At the stoplight next to the man holding a sign that says WHY LIE, WANT A BEER is a woman I’ve never seen before. As I pull closer I see that her sign says in bouncy letters:

DESPERATE, NEED

ONE HOUR IN 1996

I lower my window and meet her eyes—she has big, dark eyes with lots of lashes. I say, “What does that mean, ‘One hour in 1996?’”

“Ma’am, please, could you spare an hour, even fifteen minutes? Anything?”

“What do you mean? What exactly do you need?”

The woman hands me a piece of paper, her brows raised. I reach out for the paper. 

“Tell Yolanda,” the woman says in a low voice. “At Natural Wonders. Tell Yolanda she won’t find what she’s looking for with him. If she doesn’t believe you, tell her to look in his sketchbooks. She’ll see. Take this. Can you help me?”

I’m holding the note now and she is handing me a quarter but still staring me down and her eyes remind me of my friend’s baby’s eyes, a doll’s eyes, beautiful. “I can try,” I say, because the light is changing. I take the quarter and I’m noticing the 1996 under George Washington’s sliced-off neck when I feel a wind across my arms and my chest. I look up from the quarter and I’m in a parking lot like a dark sea, it seems even to undulate a bit, to slosh, and then it passes and I realize I am at the mall and I’m topless; I am wearing only my thrifted jeans and combat boots.

I duck down and creep toward the nearest car. It seems like all the cars in this parking lot are old. Near the mall I see a man slowly walking out, carrying a few bags; the bags look a little strange and the man, too, something about his beard or his cigarette? His shoes? A man is the worst thing that could be walking toward me right now. I dart between two cars and see a windbreaker in the backseat of one. I try the handle: it’s locked, but the window isn’t all the way up. I reach in and pull on the lock. Lucky for me that this car is so old. I open the door and grab the windbreaker and cover myself, stand up straight. The air is so crisp at this mall, sweet-smelling somehow.

Suddenly I remember the woman with the sign. She told me to find Yolanda at Natural Wonders. Is that the store with the rain sticks? I didn’t know they were still around. I walk in the sweet wind to the mall entrance, balling my hands up in the windbreaker pockets. I feel something in there and pull out a crumpled wad of papers. Two twenties—old twenties!—and a receipt from Taco Bell on Winslow Street, 3:14 p.m., September 20, 1996.

I stop just outside the mall entrance. Two women are coming out and I see it immediately—I see it in their halos of hair, even in their skin somehow, the truth of it—that I am in 1996, or this mall is, or the boundaries of the parking lot around the mall, and I know this truth all the way to the deepest part of me. I can question it no more than I question gravity or breathing air; the fact of it is all around me and I am participating in the fact of it myself.

I walk into the mall. On the right is a Glamor Shots studio, on the left is a movie theater with big vector images of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. I feel overwhelmed with the past, like when out of nowhere the air smells like waiting-for-the-school-bus-in-early-fall, but instead of a fleeting moment of nostalgia it’s a full-body experience, the moment realized, embodied, the smells of forgotten spaces unceasing, too much to absorb, every detail fascinating as a relic, a personal relic from my own life.

There was a paper—where’s the paper? It’s not in the pockets. I retrace my steps back out in the parking lot. I see it under the tire of the car I stole the windbreaker from. I open it up and it says

YOLANDA THIS IS YOLANDA

I again enter the mall and walk forward as if breaching a dune and seeing the full scope of the sea for the first time of the summer. The balconies are garlanded with autumn wreaths. Everyone is walking around in their bulky jackets, their leather sneakers. The light is warm and yellow, everything closer, cozier, deeper. I go up to the balcony rail and peer down into the ice rink. The ice rink calls to me, a potent nostalgia siren, irresistible.

I cannot ice skate with a windbreaker and no bra so I go to JC Penney and find the women’s section. I move hazily to the T-shirts with an extra collar sewn in, the racks of turtleneck dickies, the bright, bold sweaters with their triumphant shapes—triangles and squiggles tumbling across the sweaters like they never do anymore, not like this, not for the first time.

At checkout with my brand-new ancient bra, the woman rings me up silently, without eye contact. I am absorbed by looking at her face close-up. It gives me the feeling of looking at an old photo of my own mother, a familiar face with the layers of time peeled off, though I’ve never seen this woman before.

As I pass through the black plywood halls and to the skates counter, each thing I see is as familiar as it is new. The kid working (a kid, but older than me, living his quaint life at the skates counter for now, during a time I have revisited like a spy) hands me the hard plastic skates in a deep red.

I think what I want most is to wildly skate along the edge of the rink and then fling myself on my blades into the soft cushioned floor of the stands. And so I do that. In the middle of the rink three girls spin in tangential orbits, their white boots and tan tights blurring, shimmering. From above, Donna Lewis sings "I Love You Always Forever" and her voice encircles their spinning bodies.

I return my skates and go back into the mall.  I was never an adult here and I want to see Limited Too. There is a pen there I want to touch. I find it near the cash register, I pick it up. I touch my face with the plume of feathers protruding from the end. Ice blue. My designated color. We all had designated colors like Stephanie from Sleepover Friends whose colors were black, white, and red. I was experimenting with being an ice blue kind of girl, even though I wasn’t. In fact it was a continuation of this same experiment when I painted my apartment green and bought only green glassware and framed greenish needlepoint scenes from the thrift store. 

At Limited Too I grip the ice blue pen in my fist as if to crush it. The naivety of the girl who bought the pen is so precious it makes me angry. I want to throw the pen and scream about something, although I’m not sure what. I WAS A LITTLE GIRL ONCE maybe. I TRIED TO MAKE MYSELF LIKE THE COLOR BLUE. Maybe what I wanted to yell was ALICIA SILVERSTONE HAD A PEN WITH A POOF IN CLUELESS AND I WANTED ONE LIKE HERS, I WANTED A MAN TO KNEEL AT MY FEET AND HAND ME THE PEN SAYING “NICE STEMS” AND THEN I WANTED TO GO TO A PARTY AND FALL IN LOVE WITH A DREAMBOAT LIKE PAUL RUDD. I HAD TO WAIT FOREVER FOR THAT TO HAPPEN AND WHEN IT DID IT WAS WORTH IT AND I LOST EVERYTHING

I don’t scream. I leave Limited Too and find Natural Wonders by the food court. I pass the threshold holding my breath, as if walking into a temple. There is a man with an optimistic face and wire-rim glasses at the register. Near the corner where the rain sticks are displayed is a woman unloading more rain sticks from a big box. The woman has black hair partly slicked back into a scrunchie and I can see the arcing tunnel of her bangs from here. I step closer. 

The woman looks up from the rain sticks. “Excuse me,” I begin. She turns around and I see her name tag.

It’s Yolanda and she rolls her eyes when she sees me. “Oh, please.”

“I’m sorry? I’m actually—I have something to tell you, a message for you—”

“I know! I know! I won’t find what I’m looking for with him. This is the third—” she stops and looks me up and down, “—person in a Windbreaker that she’s sent to me this week.” She rolls her eyes again.

“Oh! Well, are you going to leave him? The guy with the sketchbooks?”

“I don’t know! Damn.”

“You’re still wearing your ring,” I point out.

She looks at the ring. She begins unloading rain sticks again. After arranging several stray sticks into the display she says, “I’m really on the streets?”

“I mean. You were holding a sign. I don’t know if you live on the streets or what. I didn’t get to talk to you that long because as soon as I touched the quarter you were gone, and I was here.”

Yolanda puts the last rain stick in the display and takes a step back. She peers into the sticks. “She must think I’m so dumb. She thinks I’m such a fool. Sending all these Windbreaker People.”

She doesn’t continue for several moments, so I lower myself to the floor in the Natural Wonders. I put my cheek against the carpet and close my eyes. The ambient rainforest sounds cocoon my body into a state of comfort that I had almost forgotten. It wasn’t that I was especially happy as a child, but I was a child, a real child unburdened by any great trauma. There were things I didn’t know. Things I still believed. Sweet things, like how the air is sweet here, like how the light is warm. With my face on the carpet watching sneakers pad around in the yellow light, people’s pants tapered at the ankles above thick, scrunched up socks, the worn-in shoes made of real leather, real canvas, with the sounds of a misting rain and the foreign calls of tropical birds and monkeys who still have habitats washing over me, I am able to reenter that state, which I now realize is a Zen state, an innocence protected by an absolute devotion to the present moment.

“You okay, ma’am?” The way Yolanda says “ma’am” reminds me of the Yolanda at the intersection.

I return to hands and knees for a beat and then stand up again. “I just needed to do that.”

For a moment we both look at the display of rain sticks. “Did the other Windbreaker People return to the present? What happens next?”

Yolanda fingers her delicate chain watch. “I need to get started on inventory. I don’t know what happens to y’all when you leave the store. I keep going home and making up with him and then y’all keep coming back the next day. I know what she wants me to do. She takes me for a fool. Trying to say I messed up her whole life and put her on the streets. Why’s it up to me to fix her mess? She can get herself off the streets. If you see her again, you need to tell her that. Tell her Yolanda sent you. Tell her I know exactly what I’m doing and I would do it again. I’d do it every day and I will do it every day no matter who comes in the store telling me to stop. I don’t care if he lied to me, I don’t care if he never drew anything a day in his life. You think I need him to be an artist? You think that’s why I’m with him? She doesn’t know anything about me. She doesn’t know me at all. She’s trying to write something over me that never happened. I gotta get back to inventory. Tell her not to send nobody else. Give me that note!”

I hand her the note and she scrawls on it, hands it back and now it reads

YOLANDA THIS IS YOLANDA

YOLANDA THIS IS YOLANDA

I put the note back in my pocket and leave the store, pausing again on the threshold and then stepping back into the mall— 

I’m back at the intersection in my car and Yolanda is gone. I put the car in park and hit my hazards. I give WHY LIE WANT A BEER guy the crumpled bills from the windbreaker and say, “Are you friends with Yolanda?”

“Yolanda?” He says. “Yolanda?!”

“She had big dark eyes like this,” I hold my hands in front of my eyes and wiggle my fingers to demonstrate her eyelashes.

“Oh, nah, I don’t know her. You mean Yvonne? Yvonne around. She at Winslow street I think. Hey thanks for this, ma’am, you have a blessed day!”

High on the telephone pole is a small red sign saying in black Times New Roman SANTA IS WATCHING YOU. I tack Yolanda’s note to the pole at eye-height. In my peripheral vision the black asphalt of the turn lane looks like a river. The cars rushing over our heads on the overpass have a water sound, too, like a dam constantly bursting.

There is something about my life now that will become sacred later, but I can’t know which part. It could be the highway sounds, the violent rushing of machines everywhere. It could be something like carpet. They’ve taken so much carpet away from us; the entire mall was carpeted and I never realized it. Who would ever have thought of missing carpet? Or of missing cotton and leather, who could have known that they’d replace all our clothes with plastic? And yet maybe it’s the plastic we will yearn for when it’s gone, not because we liked it or ever even noticed it, but because we were younger when it was there. Incredible the bounty my past self had access to, the vast quantity of Styrofoam and parking spaces, the heaping piles of daydreams and parties, how when the phone rang it could have been anyone. Oh well, oh well. I get back in my car and turn left.