CVS

I'm at my parents' house, the house I grew up in, for the most part, and earlier today I had to make a run to the drug store, for diaper cream and wipes, which I'd forgotten in the rush of packing. This drug store--like most of the places of business in my hometown--has been here for decades, and as I pulled up to it and parked, right in front of the store, I had that feeling I get every time I come "home" that time is slipping all over the place. 

As I walked up to the entrance, to buy my diaper cream, mind you (diaper cream! I am a mother!), I was no longer thirty-nine but eighteen, and it was the night before my parents drove me to college in a packed Country Squire station wagon, and I was meeting my friend Kate, who lived up the road in the next town over, so we could buy school supplies to bring along to school. School supplies! How ridiculous, I think now, although I guess we were more in the market for dorm room supplies, shampoo and such, although to think now that I must have wondered if these items would be hard to find on campus seems unfathomably naive.

But this is not what I was thinking as I walked up and down the aisles, not looking for what I needed, yet, just walking. I was thinking: That was yesterday, not twenty years ago. I remember what I was wearing, the shorts and T-shirt, the sneakers with the stepped-on heels, how my skin looked: tan, what I was feeling: unbearably nostalgic in that self-glamorizing eighteen-year-old fashion, what I heard: my friend's unmistakable laugh in the make-up section, where I used to buy cover-up and green clay masks--do teenagers do this still, or are the green clay masks another relic in the teenage girl graveyard of self-improvement tools?

What has happened in these twenty years? I found myself thinking. Everything--most of my life--and yet nothing at all. I have two children, and sometimes I need to buy diaper cream, but I am still that same freckled girl who thought she was so old and wise and ironic, buying pencils to take off to college, quite easily made to laugh so hard in a drug store over something moronic that a clerk is summoned to check on the girls in the make-up aisle, girls whose idea of make-up is chapstick, girls who look like they're playing dress-up when they experiment with mascara, girls who will someday, two decades later--or at least one of them will--walk back out of this very same drug store wondering how the last twenty years disappeared in the blink of an eye, the firm slam of a car door, the turn of a key.