A young mother glances up from her phone screen for her child, moved by some internal awareness and a too-quiet pall, and leans to scan around the kiosk of body lotions and Christmas bows and its bored, stool-perched employee, for her kid. But the dark-haired boy is around, in his Spider-Man pandemic mask, hiding behind a giant Kusama-looking tree ornament three times his size.
The few milling shoppers here, braving the worst days of the pandemic so far, show diversity and color, they are thick and thin, holding hands or pushing a wheelchair. An up-to-the-moment barker, a kind of shopping-mall goddess, offers chocolate to lure a shopper into a jeweler.