*

Winona Ryder and Sadie Frost as Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra 

Vintage mall interiors.

(This is a follow-up to THIS post.)

My parents were used to the old-fashioned familiarity of neighborhood shops. Local clusters of friendly retail and service establishments, where every shopkeeper knew your name. To them, malls were ominous abominations. Dark terrestrial city-caves of the future. My mother would say something like, “Welcome to Depression Valley” whenever we stepped inside the large new mall that had sprung up a few miles from where we lived. I heard her say it, but I didn’t feel it. Malls, like airports, felt like home to me. I had fantasies of living inside a mall.

(Heaven, to me, is a huge labyrinthine mall designed by Piranesi.)

I feel this is going to be a long post. Whenever I mentally transport myself inside that mall, I just don’t want to leave anymore. I’m not going to edit anything, it will all come out the way it comes out, tangents and all.

I was browsing a bookstore when I picked up a copy of Bridge of Terabithia. I had never heard of it, just something about the cover drew my attention. Suddenly this woman who seemed to have been following me around said, “That’s a really good book. My kids love it.” She didn’t look at me, just sort of glanced in my direction. There were no kids with her.

The blond elf-like girl who fascinated me so much. A sighting of her always was the biggest reward of the day. I didn’t know her name, nor did I know where she lived. But I knew where to find her. Not just her hair was blond, her skin was too; head to toe, she seemed to have been sculpted out of pure blond sandstone. One late afternoon, most people had gone home, she was sitting on one of the stone benches that ran alongside the sunken sitting area, alone. A filtered sunlight came in through the skylight above her, lighting up the thin fuzz on her bare legs. She was like a white vision in the dark space of the mall. A fleeting creature made out of thin phantom light. As I walked past her she smiled at me. It lasted less than a second, but I’ll never forget it. It wasn’t personal: she would have smiled at anyone walking past. But right now she smiled at me. I nodded, maybe I smiled back, like an alien trying to mimic human behaviour. Our paths crossed and then they diverged again.

(Years later I did learn her name. It was an ugly name: a crooked combination of harsh sounds that didn’t befit this shimmering being.)

My cousin was a nerd. The real thing, not the ironic kind. I was feminine, strangely angelic, and considered pretty with my long eyelashes and bright blue eyes. I was always kind of embarrassed to be seen with my cousin. I was underweight, tall, he was overweight, small, and there wasn’t a second I wasn’t aware of the comical difference between us. We were like the reflections of two funhouse mirrors that had come to life. But then I was always overly, ridiculously aware of myself and of everyone and everything around me anyway. I couldn’t take one step without seeing myself taking that step. We went to INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE at the mall, and the opening, young Indy with his heavy friend, reminded me of me and my cousin: there we were on the screen, having adventures. My cousin went to visit the comic book store afterwards, I tagged along. I loved going there, but not with him. He kind of lumbered through the store, buying comics, apparently against his will. Everything he did seemed to be against his will. He was alive against his will. He didn’t lumber just through the store, he lumbered through life. Back home, he didn’t seem to be happy with the comics he bought. He stored them somewhere and went on to play a computer game, against his will.

Evening at the mall. The weak twilight, the empty cars in the parking lot, gloomily reflecting the street lights, the people with their nondescript faces, everything seemed hollow to me. Like a shadow world that never sees daylight. We went to see BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II: me, my brother, and his friend Marcus. Marcus, who was black, was a movie buff. He was always going on about Spike Lee. He told me once that the Emperor from Star Wars was a clone, he said it like everyone knew that except me. He pronounced “Jedi” like “Jay-dee” for some reason. He could be outrageously funny, but whenever you tried to remember afterwards what exactly had been so funny, you could never really pinpoint it. Marcus’s humor didn’t manifest as specific jokes or quotable oneliners, rather he provided a general air of hilarity, where everything around you suddenly seemed like the absurd products of pathetic human endeavour. He saw right through hypocrisy. He was one of those people who could have become anything they wanted: surgeon, rockstar, landscape architect, comic book artist.

BACK TO THE FUTURE II. We were waiting for the movie to begin. In the row behind us, there were three girls. Who knows how those things start exactly, but suddenly Marcus and my brother were turned around in their seats and talking to the girls, teasing them, flirting maybe. One of the girls said “smartass” to my brother, he grinned. I hadn’t said a word, but as the friendly confrontation wound down, and Marcus and my brother turned to face the screen again, I felt a tap at the back of my head. It was the girl who sat in the middle. She had tapped me with the point of her boot. She looked like she might be a somebody at her school, not because of her looks, which were robust, but because of her confident attitude and her two wingmen. She looked at me and said, “Hey. You.” It sounded like a challenge. Or like she couldn’t really figure me out. I didn’t reply, and she left it there. Her friends laughed now and then during the movie, but she herself remained silent throughout.

Mall interiors from the 1970s/1980s.

My mother hated them, but to me, a kid, malls were exciting. They looked like small sci-fi colonies mixed with ocean liners, with their blood-red carpets, gilded railings, jungle plants, and crooked floor patterns. The mall, that’s where you found your precious toys. It’s where humans lived, and promises were fulfilled. Take an 1980s teen flick, and there’s a scene in a mall.

George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD shows one in all its kitschy glory.

I was about 12, when I saw her again: she was hanging out with her friends near the fountain. A blonde elf-like girl, the sun around which the other kids orbited, she laughed a lot. Whenever her friends laughed though, she seemed quiet, troubled even, biting her thumb; that’s when her eyes caught me. In a dark corner, two 16-year-olds, who seemed like real adults to me, were playing an arcade game and eating french fries; I wondered how they could play with greasy fingers. One burped loudly, but they didn’t laugh. Eyes on the game.

Suddenly these two kids rush past you on their bikes. You know one of them, he is an enemy. He gave you the finger once, the first time you saw anyone making that gesture. “Asshole,” he says. Someone tells them they can’t ride their bikes here, they shout something back.

Gino is this thin, moustached hothead with tight stonewash jeans and big white sneakers, and a permed mullet. He doesn’t walk, he bounces, like a Muppet; he moves fast, like someone who’s on his way to punch someone. He smokes and has a gold-colored necklace with his name, but better not joke about it, because Gino is the kind of guy who doesn’t get jokes. Your brother referred to him once as “Evil Freddie Mercury”. He always seems to be everywhere: when you go ice skating, you run into him there; when you go swimming, he’s at the pool; when you’re playing football in the field behind your school you know he’s going to show up. He looks at you—whenever you look at him, his eyes always immediately shoot back—but he leaves you alone and trots out of sight. You’re vaguely relieved to see him go.

The wall with flickering TVs plays an MTV video, you kind of watch as you wait for your mother to return, but not really. The two 16-year-olds have finished their game, they mumble some curses, one smacks the arcade machine, and they leave. You see Sebastian’s mother—Sebastian, the kid who stole money once. She passes you and you feel her eyes, but you pretend not to see her.

The lady in her mobility scooter, her bags of groceries tied to the handlebars. She is rotund and can hardly walk, and always takes the elevator. Sometimes people help her get in, more often they don’t. You cracked cruel jokes about her once when you were here with your brother, but really you just felt sadness.

You realize every kid is there with friends except you, and just when you’re about to discover some great truth about yourself and the world around you, your mother returns and you go home, your toys in the plastic toy store bag that you tried to hide from the blue eyes of the elegant blonde elf, who’s still laughing with her friends, and who, though nobody would have guessed it, would go on to play such a major part in your life years later.

– I Know The End, Phoebe Bridgers