I grew up in the 1980s - an inflection point in American culture and the last great hurrah of department stores, when they sat proudly as anchors of shopping malls — a connotation I really love, as though the Macy’s or Sears or JC Penney or Belk is all that keeps the Cinnabon-Radio-Shack-Spencer’s-Gifts-Hip-Pocket jellyfish strand from floating off into a cloverleaf current. I miss them. I miss their wide-open-prairie-parking lot emptinesses.
Anything might happen in a department store parking lot, but probably it wouldn’t. You could see people coming, and the way the lights spat and hissed as they came on just made it clear how alone you really were, and how safe, but not really.
It was a strange time. A bridge between something, people clinging to it like Larkin’s outdated combine harvesters, customs and habits no more useful than old worn machinery. And whatever was coming next. Department stores had a wonderful coziness that was hard to let go of — such a safe, wholesome, comforting thing.
The balance of enclosure and exposure — to the world, the consumerist risk and adventure, to a possible new way of living — of department stores was compelling.
My hometown department store had a tea room — with a honest-to-God catwalk for fashion shows — and they converted it to a kind of trippy wonderland every Friday after Thanksgiving. Santa and his Snow Princess held court at the end of the catwalk, eating cake Rudolph had mixed with his very own paws.
But it was a little unpredictable too. Once Santa called out to me, shocking me over my deviled crab (the height of culinary sophistication, obviously) with a compliment about a haircut. How did he know?
Never dangerous really. But odd. People tried to make department stores into something they weren’t: an anchor to something that had already gone, maybe. One of my grandmothers was what I suppose we must call a socialite. With each grandchild in turn, she ceremoniously took us in a taxicab (“Ladies must learn to ride in taxis”) to a fashion show at our downtown department store. What skill this might impart to me, and what use I might later make of it, has remained a black mystery.
It was already too late, for me to become a lady — the time for ladies was already done.
What else had passed away, and what still might? Do these things matter? I never know, though I suspect, really, that I’m better off, not being a lady.
I know how to hail a cab.