Still Open

I have been many things.

I was, first, a dream — a set of blueprints spread across a folding table in 1979, held down at the corners by a coffee thermos and two ashtrays. The architect who drew me had a mustache and a conviction, shared widely in those days, that the future would smell like Orange Julius, and Hot Dog on a Stick, and climate-controlled air. He was not wrong. He was just early.

Then I was construction — the shriek of steel, the pour of concrete, the slow rise of my three stories above a cornfield that had not yet forgiven the intrusion. I remember the first time my skylights went in and I understood what light was. It came through in long theatrical shafts, catching the dust of my own making, and I thought: yes. This is what I am for.

I became, in 1981, a mall.

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Those years I will not rush through, because they were very good years. I want you to understand that about me. I was loved. Not in the way people love mountains or paintings — something permanent and hushed — but in the frantic, sneakered, quarter-spending way that children love the one place they are allowed to exist without supervision.

They came in waves, the kids of the early 1980s. They had feathered hair and tube socks and a tolerance for neon that I respected enormously. They fed me with their presence: the slap of Reeboks on my terrazzo floors, the cascading mechanical symphony of the arcade, the slow revolutions of the skating rink I kept on my east wing like a secret held in the hip. They argued over boys and bands — Duran Duran versus The Police, a debate I observed with great interest and no vote. They spent three hours choosing a single album from the record store, holding the sleeve of Thriller or Purple Rain with the reverence normally reserved for religious texts. They tried on seven pairs of acid-washed jeans and bought zero. They asked for extra sprinkles on their TCBY yogurt and contemplated a slice from Sbarro's while chatting about the latest episodes of Family Ties and Wonder Years.

I held all of it. Sounds, smells, small moments that the people involved have probably forgotten and I have not. That is one advantage I have over humans: I do not forget a single thing that happened within my confines. Every first kiss beside the fountain, executed with the clumsy confidence of someone who had studied the matter in a John Hughes film and was now attempting field research. Every crying jag in the food court bathroom. Every grandmother who sat on my benches for four hours watching the foot traffic with the serene intensity of someone who has earned the right to go nowhere.

I was a place where people became themselves, incrementally, over many Saturday afternoons. That is not nothing. That is, I would argue, quite a lot.

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Then the 1990s came and brought Dippin' Dots and Cinnabon, flannel and Doc Marten's, cargo pants and impossibly baggy jeans. Imaginary social lines were drawn between Hot Topic and PacSun. Everyone seemed so content, even when they weren't. It was a wonderful time to be me. But then the 2000s arrived, and then the particular cruelty of the internet, which taught people they could acquire things without leaving their homes. My stores left one by one, apologetically, like guests who know the party is over but feel bad about being the first to go. The record store. The arcade. The skating rink. The Orange Julius lasted longer than anyone expected, which I found both touching and a little funny.

By 2019 I was what they called a “dead mall” — a phrase I disliked intensely, not for vanity’s sake, but for its imprecision. I was not dead. I was quiet. I was waiting. I had, after all, been full of people who knew something about waiting. They’d spent whole afternoons within me doing precisely that, waiting for something to happen, and it usually did.

I waited.

Then 2028 arrived, and with it a woman named Deirdre.

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Deirdre was seventy-one years old, a former marketing director with reading glasses perpetually pushed up on her head and a Reddit account she used primarily to argue about music. She had driven past me for two years watching my parking lot go to weeds and seed, and one evening, stuck in traffic alongside my western facade, she had taken out her phone and typed the post.

*Abandoned malls should be turned into Gen X retirement homes. Three stories tall. Movie theater, arcade, Orange Julius, skate park, Glamour Shots just for the heck of it.*

She intended it as a joke. She intended it the way her generation intended most things — with one eye on the absurdity and one on the genuine wish underneath. The post got forty-seven thousand upvotes in two days. Then a developer called. Then a county commissioner. Then a reporter from a newspaper that still existed.

Deirdre called it Mallvana. I would not have chosen that name myself, but I respected the audacity.

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The renovation took fourteen months.

I want to be honest with you: it was not painless. They gutted my upper level entirely, which I found alarming until I saw what replaced it — sixty-four residential units with wide windows and ceiling fans and small balconies that overlooked my atrium. They rebuilt the arcade from scratch — Pac-Man and Galaga and Donkey Kong sat across from The Simpsons Arcade and House of the Dead and NBA Jam cabinets that immediately had a waitlist — though this time there was also a fully stocked bar beside it, which struck me as an improvement on the original design. They brought the Orange Julius back in the form of a licensed smoothie franchise that was roughly seventy percent identical to the original and nobody complained because the other thirty percent included oat milk options and a rewards app.

The movie theater returned to my east wing. Fixty-six seats per showing, four showings a day, a calendar that rotated between first-run films and the films these particular humans had grown up loving. I watched, in my first month of operation, forty-three residents sit in the dark together and recite every word of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off without meaning to.

The skating rink, I was pleased to note, came back. Smaller than before, and the music was curated differently — less Top 40, more “what do you actually want to hear” — which turned out to mean a great deal of Cyndi Lauper, some Wham!, and one extremely spirited Tuesday afternoon session set entirely to the Footloose soundtrack that I will not soon forget. The physics were otherwise unchanged. People going in circles, faster than they probably should, grinning like children. A number of them fell down. None of them seemed particularly surprised or upset by this.

And yes: Glamour Shots. Third floor, between the community room and the hair salon. A rotating photographer, good lighting, a wardrobe rack with boas and leather jackets and exactly one sequined blazer that had become inexplicably popular. There was usually a small queue.

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Here is what I want to tell you about the people who live in me now.

They are not what the word “retirement” used to suggest — that is, people in the final act of retreat, closing the parentheses on themselves. They are, if anything, louder than the teenagers I once held. Louder, and more certain of what they want, which turns out to be: each other. Community. Breakfast at ten, skating at noon, a movie at three and an argument about the movie at five. Someone’s birthday every other week, which they celebrate with the same chaotic commitment they once brought to house parties.

They have chronic pain and excellent taste in music — the kind earned by standing in line for concert tickets in the rain, by wearing out cassette tapes through sheer repetition, by knowing instinctively which song from Born in the U.S.A. is actually about something dark. They have complicated histories and no particular patience for being told who they are. They have, most of them, spent several decades making concessions to the world’s expectations, and they have arrived here, in me, having decided more or less collectively that they are done with that particular project.

A man named Gerald skates every single morning, alone, before anyone else is awake. He was sixteen the last time he skated regularly. He is sixty-seven now and he has fallen four times and gotten up four times and he does not seem to be keeping score.

A woman named Patrice runs the Wednesday movie selection with the focused authority of someone chairing a small government. She is currently in a feud with a man named Ron over whether The Princess Bride counts as a romance or an action film. This feud has been ongoing for eleven weeks and I do not expect it to be resolved. I hope it isn’t.

Two women, Barbara and Theresa, met at the Glamour Shots station on move-in day when they both reached for the same sequined blazer. They are now inseparable. They share a balcony and have been known to yell things at the parking lot below at eleven o’clock at night, though I have not been able to determine what.

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I think about the architect sometimes. His blueprints. His mustache and his conviction that this was all going to work out beautifully. He meant it for one version of people, but I think — I hope — he would find this version equally valid. People require places. Not just places to buy things, but places to be, without agenda or apology, in the company of others who understand the references.

I was built for that. I was always built for that. It just took a little while to find the right people.

In the mornings, light still comes through my skylights in long theatrical shafts. It catches the dust and the faint smell of popcorn and rubber wheels on the rink and, very faintly, orange and cream. Gerald is probably already skating. Deirdre is probably already on Reddit, starting something.

I hold them. I am glad to.

I am, after all, still open.