Old Times

The new Northpoint Mall loomed up suddenly, like an apparition from another solar system—a massive concrete bunker squatting against the golden, oak-studded East Bay hills. This had to be some Flash Gordon command post, Jessica thought. Within would be panels of blinking red buttons and tinfoil galvanizing contraptions. Villain-empresses with diagonal eyebrows.

Pauline guided the Mercedes with her left hand, her right arm across the top of the seats, nearly touching Jessica’s shoulder. “All the pro athletes in the Bay Area live out here,” she said. “Even movie stars.” New monster-home subdivisions cuddled into the hillsides; they would have names like Eagle Ridge and Sierra Heights.

Jessica groped for words. “You’re kidding!” She managed.

“Ted and I thought of buying some land and building here, but we decided we’d rather get out and travel at this point in our lives, you know?”

Pauline was looking good, Jessica thought. She had allowed a few gray streaks to peek through her glossy brunette waves, and the effect was becoming, bringing out the blue of her eyes. Now that they were retired, Pauline and Ted took turns cooking heart-healthy recipes with artisanal ingredients. They supported their college alumni association, and traveled “off the beaten path.”

“We started with Antarctica,” Pauline had told her. “Too cold to really enjoy it, you know.”

“Right. Brrrr.”

“And last year we hit the Galapagos. That was really… I don’t know, humbling in a way.”

“How so?”

“I mean, you’re seeing exactly how Darwin thought up evolution.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It was the finches, you know,” Pauline said. “We learned all about it on the ship. And then we actually saw them.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Anyway, next year we’re doing Madagascar with all those lemurs. I can’t wait, they’re so adorable. And after that—don’t tell anyone—Cuba!” Obligingly, Jessica held a discreet finger to her lips.

“But you’re so quiet, girl. What are you up to these days?” Pauline patted, then squeezed Jessica’s hand, resting in her lap. Pauline’s diamond was the size of a raisin. “Impulse buy,” she said, with a snicker. “Ted gave me hell. I reminded him it was our twenty-fifth coming up.” A silence grew until the air began to sag. “Anyhow, I honestly don’t know why it’s taken us so long to get together,” Pauline finally said. “So many times I meant to call. It got to where I…”

“Forget it,” Jessica’s wide smile made her lips ache a little. “It’s just as much my fault. After all, the phone works both ways, as they say.”

“Well I’m glad you finally used it. Ted is overjoyed we’re getting together.” Pauline grinned and winked. “Feels like old times, doesn’t it?”

“Ever hear from Bart?” Jessica said, tentatively casual.

Pauline stiffened a little, keeping her eyes on the road. She took a deep breath and exhaled loudly, steeling herself. “I might as well confess; you’re going to find out anyway. Ted utterly forced me to have them to dinner last week. You know I can’t stand Lynn, but Ted sees your ex in court all the time, and it was getting awkward.”

“Why? Who cares about those two?” Jessica fluttered her hand as if waving away an insect.

“Well I certainly don’t. After we got their wedding invitation, I was actually in the process of sending regrets, but then Ted got all over me.” Pauline growled. “That man makes me so mad.”

“Jeez, Pauline, you went to their wedding?”

“I thought you knew. It had to have been the most tasteless new age event of all time. I almost threw up. All that bad poetry and a long gray ponytail minister cavorting around in a caftan. I was afraid I’d burst out laughing. Nobody does pretentious counterculture like our crowd.”

“Colette told me. Just not the part about you and Ted being there.”

“She wanted to spare you, the little beauty. But she’s Bart’s daughter too, I guess—though you wouldn’t know it, She takes after you a hundred and ten percent. Bart’s shirt made him look totally gay. And Lynn was impacted in makeup. I think Ted used the word embalmed.” Pauline awaited the conspiratorial laugh that did not come and finally sighed. “Have I upset you, ma chere?” She exhaled the French ‘r’ beautifully. She wants me to ask her about Paris, Jessica thought.

“Not a bit.”

“I mean really. Did I have a choice? So Ted made me invite them to dinner. Everyone knows I sided with you during the divorce, and I said a lot of things about them, about Lynn… Word got around, I’m sure.”

“Let’s hope.”

“I was uncomfortable all night. I had to drink practically a whole bottle of cabernet just to get through it. I sneaked it in the kitchen.” Pauline giggled, and Jessica tried too, but emitted only a dry, metallic hiccup. “Anyhoo. it’s water under the bridge. A duty dinner.”

“Of course. Let’s drop it.”

Pauline grew serious. “Sweetheart, I think what Bart did to you was the shits.” She looked over to see the effect of her words, but Jessica had mastered the tears that sprang to her eyes, tilting her head back a little to prevent their welling. “So… you seeing anybody yet?” Pauline ventured a side-eyed wink.

“Not really. These days men use me mostly as a talking post about the women they’re trying to screw.”

“Well heyyyy, you never know where that can lead. One day a talking post, the next night a lover. And congratulations on Colette graduating, by the way. Of course Bart took credit for that all through dinner, and I said ‘Barton, Colette has two parents, you know.’ I mean her getting into a school like that was totally due to you.”

“It would kill him to admit I’m a good mother.”

“Oh, he makes me so mad.” Pauline pounded the steering wheel lightly with her fist.

Jessica reached into her purse and plucked out a plastic compact, which she positioned snugly in her curved palm. She dabbed with the puff, assessing herself critically. Pauline groped out her own compact and began powdering in the rear-view mirror. “I think Tim’s coming here today,” she said. “I told him to call my cell, if he’s not too busy chasing girls all over the mall.”

“Tim drives now?”

“Just got his license. We bought him an Audi two-seater.” Pauline cackled. “That little bandit has Ted wrapped around his finger ever since he made the La Crosse team.”

“Well, I can’t wait to see him,” Jessica said, meaning it.

Pauline parked the bulky car in an outside lot, and they exited in the stiff, pebbly wind, making for the broad door, which sucked them into the mall with a perfumed gust of forced air. Pauline rearranged her hair with her nails, glittering red scimitars.

Around them, a fluorescent blur of stores was absorbing and disgorging herds of shoppers. The mall was designed like a bundt cake—tiers of commercial space surrounded a hollow core containing elevators in clear tubes. Escalators linked the various levels like silver chains. At the very top, a crystal dome hurled down shafts of sunlight on the shoppers. An art deco guardrail wound around the various levels; beyond it was a sickening drop to three shallow fishponds. The air, humidified and faintly perfumed, seemed almost rosy, the color of sunset.

“It’s like another universe,” Jessica said, unwillingly seduced. The colors had yanked her back to the beach sunsets of her youth, the horizon aflame. The tame Pacific, cerulean blue, framed her outstretched toes. Feverish with sunburn, she held an icy beer can against her thigh.

She had been a restless, impetuous girl, hadn’t she, her mind riddled with shameless fantasy. How the years had crowded past, her life subsumed in Bart’s ambitions. And in the house, always the house. Sold at his insistence, right out from under her, during the divorce. How could she have let him get away with that?

“Come on, Jess,” said Pauline. “We’ve got some serious shopping to do.” But when they passed an ersatz Bavarian restaurant, she suddenly grabbed Jessica’s arm, eyes dancing wickedly. “Omigod,” she laughed. “We have to eat here. It’s too weird.”

A waitress wearing a braided Brunnhilde wig of nauseous yellow escorted them to a black granite table with two small wooden thrones. Beer steins shaped into giggling trolls dangled from the walls beside ceramic trivets bearing proverbs in Saxon blackletter. Cuckoos spied on them from trellised clocks, and the polka music sounded like the Horst Wessel song.

“Check out the busboys in lederhosen,” Pauline said. “Nazi gay much?”

“This is totally Twilight Zone,” said Jessica. “Munich 1938. Is that Rod Serling I see?” Pauline burst out laughing, and for a moment they were transported back to their early friendship, two college crazies bursting with life’s potential. Jessica felt a sudden rush of affectionate nostalgia. Back then, everything was funny. Where had the years gone?

“You know,” Pauline said, examining the silverware, “Ted’s mother might come to live with us.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“How do you think? But we’ve already had to take away her car keys. So if she moves in, that’ll be me driving her around. Ted will insist.”

“Oh swell.”

“She forgets where she put things. She left her burners on twice this week; the manager called us. And she’s paranoid to boot.”

“That’s what happens.”

“Ted won’t hear of a nursing home. He thinks it would worsen her paranoia. Sometimes,” Pauline lowered her head and demanded Jessica’s gaze. “I think you’re the lucky one.”

“Hearing that, I do too.” Jessica laughed, and Pauline fluttered her lashes as if that weren’t the response she had been expecting. The conversation stalled, and Jessica hurriedly sipped her iced tea. She was grateful when Pauline’s phone rang. Pauline grappled in her purse, and Jessica noted the brass logo on the flap. Twelve hundred bucks, unless it was a knock-off. But she knew it wasn’t.

“Tim!” Pauline squealed. “Where are you? We just got here!” As she listened, her smile suddenly dropped into a frown, and she shook her head. “I can’t hear you. Say that again. You’re where? Oh for Christ’s sake.” Pauline rose suddenly, upsetting her purse onto the floor. She took a couple of steps and turned away and hissed into the phone, “You little son of a bitch.” She returned to the table composing her face.

“What happened? Is he okay?”

Pauline shook her head. “There’s a… problem. Nothing I can’t handle.” She looked around wildly. “Where’s the hell’s the Security office?”

“Let’s go.” Jessica fumbled money onto the table.

They had to walk outside the mall and around to the back in a dry wind that drove sand into their eyes and hair. They picked their way past huge loading docks with tractor trailers backed up to them, finally finding a narrow, deeply rutted path through weeds and dead grass.

“Where the fuck are we?” The wind blew away Pauline’s words as Jessica stumbled along in her heels. Burrs were hitching a ride on the hem of her new dress. What wilderness had they been banished to? A waving patch of wildflowers offered their pale blue faces to the sun. The opulence of the mall seemed remote, even nonexistent, as if they had been in a dream or a hallucination and were only now awakening into reality.

They finally stumbled up to Security headquarters, a severe, military green Quonset hut with a metal door and a touchpad beside the knob. Pauline strode up and banged on the door with her fist. When a buzzer went off, Jessica grabbed the knob and turned it. The door flew open too fast, twisting her arm and hitting her knee.

Inside were several metal desks and a solid wall of television sets on which shoppers appeared foreshortened, aimless, and dowdy. A fluorescent light in the ceiling buzzed in chorus with the power station’s hum. The glare sallowed the faces of two portly guards, who held by each arm a cringing, gaping teenaged boy. At the sight of Pauline, he tried to jerk his arms free.

“Tim! What happened?”

“He was apprehended shoplifting at the Gap, is what happened, Ma’am,” said a security guard. “There’s the evidence.” A pile of jeans lay on a chair beside one of the desks. “Are you his mother?”

“I’m Mrs. Ted Argyll. You let go of my son this minute!”

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait for the police. He’s under arrest. It’s mall policy.”

“What policy?”

“An employee caught your son walking out with those pants under his shirt. He had to chase him for a quarter of a mile. Several people were knocked down by your son refusing to stop.”

“I don’t believe it. This is a mistake!”

“It’s petty theft, is what it is, Ma’am,” replied the guard. “So far. It may be more than that.”

“I didn’t do a thing,” Tim wailed.

“You’d best discuss that with the officers,” said the guard.

“All this for a few lousy pairs of pants?” Pauline surveyed the trousers with bottomless loathing.

“We found items from other stores on him too and no sales slips.”

“Nobody saves that shit anyway.” Tim kept coiling and glaring like a caged weasel.

Pauline looked at Jessica, who shook her head and shrugged in helpless dismay.

“I’ll pay for it all right now.” Pauline extended her purse. “Here, how much is this? I’ll pay cash.”

“I’m sorry, that’s not possible.”

“Oh pul-lease,” cried Pauline. “I know how you operate. You have to make quotas, so you plant stuff on people. I hope it happens to one of your kids someday.”

“Excuse me,” said Jessica, stepping forward. “I’m a character witness. I’ve known the boy since this big.” She held her hands six inches apart. “He’s never done a dishonest thing in his life.”

“Jessica,” Pauline’s lips, flattened now and curving downward, reminded Jessica of a scythe. “I think I can work this out better if you’re… elsewhere. Why don’t you go ahead shopping, and I’ll meet you at the doorless door at two, all right?”

“Right. Good…Goodbye, Tim.” Tim, staring glumly now at the floor, did not respond. Jessica hovered awkwardly for a moment.

“Will you go please?” Pauline exploded. “What do I have to do? Jesus, you really are clingy.” Jessica wheeled in shock, her mouth opening and closing. She looked at the expressionless security guards and walked out, blinking rapidly, her legs unsteady, feeling as if somehow she were the prisoner, making a break for it.

Disoriented and blown about by the wind, Jessica lost her way and wandered for half an hour outside the mall, unable to find an entrance. When she finally got inside through a service door, her clothes and shoes were covered with dust. She couldn’t find a restroom, though she followed the arrows for what seemed like miles. The indifferent noise and glaring colors penetrated her head and triggered an ache.

My God, Jessica whispered to herself, wandering aimlessly. The way she talked to me. The dislike in Pauline’s voice had the intensity and momentum of a bird loosed from its cage, or a bull from its lasso. So Pauline hated her, scorned her. She, Jessica, was a nuisance, a poor, foolish thing. A weakling deserted by her husband; a nothing. A duty date. And that was why Pauline had never called her. Jess had her answer now. The most obvious reason had been the correct one. Why, they probably had Bart and Lynn to dinner all the time!

Numbly, Jessica began to move with the flow of shoppers, the stores gliding past in a garish diorama. She mounted an escalator; then, at a loss, returned to the floor she had left. She had no idea what to do with herself; she couldn’t afford to buy anything. Her sole purpose in enduring this mall had been to see Pauline.

What’s the use? she thought. Where’s the store that sells second chances? And how was she going to get home? She never wanted to see Pauline again as long as she lived.

Jessica caught her own reflection in the window of the Danskin store, against a magenta leotard: thin, drooping curls, two round brown eyes peered back at her from beneath straight bangs and thin eyebrows penciled into an imploring arch. The nostrils were pinched with stress, and her carefully outlined lips quivered on the edge of a sob. The hair’s gotta go, she thought, so warmed-over seventies. What am I, anyway? A relic.

Jessica looked around and noticed three fat pastel arrows pointing toward the “South, East and North Malls.” Another indicated the way to the “Main Concourse and Shoppes.” Into her mind suddenly flashed an image of Amundsen—or his doomed adversary, Scott—confronting the unspeakable Antarctic expanse. Her heart sank.

And in the pit of her stomach a tiny kernel of panic sprouted; a souvenir of the little girl who had stood alone, bellowing with terror in the Notions section of Macy’s, while her mother searched the toy department two floors above.

The thought of Pauline now filled Jessica with antipathy, cauterizing a friendship she should have written off the week Bart left her. Not a single call from Pauline all this time. It was Jessica herself who had finally called. And Pauline had kept trying to get off the phone, hadn’t she? Jessica had thrown out far too many intimate details, like breadcrumbs, just to keep Pauline’s attention.

Wasn’t that the story of her life? Currying favor that was never forthcoming? Jess at 13 buying lunch for the whole tableful of popular girls so they would let her sit with them for that day only. The same Jess who had refrained from seeing a divorce attorney; letting Bart—her adversary—draw up the settlement agreement and sell the house out from under her, splitting the equity she was legally entitled to. Over the years, she had spent down her capital to supplement Bart’s stingy child support and her insufficient wages, guaranteeing a future of cramped, nondescript rentals. What kind of person accepted cruelty with gratitude? One who feared being alone, ignored, passed over. And who then brought that precise fate upon herself.

But how would she get home now? Jessica tried to ground her wandering thoughts. She would have to call a cab, and she had already exceeded her credit limit to buy Colette’s graduation gift, a platinum and sapphire pendant the girl had spent hours picking out.

Jessica sank onto one of the garish mauve benches, fabricated of some injection molded plastic that cradled the body. She thought back on Pauline’s dinner parties; Bart arguing politics with Ted; Tim’s sticky little hand grabbing her “ticket” for his magic show. His grandma, a grinning Svengali, prompting the boy’s performance from her recliner. Pauline’s daughter, Isobel, would have been resentfully loading the dishwasher in the kitchen. She had dropped out of Brown after falling in love with a Black musician in his fifties. Jessica heard that Isobel had nothing more to do with Pauline. All families are unhappy in that Tolstoyan sense. When you look deeper, what is there to envy after all?

Jessica had plummeted so far down into the tunnel of memory that when she felt a gentle tap on her shoulder, she jumped and gave a little scream.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. I didn’t mean to startle you.” She recognized the security guard who had detained Tim.

“Oh no, of course. Don’t apologize. I was woolgathering.” She laughed mirthlessly.

The guard lingered, scanning shoppers keenly out of habit. “I… just felt real bad for you in there. The way that woman talked to you. You didn’t have that coming.” Jessica tried to smile, but her eyes suddenly stung and her mouth trembled. Rudeness and indifference she could endure, but the least act of kindness made her fall apart.

Gingerly, the guard sat beside her on the bench. He rubbed his shoulder and grimaced. “Arthritis.”

“What’s going to happen to Tim?”

“Probably nothing. They might not even file a complaint. Your friend looks like she knows her way around the legal system.” He and Jessica exchanged sardonic smiles.

“Her husband’s a lawyer. As is mine. My ex-husband, I should say.”

“I wasn’t being a bully or nothin’, you know. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how much money these stores lose to shoplifters. And a rich little snot like him. He could have bought those pants ten times over. I’ve got no sympathy, I’m sorry.” The guard was tanned and heavyset, with a pompadour of steel-gray hair. Wrinkles cleft his temples from eyes to hairline.

“Pauline and I hadn’t seen each other in years. She never called after my husband left me.” Jessica clenched her teeth; she was talking too much, as usual.

“I just can’t understand that.”

“Well, she’s embarrassed, I guess. Still, I was hurt. We were like sisters.” Tears welled in Jessica’s eyes.

“No, I mean, I can’t understand why your husband would leave a fine gal like you.”

“You know,” Jessica fumbled in her purse for a tissue, “I never understood it myself.”

“I lost my son to a drunk driver,” said the guard. “He wasn’t much older than that boy Tim there. And then my wife died over a year ago. Cancer. Seems like yesterday.”

“You’ve had more than your share of heartbreak.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” the guard said. “This hasn’t been the easiest day for me either.”

Jessica nodded. “Thank you. I could use one.” They sat looking into and through and beyond the stream of shoppers.

You can learn  more about Linda by clicking on her bio:  https://thievingmagpie.org/linda-boroff-bio/