The Chihuahua is small and fat and wearing a green coat – it looks a little like Churchill. Its eyes are weepy, and a lot of its sandy hairs have turned white. It begins to shiver – for November, the weather is cold. Then it whimpers quietly, as if it’s ashamed of being old and frightened. But mostly it waits for its master to reappear from inside the supermarket.

She sees it, feels tempted to bring it inside – of course that would upset the owner too much. She senses a passerby, a woman’s voice. “Awwww….” the woman says, looking at the little dog.

Kneeling down, Jane winds her scarf around the small animal and walks away. The scarf is like a blanket around the animal. Each half of the reversible grey and white garment is symmetrical, with snowflake designs knit into the pattern at different points. At a couple of places there are half-snowflakes at the edge of the scarf, as if the other half had fallen off.

From the corner of her eye, she realizes she’s being watched. A man entering her office building has seen her spontaneous act. What was he thinking? Or was he just looking through her to the display in the supermarket window?

Back at the office, she realizes the problem with this good Samaritan mentality. It leaves you without clothes pretty quickly. You know, this is the Northeast, she says to herself, and if you keep this up, you’ll be depending on the kindness of strangers for your winter gear.

After work, she makes a quick trip back to the supermarket. A clerk opens the lost and found drawer: umbrellas, books, gloves, even a coat, lie unclaimed like souls in purgatory. But there’s no grey and white scarf. Jane passes the mounds of overpriced oranges and apples, the exotic salad bar, and the fish counter. “Order your holiday turkey now,” she reads, and heads for the door.

The weekend comes, a furlough from her boring job. She finally faces up to the inevitable – a trip to the mall to replace the scarf. First, driving there. That means, her driving there. Shooting on to the highway - no ramps to ease on: just gauge a break in the relentless stream of travelers, take a step in, and move along in the under toe. Of course, she squeezes her way over through the breakdown lane – it was always a little too confusing to figure out what the other cars were doing. She generally hoped they had the good timing to work around her. Why couldn’t she have stayed in the city, where you could relax and read a book between destinations?

At the exit, she passes a pickup making an illegal U-turn to reach the mall access road. Peaceably, she continues along the legal road, listening to a greasy T-bone Walker version of “Stormy Monday.” A half mile down the slow-moving road she finds her usual spot to reverse direction. She watches an oncoming bulldog of an SUV ignore the double yellow line to pass a couple of cars. Finally, she reaches a back parking lot that leads into the mall area. She’s managed to avoid as much of the highway as possible.

Opening the door of the first department store, she’s immediately being seduced by an impulse item. Suede slippers. Warm and cozy! Made in China! Marked down, Lord, love the color, goes with her floors. Dammit, she need slippers, $13.50 won’t break the bank. She takes off her boots and carries them carefully to the slipper wrack. The medium fleecy-lined fluffies are selling themselves. But do they fit right? Isn’t the left one tighter than the right? Oh, hell, she takes off her left sock, who’s going to notice? She tries another size, another style; well, backless will flip flop around; the others are too pricey.

Her shopping tolerance drops like a glucose level, so she cuts the slipper search short and works on the scarf choice. Nothing is right in that department. Pastels, rippled chenille, Burberry plaids. She turns over the price tag on a soft, understated, grey and red plaid cashmere, drops it like it’s contaminated. Finally she buys a dowdy grey waterproof hat and leaves the store.

But still, no scarf. She ventures out into the mall. How did people spend so much time in these overbright cavernous places? How much short wave ultraviolet light was filtering down from those mercury-containing fluroscent lights? What if they closed all the malls in America and sold goods at dull-looking poorly-lit buildings? Kind of like Russia before Perestroika. People would still come.

Old people sit on the benches, waiting with vague, tired looks in their eyes. Packs of adolescent girls, mostly under driving age, roam the hallways like pastel-colored foragers. Families bounce from one buy to the Best Buy, children already lining up at the center of the Mall to be photographed reciting their gift list to Santa. Nothing like starting consumerism young, she thinks.

Passing the toy store, Jane asks a young salesgirl if the battery-powered Scottie she holds by a leash is friendly. “Oh, yes.”
“You know you’re choking him when you lift him off the ground like that?”

She narrows her hunt to one more store, and heads for the scarves. “It’s under Designers,” a Cambodian boy tells her quietly. She keeps at it, trying patterns, rejecting textures, grimacing at price tags. But she’s about had it.

Suddenly, her eyes spot that same length of grey and white snowflakes she had given away. Reversible, with that same lopsided pattern, like flurries falling haphazardly in a light storm. The kind of thick flurries that stick to you in starry patterns. She’s always loved snowflakes like that.