Robert Coover - John's Wife

Clarissa, diminutive queen of the mall rats and the pool punks, would have loved her grandfather’s description of her daddy’s constructions as “fantasy structures.” Especially the malls. Pure magic. They were, always had been ever since she was little. Like fairy kingdoms, sun palaces. They let her run wild in them back then and she could do no wrong and everybody smiled at her and gave her treats and presents, it was very exhilarating. Her daddy used to bring circus acts and musicians and famous comedians to the malls to draw the crowds, and there were always coin-operated machines to ride or play and free badges and balloons from the stores and special decorations for every season with Valentine redhots and chocolate Easter bunnies and Fourth of July fireworks and Halloween masks and corn candies and Christmas Santas. When she was only five years old she was a model in a spring swimsuit show out there, and she never forgot how they laughed and cheered, especially her daddy with his dazzling eyes lit up, when, in the middle of her routine, she tucked one arm in and, with a smile like the ones she’d seen on television, let the shoulder strap fall to her elbow. It was electric. Then her daddy built the new mall with the big food court in it and that became her favorite. Still was, even though there was an even fancier one now out by the highway. All the big kids started hanging out there in the food court, and lots of intense things were going on, grown-up things, though in the beginning she didn’t know exactly what. Just that they seemed too important to miss. And now, for the first time, she was no longer allowed to run free, she always had to be with her mother or Granny Opal, the only grandmother she had left, so that just proved it. Something was happening. Luckily, there was a video games arcade right next to the taco bar and she could always get them to take her and Jennifer there (they were best friends now and both curious as cats), and then go for a coffee and leave them alone. It helped when her granddad had his stroke, because the retirement home was out near the mall and Granny Opal or her mother, whichever one was with them, often slipped away then to pay him a visit. Anyway, Clarissa was in high school now and too old to be chaperoned, and she said so in no uncertain terms. This was her real life and it wasn’t fair to let her miss it. Jen, who was a preacher’s kid, loved it at the malls just as much as Clarissa did; her word for it was “spiritual.” She said she thought there was something phony about church and Sunday school with their blowhard Moseses and dead Jesuses, the malls were where God was going to show Himself (or Herself) if anywhere at all. You could just feel it. She and Jen figured out most things out there — the dare-me shoplifting, the ripped-off stuff for sale, the alcohol snuck into the rootbeers and milkshakes, the secret pot smoking and the funny pills and the furtive dealing, what was going down at the far end of the parking lot when people paired up and went out there for a while, all that — and they started dressing in printed album-cover tee shirts and leather jackets and chains and torn designer jeans so as to fit in better. Jen even got herself a nose ring, though she never wore it back home at the manse, she said it really freaked her mother. Clarissa was not so sure about this. Jennifer’s mom used to be a hippie, and she was still spaced out a lot of the time. Which could be fun, she now knew. There was a lot of cigarette smoking going on out at the mall, too, of course, it seemed like everyone had the deathweed habit, but Clarissa didn’t go that far. It was the one completely serious thing her father had ever said to her: “Clarissa, please. Promise me. Don’t.” And she had promised, and she’d never break her promise either, though she took it for granted if it wasn’t tobacco, it was okay. Her dad loved her, but he was no square.

Opal felt uncomfortable leaving her granddaughter and her little friend by themselves, dressed so provocatively, in that loud unseemly place, but she felt even more uncomfortable sitting there alone among all those ill-behaved children, so she often, whenever obliged to take Clarissa to the mall, fulfilled a second obligation, this one to her daughter-in-law, by visiting the child’s father, poor devastated Barnaby, at the retirement home, though it was hard to say in the end which experience was more repellent. The mall certainly was unbearably noisy and the air in the open restaurant area where the only chairs were was saturated with the fumes of fried fat and sticky sugars and cigarette smoke and a sour-milk smell that reminded her of sick babies. Outside there were no park areas or sidewalks or benches, or inside either, no place just to sit, but even if there were she would have felt conspicuous plopping herself down in the middle of all that mindless bustle. So, really, she had no choice, and anyway she did not really fear for her granddaughter, it was a public area, after all, dozens of people passing through every minute, and they all knew John’s daughter when they saw her, what could possibly happen? The town had changed dramatically, almost unrecognizably, since Opal was a girl here, but in some ways her son’s shopping malls, as Kate had pointed out to her when she was still alive, were a throwback to the village past of their youth, or perhaps even earlier. More anonymous maybe and off-center, but they were simple communal gathering places for scattered populations the way the old farm towns were (said Kate), this one among them, a place for barter and exchange, for the transmission of news and ideas, for ceremony and for courting and for friendly competition. When Opal, whose love for her son clashed with her distaste for his malls (if a throwback, certainly a parodic one), had objected that what was missing was that there were no churches out there, Kate had replied: No imported old world churches maybe, but holy places just the same, Opal, good old national temples with the sacred stuff of glorious enterprise heaped up at the altars and shopping baskets as communion trays and beeping cash registers like the ringing of church bells, moral lessons provided by merchant-priests and their security guard-sextons. And there are all the fastfood chapels for ritual feasting, inviolable in content as kosher or Eucharist, and the cinemas for divine specracle and iconic representation, with multiple screens for the different denominations, and mannequin angels and God’s omnipresent Muzak voice and the final benediction straight down from heaven of the accepted credit card and even, or maybe above all, the vast apocalyptic barrenness of the parking lots: go visit those prophetic fields on a Sunday morning sometime, “Opal, if you want a true”—and here she employed the very word that the preacher’s daughter (virtually unknown to Kate at the time, little Jennifer being a less than devoted user of the municipal library), was to use many years later, riding home from the mall, all ecstatic in her adolescent way, in Opal’s car—“‘spiritual’ experience.” Ah, dear impossible wicked Kate, who never ever went to the malls herself, how she missed her! And Harriet, too, the doctor’s wife, so many good friends gone! Even poor Audrey, difficult as she could be, Opal missed her, too, all her friends were slipping away, soon she’d be all alone. And now Audrey’s Barnaby as well, not much better off than dead; she visited him as often as she could, but he didn’t even seem to know who she was most of the time, it was very sad. It was while returning from just such a visit one day, Barnaby having mistaken her on this occasion for his dead wife, breaking into a violent tantrum and accusing her of betrayal and stupidity, some sort of division problem Audrey had got wrong or something, you could only make out about half of it, that Opal found the shopping mall surrounded by police cars with their blue lights flashing. She was in one of John’s cars that day, so they waved her through. She felt dreadfully guilty, though whether on account of Barnaby’s accusation or because of her abandonment of Clarissa or on behalf of her son whose mall was being so dramatically besieged, she couldn’t say. But when Clarissa saw her, she came dancing over as though nothing were happening, carrying a big plastic bag from Jeans City with what looked like a box of shoes and Jennifer’s folded-up jacket inside, Jennifer now wearing a man’s white shirt, knotted at the waist, over her printed tee shirt which on this day, as Opal remembered all too clearly, showed four naked men holding musical instruments in shockingly obscene positions. And she the minister’s daughter! These children today, Opal would never understand them. It was like there were no rules, no boundaries at all. And yet they seemed as innocent as ever. Clarissa, squealing something about finding “these really crazy walkers,” leaned in and gave her a big hug and kiss, just like she used to do when she was little, but hadn’t done in so many years Opal had forgotten what it felt like, and then insisted on skipping over to the police chief to show him her purchases. He waved her away with a weary smile, while continuing the conversation he was having on the walkie-talkie held at his mouth. Jennifer meanwhile, in the backseat, had a frozen smile on her face that made her look more dead than alive. Maybe she’d eaten something she shouldn’t have. All the way home, Clarissa kept wanting to know about Opal’s own adolescence, which Opal found flattering until Clarissa asked her: “When was the first time, Granny Opal, when you did it, you know, with a man, and what was it like back then?” “The first time was with your grandfather, of course,” she lied, feeling suddenly less flattered. “And it was just as it should have been.” The little rascal. When, a day or so later, Opal asked about the shoes, Clarissa shrugged and said they were the wrong size, she’d taken them back.