Great Suburban Traditions No.8: Going To The Mall

If you wanted to put a positive spin on a trip to the mall, you could point out that it’s full of lovely young women flashing you friendly smiles. But don’t delude yourself that they’re up for the kind of water closet cubicle fun that the seasonally employed, nihilistic main character of ‘Bad Santa’ indulged in with middle-aged housewives during his lunch break. These are commercial smiles aimed at dislodging only hard cash from your trousers, and presumably it still works. For a tight-fisted misanthrope, though, the real fun part of going to the mall is to talk to a Young Flashing Smile for five minutes, buy nothing, and then watch the tortured way she will try but fail to bid you a friendly goodbye.

I was at the mall yesterday, and even though the Financial Times is claiming on today’s front page that the US economy is now in recovery, that news has yet to manifest itself in the nation’s sanitised kirks of commerce. Customers were scarce, but there was an abundance of sales people, and those on the open concourse with their market-style stands were the most desperate of all. Years of looking away from hard men’s stares in English pubs hasn’t quite trained me well enough to avoid the lurking eye of the commission-hungry, artificially fragrant, high-heeled harpie who insists on telling you that Mrs. Pop would love this revolutionary new nail varnish.

“Why is it revolutionary? Does it make you take to the hills with an armed militia and plot the overthrow of the military-industrial complex?”

“Hey, what’s the accent? Are you from Australia?” is usually the response to that kind of comment. Training taught them to keep the smile big, but the talk must always be nice and small. It’s around this point, as they guess that you might be mildly insane, that the veneer of civil discourse starts to betray its first cracks in the sales assistant’s voice. At the same time, your presumed madness might be their best chance of a sale today, so they’ll make one last effort by halving the price.
This happened yesterday when I walked into a posh chocolate shop. Following the statutory agreement that we were both doing fine, I didn’t make an immediate grab for the shop’s most expensive items, so the saleswoman told me that Halloween goodies were two for the price of one. I bought some stuff as a salve for my girls’ football team, because they’re all mewling that they have to play on Halloween. Then the saleswoman charged me full price. “Er, didn’t you just tell me they’re two for price of one?” I asked. “Ha ha, so I did,” she laughed, almost hysterically, like she’d been saying it was just a generous offer on the spur of the moment, but she didn’t really mean it. So could you pay the full price? Pleeeease?

It wasn’t so hectic in the bigger shops, where staff are possibly less concerned about the faceless parent company going bust. The reason I actually went to the mall was to buy a roasting dish on offer in one of the department stores. I couldn’t find the one I wanted, and the only person visible was a teenage sales assistant, who ignored me because she was too busy texting. One day it will occur to American retailers to train their staff to help people, but without all the oily pushiness and naked insincerity. That day will be when we’re all up in the hills having a hell of a nice day with our armed militias.

Rabbits And Recession

My next-door neighbours asked me to look after their dog for a couple of days, so last night I took the mutt for a walk at twilight. She’s a malleable black Labrador that jumps back at a rustle in the leaves and runs from runty, yapping curs a quarter of her size. I admire her pacifist leanings in showing no desire to hassle the deer we saw, or the skulking fox in the undergrowth of the nearby wood.

Our route was illuminated by thousands of fireflies, those amazing insects that are wise enough to simply light up their back-ends when they want to have sex. Other than the odd passing car, a Dad and his two boys at the playground, and a handful of others out dog walking, it was already quiet by 9pm. Even in houses with lights on, you saw no signs of life besides the odd flickering TV screen. We could just as easily be living way out in the countryside.

The other conspicuous thing since I last walked around my local streets is the comparatively high number of empty houses, either available for rent or up for sale. Until a couple of years ago, they would have been sold or inhabited almost as soon as they were empty. Now, families are suddenly gone and you never get to hear their stories. Ask a neighbour and they’ll shrug. Does that house belong to the bank now? No one knows, or wants to say. In suburbia, even the recession is silent.

This morning, I took the hound out early, watching birds of all colours and sizes at their most active hour - blue jays, cardinals, nuthatches, wrens, and three blackbirds having an argument. A woodpecker hammered away at a tree trunk, somewhere out of sight. There were also two rabbits on a front lawn, guarded but not alarmed at our approach. This year rabbits have been an increasingly common sight, and no more unusual than a grey squirrel. When I tell my daughters that dinner’s on the lawn, it just needs to be caught and cooked, they are no longer upset by my lame stab at black humour for the U-teens.

I’m not one for omens, but I recently read Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, about the recession in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, caused partly by drought, and partly by the environmental rape of the previous decades, when farmers rushed to rip up the grass lands of the High Plains and plant wheat. The only creature to thrive was the rabbit, and for thousands of poverty-beaten people its meat became one of the few sources of food, pickled for nourishment through the barren winters. Towns organised rabbit drives, where thousands of the creatures would be clubbed to death in a single afternoon, both to provide food and to control a pest that might eat any of the few crops that managed to grow.

The current economic woes haven’t yet reached the point where I’ll meet my neighbours out on the street wielding a baseball bat rather than a dog leash. At the same time, the financial news delivers little besides stagnation and slump. Walking tonight in the gloom, I may begin to imagine those empty houses filled with the wandering and the dispossessed, sleeping on bare floors and roasting culled rabbits on a rusty, flickering grill fuelled by firewood from nearby Rock Creek Park. Maybe they’ll be singing to pass the time. Finally breathing human life into suburbia.