I tried to focus on the blur of paper products in front of me—plates, napkins, gift bags, wrapping paper. Where the hell was the toy aisle? I sped around the corner and caught a glimpse of army green fabric. David’s shorts?
“David?” I called, flat-out running now. I nearly tripped over a display of brooms standing against the wall, and catching my balance, I was sent flying into the toy aisle where my son crouched, looking intently at the assortment of cheap plastic toys. I was both astounded and mildly comforted to see King Rex and Weeple there too, crowding the aisle with their bulk, like bouncers at a nightclub.
“David!” I grabbed him roughly and lifted him into my arms, even though he was getting much too heavy for me. “Are you okay? Is everything okay? I was so worried about you.” I pressed him to my chest, ignoring the way he struggled and squirmed against me. My wildly beating heart was trying to settle back into its proper place, but it was still too expansive with emotion.
“I’m okay, Mommy,” he said.
I released him, and he sauntered back over to the wall of toys as if I’d merely disturbed him. He held up a robot action-figure. “Can you buy this for me?”
“No,” I said. “Definitely no. Especially not now.” I bent down to clasp his wrist, and he ducked out of reach. “David Patrick, we are leaving this store right now.”
A low rumble started, like a stomach growling.
“You did a very naughty thing, running away like that,” I continued, “and you scared Mommy and Grandma Duffy to death. Don’t you ever do that again.”
The rumbling was getting louder. It seemed to be coming from his dinosaurs. I surveyed the aisle for the black shadow, but it was nowhere to be seen. Were they growling at me? I tried to grab David’s wrist again, but he retreated a step and King Rex slipped between us. Under the store’s fluorescent lights, the T-rex looked like a ghoul from a haunted house. I knew I should have been afraid of his vampire-sharp teeth, but I was adrenaline-buzzed with a mixture of maternal relief and outrage.
“Come here this instant, David!” I ordered. “We’re leaving.” I reached purposefully around King Rex, and I thought I felt the side of my hand brush something cool and scaly. I flinched and fought the urge to draw back and instead caught David’s forearm and started to tow him out of the store. I was panting and my muscles were twitching like I’d just run a marathon.
David was wailing with the shrill frequency and intensity of an ambulance siren as I dragged him toward the door. I glanced back to make sure his dinosaurs weren’t following us, but mercifully, they had vanished. The greasy clerk watched us in half-excitement, half-horror as we left his store.
You scared me to death. Don’t you ever do that again. The furious, yet loving words resounded in my head and brushed a memory loose. A time when I had run away from my own mother and scared her to death. Don’t you dare ever pull a stunt like that again, Anna Grace. You hear me?
When I was seven years old, my mom dragged me to the East Ridge Mall almost weekly, and every trip lasted at least four hours. We didn’t go there to shop for school clothes or books or toys for me; we went to shop for The Perfect Dress for her. For a while there, it felt like I spent more of my life in department store dressing rooms than I did at home or school. I became accustomed to the familiar detritus of dressing rooms—pins from dress shirts, broken hangers, crumpled up wads of tissue paper—and the sadness and secret life behind the velvet curtains. The women who cried quietly, the mothers and daughters who argued savagely over the cut of tops and jeans, the bosom buddies who boisterously discussed their personal lives from separate dressing rooms, the boyfriends who slipped in with their girlfriends and made them moan, which was almost as disturbing as the crying. To this day, I still couldn’t stand dressing rooms and rarely tried anything on.
The Perfect Dress was akin to the Holy Grail for my mom. As far as I could tell, she didn’t have a specific shape, style, or color in mind because she tried on nearly everything on the racks. It seemed to have to do more with how it looked on her and how it made her feel. In all our shopping trips that year, for all the thousands of dresses she tried on, she only ever purchased five dresses. Three of them she ended up returning, and the other two hung in her closet awaiting some special moment that never came. My mom never bothered to explain her relentless hunt to me, but looking back now, it seemed that the magical power of the true Perfect Dress would be meeting the Perfect Man, who would sweep her off her feet and away from her miserable life. And me.
One particular afternoon in December, my mom dragged me to the mall as per usual, but this time, I didn’t mind as much because she’d promised we’d make a trip to visit Santa. I waited patiently in a hard plastic chair, not unlike the ones we had at school, outside the dressing rooms, while my mom glided out in a never-ending stream of festive holiday dresses to scrutinize herself in the mirror.
“What do you think of this one, Anna?” she asked of an off-the-shoulder, green velour, tight-bodiced, full-skirted number. It was her standard question, so I gave my standard response. The few times I’d tried to share my honest like or dislike of a dress, she hadn’t listened to me anyway.
“It’s pretty.”
My mom sighed tragically and spun a few times in front of the mirror to get the full effect of the skirt. She looked over her shoulder to see if any of the other store patrons were admiring her. She fluffed up her honey-blond hair and then patted it down. “I think they had this in red too. Anna, would you mind getting me one in red? Size five. I think it was on one of the racks at the front of the store.”
Some of the nicer department stores had salesladies with strong perfume who fluttered around my mom, bringing her different sizes and colors of dresses, and even recommending and picking out different ones for her. They were always bitterly disappointed when she didn’t buy anything. When salesladies were in short supply, my mom sent me on her dress errands.
The front of the store opened up to the mall, and as I flipped through the rack of dresses, searching for a size five, a loud family passing by caught my attention.
“I’m going to ask Santa for a remote-controlled helicopter!” a boy cried. He was about my age, wearing a dopey-looking sweater with a turtleneck under it like it was school picture day.
“I’m going to ask Santa for a helicopter too!” a smaller boy piped up. His outfit matched his brother’s.
“Copycat!” The older boy complained.
Their parents were walking behind them, holding shopping bags and smiling.
“Don’t forget to say please,” their dad said. “And make sure to thank Santa for all the nice presents he got you last year.”
“Okay,” the older boy agreed sullenly. “And I won’t say anything about the Legos he forgot last time either.”
I watched them walk away, presumably to Santa’s Village, and burned a jealous look into the boys’ backs. How lucky they were. No doubt they didn’t have to endure hours of dress-shopping before they got to visit Santa.
“Can I help you, sweetie?” A saleslady’s voice brought me back to my task at hand.
“I’m getting a dress for my mom,” I said. “She’s in the dressing room.”
“Well, let me help you.” After I told her the color and size, the saleslady gave the rack a few efficient flips and handed me the correct dress. She was wearing a white, fuzzy sweater with a gingerbread house pin attached to her shoulder. It looked like it had real gumdrops glued to it. My mom would’ve called it ugly.
“I like your pin,” I said.
“Why, thank you, sweetie,” she said. “I just love Christmas, don’t you? I bet you’re going to see Santa today.”
I nodded uncertainly at her.
The saleslady glanced down at her watch and then frowned. “As soon as your mom is all finished up in here, you’ll have to go there next. I think Santa and his elves are only here until four o’clock.”
I rushed back to the dressing room, the red dress dragging on the floor a little.
“What took you so long?” my mom asked as she snatched the dress away, but she didn’t wait for a reply. She flounced back into her dressing room and shut the saloon door with a slap. I returned to my position as sentinel on the plastic chair.
The red dress wasn’t quite right either, and neither were the next four. When my mom came out with an armful of dresses to hang up on the discard rack, I grew hopeful. I stood up, but she told me to hold my horses, that she still had a few more to try on before we could go. I relayed the saleslady’s information about Santa’s Village closing at four, but she waved my concern away, saying we’d still have plenty of time to see Santa.
I sat back down, kicking the bottom of my chair with my too-tight snow boots.
“This is boring,” a girl’s voice said. Leah Nola. She materialized in front of me in her gray jumper, the kind of dress I’d always wanted my mom to buy me, but which she insisted looked too “parochial.”
“Tell me about it,” I whispered.
Leah Nola blew her bangs upward in sympathy. She often showed up on these dress-shopping excursions to keep me company. “Do you want me to stay with you?”
I nodded, and she sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of me. She pulled her skirt taut over her knees.
My mom appeared in a sequined black dress with a plunging neckline and a slit all the way up her leg to her thigh. She seemed to stiffen when her eyes landed on me and swept over Leah Nola.
“It’s pretty,” I said, before she could ask.
Leah Nola coldly assessed her. “She looks like a vampire.”
My mom scowled and propped her hand on her hip. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? It makes me look pale and my hips look really wide. Something about these sequins.” She grimaced at her reflection in the mirror before turning on her heel.
“Ask that lady what time it is,” Leah Nola directed.
“Excuse me,” I said to the elderly woman leaving the dressing room carrying a pair of slacks. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Three forty-five,” the lady read off her watch and kept walking. A sneaking suspicion that I was going to be let down—yet again—crept over me, and I felt a little like crying.
Leah Nola gripped her knees and rocked forward. “This is boring.”
“Stop saying that,” I hissed. “I know it’s boring. And you’re not the one who’s been sitting here all day.”
Leah Nola’s lavender eyes flashed. It was a look I knew well, her mischievous look. “Do you want to go see Santa?”
“You know I do,” I said. “But my mom’s not done trying all her dresses on yet. We’ll go once she’s done.”
Leah Nola stood up and tiptoed toward the individual dressing rooms, as though listening for my mom. “You heard the lady. It’s three forty-five. Santa’s here until four. Your mom won’t be done by then.”
“She said there’d be enough time,” I murmured.
“Do you want to see Santa?” Leah Nola repeated.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Then let’s go.” She held out her small, pale hand.
I’d like to say that I hesitated, but I didn’t. We scurried from the dressing room area and hid behind a rack of dresses. The kind saleslady with the gingerbread house pin was milling around, so we waited for her to ring up the elderly lady’s purchase before making a break from the store. The mall was bigger than I had thought. Louder. More crowded. I would’ve frozen and turned right back around had Leah Nola not been by my side.
“Do you remember where Santa’s Village is?” she asked, hovering close to my shoulder.
“By the food court and the cookie bakery,” I said.
“That’s good.” Leah Nola smiled reassuringly. “Then let’s just follow our noses.”
No one noticed the little blond girl and her imaginary friend as we darted between the crowds of shoppers. When we finally arrived at Santa’s Village—a bustling beacon in the middle of the mall, cordoned off by a faux gold gate draped in greenery—we spotted the long, winding line of kids with their parents and realized that our adventure had probably been in vain.
“There’s no way Santa’s going to have time to see all these kids before four,” I said.
“Why not?” Leah Nola said. “He’s Santa.” She guided me to the end of the line.
A man, a pregnant lady, and a toddler were in line in front of us. I didn’t like the looks of the man. His hairy arms were impatiently folded across his chest, and the only times he unfolded them were to swat the toddler’s hand away from the greenery and cottony snow. This mean impatience, combined with his gingery hair, reminded me of Ronnie, one of my mom’s ex-boyfriends. When the man noticed me in line behind them, he smiled at me, showing all his teeth. Goosebumps pricked the skin of my arms and legs.
The line inched forward, and Leah Nola and I hung on. Not having a watch and being too afraid of the man in front of me to ask the time, I had no idea if it was four o’clock yet. It seemed like enough time had passed for my mom to have discovered I was gone, changed back into her clothes, and made a dash to Santa’s Village. Surely that was the first place she’d look, right? If she knew me even a little? But maybe she’d noticed and decided to finish trying on her dresses anyway, which were clearly more important to her than me. Or maybe when she’d realized I was gone, she’d decided this was the perfect opportunity to be rid of me. Maybe she had left the mall without me.
Under my wool winter jacket, I started to sweat. Part of me had assumed I could slip out of the dressing room, see Santa, and return—my absence totally undetected. The other part of me had wished to create a ruckus, to get a reaction out of my mom. I had hoped she would come searching for me, with tears rolling down her cheeks. But what would happen if she didn’t come and find me at Santa’s Village? What would happen if I went back to the department store dressing room, and she was simply gone? I unzipped my jacket, hardly noticing that a sign had been placed behind me, indicating I was the last child to see Santa that day, and that only four other children were ahead of me now. Sweat poured down my chest and back, and I suddenly felt lightheaded.
Leah Nola poked me in the side. “I think I see your mom.”
I followed her gaze, and sure enough, there she was. Composed and beautiful, like a mermaid on the prow of a ship, she parted the crowds effortlessly. She had changed back into her lacy blouse, jeans, and boots, and the mall’s skylights made her honey-colored hair shine. My first thought was, She doesn’t need the Perfect Dress. She’s beautiful without it. My second thought was, She doesn’t look the least bit sad or worried. For onlookers who didn’t know my mom, they would’ve thought she looked calm and unruffled, but I could tell she was pretty pissed off.
I ducked behind the pregnant lady.
“We should hide,” Leah Nola suggested. “Teach her a lesson.”
I shook my head. As disappointed as I was to learn that my mom didn’t love me, that my brief disappearance hadn’t shaken her up at all, I knew that prolonging her discovery of me would only make her angrier in the long run. The pregnant lady stepped out of my way, exposing me, and I suddenly realized that I was next in line to see Santa. A vista had been opened up before me. I could see his big golden chair and the fake Christmas trees flanking him. The creepy man set the toddler on Santa’s big, red-velvet covered lap. The toddler immediately began wailing and reaching for her mother. Santa clung to the child as if she were a slippery fish and smiled tiredly for the camera.
“I hope you’re happy,” my mom said, towering over me in her boots. “You just had to get your way, didn’t you? You scared me to death.” She bent down to my height and gripped my shoulders. Her hands felt like claws digging into my winter jacket, all the way to my bones. Her hazel eyes were abnormally bright. I thought for a moment that she might hug me, but instead, she flung me away from her, as if in disgust. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”
A young woman dressed in a green felt smock and gold tights approached us. “Welcom
e to Santa’s Village. It’s your turn to see Santa, and you’re pretty lucky, because you’re the last kid of the day!”
My mom sneered at the elf. “That won’t be necessary.” She whipped around to face Santa. “Anna Grace Jennings!” she shouted at him. “Write that name down on your naughty list. She doesn’t deserve any presents this year.”
The pregnant lady and the toddler were still lingering on the other side of the gold gate. She looked from my mom to me with a look of pity before her mean husband hurried her away. A few other shoppers had stopped to watch the spectacle, and I felt like burying myself in the fake puffs of snow and never coming out again.
Santa’s mouth opened in a retort, but we never got to hear what it was because my mom was already dragging me away. I could feel her anger vibrating through her arms as she jerked me down a side hallway that led to where we had parked several hours before.
“Don’t. You. Dare. Ever. Pull. A stunt. Like that. Again. Anna Grace.” The angry click of her boot heels punctuated each of her words. “You hear me?”
I stared defiantly ahead, not responding.
“Do you hear me?” my mom demanded, the claw digging into my shoulder again.
I gave in. “Yes,” I said softly.
Imaginary Things Page 20