themall

Nothing makes me feel older than the mall. Even though I am only twenty-seven and even though I work with kids, the moment I step inside the Mall of New Hampshire on Sunday evening, I instantly feel like I am some doddering old scholar who has been slaving away on a manuscript in an ivory tower for the past forty years, wholly disengaged from the real world. And the real world, it turns out, is bright and shiny and empty.

I am not being cute. Most of the stores do seem to be empty, although the mall is filled with people. Most of them are congregated in places like the Apple Store, the AT&T store (whose design is so similar to that of the Apple store I’m surprised they haven’t been sued for intellectual property theft), the Windows store (likewise, but that's older news), and the food court - or just walking around, like me. The most conspicuously empty of the stores are the new ones, the ones that have popped up since the last time I was here. (I wonder vaguely when that was. Maybe a year ago? Two? I know I have been to other malls - the one in Burlington at some point last spring, for sure - but it's been a while since I've been to this particular one. Not that they're all that different, of course.) There is a crepe place with some clever, punny name, completely deserted, one late-teens/early-twenties employee looking bored behind the counter. Even though you know that if you told people there was a crepe place at the mall, you'd get, "oh my god that sounds amazing, we need to go.” You can just see the comments on the Facebook post. But it’s one of those things that really only sounds appealing when you imagine that it’s somewhere else. You get jealous of the people in New Jersey or California or wherever who get to have a crepe place in their mall and take it for granted. But then when it shows up at your mall, in your town, you never go, and then it goes out of business, and you can go comfortably back to just passively longing for it.

That’s how my students are with the whole mall business, by the way, which is maybe one reason why this place still seems so foreign to me in its youngness. I don’t work with kids who spend their weekends hanging out at the mall. They are a degree removed from that. They still consume the same media as those kids, but they are unable to actually make it a reality, since we live so far away from anything resembling a mall - even Walmart is an hour-plus drive, even Walmart is a trip, a source of excitement - so they haven’t quite learned to become jaded and bored with the place. They would still be awed by all this brightness and busyness. Not quite the same way I am, though. Their awe would be aspirational. Mine is currently oscillating between nostalgia, amusement, and misanthropy.

I am at the mall because I need to buy a dark dress shirt for my Aunt’s funeral the next day, because I know the expectations of funerals and my extended family well enough to know that they would view it as slightly inappropriate if I showed up in a colorful shirt. That they take seriously the notion that dark colors are a signifier of one’s mourning. And even though I read enough postmodern literature in college to know that this is an arbitrary social convention, even though I have written papers on semiotics and signifieds and so on, I will make this compromise to the society in which I actually live. I will spend like a good little capitalist, buy a new shirt even though I already have plenty of perfectly good shirts I could wear.

But I haven’t actually entered a store yet; I am taking a stroll around the mall first. I am doing this for a couple of reasons - first, to stretch my legs, since I have been in the car for nearly three hours already, with only a couple of quick stops. First, at a gas station in Lancaster to fill up my car and purchase a bottle of water; then, at the McDonalds in Lincoln to use the bathroom. (McDonalds is a great place to use the bathroom without feeling like you have to buy anything; most of them have a separate set of doors near the bathrooms, so that you can slip in and out without seeing or being seen by a single person.) I am also walking around the mall for the sake of sating my own curiosity regarding what it is like these days, and reassuring myself that even if I am not of “the people” then at least I can exist among them, that I am capable of mixing with them and not seeming like that out-of-touch hermit, that I can criticize capitalism as a system without disparaging the people who exist as part of it.

What I want is to be the sort of person who goes to the mall because he has to and then has all of these brilliant thoughts and observations and witty remarks about late capitalism and modern society and so on and so forth, that he can then write about, in the style of someone like David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen or maybe even a particularly high-spirited Chomsky.

Every store is playing a different song, carefully chosen to go along with its aesthetic, I’m sure, after a series of focus groups and surveys and spreadsheets. There is also music playing in the hallways of the mall. We are terrified of silence, of stillness, of any moment that is not filled up by media, and I can imagine what one of those cultural critics would have to say about that. But I am torn; I see their point, and yet I also love the sense of chaos and positivity that it brings. One of the songs I hear a snippet of is “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas, and I am momentary transported back to senior year of high school, when we used to sing that song at every party, when it was the anthem of our group of friends, a statement against the pretentions of the school music programs to which we did devote a lot of our time. The lyrics are stupid and asinine (when it lists the days of the week, it says Saturday twice) but that was the point. It’s supposed to be stupid and meaningless and fun, and it was a point of pride for us that we understood that that sort of things has its place too. A little nonsense now and then. The necessity of Dionysian frenzy.

I had been listening to Joanna Newsom in the car, which seems absurd - poetic, quixotic, pretentious - now that I am inside. As do the things I was thinking about. That all of this was going on the whole time, while I was pondering the aesthetics and ramifications of the interstate system, whether I was for or against it, on the whole, in a symbolic sense - while I was navel-gazing, essentially - real people were living their real lives here.

I parked outside of JCPenney, having decided at some point along the drive that that was where I would buy my shirt. I wouldn’t look for the cheapest place. I wouldn’t insist upon going to a fancy place, or a trendy place, or somewhere that I knew so-and-so shopped for their clothes. JCPenney will be good enough. It is familiar. I have shopped there before. I know what to expect. I know where the men’s section was - on the second floor, up the escalator.

Getting on the escalator right before me is an approximately eleven-year-old kid, who from his behavior I would guess falls somewhere on the autism spectrum. He greets me enthusiastically and tells me about how much he loved escalators. I give non-committal, polite responses. His mother (I assume) stays and waits at the bottom. As soon as he reaches the top, the kid goes straight for the down escalator, and I wonder how long the mother will be patient, will indulge this weird pleasure and interest of his.

I look through all the dress shirts and struggle to find one in my size, which has been a source of both annoyance and pleasure over the past year: the scarcity of the men’s small. For a while, I blamed it on the North Country, playing into the stereotype that all the hunting and the ATVing and the conservative politics were somehow tied to image of shirts that only came in XL and above. But here I am in Manchester, which actual city folks might mock as a small, dinky town but by New Hampshire standards really is “the big city,” and I’m having the same problem. But it’s not a problem you can complain about: it would sound like fishing.

I finally decide upon a gray shirt, which is apparently on sale for twenty dollars, down from fifty, and bring it to the cashier. He is probably a couple of years younger than me, ambiguously ethnic. Maybe Middle-Eastern or Hispanic. But really just American. The child of immigrants, maybe, but more likely a grandchild. No accent. Clean-cut and neat, very thin. Possibly gay. He informs me that the shirt was on sale because of Black Friday and I remark that Black Friday isn’t for a couple of weeks, and he replies that this is “a taste of Black Friday.” I say something about how everything is getting earlier and earlier, thinking about how Halloween displays go up in September and Christmas displays in October. He says something, good-naturedly, about how the company just wants to pass along savings to customers; matching his tone, I reply that they just want to sell stuff. It’s a pleasant, agreeable interaction.

Here it is; here’s my story, my critical observation about the absurdity of late capitalism. Words divorced from meaning: Black Friday just a label, a name, a way of selling goods. I hand him my twenty-dollar bill and he puts my receipt in the bag. No change. I realize too late that I should have said I didn’t need a bag, since it seems wasteful to use a plastic bag to carry a single shirt, but it isn’t worth going back, and besides, a bag is a quick, easy way to communicate to the other employees in the store that I am not shoplifting, and therefore get me back out into the world where, if I am lucky, the sun hasn’t completely finished setting and I will get to see a sliver of color as I head onward - first, to Dunkin' Donuts, to procure a coffee for the morning (a necessity every time I spend the night at my dad’s house, since he doesn’t drink coffee) and then, finally, to my destination.