The Maul

This weekend we went to an outdoor mall that has fountains and trolleys and a live jazzy jazz band with horns. It is the kind of place where you might see someone skip out of a store with 3 huge bags in each hand and break into a Broadway show tune. And you would not be surprised. In the winter, at Christmas-time, there is fake snow after 5 pm that blows down under the old fashioned street lamps and Nat King Cole sings through the loud speakers. There are foot-long orange and yellow koi fish that swim around in ponds and people line up to kiosks that sell bedazzled Louis Vuitton outfits for small dogs. It is the kind of place where rainbows and lollipops decorate the sky and there’s a three-story glass staircase in the Mac store.

It is the also kind of place where you go to pay for four tickets to the movie, 3 children, 1 adult and they tell you $57. It is the kind of place where, at the restaurant next door, a hamburger is called ground sirloin and comes on a brioche made in a Parisian bakery (and where a child who doesn’t care for the brioche will drop it into a plant next to the table, even though the Parisian brioche is part of the reason the burger costs $23). It is also the kind of place where at least one child will find an item that he instantly and wholeheartedly cannot live without. And he will be so overcome when he keeps hearing the word No that he lies down on the trolley tracks until an adult in attendance tells him the entire family will have to spend the night in jail after they are forced to clean the blood and ground sirloin off the tracks. And he still won’t get up.

It is the kind of place where people turn their heads and sadly look away while you drag your screaming child back to the valet parking lot while the other two children alternate between looking humiliated and yelling at the screaming child every time it seems like he might stop. The kind of place where you just give your entire wallet, your watch and your sneakers to the parking attendant so you can be on your way. And the kind of place where once you are back on the street and five minutes away, everyone, finally and happily, starts singing.