Just about every weekend in the late 1980s and 1990s, my parents shuttled
my younger sister and me from our home in Baltimore City to one of Maryland’s suburban shopping malls for an all-day excursion. Our tour guide of
sorts was my mother. No matter what shopping center we visited—Golden
Ring Mall, White Marsh Mall, or Eastpoint Mall—we parked by the entrance
of Hecht Company and began our jaunt in the store’s shoe department. For
what felt like hours, my mother browsed and tried on shoes, while my father
wandered over to the men’s department and partook in his own shopping
ritual (which, to be honest, remains a bit of a mystery because my sister and
I tended to stay within eyeshot of my mother). Effectively, my sister and I
were left to our own devices: we pranced the selling floor in oversized
display shoes, played make-believe with store mannequins, or found a quiet
place to camp out and read books we had brought from home. Occasionally,
my sister and I bickered over a pair of shoes we both wanted to try on; but
our spats ended as quickly as they began with one stern look from my
mother—a look that unmistakably said, “Don’t make me come over there.”
Here, amid the display of women’s shoes, the two of us constructed a
playground or nursery of sorts—amenities that had disappeared from
department stores nearly twenty years earlier.
After my mother finished shopping for shoes, and despite our silent
wishes to head to the toy department or leave the mall altogether, she led
us to women’s handbags, sportswear, housewares, and then the children’s
department. Even if she found what she was looking for at Hecht’s, she
would always “take a quick look at what they’ve got” in Woodward &
Lothrop, Macy’s, and Lord & Taylor. Of course, nothing about her “taking a
quick look” was quick. In those stores, my mother followed her same shopping pattern—shoes, handbags, clothes, housewares, and then more clothes.
She visited each store with the same exuberance as she had in Hecht’s,
while the rest of us grew increasingly impatient, bored, restless, and tired.