The mall was only a few blocks from my house, so I took my time walking, eating my Pop-Tart as I went. When I got to the main entrance I stopped to put on my name tag and tuck my shirt in before going inside. I worked Sundays with Marlene, a short, chubby girl who was in community college and hated Burt Isker for no particular reason other than he was old and cranky sometimes and always nagged her for not selling enough socks. They kept track of these things, and every once in a while on a Saturday a Little Feet manager came down from the home office in Pennsylvania and set a quota for each of us on shoes, socks, and accessories. It’s hard to push socks on someone who doesn’t want them, and Marlene was always getting reprimanded for not being aggressive enough about it. They wanted you to hound the customer, and on big sale days Burt would stand behind me as I came out of the stockroom with my shoes and hiss, “Socks! Push those socks!” I would try but the customers would always say no because our socks were so expensive and they didn’t come in for socks anyway, just shoes. No matter what those higher-ups at Little Feet thought, socks just weren’t an impulse item.
Marlene was already there when I walked in, sitting behind the counter with a donut in her hand. The store was empty like it always was on Sunday, the mall deserted except for some senior citizens from the nearby retirement home doing their laps, from Belk’s to Dillard’s and back, with a pulse-check break at the Yogurt Paradise. The Muzak was playing and Marlene was reading the Enquirer and grumbling about Burt Isker when our first customers appeared. Because of her seniority it was always my turn when it was slow, so I got up and went over to see what they needed.
“Hi, what can I help you folks with today?” I said in my cheerful-salesperson voice. The mother looked up at me with a blank expression on her face; the father was over by the sneakers, flipping them over one at a time to check the prices. The little boy they’d dragged in with them was sitting next to his mother and gnawing on his thumb.
“We’re looking for some new sneakers.” The father walked over to me, holding a popular style called Benja min in his hand. All the Little Feet shoes had children’s names; it was part of the gimmick. The Little Feet chain was full of gimmicks. “But thirty-five dollars seems kind of steep. Got anything cheaper?”
“Just this one,” I said, holding up a model called Russell, which was cheap because it was an ugly bright yellow-and-pink-striped style from last year that never sold well. “It’s on sale for nineteen ninety-nine.”
He took the shoe from me and looked at it. It was blaringly bright, especially under the fluorescent lights. “We’ll try it. But we’re not sure what size he’s up to now.”
I went to get the measuring scale, then squatted down in front of the kid and unlaced his shoe. There was a small explosion of dirt and gravel as I pulled it off, at which his mother like all mothers looked embarrassed and said, “Oh, dear. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Happens all the time.” The little boy stood up and I fixed his foot in the scale, sliding the knob on the side to see where it reached to. “Size six.”
“Six?” the mother said. “Really? My goodness, he was just a five and a half only a few months ago.”
I never knew what to say to this, so I just nodded and smiled and went off to look for the ugly Russell shoe in the storeroom, where we had tons of them piled in stacks. Marlene was still in the same spot, licking her fingers and flipping through the glossy pages of the Enquirer.
While I was lacing up the shoe, sitting on the floor in front of the little boy, he looked at me and took his thumb out of his mouth long enough to say, “You’re tall.”
“David,” his mother said quickly. “That’s not polite.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I was used to this by now; kids are dead honest, no way around it.
Once we’d gone through the fitting and the lacing and the pinching of toes, and we’d all watched David walk around the store in his bright, ugly shoes, blaring pink and yellow against the orange carpet, the decision was made that they were a perfect fit and affordable. I watched the father sign his credit-card slip, his script looping and neat, then slid the old shoes into the new box and handed the kid a balloon and they were on their way. Little Feet was too cheap for helium, so all we gave out were balloons pumped from a bicycle pump, with a ribbon tied around them so you could drag them along behind you like a round plastic dog. There’s something depressing about a balloon that just lies there, listless. I always felt apologetic as I offered them to the children, as if it was somehow my fault.
I told Marlene I was taking a break and went down to the Yogurt Paradise for a Coke. The mall was still dead and I waved to the security guard. He was standing outside the fake-plant store flirting with the owner, who had a beehive and a loud laugh that echoed along behind me after I’d passed them. I got my Coke and walked down a little farther towards Dillard’s, where a stage was set up and some kind of commotion was going on: several people running around and hammering nails and one woman with a microphone complaining that no one was paying attention. I sat down on a bench a safe distance away and watched.
There was a sign right next to me that said LAKEVIEW MALL MODELS: FALL SPECTACULAR! with a date and a time and a graphic of a girl in a big hat looking mysterious. Everyone in town knew about the Lakeview Models, or at least about the very best known Lakeview Model, Gwendolyn Rogers. She’d grown up right here in town over on McCaul Street and gone to Newport High School just like me and was one of the very first of the models, which were basically just a bunch of local girls all made up and flouncing down the middle of the mall for the seasonal fashion shows. She was the closest thing we had to a local celebrity, since she’d been discovered and gone off to New York and Milan and L.A. and all those other glamorous places where beautiful girls go. She’d been on the cover of Vogue and did fashion correspondence on “Good Morning America,” always standing in front of some fancy store with her hair all swept up and a microphone planted at her lips, telling the world about the latest in hemlines. My mother said the Rogerses had let Gwendolyn’s success go to their collective heads, since they hardly spoke to the neighbors anymore and built a pool in their backyard that they never invited anyone over to use. I’d only seen Gwendolyn once, when I was eight or nine and walking to the mall with Ashley. There she was in front of her house, reading a magazine and walking the dog. She was so tall, like a giant in cutoff shorts and a plain white T-shirt; she didn’t even seem real. Ashley had whispered to me, “That’s her,” and I turned to look at her just as she saw us, her head moving slightly on her long, fluted neck, like a puppet with strings that stretched all the way up to God. I didn’t know what was in store for me then, what I would someday have in common with Gwendolyn other than our shared hometown and neighborhood. Back then I was still small, normal, and I just stared at her, and she waved like she was used to waving and went back inside with the dog, who was short and fat with hardly any legs to be seen, like a Little Feet balloon.