My fortune cookie tells me I’m exactly where I need to be. I’m sitting in the food court of the Opry Mills Mall eating a plate of orange chicken with fried rice and drinking a fountain Coke Zero. Is this where I'm supposed to be? It seems fitting, but also a little sad. I'm enjoying the moment, though, as I watch a mall employee ready the carousel in the center of the food court.
The mall is crowded for a Monday morning: sales associates grabbing coffees before the security gates at their respective stores rise to let them in; solo shoppers with Christmas lists; families who had to push two tables together to fit all their kin; mothers and their babies in strollers, so many mothers and children, mothers who breastfeed underneath blankets, who portion out chicken nuggets and French fries from Burger King onto Styrofoam plates, mothers who wrangle siblings for a photo with Santa, mothers who dole out Goldfish crackers and yogurt balls and sippy cups of water and milk and juice.
Even though I am a mother, I don’t feel akin to these other mothers. My daughter is in daycare today, and the weight of the guilt is heavy. All I have left to do for the semester is grade, and maybe I could do that during her naps if I kept her at home. Maybe I should have her here with me. But she loves daycare, her teachers and her friends. And they love her. When I went to pick her up the other day, she was in the middle of all the babies shaking a tambourine. It looked like a baby version of band practice.
I thought that after a few months of daycare, this guilt would subside, but it still rests in me like a sleeping animal.
Carl texts me pictures of items I’ve asked him to get from Whole Foods for the baby: the peach yogurt she eats like a champ, a ripe avocado that I’ll mash with a bit of lemon for her to try, organic apple juice to help with her cough. I see the irony of me eating this horrendous meal while I meticulously plan a week of new foods for my daughter.
I ate a lot of Panda Express when I was pregnant. When I walk up to the queue, seeing the big bowls of glittering orange chicken is still comforting. I also ate a lot of leafy greens and protein and tried to eat mostly healthy. But there was definitely trips to Chipotle and Cold Stone and Jeni’s and Daddy’s Dogs and of course, Panda Express. And of course the guilt of that too, the I should be eating better for her.
It seems that motherhood is always wondering if you’re doing it right despite knowing there is no right way to do it.
And right now, the baby is at daycare having a good day and I'm at the mall enjoying my meal.
A bell sounds throughout the food court and the carousel takes its first ride.
*
Opry Mills is largest outlet shopping destination in Nashville. Formerly, it was the site of Opryland USA (or more colloquially known just as Opryland), an amusement park in suburban Nashville, Tennessee. Known as the “Home of American Music,” Opryland USA featured musicals alongside the classic amusement park thrill rides. Opryland was also billed as more of a “show park” rather than a “theme park” because of its focus on musical production that represented a wide array of country, jazz, gospel, bluegrass, pop, and rock and roll.
The park thrived until it didn’t. It was doomed by location (situated between the Cumberland River and Briley Parkway) and Nashville’s climate, restricting operation to weekends in the late fall and early spring, only open full-time in the summer. I’ll spare everyone the entire history of Opryland’s demise, but eventually the site was demolished and the Opry Mills mall came into existence on May 12th, 2000 under the ownership of the Mills Corporation, which later was acquired by Simon Property Group.
Opry Mills today is a single-level mall, which, to me, is less desirable than a multi-level mall. There is something indescribable about ascending, or even descending, an escalator. There is a unique magic to getting from one level to the next in a matter of seconds.
The mall today has over 200 stores, including outlet stores (woo!). The mall is still surrounded by music and attractions such as The Grand Ole Opry just right around the corner, the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, Gaylord Springs Golf Links, the General Jackson Showboat, Paula Deen’s Family Kitchen, and a Bass Pro Shops. The mall itself also houses a Regal Cinema, a Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, Aquarium: an Underwater Adventure, a Dave & Buster’s, and a Rainforest Café.
I just finished reading Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton, an installment of Bloomsbury Publishing’s Object Lessons—a series of brief, beautiful books that animates the lives of ordinary objects. The book made me want to go to the mall, immediately. It brought me to Opry Mills, of course, but it also made me want to travel back in time.
I wanted to travel to my youth, to the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey where my mom used to take my brother and I to My Favorite Muffin for mini blueberry muffins. Or to Westchester Mall in White Plains with the Warner Brother’s store, the giant figure of Bugs Bunny dressed as the Statue of Liberty holding the Declaration of Independence tablet in one hand, and in the other, the eternal torch. I wanted to go into KB Toys and look at all the Barbie dolls. I wanted to try on shoes in Kid’s Footlocker, placing my socked foot into the metal shoe sizer and watching the contraption close in on my toes. I wanted a scoop of vanilla ice cream from Häagen-Dazs. I wanted to walk into Abercrombie & Fitch on a schoolday afternoon, my mom having picked me up early, the two of us entering into the mist of perfume, woodsy tinged with bright fruit, and perusing the racks for a new denim skirt. I wanted a tuna melt from the Jewish deli in the food court, or sesame chicken from Manchu Wok, or a slice of cookie cake from Mrs. Fields. I wanted to try on bodycon dresses at Forever XXI or to look into the glass case at Macy’s and admire all the Michael Kors watches, the ones girls at my school had and wore with such ease, all those shimmering diamonds circling around the opalescent faces.
The mall of Matthew Newton’s youth was the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a beautiful recollection of childhood, Newton writes about waiting for his mother, “eagerly awaiting her return to us,” outside of Gimbels department store where she worked. He describes sitting in the passenger seat of his father’s gold Plymouth Duster, a baseball game on the car radio, his sister skating up and down the sidewalk adjacent to the car.
“Our family was happy at the mall,” Newton writes. “Part wonderland and part bazaar, it was a place that had nothing we truly needed yet everything we wanted.”
After what feels like eternity, his mother exits the store and a young Matthew runs toward his mom until they collide in an embrace. She brings him bakery bag from Daisy Donuts, thumb print cookies bought especially just for him. “Tell us everything,” his sister pleads as the family leaves the mall to return home.
The scene reminds me of when I was home from college during the summer and my mom was working at Macy’s. My family shared cars and I often was the one who volunteered to go pick her up. I was eager, too. Eager to hear the wild stories about all the crazy customers, eager to see if she’d used her Bonus Bucks to get me something she saw me eyeing from the store, eager to drive around the corner to the Cheesecake factory where we’d share potstickers and a Luau Salad or to pickup takeout from somewhere closer to our apartment in Delray Beach, maybe Tomasso’s or Bamboo Wok.
I remember waiting in the car for her, my window rolled down with the radio off so I could eavesdrop as the other employees headed for their cars. I watched them clutch lunchboxes now empty and discard Starbucks cups into the trash. I watched them laugh and wave goodbye to each other. And then my mom would walk out holding a plastic Macy’s bag filled with something for me, something for herself, something for my dad or my brother, and she would squint her eyes as she adjusted to the dark as she found her way to the car. She’d get into the passenger seat and sigh and I’d drive us down the levels of the parking garage. When we cleared the mall altogether and made it to Glades Road, she’d start talking.
I was waiting for my mom because I wanted to help out, of course, but also because I had nothing else going on. I had no plans, no friends. I was boyfriendless. I was between years of college, between guys I was seeing, between wanting to go out and wanting nothing to do with anyone. I was depressed. I was anxious. I wanted to be with my mom more than anyone. I’d meet her for lunch at Mariposa inside of Neiman Marcus during the day. I’d come to the mall and walk around, stop at her register inside of Macy’s and wait for her to clock out for lunch.
Sometimes if I really needed her, she’d leave her post and walk me outside of the store and listen as I cried about this or that, as my world was falling apart and my mind was crumbling. Her world was the store. When one works retail, one’s life becomes the store. You are always coming and going to the store. You are always calculating time until your next break, until lunch, until closing, until you can clock out. You want it to be dead but you also are bored if it’s not busy.
I, myself, have worked at many stores in the mall, including a summer stint at Macy’s between my junior and senior year of college. I worked at Abercrombie & Fitch at the Town Center Mall when I turned seventeen and was old enough to work in the state of Florida. I worked at Hollister at the College Mall in Bloomington, Indiana when I was a sophomore. I worked again at Abercrombie & Fitch at Town Center as a Manager in Training when I finished grad school and had no idea what to do with my life. I worked at Lululemon at the Americana at Brand in Glendale, California during the pandemic when I was teaching remote and we needed the money.
Working at the mall is a completely different experience than being a customer. When I worked retail, I envied the freedom patrons had to come and go as they pleased, to leave the premises and move on to the rest of their day. I longed for the outside world, despite how much trouble it brought me. I longed for my bed, for the comfort of home, for the beach, for the ability to look up at the sky and search for God in the great blue above.
*
The Monroeville Mall was one of Pittsburgh’s first enclosed shopping malls.
“By affording opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment, by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void.”—Victor Gruen (forefather of the American shopping mall)
For a time, it lived up to Gruen’s promise. The Monroeville mall promised a climate-controlled setting where people congregated. The mall had waterfalls and fishponds and an indoor ice skating rink and a monolithic clock tower. It was the set of George A. Romero’s horror film, Dawn of the Dead.
And then, the mall was completely renovated between 2003-2004. Oddly enough, these are the years that my novel, The Brittanys, takes place. Another uncanny detail is that Matthew Newton and I share the same birthday. I digress.
The renovation of the Monroeville Mall also included a major expansion. And we see this happen more and more these days; malls of the past becoming more equipped for the present, or even sometimes, looking ahead to the future.
“Aspiration is key to a shopping mall— not only to its success, but also in its appeal. It is a hopeful place that perpetually embraces the new, where now is forever” (Newton).
What I love about Shopping Mall is how Newton combines memoir and research in a seamless and enjoyable fashion. The book showcases the mall not only as a place of consumerism, a collection of stores where goods are bought and sold, but as a place of “curiosity, ritual, and fantasy.”
For me, the mall is all these things. But it is also akin to a place of worship. Weird as that might sound, it’s true. It’s a place I go to find myself when I am lost. It’s a place to gather my thoughts and be alone among other people. It’s a place to treat myself, to slow down when life is too much, to rejoin society when I feel so distant I can’t bear it.
“Reentry to the mall triggers, a kaleidoscopic rush of memories– from your first visits as a child or the countless times you rode the Easter train at center, court, to that afternoon as a teenager spent suit shopping for your high school dance or as an adult pleading with the clerk at customer service to issue a refund. Entering the mall is like tuning into an unbroken neural frequency, a signal at once individually unique yet universally relatable” (Newton).
After weeks of turmoil and broken friendship, the narrator of The Brittanys meets her best friend at the mall where all is seemingly forgiven over perusing Sephora for lip products and scoping out cute boys in the food court. Both girls enter the mall of unsure of how the afternoon will unfold. They leave as friends, once again, back to the way things were.
*
My absolute favorite mall is the Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas, Nevada. I have such fond memories of going there with my mom on vacation, randomly showing up on days when there was in fact a fashion show right in the middle of the mall. I once flew to Vegas from Florida to spend a weekend with a friend for her birthday. After an exhilarating few days, her flight left early in the morning while mine was a red eye later that night. I spent the afternoon walking the Fashion Show Mall without a care in the world, buying things I didn’t need that would make it hard to close my suitcase.
To this day, I often find myself shopping as if there is some perfect outfit that will finally make me happy. This one purchase will solve everything. Of course it doesn’t. It never does. It couldn’t possibly. But there is the fantasy of fixing oneself with something as simple as buying clothes.
“Such joy is intrinsic to the appeal of a shopping mall. It’s what attracts us there in the first place, and what entices us to return. Not only in the joy of deliberating over objects we desire, but in the joy of participating in the fantasy of the mall—suspending all disbelief and disappearing into a world within a world. When we visit a mall we seek an emotional experience. When we enter a dressing room and look in the mirror, we might see a better version of ourselves or perhaps the person we wish to become…visiting a mall is as much about the future as it is about the past, as much about experiences that have happened as it is about experiences to come” (Newton).
But I'm never alone when I go to the mall. I'm surrounded perhaps by other people with this same feeling, this same hope of perfecting the self through majestic purchase. Or else they’re there for escape, to escape the daily trivialities that can feel so big and important.
I remember going to Yankee Candle (which the Opry Mills Mall still has for some reason) and moving from candle to candle smelling each one, like there was a scent that would fix my anxiety. Or when I got older, inspecting each item of clothing at Forever XXI in an attempt to win over a boy with the ideal garment. Or eagerly awaiting the Nordstrom annual sale so I could finally solve all my problems.
Every time I step into a dressing room, there is a deep privacy that I experience. Locking the door and undressing in this foreign space, literally becoming flesh once again before trying something on to see if it fits, is sort of like being reborn.
And now when my daughter is with me sitting in her stroller seat and biting down on her Winnie the Pooh teething toy, I share this quiet moment with her, the two of us in the solitude. She somehow knows to be still, as if my life going to malls has been programmed in her. When we leave the mall, shopping bags conveniently resting in the undercarriage of her stroller, the cold winter air hits our faces and we share the experience of re-entering the real world.
The mall as a portal. The mall as a reprieve.
The mall as the chorus of my life that I always want to sing
—
A link to Shopping Mall because you should read it!
Subnivean recently published some fiction of mine, “The Animal Man,” based on my summers working as a day camp counselor in South Florida— all that heat, all those crazy kids, and all the wild and unruly moments.
Rapidly approaching locally at The Porch: a one-day in person workshop for “Writing in a Flash” on January 27th— open to all genres!
And on February 3rd, I’ll be leading a virtual one-day workshop, “Short Shorts,” for Lighthouse Writers.
As always, thank you for reading, and here’s a shameless plug to say that I now accept a small, optional fee if you wish to become a paid subscriber :)
***
In the new year, I’ll be starting a writing club, Snack Time: Writing Between Meals, that will meet online once or twice a month. Please reply if 1) you’re interested and 2) with some days/times that work best for an hour of writing. You can join once, twice, every time, or simply whenever you’re available. Cost will be $10 per session with an option to snag 5 session for $35.
The hour will focus on a short piece of writing followed by a lil discussion and a writing prompt. We will also chat about craft and form, and I’ll be open to suggestions for topics as well.
Please respond with some feedback that will help me get this group underway in 2024!!
Shaha used to be my middle name. Great article just went to Panda Express a week ago. What a crazy world we are in!