Shoes, Soulmates and Savtas

No visit home is ever complete without the requisite shopping trip at the local mall. Last week’s Thanksgiving visit felt like a time warp to the end of the summer, which was marked by a particularly memorable shopping experience. I had just returned from two and a half months in Jerusalem, but I can honestly say that going to Westfield Shoppingtown Montgomery was one of the most interesting parts of my summer.

I went with my mom and her mom, my Polish Jewish “elegantzka” grandmother. Savta, as we call her, insisted on locating the perfect “something” for me, her younger granddaughter. So we loaded into the purple minivan and zipped a few exits down the interstate. At the exit we waited in lines of traffic, mostly other minivans and SUVs, and by the time we found a parking space in the sea of waxed cars, I was nearly ready to go home. But we trudged on and pushed open the glass doors to Nordstrom.

Before us was a sea of stuff. And being at Nordstrom, it was a sea of upscale stuff. Stuff whose “stuff”-ness was strategically downplayed by the well-heeled salespeople who dressed it up and hung it from metal set in satin and wood. As soon as we entered I lost my appetite for anything. I think there’s something about the abundance of material goods that drives us either way: desire or repulsion. As mom and Savta floated in the former category, I was bouncing around in the latter. We headed towards the open part of the mall and I made eye contact with a hardheaded four-year-old whose mascara’d mother was stuffing his arms into a corduroy jacket. All it took was my empathetic gaze to finally break him down into a teary tantrum.

What exactly is it about the mall that brings these intense emotions out of us? I don’t know about my young golden-curled friend, but I generally enjoy shopping. The overweight penalty I paid in the Tel Aviv airport is testament to the decidedly materialistic way in which I experience place. So while some people return from vacation with postcards and souvenirs, I come back with a suitcase stuffed with shirts, bags and shoes.

Contrary to appearance, though, it’s not the acquisition of stuff that I’m after. In Israel, for instance, it was the participation in commerce that I was interested in: getting my bag searched on the way in to the store, tripping over Hebrew slang while fending off vulture-like salespeople, being ruefully grateful that I wound up on the privileged side of the racial profiling coin. Whatever item I walked out with would serve as a symbolic reminder of having been in a different place, and of the ways in which my daily American life is distinctive. One of those ways, of course, is the difference between casually sniffing a shirt picked up at a colorful outdoor market, and examining myself from all angles in a three-way mirror at the mall.

Part of what I find overwhelming at the mall is how utterly blatant American consumerism is. The mall doesn’t even pretend it is about necessity items. And maybe we should be grateful for that: Your local mall (that is probably now owned and renamed by a giant corporation) is very upfront about its mission. It exists to glorify consumerism—and to include you in that project. So while I wove in and out of oncoming foot traffic making mental lists of what I “refuse to buy,” “kind of need” and “kind of want,” I caught glimpses of shoppers exclaiming over each other’s purchases. The skinny “’tween” girls snapping their gum and flopping their wrists while shimmying their pink-skirted boyish hips from side to side; the thirty-something couple holding up five shades of blue “onesies” for the infant drooling in the stroller; and my Savta, still mesmerized after all these years by the marble floors and bright lights of this American shopping mall.

After some urging from the maternal units, I left the mall that day with a pair of pink Velcro shoes. Displayed on their very own glass shelf, they called out to me from above the fanlike arrangements on the tables. So I blurred the line between “kind of want” and “kind of need” and we drove away with a new pair of shoes. Three months have passed, and I’m looking at them right now, cozied up inside their sleek box and patterned tissue paper. The receipt sits in an envelope in my desk.

Yesterday I spotted someone crossing the Yard in the very same shoes, and while my heart leapt at the sight, my head knew better. Consumer culture makes soul mates of us all.

Ilana J. Sichel ’05 is a literature concentrator in Dudley House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.