Tube Socks and Pancakes

Essay: how to not be a taste-tester

Remember shopping malls?

Living the good life,
walking from store to store,
eating pure junk from the crowded food court,
indoor entertainment, buy stuff you don’t need,
kiosks hawking everything from nail files to space age massage chairs,
I’m thinking all the way back to the 1980s malls.

Those were the days. And true stories really trip my trigger.

So if you can imagine how malls used to be, you can imagine me, killing time, walking through one. Tube socks from Montgomery Wards — my buying mission. For my husband. The stripes on the top, pull up to the knee kind. He’s a baseball coach, those socks are part of his polyester coach shorts, plastic cleats, and tucked-in polo shirt uniform. He’s a real style setter.

Picture me walking towards Montgomery Wards, the anchor store at one end of this particular mall. The other end is anchored by Sears. I’ve just left the Cookie Caravan a few stores down. I’m finishing off a giant chocolate chip cookie and wiping my hand on my jeans. A woman comes out of a nondescript storefront, clipboard in hand and walks up to me.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but are you a homemaker?”

It’s the the 1980s, remember, and it’s still okay to ask such a thing. I’d just purchased my first microwave, had two daughters under the age of six, and didn’t work outside the home. Homemaker me.

“Yes, I am,” I look away from her, watching the mall walkers stride past me on their way to physical excellence. Malls back then were geriatric exercise halls.

Turning my attention back to the woman with the questions, I notice she has a purple clipboard and a red marker. She wears half-glasses perched on the bottom of her nose. I check out her outfit without changing my expression. Turquoise polyester bell bottoms, bright yellow sleeveless turtleneck, hair in a ponytail tied with a flowered chiffon ribbon and patent leather sandals the color of lime Jell-O.

She wears one of those bullet bras from the fifties, shaped like the nose cone of a B-52 bomber.

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