I open the cooler door with my right hand as I attempt with my left to clear the shopping cart from oncoming traffic in the dairy aisle, and I’m nodding my head with feigned interest in my littlest’s chatter and so the child, an opportunist since his unlikely conception, mistakes my distraction for concession, grabs a gallon of chocolate milk, and hurls it atop my heirloom tomatoes. “Mambo No. 5” bumps softly out of the supermarket speakers and I close my eyes and my nodding turns into a rhythmic bop and immediately it’s 1999 and there is no littlest, no middle or big, no spouse or soccer practice or squished tomatoes, no MAGA or perimenopause or milk—chocolate or otherwise.
I’m in an East End nightclub, drunk on vodka-Red Bulls, the baseless optimism of youth, and my first taste of freedom. Bone-deep aware of my fraught Americanness. Strobe lights kaleidoscope around flailing limbs, refract off sequined miniskirts and sweat-slicked clavicles. A passerby burns my arm with his cigarette and kisses me on the mouth. “Mambo No. 5” comes on and Lily screams, grabs us by the hand or waist, whatever’s within reach, and pulls us into a circle in the center of the dance floor. “It’s our song!” she yells into my ear, and we’ve known each other 72 hours. Lou Bega’s beat thumps through the club, beneath our platformed, unbunioned feet, electric in our trim thighs and easy hips. Lily holds her bottle of Hooch like a mic and points her finger at each of us, wailing our names to the rhythm of Bega’s sexist litany: “CHARLOTTE! ARIEL! GINA!… YOU… !” I am floating, suspended in the all-in intensity of this cultic bubble that’s everything until it pops.
I used to wonder if a whole version of myself failed to exist once that hive scattered.
But this awful song reminds me I’m real.
I grab the chocolate milk from the cart, heave it to my mouth like a mic and point my finger at my five-year-old, inserting his name as a lyric. He sprints down the aisle, mortified.
Placing the chocolate milk back in the cooler, I catch my own gaze in the glass. I recognize a dozen selves in my reflection, all shimmering at once, all holding each other up.
Edith-Nicole Cameron (she/they) writes, teaches, and parents in Minneapolis. She used to be a lawyer and an actor. They feel lucky to have had work featured in various journals, including elsewhere magazine, Star 82 Review, The Brevity Blog, Literary Mama, and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things.