Mall Goddess by Marilee Dahlman

Mall Goddess | Marilee Dahlman

Let’s put this into perspective. There were problems in the world. Bill Clinton, at that time, he had problems. The whole Monica thing. O.J. was free, there was still stuff going on in Bosnia, and the Spice Girls were breaking up. But my problems, right then in that food court? They were epic.

What was happening was I was sitting across the table from my true love, Justin. He was doing more wincing than talking. I could see palm sweat where he’d been gripping the edges of his Sbarro tray. 

“I felt like I had to say yes, Kylie,” Justin said. “I mean, when you just grabbed me in the hallway. I was in the moment, you know?”

The hallway, grabbing him—that would be in the school hallway, right after the class we had together, Greek & Roman Mythology. Sometimes I called Justin my Apollo, which he liked, but the truth was that he reminded me more of a centaur. He had doe eyes, soft and brown and hidden by long lashes, just as I imagined the eyes of a half-boy, half-horse. He was beautiful and strong, but prone to skittishness. At that moment, his soft eyes kept glazing over and flitting sideways to glance at his friends, sitting at a table over by Subway. He drummed his fingers and fidgeted.

Justin and I were at our favorite table, the one by the window overlooking the parking lot that sits between the mall and Applebee’s. That was our joke—let’s have a date at Applebee’s. But we couldn’t afford that so he’d get two slices of pizza from Sbarro, I’d get a cinnamon Auntie Anne’s pretzel and we would dine like gods at our special table. 

“I know I said yes,” he said. “I just don’t know if I meant it.”

My mind caught up to what “yes” he was talking about. I’d told Justin that we’d go to prom together. He’d said yes. I’d said yes to other things. Three times in the car, parked in a quiet spot, I had said yes.  

I had to respond. But my breath whooshed up and down my throat, sweat popped out all over my body, including my face, and my brain mostly shut down, except for the part that became omniscient, able to see other people staring at us as they sucked on straws to hide their smirks. To top it off, I had to sit a certain way because of a bad zit on my back that hurt when I leaned against the chair.  

“I love you.” I wished we were together in his dad’s Trans Am, Soundgarden playing low. Anywhere but here, under the glare of the mall’s fluorescent lights.

“What, Kylie?”

“But I love you.” I said it more loudly. At that point, people openly looked our way. Justin’s friends, Marcus, Steve, and Wendi. The two guys in blue Menards shirts eating KFC. The lady with a kid pushing Matchbox cars onto the floor.

Justin beamed a smile. His lips pursed to make a “pfft” sound. He acted like he was five years older, even though he was two months younger and we were both seniors. 

“We can’t go together.” He paused to glance at the friends. “I know what I said, but no.” 

That’s when everything burned. My heart went as dark as a charcoal ember, with crackling red pieces breaking off. My brain smoked. I looked around, anywhere but his face. Flames streaked up the food court walls, melting the octagonal skylights, blazing through electrical wires and drywall and incinerating everything in the whole mall, every fleece jacket, fruity candle, crappy piece of jewelry, all the CDs and Pepe jeans, everything, every shelf and mannequin. It all burned to a crisp, and it didn’t make any difference to the world because it was all nothing to begin with. I ought to do it. Burn the place so there’d be nothing left but a jumble of blood and bones sitting on ash and the smell of smoke obliterating the lingering aroma of Orange Julius. 

Justin was still in front of me. He started to push out from the table—no! I would not be left sitting alone, like a loser. I would get away first. Standing up fast, I shoved the table somehow, which I didn’t mean to do, and Justin looked scared. Okay, if he was going to act jumpy, I’d make his performance worth it. I picked up my chair a few inches and slammed it to the floor. To this day, I try not to think much about what happened next, which is that I strode away, toward the mall’s main corridor, but had to stop and puke up that pretzel. I did it next to a trash can, by the mural with the buffalo herd and the cornfield. I guess everyone saw me do that but, like I said, I try not to think about it much.  

###

So, anyway, that was the drama of my life. When I graduated, it was clear I needed a job, so I tried different things and ended up back at Empire Mall. Weirdly, my best job was at Foot Locker. I didn’t mind the people I worked with. The place had a clean, rubbery smell. Yeah, I felt I was above having to fit shoes on people, but it was better than working in fast food. And I had no interest in breaking my back or slicing off a finger down at the meatpacking plant. 

Wendi, Justin’s friend whom I finally understood was more than a friend, would come to the mall sometimes and pretend not to recognize me. Other times she would act really friendly. I met a guy named Brandon who worked at Sbarro. Justin never came to the mall, so God knew where he got his Nikes. I’d see him around town sometimes. He’d cut his hair shorter and gained fifteen pounds. If we were together, I’d still love him. 

I married Brandon. We had a reception at the Best Western where we danced to the Kelly Clarkson song “Breakaway.” More importantly, when Foot Locker left the mall, I snagged a job in maintenance. I was doing that for about two weeks when my supervisor retired and the mall’s security guy quit, which left me as the mall’s chief maintenance and security person. The mall management company emailed me, “We’re happy to have you keeping an eye on things as this commercial center’s chief custodian.” 

So, mall janitor. I had a job and a husband and you’d think that’d be enough, but I made a point of keeping tabs on Justin’s whereabouts. Accidentally-on-purpose I’d end up in the same place as him. Picking up pop at Hy-Vee, waiting in reception at the vet, once watching the downtown Halloween parade. I wouldn’t say anything. Neither would he.

That is, until the summer I turned twenty-nine. It was an average day, no warning. I hadn’t even planned it. I was crossing the parking lot of the highway Culver’s under the glaring August sun, mind going a mile a minute, just wanting to pick up a Butterburger and frozen custard. Justin was walking out alone, and when our eyes met, he got this look like he’d been caught shoplifting. Beauty’s skin deep? Whatever. When I took in his brown-green eyes, quick smile, and broad shoulders under that plaid shirt, I knew his soul was all colors of the rainbow edged in gold. 

We passed each other. Behind me, his voice floated along the air. 

“I was stupid back then. Sorry.” 

He actually apologized to me, at least to my back. But it was so unexpected. What do you say if you hear what you always wanted to hear but you aren’t ready for it? In an instant, I remembered what he’d been like and why I’d never gotten over him. We’d bonded in art class and he’d paint with green while singing Green Day songs. He’d always found something nice to say about my mother, whose moods swung between vacant silences and hurricanes of pointless activity—“She wears the prettiest earrings!”

I faced him. “You were never stupid.” 

Justin flicked his head like he was making sure nobody was looking, stepped closer, and snuck a hand out to graze my elbow. He smiled at me with his mouth and eyes and whole heart. A wonderful moment. I’ve held onto it for years, always going over the memory with care, like it’s a floor I’m waxing. 

###

Brandon turned out ok. We pretty much get along. We have one child, though that took a while. When Sbarro left the mall, Brandon got a job at Casey’s gas station. Sometimes the Casey’s manager gives him old t-shirts for free when they get a new shipment. I wear them. 

The weird thing is, sometimes I catch Brandon looking at me, his eyes on the hard plasticky print of a lizard or truck or whatever’s on the front, and he’s standing there, and I’m sitting on the couch, and his chin—he’s still got zits, after all these years—wobbles and his eyes get wet. He looks so pathetic I have to get up and leave, trying to resist kicking in drywall on my way out. We don’t have much to say to each other the rest of the time, but I give him orders. Pick up the kid, stop buying milk at Hy-Vee when it’s cheaper at the new Walmart, and why don’t you put laundry away for once?

He doesn’t do what I say. Neither does our kid, for that matter. It’s only at the mall where I’m really in charge. 

The mall got quiet. Literally, because the speaker system broke and I didn’t know how to fix it. But the place didn’t become a ghost mall, not totally, not from my perspective. I kept it alive. The fluorescent lights glowed and the skylights were clean. It was only the vacant stalls that made it seem dim. Sometimes, doing my patrols, I got the feeling that the mall was truly alive. In the heat of summer, being inside the mall felt like being inside a human lung, all damp and warm and dark. The space slowly replenished its air, breathing in the hot mist hovering above the parking lot asphalt, and exhaling its humid stuffiness through every crack and orifice in the roof and walls. The circulatory system of pipes still worked and the nerve system of wiring and lights illuminated every inch of peeling linoleum. If this place was a ghost mall, it was a living ghost. 

Justin never came in. He and Wendi had one kid, like me. I’d once admitted to Brandon that my feelings for Justin hadn’t been a short-term thing. By junior year, I’d actually been in love with Justin since I’d seen him on stage in eighth grade singing the lead in Music Man. Brandon was understanding about it at the time. But once in a while, like an assassin slicing a dagger, he makes a comment about Justin and Wendi, twisting it in a way that makes it nasty about me. Like, Wendi went back to school and became a nurse practitioner. He says, “They must want more in life, you know?” 

I did used to want more. Something with myth, maybe becoming an archeologist. But not everybody’s meant to follow dreams. Some people have to survive a dying empire. I conduct my patrols, mop the floors, change lightbulbs, water plants in the brick planters, dust benches, tar up roof leaks, fix broken tile in the restrooms, pull weeds in the parking lot, and even repair the electrical although I don’t have a license. The management company doesn’t ask too many questions. They just claim new tenants are about to arrive. 

Some vacant stores have beige banners across, showing jubilant women shoppers and the words “Good Things Coming Soon . . .” I stopped believing good things were coming when they stopped sending the banners. JCPenney was deader than a doornail. Bath & Body Works, a black hole. Spencer’s Gifts, godforsaken and possibly haunted.

One time, I went into the old Kmart and saw graffiti splashed on the back wall, red and yellow flames bursting everywhere. That hit funny. It made me mad, like, if anybody’s going to burn down the mall, it’s going to be me. This place is mine. I take care of it, keep it alive, and I’m the boss. If I hear clatter or laughter pealing from the darkness of that empty Kmart, I go over there. I’ll say, “Won’t have that business here,” but mostly my mere presence with a big yellow flashlight is intimidating enough. 

But sometimes, when it’s a bright day perfumed with Mr. Clean, it feels for a moment like all the retail could return. Everything could go back to how it always was, if only the mall management company or the U.S. president or God just flipped a switch. 

###

I’ll tell you what happened last July, when I was repairing a broken window: I saw an old red 1991 Trans Am cruise by really slow. Justin’s ride. He’d kept it going all these years. 

Quickly, I patrolled the whole mall, peering out all the windows. What I saw made my heart race and my head go all light, just like when I was a teenager. The Trans Am was parked at the old Applebee’s. It wasn’t an Applebee’s any more, it was a Mexican cantina that a family started up three years ago in that building when the Applebee’s left. 

Justin had gotten a job as a server there, it turned out. I stood at our window, right by our old table, and watched him get in and out of his car a dozen times. He always wore jeans and an untucked white shirt, sleeves rolled up. His hair was still thick and he’d put on a few or fifty in recent years, like we all have. It was the same Justin with the charming tilt of his head and slow saunter like he had all day to get wherever he was going. I wanted to be closer, to know if his eyes were still penetrating and kind, if he sang along to the radio, if he still wanted a pet bird or ever got one. How can it be, after all these years, that I wanted to hold his hand on a blanket in the grass at a firework show?

The best part wasn’t how he looked. Minor details. What mattered was where he looked. When he arrived or left, I would see him take a long glance toward the food court window where we used to have our dates. This was true whether I spied from the windows, the roof, or the old Kmart’s glass doors. 

Take a long look, Justin. It’s the place where you ruined your life. Both our lives. 

I wanted him to come over to the mall. I also didn’t want him to come over, because if he was nasty somehow, I’d lose something inside me, some little jewel of hope I pretend I don’t carry around all the time. 

But sometimes, you have to go out on a limb. After careful planning, I made a point of timing things. A month ago, striding across the parking lot to my car just as he was getting out of his, I lifted the hand that held my keys, keeping the wave as casual as I could. The first time he just nodded back. The second time, when I was up on the roof trying to push October’s first snow off the worst leaky places, he waved first.  

After that was the long waiting time, when the sun dimmed for winter and every day lasted forever. Every morning, I looked at Brandon sleeping, and saw someone I loved. But at the mall, in the women’s restroom, I looked in the mirror and saw someone who’d never gotten what she wanted. Across town, was Justin looking into his own mirror, and contemplating what could happen between us? 

The waiting got worse. I sat in the mall and things no longer burned. They vanished. The steel and concrete dissolved into the air. The linoleum sank into the soil and the artificial lights faded to let the real stars glow. In my mind I chased Justin. Confronted him. Long after closing up, I would collapse on the floor in the food court, next to the buffalo mural, now with chipped tile and the buffalo fur faded to corpse gray, and I’d unwrap a Pecan Spin, the crackling wrapper the only sound on planet earth, and I would wait. 

The Mexican place closed in February, shut down for good. I don’t know if they went bust or the family just moved away, but the cars stopped coming and so did Justin. It took twelve hours for the place to look like it’d been abandoned for centuries. With snowdrift piled against the front entrance and icicles dangling from the eaves, the cantina was a ruin that belonged in a haunted forest. I emailed the mall management company and they said they’d heard something about a barbeque joint going in, maybe.

The Mexican place going bust meant even less foot traffic in the mall. I still patrolled with my mop, trying to get my ten thousand steps in, but it didn’t seem to do much for my physique or energy levels if I did or didn’t. The Claire’s left, as did the Things Remembered and the twin-screen movie theater. 

So, now there’s the florist, jewelry and watch repair, pawn shop, and military recruiting office. The place where the Buckle used to be is a Senior Citizen Meeting Room. I said to Brandon, I’ll bring the kid one day. She can get some energy out. Brandon just sucked on his bottom lip and said, “I don’t want her to see her mom as a janitor, ok? I just want more for her, you know?”

###

Justin’s Trans Am cruised along Seventh Avenue, in front of the mall, twice in early spring. Twice that I saw. So, how many times total? And, why? He lived in a neighboring town. No reason to be here, except maybe to visit friends. He’d always had friends. 

A mall is kind of a changing thing, just like a person. We would definitely get a medical clinic. That tenant was starting to set things up. The food court had a donut shop. There were white mannequins left where the JCPenney used to be, always standing like naked ghosts about to have a party. I left it that way because the gray hairs walking in the mornings always take a long look at that scene, it was part of the entertainment of their morning exercise. 

I always kept the food court tables clean and the chairs lined up nice and straight. That’s where I was when it happened. Right in the food court, while spring rain pelted the windows, I heard the soft tap of footsteps. A second later, I saw a man in a green plaid shirt, wet hair flattened across his forehead, amble in with a brave smile spreading on his face. 

It was Justin. 

He stopped under the sign that said “Food Court” in cursive letters. They used to be bright yellow. Now they’re the color of stained teeth. He took in the scene, snake plants in big cracked pots under the skylights, every table empty, and the dark void where I used to buy big soft pretzels caged in metal. Even though he was the confident type, he said nothing. His grin froze up. 

I edged closer, near enough to know he smelled like the rainy outside, damp earth and wet asphalt. He regarded our old table. 

His face looked so sad, I said, “Wanna walk?” 

He nodded. We took off into the mall’s main corridor, strolling side-by-side past shuttered stores like we had some place to go. My heart raced. I attempted a dignified smile while feeling like a magical power would lift our bodies and we’d transform into people with shining eyes, wearing glowing garb. Why was I so devoted to this prince? He wouldn’t change our realm of rotting mall and dying town. Yes, he’d been a friend. Back when we were dating, there were laughter and parties and fun and the belief that there was a golden odyssey of life waiting for us. Not always easy, but a journey with meaning and mystery along the way. Maybe, together with him, there would still be some wonder ahead. 

“So, this is where you’ve been hiding,” he said. 

The way he said it, a little high-pitched, I figured the words were planned out. After he said them, he glanced at me. I didn’t like that look at all. It was slightly timid, as if he was afraid that I’d strike him down with a bolt of lightning. He didn’t used to have that look. Maybe I was overthinking things, but I got the feeling he’d been saying things for a long time, and getting mean answers back. I had stuff I wanted to say to him, aching matters to get off my chest, but I decided that, for the time being, I would just be agreeable. 

“Yeah, but you found me, huh?” I smiled and stopped, and he did, too, and we didn’t know what to do so we started walking again. Maybe a promenade is all he planned on. There was nobody else around. We got to the theater and I wondered if I should invite him in. We could sit in the dark and talk. The words just didn’t come out, though. We went back to the food court, quiet the whole time. 

“You could’ve been my prince,” I finally said. Yeah, I know, I have a one-track mind. All these years haven’t changed me. At least, not how I feel about him. Justin didn’t seem surprised by my words. “My prince,” I said again.  

Justin winced and waved a hand at the faded lime green acre of chairs and tables. “And this would be our court.” He twirled and gave a dramatic bow, swooping his head low and scraping the floor with his fingertips. 

I felt sick. Like, depression walloped me like it was an ice road trucker and I was a half-wit doe. God, what did I have? What did I ever have that I could give to anyone else? And what could Justin ever give me? I’d never had much power over my own destiny. Not once the local college closed down, taking its arts program with it, and not when life had handed me the duty of caring for a mother with mental health issues. Yet, with Justin there could be laughter. Music and camping trips and laughter. At least sometimes. Maybe.

Justin’s hand was suddenly holding my elbow. I got a strange sensation, like my brain was in a Ninja blender. We were walking but my head was spinning and weightless. It was all I could do to plant one foot in front of the other and not puke or fall down. We left the mall and trudged through the parking lot. The rain had stopped. The only sound was the gigantic American flag at the dealership across the street flapping in the wind. We arrived at his Trans Am, parked between the mall and the old Applebee’s. He let go of me to rummage in the passenger side and grab a plastic Hy-Vee grocery bag. 

“The pizza’ll be cold,” he said.

I looked at his wedding band on the hand holding the grocery bag. He noticed me looking and our gaze met.

“We’ll have an affair, see,” he said.

I nodded. Yeah, of course I’d go along with that. No question. The fleeting thought of my husband Brandon hurt more than I would’ve expected. It wasn’t a wood sliver under skin, it was more of a smash of a hammer on a thumb. But when that happens, you swear and keep pounding away. Sometimes, you just have to finish building something.  

Justin still had the keys to the old Applebee’s. I guess that was his kingdom now, the way the mall was mine. The old restaurant was dark but not as dilapidated as I would’ve thought. The plants were dead, there were carpet stains and a slight mildew smell, but the ceiling didn’t look like it would collapse on us.

“They took care of it,” Justin shrugged. “But you know how it is.”  

The electricity wasn’t on. The window shades were up, letting sunlight in, and cracked glass let in fresh air. We picked out the table facing the mall parking lot. We sat down, vinyl booths squeaking like crazy. It was funny to get this perspective, to face the gray boxy building with peeling paint and faded store names surrounded by a weedy parking lot moat. We’d started over there, a million years ago. I guess we got farther than where we’d begun. 

Justin sat everything on the table between us. Some Mountain Dew, pizza slices and cookies. 

“Royal buffet,” I said. The emptiness inside was filling up with something. Justin, this old place, the food – it was a nice concoction of novelty and the familiar. It was real life. It was magic. Whatever the power behind it, I’d have someone to share my realm with.

Justin laughed. He drummed his fingers on the table and his grin spread wide and genuine.

We didn’t eat at first. I took his hands and we looked at each other, the inside of the restaurant, and the outside of the mall. All abandoned property, or close to it. To put things in perspective, I guess everything crumbles eventually. But something else had begun. No myth or fairy tale. Just me and Justin together, finally, in our own ever after.

Listen as Marilee reads from her story…

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