Sade Saves
I've tried to say how it was, in those boombox times. When I am near 21, and poor, and pregnant. There is no clue as to what next Tuesday will bring, let alone the rest of this one, when the Challenger explodes every minute on the mute TV.
The boy who had just as much sex with me as I with him has no decision in his belly, and he hasn't called. I am jealous of his freedom yet refuse to leave my neatly made secondhand mattress. My head is between a landline and my booming system. I am abandoned and loudness is a weighted blanket. The twirling cassette, from a girl named Sade, is called Diamond Life.
This is 1986, and though Sade's second album, Promise, is everywhere, I crave the multiple entendres of Diamond's "Cherry Pie." There's grit — "Sally," "Frankie's First Affair" — in the way Sade names names. Haven't I told you before, she sings: We're hungry for a life we can't afford. Even the album's title feels coded: It would be beautiful to shine bright, but I want to feel indestructible.
Because things are falling apart. It's not just the boy with his long lashes and fast car and ability to compartmentalize. It's that I don't know if I'll ever have a job that pays more than survival coin. Or a partner who will call because he likes to and because he said he would. It's that the news keeps saying "Reaganomics" and I can't afford the good college I got myself into. It's that my friends are all working plans — collecting diplomas or selling dope or both — while performing nonchalance.
To paraphrase. We considered as givens not just the grimy details of our hard knock lives, but also "the AIDS" we didn't understand, the lack of Black faces at local universities and the low-key PTSD of living in our city's "."
