksgiving, the winter she drove the Colt Vista out on the frozen lake.

“That ice is two feet deep!” she declared, persuading me out of my tryptophan coma after dinner. “We could drive a Mack truck out there and we’d be fine. Come on. Let’s have an adventure.”

I trotted after her even though I was scared, still protesting, What if we fall in? and Would Pops be able to get to us in time? I was an anxious kid, far topped by my mother in fearlessness. I remember her mouth stretching in delight, her white teeth glinting as we careened from the boat landing onto the lake and across the ice, her action-movie steering sending us in lunatic figure-eights that left the snow still scarified in the morning.

At first all I could do was clench the door handle and pray, but when she stopped the car and dragged me out in the middle of the frozen lake, I think I began to feel what she felt — a need to drive recklessly with no one around to see, to feel enormous or tiny in the face of something enormous, to be confronted with a carpet of stars and a raw night of possibility. They say that children who lose parents at an early age freeze developmentally at the age of that loss — that part of me will always be five years old and speeding in pigtails across the lake, hoping Mom and the ice car will come back to shore before spring. I spread out my blanket on the marbled frieze of Lake Calhoun, facing the Minneapolis skyline, and dig my boot heels into the snow, nestled in Pops’s parka, not at all cold.

Mom’s seventeenth-birthday letter came a few weeks late, predictably. I didn’t open it right away, didn’t see the point. Dear Esme, it would read. Let me offer you another year of self-absorbed and badly organized line items that may or may not make any sense to you. Oranges, reflections on your life before age five, & etc. Love, Mom.

Shaking my head, thinking what the hell, I draw the envelope out of Pops’s coat pocket and pull off my glove with my teeth to slit it open. Unfolding the paper, I notice with shock that the letter doesn’t seem to be just a list. As I skim it, it still doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, at least not “sense” in the conventional understanding of the word, but hey, some of it actually has, like, syntax:

Dearest Esme Ruth (spawn of mine),

I can’t believe you are seventeen already. I think of what you must look like now, probably more like the young woman I used to be instead of the child I used to know, and it makes me feel old. I read your letter and it meant so much to me to hear from you, even if it meant hearing how angry you are with me. You can’t know how angry I am with myself. My visa expires next year and I may have to return to the United States whether I like it or not, which both scares me and fills me with hope, a hope that we might open that bottle of wine and close down a restaurant together talking someday soon, a hope that you turned out better without me, just as I thought you might. I was selfish. But please believe that I thought it might have been for your own good.

It occurs to me that maybe I never stopped to tell you it wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay to explain the hard things to you. I loved you — still love you — so much, Esme, and I love Luke too, and it was all my fault for getting married too young and boxing myself into a life I wasn’t ready for. A Jungian psychoanalyst from Gstaad arrived on the kibbutz a few months ago, and she and I have been spending some time together — she told me I ought to try to write you a letter without relying only on lists, so here I am, trying. I know it isn’t enough, but maybe it’s a start. We all move forward, Esme, even those who have been given up on, even those who have given up.

Knowing you are seventeen now made me wonder whether you have fallen in love yet even before I read your letter. Something told me, some uterine sixth sense, that you had fallen in love, and that it was unexpected and raw, and it made me think yes, my darling girl, say yes, don’t ask questions, open your mouth and breathe out and say yes. You are doing exactly what you should be doing.

Just as hair always grows back, so do the seasons change.
Three baskets of oranges this morning, but the orange groves are beginning to disappear.
I ought to send you some oranges.
Remember how young you are.
I named you Ruth after the only woman author in the Old Testament (or at least the only one who didn’t have an awful name like Esther). Keep writing. Honor who you are at the center of your name.

I love you, Esme. You’ll hear from me before eighteen. Your Mama

For the first time since she left, I think Mom might be okay. Crazy, but a little — what would you call it? — self-aware, or something. I sprawl all the way out like the Vitruvian Man and tuck away the letter. Everything changes, I guess.

I still don’t know where I want to go to college, but I know I want it to be in a city. I think I want to live in New York first and let it slug me around a little, then run away to the beach when I get too weary. My secret dream is to sort of get adopted by a hip-hop crew, or any good-hearted passing band of freaks, really, and whisked off to Brooklyn or San Francisco for a series of indoctrinations that’ll transform me into the Real Thing, whatever that is. It’s not like I want to get discovered, exactly, the way you hear about actresses getting picked off at diners. It’s more about my own road to discovery, like pecking my way out of a shell. I just want to roll deep with a pack of talented bastards. Doesn’t everybody?

I take out my iPod and scroll through to the feature presentation of tonight’s listening. Live at Holyhill: The Sister Mischief EP is the newest little bundle of joy in the blended family that 4H has become, and I’ve been saving my first experience of it for just the right setting. It’s been selling like hotcakes under the counter at school, and Yusuf has sort of become our unofficial manager-producer, whisking us around to check out other acts in the Cities and jam with his homies. He and Marcy are a match made in heaven — if heaven were the hip-hop section of the Electric Fetus — on the beatboxes and turntables, and it’s sweet how they think we don’t notice their furtive groping the minute we leave the room, the hands reaching for knees under the soundboard. Even though she doesn’t admit explicitly that they’re together, she gets this kind of proud tone in her voice when she talks about all the shit they work on together, all of which has a bunch of Radio Shack jargon that kind of sails above my head. It’s funny. Now I know how Tess knew.

As per Principal Ross Nordling’s proffer, the 4H cohort set to work on a mission statement during our suspension for the assembly that rocketed us into bona fide high-school notoriety.

“That shit is hot,” Marcy proclaimed as we huddled around my laptop last week.

“It’s basically the sickest mission statement anyone’s ever written,” Tess said, joining the self-congratulation.

“I’m going to make it my college essay,” I said. “Don’t worry — I’ll credit you guys.”

“I gotta admit, I was always super afraid of getting suspended,” Rowie said. “But now, after getting suspended for the most bomb-ass show Holyhill’s ever seen, I’m pretty effing proud.” I looked at Rowie, glowing softly. In my mind, I reached out to ruffle her hair.

“Hell, yes.” Marcy offered a fist-pound and we tapped a knuckle quartet. “Rhythm and poetry, motherfuckers.”

“Be somebody, motherfuckers.” Tessie grinned as we crowed at her dropping the F-bomb.

HIP-HOP FOR HETEROS AND HOMOS: OUR MISSION

Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos, or 4H, is a sex-positive hip-hop collective devoted to thoughtful discussion of the intersections between girls, boys, beats, rhymes, and bombs. We are committed to nonviolence and the pursuit of lyrical happiness; all are welcome in our safe space. We celebrate the unexpected coupling, the sampled homage, the queer, subversive, multicolored, and mixed, and our task is to complicate, to investigate, to question everything.

4H holds central the First Amendment: that the public school, as an outreach of the government, may not make a law upholding any one religion over another, or prohibiting the free exercise of any religion; it may not abridge our freedom of speech, or freedom of the press, or the right of the people to assemble peacefully, or to petition the government for a redress of grievances. We believe that truth is found in words spoken out loud, and we accept love and brilliance in all forms in which they are found. We are Catholics, Hindus, Jews, Lutherans, Muslims, all faiths and all colors, and our common religion is the nation of hip-hop, of rhythm and poetry.

By combining our inquiries into hip-hop and sexuality, we aim to create a place for people and ideas that some might consider renegade. Queerness, as we understand it, represents a refusal to conform to roles prescribed to us by others and a belief that we are all equal as interconnected agents of love: each in our own way, whether we love women, men, or both, we are all queer, either because of our own orientation or because of the orientation of someone we love. We reclaim a word that once expressed hatred to express support for and solidarity with our GLBT brothers and sisters. By integrating feminist and sex-positive language into hip-hop, our mission is also to make hip-hop queer in our sense of the word, or to illuminate the queerness that has always been inherent in hip-hop. Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos celebrates sameness in collective otherness.

It’s almost uncanny how much things between Rowie and me have gone back to the way they used to be, a playful camaraderie with subtly resolute boundaries, sisterhood with a perimeter. No more hair-ruffles or biceps-punches, no hugs, only a parting fist-pound here and there. It’s an unspoken doctrine we both observe, as though one stray of a hand could send the whole house of cards crashing down. What sticks in my craw about it is how electric the untouching is, a negative relief as charged as its positive, an acknowledgment by denial that something still courses in the space between us. For now, we just don’t talk about it.

I don’t know if Rowie will ever be with another girl the way she was with me — as much as I’d like to claim sameness with her, I don’t honestly think she’s whole-hog homo. I think the shape of a girl-body in her bed was one that kind of snuck up on her. Maybe things would’ve been different if we’d been in college, that undetermined Other Place where things that haven’t happened yet happen, a place we understand only as a space separated from here, like abroad or the streets. All I want for her is that she finds a way to be who she is, the imp of an MC we’ve seen, alongside the images of model-minority MDs her parents have cast her in.

Maybe growing up is mostly just about learning how to play more parts at once, how to give them each their scenes.

“You can do everything you want,” Pops tells me when I’m brooding. “Just not all at the same time.”

I shift on the ice, starting to feel the cold a little. It’s time to do what I came here in the middle of the night to do. I press PLAY.

The first few seconds are a fraught jumble of background noises: Yusuf fiddling with the controls, the four of us switching on our mikes and blowing into them, the crackle of Yusuf whispering to us that we’re live over the walkie-talkie. He’s left the recording all but uncut, I realize, and as I listen to it, I can hear every charged particle of anticipation, the crude rustles of a room packed with bodies, Nordling droning, Ladies and gentlemen, please find your seats. I hear our last words to one another before we brought the house down and blemished our permanent records all at the same time, and I hear myself barreling onstage.

In the first verse my voice is shaky and a hair too fast, tight-throated. I can hear myself begin to relax and roll with it, and I can hear myself pick up speed and realize I’m having the best time of my life, and I can hear the wallop in all our voices as we land hard on the illest Sister Mischief. I hear myself holding my breath as I wait for Rowie to plunge in, hear the release when she whips out her wicked and throws it down. By the second verse, I am fully my own irrepressible self, powerless to hold any of it in. And MC Ro and me are MC Ro and me like we always were, rhyming, soft and serrated aloft in a common rhythm, her sweet and my skanky all tangled up like skinny legs.

I hear Marcy scratching on her portable turntables and Tess’s raging caterwaul, and it strikes me that I do roll with a cast of talented bastards, that I’m getting ahead of myself again, and that this is the way I’ll always remember them: sixteen and throbbing with a heavy mixed-up beat, authors of their own chaotic destinies, caught in between one thing and all the becoming still left before the next, wild-eyed and wide-mouthed, jamming hard with our joy spilling out all over. Careening across a frozen lake on a prayer that none of us will fall in.

Yusuf’s added a little coda to the EP that I haven’t heard before, some B-roll of the four of us fucking around in the Njakas’ garage-studio when we didn’t know he was recording.

“Yo, do you all remember that time we made Ross Nordling crap his pants?” Marcy’s voice drifts in over the laughter. “That was the sickest.”

“Dude, I done saw it with my own eyes,” a disembodied Rowie says. “Homeboy had to throw away that pair of boxer briefs.”

“Cracka got served!” I crow. “Let’s jam on this for a minute. Marce, count it off.”

“One. Two. Three. Four,” she gutters. She’s live on the beat, hammering on an old drum kit Yusuf scrapped together for her birthday.

“Sister Mischief all up in here,” Rowie starts. “MC Ferocious in the house.”

The beat peters out as all four of us scatter in laughter, tossing good-natured insults at one another, loving in name-calling. You dirtbags. SheStorm, where’s my beat? You fools didn’t even let me get to my hook. I got a beat for you right here, slick. Perv. It’s so un-self-conscious, freed from the body, just the casual intimacy of four girls amassed as something greater than any lone one of them. There’s a slow fadeout, our jabs and postures and laughter slowly dying, as if I were a car pulling away from a party still in full swing. It leaves me bitten by something like awe, feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of our becoming.

The cold has hooks now, and the whole span of my dorsal side feels like it might be frozen to Lake Calhoun. The little dipper in the southwestern sky points me home as I count the constellations I know, a fistful of pinpricks in an unbounded galaxy, so many still nameless in the mass of everything I haven’t learned yet. It’s the naming, I think. The naming is the question. I stand up and shake the snow out of my blanket. Cocking my head at the crescent moon, I say a silent prayer that life will always feel like this, all shot through with magic words and glittering samples hovering just out of reach, just the same as now, except — I pull my headphones back over my ears as I dust off the snow and cue up the SM EP again — except I’m listening, really listening this time, and older now.