If I Could Turn Back Time (6 page)

This didn’t fit any of his theories.

Since at least some part of my logical mind was clearly still at work, I could only conclude that I must have had a psychotic break. Something had triggered guilt, or maybe regret, that was traceable to this time, and I had to undo it—if only in the deep recesses of my memory—in order to return to normal.

It was a flawed theory, I realized that. I wasn’t entirely convinced that my logical mind would be on duty at all if I’d had a psychotic break, and I wasn’t at all sure that people had psychotic breaks in order to
fix
their psyches, but what did I know? Oliver Sacks’s
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
and other bestsellers about weird phenomena had sat, unread, on my shelves for years while I instead studied the more interesting (I thought)
Wall Street Journal
and
Financial Times.

Which left me here. Seemingly time-traveling, but having decided I was in the safety of my own mind and I just had a few things to work out. It wasn’t really that hard to buy—I’d had some rough years. There were definitely regrets.

Hell, maybe it was even Lisa’s news on the eve of my birthday that had lit a fire under some heretofore-unexamined desire to be Donna Reed. It wasn’t
impossible
. I’d had baby dolls as a kid. I remembered playing school with a little chipped blackboard and some stuffed animals in the basement. I’d had deeply traditional and sexually stereotyped ideas about my future once upon a time.

But I was turning thirty-eight—in fact, at this point I must
be
thirty-eight—and I knew the odds of getting pregnant had dropped tremendously since my late twenties. They drop every year. That doesn’t mean anything concrete, obviously, doesn’t mean it was impossible, but maybe I’d taken the statistics as comfort, even as justification for my not having a family. Was that really such a bad thing? More to the point, did I, somewhere inside, believe it was?

Now maybe my inner Donna Reed was screaming at me for equal time. Maybe Inner Donna Reed was pissed that Inner Mary Tyler Moore and Inner That Girl (aka Inner Marlo Thomas) had better wardrobes and hair and had, thus, won my allegiance.

Or … maybe part of me was just deeply, deeply tired. Maybe—and this seemed likely—part of me just didn’t want to spend my whole life doing it alone. I’d succeeded, certainly, but that didn’t mean it was easy. At the end of the day, I still had no one to count on besides myself. Very often—and on a conscious level—that was a really heavy burden.

So—time travel. What if I went back in time and did things differently? I already knew I could succeed and have a very comfortable career and financial life. I knew, even, that I could do just fine without a husband or longtime significant other. I knew I
could
manage very well on my own, thank you very much.

But at the same time, maybe I’d ignored a happier alternative.

In fact—I knew I was reaching into crazy, yet what about this
wasn’t
crazy?—maybe everyone went through this. Maybe this, which seemed like an eternal dream at the moment, would turn out to be a blip somewhere undetectable on my timeline that changed the course of my fate.

For better or worse.

In any event, I decided that the only thing I could do with this …
circumstance
 … whatever it truly was, was to go along with it. To live and breathe through it and to play it out, as crazy as it was. If it
was
a psychotic break—and that continued to be the only thing that made sense—it was still angst in search of an answer. Fighting it and trying to figure out the science or psychology of it was clearly getting me nowhere. It felt, very realistically, like many hours had passed with me pondering the question, with no answer. I’d never had a dream like this before.

So, instead, I had to figure out whatever I was supposed to figure out from it.

And that began with orienting myself to this memory.

That was, at the very least, a concrete problem to be solved. And concrete solutions were my forte.

From what Mom had said it was the week of my senior graduation. That was May. I turned eighteen two days before graduation, and my birthday was May 19, so that meant today was May 18. Wednesday.

Once again, I wished I had my phone so I could just look at it and confirm the day and date (and year), but that wasn’t happening, so I had to rely on my memory and logic. It was Wednesday. High school was almost over.

What had happened in the week before graduation? What was coming up in the next few days? Even the next few hours might be relevant. Who knew?

I searched my mind, but nothing important, nothing even remotely important, stuck out. Which wasn’t to say something important hadn’t happened, but only to say that I hadn’t committed it to memory when it
did
happen. Often, life-changing events are only recognized as such in the rearview mirror. But twenty years on is quite a long distance to see in that mirror.

All I could remember of this time was Tanya (my best friend) and me going to the pool and trying to get as tan as possible for the rounds of graduation parties that were coming up. Easier for her than for me. She had that tawny skin that always looked golden and tanned easily. Brown hair that got bright golden highlights in it from the sun. Hazel eyes that really could look green or brown, depending on the light.

I had to work a lot harder to get tan. Even though I was fair, with dark blond hair and light blue eyes, I didn’t tend to burn. But neither could I hold on to a tan to save my life. Two days after looking like a sunscreen ad, I’d look blotchy and pale again. So I
really
needed to work on my tan. I had a perfect green sundress all ready to go, while Tanya was opting for the more obvious turquoise. We were also going crazy with the Close-Up toothpaste, hoping for perfect Christie Brinkley white smiles with our tanned skin and highlighted hair.

And only then did it occur to me to wonder what I actually
looked
like at this point. I got up and made my way to the mirror on the door.

The first thing I noticed, even just getting out of bed, was that my body didn’t ache. It always did lately, either because of the muffin top I was constantly working to get rid of or because of the workouts I was constantly doing to get rid of the muffin top. It seemed like
something
always hurt, not just my back.

Not today, though. Today I felt as light as a ballerina. It was uncanny. Almost zero-gravity stuff. Just for fun I bent down to touch my toes—in my thirties my hamstrings had gotten as tight as banjo strings, so I didn’t think I’d get past my knees, but to my surprise I went all the way down easily and touched the cool wood floor.

My first thought was:
Sex would be SO great with this body!

Seriously.

What a fool I’d been to hold out all through my high school years, being such a high-collared prude instead of enjoying the hell out of this thin, tight body.

Next thought: Brendan.

Naturally.

Brendan Riley was my boyfriend in high school. From the tail end of tenth grade through twelfth, which I guess made him my boyfriend right now. I laughed out loud to myself. I had an eighteen-year-old boyfriend. Typical black Irish, with dark, wavy hair and light blue eyes. The lightest sprinkling of freckles over his cheeks and nose. He was beautiful, honestly. He’d set my standard for male beauty at a young age, and he was still the yardstick for my “type.” Hopefully I would be able to wrangle this dream to see him, but either way, he was out there somewhere. Wait till I told Sammy.

Assuming Sammy would believe anything I said and not just have me committed right away.

And assuming I wasn’t
already
committed, and this wasn’t just a manifestation of whatever I might be being obliviously treated for. Which seemed pretty possible.

This was the problem with spending a lifetime imagining different outcomes and scenarios: it was all too easy to imagine things that were too tough to really contemplate.

Back to now
, I reminded myself. Whatever
now
was. Back to the present thoughts. Back to the thing I was wrestling with above all else. Back to the past.

I looked in the mirror.

It was a shock. It doesn’t seem like it should have been: waking up in my high school bedroom, talking to my parents about my last week of high school, and knowing, therefore, that this was a dream about being in high school should
certainly
have prepared me to look in the mirror and see my high school self.
Or
my present self. Or J. Lo, or a Martian, or just about anything.
Nothing
should have been a shock.

But when I saw the smooth skin, the fuller cheeks and lips, and the bright, clear eyes, something cold ran down my spine. Previously I’d thought I hadn’t really changed that much from high school. I was definitely holding up all right, thanks to a lot of work and good genes, but, wow, it turned out I really looked quite a bit different. I honestly felt like I was seeing an old friend whom I hadn’t seen for a very, very long time.

And, obviously, in a sense I was: I was definitely seeing a face I hadn’t seen in twenty years, but wasn’t it so completely embedded in my subconscious memory that seeing it should have felt natural on some level? Why didn’t the part of my brain that knew exactly what was in the closets and drawers, and that knew exactly where I’d taped my Jon Bon Jovi pinup, know my own face as well as the material echoes of that time?

I can’t say, but I stood there, frozen, looking at my reflection until I realized I was holding my breath, and let it out in a heavy flow. My heart was pounding, racing. It was uncomfortable and scary. Not really
fun
, like you’d expect, but terrifying.

Was this what crazy felt like? Being trapped in a false “reality” and unable to break through to the other side? It was like floating around in a soap bubble that wouldn’t break. I could see, or remember, everything from my
real
world, so part of my mind was completely intact and logical, yet everything I looked at—the gauge I’d usually call the most trustworthy one—defied every single thing I thought I knew.

Time travel doesn’t happen. There are no time machines. And spontaneous time-hopping is a ridiculous notion, best saved for children’s books and sci-fi enthusiasts. Fun? Sure. In a movie.

But this was madness.

I was trapped, surely, in my own mind, and I couldn’t get out.

And who would believe me? No one who wasn’t experiencing the exact same thing could possibly understand. No scientist or doctor who hadn’t been there could treat this, unless the “treatment” was strong sedatives and a straitjacket.

This was the most alone I had ever felt in my life.

I took a bracing breath and looked back in the mirror, hoping—I don’t know—hoping I would morph back into myself or something.

Now, I’d never even
wished
to go back in time and be younger. I wasn’t one of those people who was constantly lamenting the past. Admittedly, when I’d gotten out of bed with no aches and pains, that had been pretty nice, and not something I’d really expected. But looking at my reflection made me feel, more than anything, like time had passed without my realizing it.

People drop out of our lives all the time, we all know that. Friends come and go. People join you for
a reason, a season, or a lifetime
, as the saying goes. But you never really stop and think about all the
selves
you lose on the way. I wasn’t the same person I was in high school anymore, obviously, but there were things about her I had liked. Qualities she had that I was sorry to have lost. A certain optimism, an absolute faith that everything would be all right and that I’d have everything I ever dreamed of, a security that came with having no real responsibilities and both parents, loving and present and comparatively young.

I saw all of that in the face in the mirror. Crazy or not, I saw truth there. All of those thoughts and confidences and dreams. And that, perhaps, was the biggest difference between my eighteen-year-old face and my thirty-eight-year-old one: A lot of the dreams had gone out of me. There were too many things I didn’t believe in anymore. I’d lost a lot of my optimism.

Yet there it was in the face in the mirror.

Physically, the differences were to be expected: My eyes were completely without crow’s-feet. There were no faint ghost lines where I raised my eyebrows. My mouth was fuller than I’d ever realized it was, though I could recall being embarrassed by my pillow lips because they definitely were not “in” back in those days. Now I saw it was flattering, though. Youthful, you might redundantly say.

It was still going to take a decade or so for that to be considered desirable.

My hair was a ridiculous mess of layering and strawlike highlights from the sun and chlorine. Now I knew how to fix that with some good conditioner, a blow-dryer, and throwing out my old lavender curling iron, which smelled like burning rubber when it was turned on, and which had left countless burn marks on my wood dressing table. But then I’d been doing my best, and my best left a lot to be desired.

So perhaps the most surprising thing of all—no matter what had brought me to this dark old corner of my mind—was that, more than envying the girl I once was, I kind of felt sorry for her.

I looked at my youthful face in the mirror and saw my eyes shift—“smize,” Tyra Banks would call it in a couple of decades on
America’s Next Top Model—
with the secret knowledge that I was being given a second chance to
enjoy
my history and relive those magical make-out sessions of youth without being a cougarish creep.

Because, make no mistake, Brendan was really cute. My days with him had been sweet and romantic and exciting and in so many ways wonderful. I know every generation looks at their youth as a time of so much more innocence, but I think that is particularly true for the pre-9/11 generation. There just wasn’t as much
fear
in the air, back in those days. There was a hope and positivity, at least for me, that I didn’t fully realize I’d lost until the very moment I was standing in my old room, surrounded by my old stuff, looking at my young face.