The Mall

It has everything and nothing

Two weeks away and I can’t say I’m proud. 

But hey, we’re back, baby. We’re getting up. We’re making the bed. We’re going on a walk. We’re eating a nutritious meal. We’re making a little to-do list. We’re seeing that, at the top of the to-do list is: “buy new tips for your Apple Pencil,” and it’s been there for…a while now. We’re GETTING THOSE TIPS. You know what that means? 

We’re going to the Glendale Galleria. 

That’s right, fasten your seatbelts, kids. This isn’t an insightful entry. We’re not doing any metaphors for life and death. We’re not painting a tender portrait of a beloved relative. We’re taking the 5 to W Colorado Street, almost making a wrong turn at the exit and getting back on the freeway, swerving into the next lane to correct our error, muttering “shitshitshit”, and finally, gently cruising into an enormous free parking structure, where we get a spot right in front of none other than J.C. Penny.  

Let’s step inside, where it’s air conditioned and Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” is playing in the food court. Let’s smell the Panda Express. Let’s watch the teenagers, stewing in the last weeks of summer, gossip with their friends over orange chicken. 

The mall is right where you left it. Yeah, there’s some new technology, but you still can’t figure out where the bathrooms are and there is definitely wet toilet paper on 75% of the seats once you get there. 

I don’t know the Glendale Galleria. I’ve only been here a couple of times. But I understand the Glendale Galleria. I understand that there will be a trinity of big-box/ department stores on its various corners (Target, Pennys, Macys, in this case). I know that there will be kiosks. I trust that I will approach an escalator, thinking it’s going up, only to realize it’s going down. I know I said no metaphors, but come on. It’s right there. 

There will be teenagers. So many teenagers. Teenagers in their natural habitat. A kid with headphones walks past a Wetzel’s Pretzels, sulking. Then, like a gas station tube-guy pumped with air, his whole posture lengthens. He sees his friend! They hug. I feel young again. 

At the Apple store, I make my professional purchase, but the energy of the mall makes me goofy and immature. The guy who helps me does a “wellness check” on my device, just to make sure that yes, it’s the pencil that’s glitching. But I kind of already know that’s the issue, so I insist it’s “just the tip” I need. “Just the tip!” I say again, immediately mortified. As he’s ringing up the item, he asks what I have planned for the rest of the day and I think, I might wander into traffic. Instead I tell him I’m going to “walk around the mall because I find malls comforting.” “Cool” he says, in a tone that indicates he does not find that cool. 

I worked in a mall the summer before college, in the Kid’s Shoes department of Nordstrom. If someone had told me “I find malls comforting” while 8 hours deep into a shift selling Prada ballet flats to a middle schooler, I would have checked out, too. But that job was fine. I had friends. A lot of them were young people and it was also their summer gig. There was a consistent tension between the seasonal kids and the full-time adult employees. They thought we were clowns and we kind of were. I was blowing up balloons, crushing hard on the resident piano player on the first floor who did a bunch of Rihanna covers. Everything was so new. 

Leaving the Apple store, I am accosted by Zara just yards away, tempting me with its bold prints and cheap linens that disintegrate after four washes. I’m in the dressing room mere minutes after entering, with a rack of skirts and shirt-dresses. The thought “maybe I’ve outgrown this place” enters my mind while squeezing into acid-washed jean shorts. My body looks both thinner and fleshier at once. Gravity, man. Unable to accept reality, I purchase an unremarkable $27 top. It’s summer, I reason, wringing every last drop out of this excuse.  

In the checkout line, I smell the perfumes on display. They take me straight back to high school and my friend Simone’s bathroom that she shared with her sister. I don’t have a sister, and the fragrances they collected over the years always entranced me. Different shapes and sizes and smells, we’d put a generous amount on our wrists and in our hair before sneaking out to a party in the neighborhood. We’d always exit through her bedroom window on the ground floor, right above the trash cans. More than once I fell in those cans, defeating the purpose of the perfume. 

The mall was also where I had my first date ever, in a Jamba Juice. I got Caribbean Passions with a boy who played soccer. We talked mostly about where we were applying to college. He went to the fanciest private high school in Seattle, and I remember his “safety school” was my “reach school.” He would end up going to that safety and I would not end up going to that reach, and after a couple more dates we would never speak again. 

I can’t find Jamba Juice at the Galleria, and when my hunger grows I want nothing more than a Chipotle bowl. I sit and watch the people eat and swarm. It’s like a coral reef but also not like that at all. 

Next to me there’s a pair of kids picking at a bag of Hot Cheetos and drinking two different types of iced coffee– Dunkin Donuts AND Peet’s. They are terrifically high and playing with a mini skateboard. It has a ramp and everything. The girl wears a red shirt and has dyed her hair black; I can see her strawberry-blonde roots. The boy has a little mustache and studs in his ears. He does a kick-flip with his index and middle finger and then flicks the board over to the girl. This is wordless. They are so stoned. They rest their heads on each other’s shoulders. 

​​I went on another mall-date. It was at, I think, Taco Time? It’s like Taco Bell but is exclusive to the Pacific Northwest. They make really good burritos and even better tater tots. I placed my order and my date paid, which I found very chivalrous. I went to middle school with him, and had been pining for years. Finally, there we were. The fluorescent lighting gave our skin a corpsey glow. I can’t remember what we talked about, but it was nothing like the mini skateboard afternoon. No silent comfort, mostly this kind of thirsty chatter. The same feeling I get when I try on jeans shorts that aren’t for me. I wish this worked. I want to be the kind of person that this works for. Like Jamba Boy, he would also stop returning my texts. But he recently apologized for it, some 15 years later. “I actually really liked you,” he told me. I wish my sixteen year old self could’ve heard that. I needed it more then than I do now.

Oh, the mall! The scene of love and heartbreak and window-shopping and after-school evenings with friends eating fro-yo. In each store, something new. Try it, taste it, love it, despise it. Think of what could happen and who you could be.

Or, get in and get out. As I age, the mall is much better when I know exactly what I’m looking for. 

On my way to the car, I stray one last time. I stop in Banana Republic, because there are weddings on the horizon that are not mine. When I enter, a person who can only be described as The Happiest Man on Earth greets me. “How are we today?!” he asks. I say, “Fine, thanks. You?” He says he’s fabulous, and adds, “We’re in Banana Republic!! How could we not be??” 

I can think of a few reasons, but that’s beside the point.

I try on a dress and it fits. I don’t purchase it. Instead, I put it back on its hanger, neater than before. I’ve fed myself, seen the reef, bought what I came here to buy. That’s enough. I give the cheerful man a gentle wave as I exit, which he doesn’t see. He’s making a sale. Good for him. Good for me.