Joann’s return to the mall Feb. 6, 1986
Joann made an appearance at the mall looking for comfort
again.
She is a small girl, a graduate of the school of mall rats,
whose whole life for years revolved around this place, working for a time at
the Dunkin during the day, and hanging out here during the overnight when I
worked at baker.
Brown disheveled hair, brown sad eyes, and a mouth always twisted
into an expression of pain, even when she is happy.
This time she came back like a stranger, calling from the
bagel shop near the side door, asking permission to come see me.
Once everybody’s girlfriend especially the cops and the
guards, she got married at some point after she left here but returns to these
hallowed halls after getting a divorce.
She called me because she believes the new guards want to
keep her out. Her reputation precedes her, and the new guards have heard about
all the trouble the old guards got into on her account and want to keep arms’ distance
from her –as if she carries the plague.
I try to tell her she’s been silly, but we both know how hated
she once was, the trouble she’d once caused in the private lives of the other guards,
some of whom also came close to divorce on her account.
She’s not really pretty in a conventional sense, but there
is something acutely attractive about her that make men gravitate in her
direction, even when they don’t want to.
There is every reason not to trust her.
She is a well-known liar. And lied to me when she finally
reached me, telling me about her and Phil and some other job he’s promised her.
She is desperate to feel important. It is important for her to be someone.
She is also a thief, but no worse than others who still work
for my shop and the mall.
She steals little things, and often, other people’s souls,
attaching herself to men like a parasite, as she once did to the manager Danny,
who did his best to resist her right up until he couldn’t, and then had to
explain it all to his wife, when she found out.
For all this, there is another person inside Joann, behind
all the masks she wears, someone who legitimately cares, a somewhat naïve and
vulnerable child who ultimately always trusts the wrong people not to hurt her
and those people always do.
As I said she’s not pretty in a conventional way, but she is
cute in a kind of puppy kind of way, her brown eyes drawing you in as she bops
up and down, licking her lips to tell you when she’s horny, often pressing so
close as to press her breasts into you while she engages you in conversation.
She has a crooked smile she can turn on and off, like a neon
advertising sign, telling you when she’s interested and when she’s not.
But coming here originally as a mall rat, she’s a bit slovenly,
her shoulders slumped, and on a bad night after being out too long, she has a
not-so-subtle stench, I notice, most other men do not.
When she isn’t trying to seduce or impress someone, when she
is “not on” stage, she looks a bit bland, lost even, lonely, definitely lost.
Last night, she was on, swearing a wrinkled silk blouse that
showed the tips of her pointed breast, very tight jeans and designer jeans, a
stylistic image of Middle-Class poverty she as a kid of the ghetto is still hoping
to achieve.
She came through the door staggering a little like a drunk,
taking in the old sights with clear nostalgia, telling me at the same time how
she didn’t miss the place at all. Within minutes, she paraded around the place
as if she owned it, using the toilet without asking, making her own pot of
coffee in front, pausing once to peer through the closed gate out into the dark
halls of the mall itself, mumbling how everything had changed, her voice full
of quiet pain, her mouth twisted into something so sad it was hard for me to
look at her. Then, realizing I was studying her, she snapped back into
character.
She told me she’d been with the mall from the day it opened
in 1970, one of the original mall rats, whose eventual leaving must have wrenched
something in her.
WI last saw her here, a line of men had waited their turn to
take her out (which meant down to the public restroom at the heart of the dark
mall or to the back seats of their cars), men she knew and admired, even if
some of them had come to hate her for helping to ruin their lives. Now, everybody
here was a stranger except for me, and all her talk was about something that no
longer existed, other people, another place, another era she ached to get back,
but could not.
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