Soap Opera Slaughters Read Free

settled, moved or dead, my family is gone, it’s gauche to buy newspapers with rotogravure if you can even find them, American restaurants don’t have tables for one...and even I was bored by the valid yet commonplace litany of my own self-pity.
    The late August sun filtered through the interstices of the oriental screening, unaccompanied by the slightest noise of traffic. Pine Street might have been an empty Kansas plain.
    After feeding the fish, throwing out the garbage, watching strangers walk past my window, I wondered what device I could discover to take the cutting edge off living through another Sunday.
    Stooping, I picked up Saturday’s newspaper where I’d left it, still spread out wide upon the living room rug, and there was the big banner headline staring up at me.
MEET YOUR FAVORITE SOAP OPERA STARS!
    At first I told myself, Gene, you’re not going to drive twenty miles and rubberneck with the unwashed multitudes just to catch a glimpse if your dream-mistress’ eyebrow. Then I modified my machismo. I had nothing better to do, and I’d been meaning to check out the new Delaware County mall, anyway. Sure, I felt a little sheepish about the extent to which soap opera addiction had taken hold of my imagination, and yes, I fully expected to find myself in the middle of an army of closet loonies unable to separate fantasy from reality, but damn it, I argued with myself, there are supposed to be fifty-five million Americans watching daytime dramas every week, why should they be any less correct than the proverbial outnumbered Frenchmen?
    Before I left, I considered taking along my binoculars, so I could at least be reasonably sure of getting a good look at Lara Wells—just to see if she really resembled Hilary all that much. But I decided finally to leave them behind, on the unlikely chance that I might actually meet her. I wouldn’t want to give her the impression I’m just another celebrity chaser.
    I pulled off Township Line and headed south towards Garrett. Traffic was unusually heavy for a suburban Sunday. I had the ominous impression that most of it was headed exactly where I wanted to go.
    I was right. A block away from the main parking lot entrance, the line of autos came to a bumper-to-bumper standstill. It took a good ten minutes to inch close enough to see the actual turnoff. The holdup was chiefly caused by a few inept lot attendants trying to direct the arriving vehicles to the rapidly disappearing spaces within.
    I managed to make it inside, though not many behind me did. I found a space in the last, furthest row from the long, low line of the exterior mall. Switching off the ignition, I locked up, got out and set off for the main entrance.
    It was a warm afternoon, with a sky the color of the water of Provincetown. The clouds were shy and scant, and the sun gloried in puckering up my eyes against its glare.
    As I drew closer to the quarter-mile-long main el of the complex, I realized that, despite the crowd, I was in a much better mood, partly because I was doing something instead of sitting at home staring at the calcimine, partly because the clement weather brightened me. But mainly because I enjoy visiting shopping centers, department stores, supermarkets—they evoke in me that sense of Carnival which is an apt metaphor for America itself, glamorous and tawdry and wonderful. Even roadside Howard Johnsons charm me with their vulgar array of coin machines that I can never pass without dropping in a quarter just to witness the mechanical mysteries of some worthless trinket’s chuted delivery.
    In the parking lot, adults and children of all ages streamed towards the mall’s main entrance, bottlenecking before its thick Lucite portals like dreamers asked to choose between the Gates of Ivory or Horn. Their eager shining faces were mostly Caucasian, but with a generous sprinkling of other ethnic groups. Some talked and laughed, but mostly it was a curiously quiet crowd, tense with a charged