Inventory

My first year in college I fail several courses and am only allowed back for my sophomore year after a humiliating conversation with the Dean of Students.  Although I am a little in dread of it, going back to William and Mary turns out to be an effective escape from the ropy home-front tension of impending divorce.   Also: in the spring, I apply to enroll in Introduction to Fiction Writing.  From several dozen applicants, I get through the first round of rejections and am invited to a lunch interview with the instructor, a dark-haired, barrel-chested thirty-year old writer named David Something.  I can’t remember his last name, but if I call him “Professor” he corrects me. 

“Call me David,” he murmurs.  Call-me-David “forgets” his wallet on the way to our lunch interview. “Let’s skip the restaurant, go back to my place and just have each other for lunch.”  He leers.

I realize he has no idea that I am a virgin.  I am encouraged that I seem more mature than I feel.  And in the end, despite my demurrals regarding lunch, I am invited to enroll in Introduction to Fiction Writing, and by Thanksgiving Break I am actually enjoying myself at school.  The writing course is going well, confidence is up, and I firmly yet tactfully rebuff call-me-David’s ham-handed attempts to bed me. 

Things on the home front are not great, however.  My parents are swinging for the fences. “The lawyers have taken all the money,” they take turns saying.  My Dad moves out.

Someone puts the back-country Greenwich house on the market, and, this being the 80s, it sells immediately for double what my parents paid for it three years ago.  Things were flagging there, divorce-wise, for a while, but new funding for the lawyers means game on.    My mother and brothers and I move into a condo.  My father moves into a small house in Old Greenwich with a creepy roommate.

I decide I need a real job this summer with a real paycheck:  no more waitressing at IHOP, no more cashiering.  Child of Greenwich that I am, “real job” equals “New York City job.”  I have a thirty year old man propositioning me, I want to shout:  I’m ready for a real job, a woman’s job. 

I briefly discuss this with my mother (the job, not call-me-David’s offers of oral sex) and announce I intend to find a position in the City.  She doesn’t ask how I plan to do this or even where I am thinking of applying.  She has other things on her mind and less time for us – the longer commute means she leaves sooner, gets home later;  she has more and longer meetings Mr. Lambert, her lawyer, than before.  Mr. Lambert approves of her move to the condo, but I hate it.  I have a room the size of a closet, a closet the size of a suitcase.  There is no garage, no backyard. 

The only person around to punish for the situation is my mother, but this suits me just fine.  In fact, since my father is mostly absent, I double up on the punishment I give her.

Just before break I sell my Econ book back and buy a one week pass on the Metro North Commuter Rail.  Every morning during break,  I wake up and get dressed in high heels and a dashing black cape and runway-ready makeup.  I spend a great deal of time on my makeup, since I have no credentials beyond well-applied makeup.  Well, I type.  But I don’t intend to find a job where typing is required.  I take the train into the city with my mother that week, and this is enjoyable for her, I suppose, since, in public, I act like a human being and am civil and chatty with her, talking about articles in the New York Times, making plans to have lunch together in the Penny cafeteria.   

Once in the city, she goes to work and I walk into every couture, cosmetics and department store listed in the Manhattan directory, from Fifth Avenue on over, giving out copies of my resume, filling out application forms.  Yes, I am a citizen;  no, I have never been arrested for a felony.  Eventually, at Elizabeth Arden, I get past a receptionist and am ushered upstairs to meet the manager:  Mrs. Sutter.  Mrs. Sutter is a tall and slender woman with about as much juice as a pencil.  She looks me over, glances at my resume, takes in the makeup and the dramatic “get-up” (my Mom’s words) and asks me if I’m going back to school in the fall.  

“No,” I lie.  “I’m taking time off.”  After a few minutes of conversation, clearly to establish that I am not a moron and that I can talk the talk of the fashion I will be expected to sell, I am hired.  I will start in May, after exams.       

Elizabeth Arden has a Red Door as part of its marketing-presence-thingy, and when I walk through it on May 10^th, I feel like Mary Tyler Moore:  I Can Turn The World On With a Smile. I want to toss my hat in the air but I have no hat.

This, I think, will be so much easier than college.   

Things begin somewhat inauspiciously.  As soon as I walk into the store, through the Red Door, I encounter a woman who looks just like Lisa Taylor (my favorite model of all time!).  I introduce myself as “the new sales associate.”  “You look just like Lisa Taylor!” I tell her.  She looks at her nails. 

“Don’t ever walk through that door again.  That door is not for the help. Use the back entrance,” and then she walks away.  I do not ever see her again.  

The next person I meet is Sylvia.  Sylvia is clearly also Help, a fellow saleswoman. 

This is the last time I think of anyone there as “fellow” anything. 

Sylvia, it turns out, is the highest selling saleswoman at Arden.  She is a large woman – busty like nobody’s business, poured into her polyester pant suits.  Every day she wears either a thin purple sweater or a thin black sweater.  Both fit her like a sausage casing, both are flecked with scalp flakes each day, and yet still Sylvia has scads of rich women asking for her help.  Sylvia, they say, help me pick something out for Amalfi.  She calls me “darling Pamela.”  She is just as friendly and great to me no matter how many sales she steals.  

Sylvia gives me a tour of the downstairs:  Ready-to-Sports-Wear, Ready-to-Cruise-Wear, and miscellaneous Ready-to-Ready-To-Wear.  “Anything cotton, anything daytime,” she says.  I roll my eyes.  I know this already.  We go up the elevator, see Couture and Lingerie and Purses and Evening Wear. 

The carpeting here is thick and pink, marked by scrapes from a vacuum, like parallel claw marks from a huge cat.   I can smell perfume. Sylvia waves at this and that, then gestures me back to the elevator.  Third floor: Spa Care.  Skin care, hair care, nail care, even bikini-line care.  They care quite a lot, in the Spa.  Sylvia waves to the back:  Mrs. Sutter’s office.  I see her office up close only once more, on the last day, two months hence, of what would turn out to be a lackluster sales career but a memorable and career in shoplifting. 

Sylvia takes me back to the first floor and I meet a few more people. 

Robin works in Cosmetics, just a few steps away from Ready-To-Wear.  She has very black hair, very pale skin, and apple-red lips, á la the Stepmother in Snow White.  I read a lot Vogue, know all the models:  she looks just like Janice Dickenson.  Most of the time Janice ignores me.  She spends her entire salary, I come to believe, on makeup, clothing, nail polish, hair product, and perfume.  It shows. 

Ludmilla is from Poland.  She looks just like Renee Russo, or maybe Patti Hansen.  She is tall, with blonde hair, translucent skin, stacked as a bra-model.  Has a beautiful Polish accent, but can drop it and use a French accent if that seems warranted.  She works mostly in Spa Care, sometimes Cosmetics.  She once complimented me on my skin.  Wheee!  But then the next time she saw me she wasn’t sure who I was. 

Miriam is a very young Jewish girl who works exclusively in Lingerie.  I suspect she is Sylvia’s niece but it’s clear that no one wants to talk about this, so I don’t.  Miriam lolls about like the senior member of a large harem:  people tend to want to bring her things, and she likes people to bring her things.  Every week she borrows a little bit of money from me which she doesn’t pay back, but she also introduces me to tongue.  Miriam shuts me out of every sale, every day, every week, without exception.

Jacqueline works upstairs in Couture and Lingerie.  Jacqueline, like Mrs. Sutter, is tall and slender and old. Jacqueline has clear standards of what is and is not good behavior.  She never steals a sale from me;  she is morally and ethically careful, never borrowing a penny, never coming in late, never asking for any favors or taking any either.  Jacqueline, unlike Mrs. Sutter, does not give off an air of having once been like Lauren Hutton. What Jacqueline does give off is the air of keeping up standards.  Also poverty.  She reminds me of no models.  She is the only person who is nice to me.  Jacqueline is a desperate yet effective saleswoman, cloying in her complimenting of the customers, a hanger on, a getter of more clothes, a woman whose own clothing was once fine but is now shabby, a bit tattered.  Having lived in Greenwich for so long, I have seen plenty of rich people who don’t care about clothing, and I’m quite sure that Jacqueline is not in this category.  Jacqueline’s category is the once-rich.  A category I’m moving into. 

Elizabeth Arden is, in short, a very estrogen-rich environment.  Also there are no black people anywhere.  Except Melly.  Melly works in Inventory:  her job, as far as I can tell (I can’t ask her) is to determine what has been bought and what has been stolen.  She wears forgettable clothes, and has crazy dark freckles on her face that do not look like the freckles of the Irish and Scottish girls I have known.  She doesn’t look like a model either.  To be fair, this is more difficult for Melly (to look like a model) because there’s only one, that I’m aware of:  Beverly Johnson.  But Melly does not look like Beverly Johnson.  Melly is a middle class woman who doesn’t care if anyone knows that her money is going to other things.  She doesn’t talk to me at all, but after two weeks of working at Elizabeth Arden I am used to being ignored and don’t take it personally.  Also, I am white and she is black, and there is that strange and deep divide of class as well as race. 

In the break room she has pictures of her toddlers and a small black and white Polaroid of her husband, smiling shyly.  One day, the gossip flitting around, I realize that he is dead, and it is just Melly, raising her kids.  I avoid her after that.  Not that she notices. 

Back by the elevator is Nick, one of the only men in the store.  Nick has peroxided hair;  he is as young as Miriam, homosexual, unapologetic.  Elizabeth Arden has him in a suit that is meant to be a uniform but on him, his white hair and his faintly rouged lips, his swishing walk, the thick gold braid on his shoulders and draped between the double-breasted rows of buttons, he looks like a slender, gay, Barnum and Bailey ringmaster.  I do not know how Nick tolerates his job:  my job, with more motion, more conversation, and more to look at, is already, after the first three weeks, almost unbearably boring and physically stressful.  His job lacks motion completely.  Plus he is not allowed to talk to the customers. 

He takes a customer up and I walk back to Ready-To-wear and I sit on a gilt chair that is supposed to be only for the customers. Melly is there, counting, swearing under her breath.  I flex my feet a few times, relishing the sensation, but sitting on the chair will only, I know, make it feel worse when I have to get up again.  

Melly is still swearing.  She gets up and leaves.  Goddamn, she says.  I wonder again what is going on.  Have a lot of things disappeared?  Have they been stolen?  I go and talk to Rafe to find out. 

Rafe is the security guard.  Rafe has a distant look about him and a gut.  He is not in the kind of shape you should be in, I think, to stop burglars and criminals.  He talks a lot about retiring but mostly he wants to talk about college life with me, about Greenwich, what it’s like to go to the beach whenever I want.  We get to be friendly and pretty soon instead of opening my purse and looking inside, the way he is supposed to, he waves me through.  He still looks through my bag, the one with my lunch, my book, my raincoat.

The weeks go by.  It is July.   I am not making more money than I would have at IHOP, but I don’t mind too much.     

One day a very young black girl comes in to shop.

Elizabeth Arden does not really have clothing for young white girls;  I am pretty sure we have zero clothing for young black girls.  Mostly we dress middle-aged white ladies.  Everyone in the store slows down to watch her, including me.  The girl picks up a few things but refuses to answer when Sylvia tries to help her.  She moves into the dressing room. 

Sylvia walks close, raises her voice to be heard through the thick curtain.  “How are you doing in there?  Can I get you another size?” she asks. 

And the girl says, “Go away! Did I ax you to get me another size?”

And I am shocked that she is so rude to Sylvia, and I am feeling superior because I know that “ax” is low class, and I am fascinated to know what this girl might be trying on – what would she possibly wear from our stock?  Before I can hazard a guess about this, Sylvia gasps.

Then Sylvia does something that is so anti-Sylvia that the universe must be tipping:  she pulls the curtain wide open, as far as it will go. 

“Just look at her!”  she says, accusing, horrified.  We crane, and all of us – Ludmilla in cosmetics, Rafe in his blue pseudo-cop uniform and little Nick in his elevator boy get-up, me in my Good Black Dress – all of us can see her in the desperately small dressing room, can see her plump thighs, bare to her panties because she has hiked up her dress in order to pull on the shorts under the skirt.  She has hiked up her shirt as well, and around her waist are three necklaces.  She is frozen in this tableau, speechless. 

A roll of fat suddenly pops out over the waistband of the shorts.  Her mouth breaks into a pained snarl, half anger, half fear.      

“Get away from me, close that damn thing,” she says.  Sylvia lets the curtain close but sticks her hand between the curtain and the wall. 

“Shorts, two necklaces, and the sunglasses,” she declares.  What sunglasses?  I hadn’t even seen them.  As they are handed back Sylvia gives them to Rafe, who has also stepped closer.  The girl stalks out, not bothering to address any of us.    

“Low life trash,” Sylvia says.  “Coon.”  I am more upset at seeing this side of Sylvia – hard, mean, mean – than I was at the girl’s efforts to steal.  But all I do is shake my head.

On the weekend, I speak privately to Rafe about it.  “Shoplifters,” he says, looking over his shoulder as if he himself were doing something illegal, “all have their ways.  Some are more successful than others.”  He speaks in a hushed tone.  I am still as shocked as I was the day before, but something in me was born when he said “successful” and “shoplift” in the same breath.  Something that had previously seemed impossible, after all, was just nearly pulled off by an ordinary girl who took not even basic precautions to prevent getting caught. 

I knew I could do better.

A day later I am alone, upstairs, and Miriam is at lunch.  What would be the easiest?  What would be the smallest desirable thing?  A scarf.  Not just any scarf: a pale pink Chloe scarf I have coveted for many weeks.  I have noticed, working here, that there are items which I want no matter how many times I see them:  these I covet.  There are others that seem attractive the first time I see them, but like a candy with no subtlety, their appeal fades fast.  I begin to discern:  this belt, not that;  these sunglasses, not those.  This top, this dress, not that one.  I steal the pink scarf with ease.  No one misses it.  Inventory is taken, apparently, only on the clothing. 

Next I turn to the Purses.  I have been here every day for weeks and never saw anyone even open the drawers with the purses in them.  The drawer pulls, in fact, are shockingly dusty.  I clean the handles, then sprinkle a little baby powder on them, and check to see, every day, if anyone has touched them.  No one has.   

One day I wonder if inventory on some things is being taken at night, when I’m not around to see it.  I ask Rafe what happens at night?  Does he ever act as the night guard?   Is there a nighttime person? 

“No one comes in here at night,” he says;  “Some security bells are set, so they know what’s up.”  He looks at me, about to ask what’s it to me, I feel sure, so I ask to see more pictures of his grandkids, especially the baby.  He beams.  Sure thing, sweetheart, he says.  He doesn’t say sweetheart the way call-me-David would say it.  Rafe says it the way my Grandpa says it.  Rafe is a sweetheart himself, and I tell him so.     

Over the next few weeks, my haul is two scarves, three belts, and several necklaces.  For some of the objects I borrow the young black girl’s method and tie them around my waist after I remove the security tags.  The security tags come off with a pair of scissors.  There is nothing secure about them, as far as I can tell. 

The next week I get a little bolder, and take a purse. 

There is no hue and cry.  In fact, nothing at all happens.  Melly takes inventory of everything she takes inventory of as usual.  We sell things.  That is all.   

The week after, I take a blouse.  In order to get the blouse out of the store, I have to remove the stiff finger-like plastic security tag, attached with some kind of metal pin.  A machine that looks and sounds like a nail gun in reverse is needed to get the metal pin off the clothing without ripping the clothing. 

Only one obstacle lies between me and the removal of these larger items – the larger purses and things I want.  Rafe:  although mostly he does a superficial job, occasionally he really lets me show him the bag with my shoes.  This is irritating.  I need for him not to look – ever.  I get more annoyed every time he looks into my bag, but I dare not show it.  But then one day I dump the whole thing out, theatrically showing him what was in the bag down to the bottom.  He is clearly embarrassed:  his skins pinks up, he pulls on his earlobe. So the next day I do the same, and on the day after, again.  His face turns pinker and pinker with each dumping.  After the third time, he says, No, no, no, and waves me through.    

After this problem is dispatched – the searches through my things – I am free to take whatever suits me.  I grab clothing that is too long, too tight, and too short for me.  In the jewelry section I take another necklace that I don’t like;  a pair of sunglasses that look funny on me, and the shirt that Wanna-Be-Shoplifter Girl was trying to put on when Sylvia opened the curtain like Toto in the Wizard of Oz.   

Inside the crowded condo, the stolen merchandise is piling up.  I have to find a place to put it or stash it or something it, because eventually my mother is going to find it and she’ll figure out immediately that I’m stealing.  I decide to send one purse to Emily, a good friend of mine at William and Mary who also has a birthday in July, although I’m not completely sure of the exact date.  The bag is a knock-off Bottega Venata.  Bottega Venata is, I think, Italian for “Buttery soft brown leather.”  At seven hundred dollars, it is a very nice knock–off.  I put in a thoughtful note, tape up the wrapping paper, and send it off. 

She phones me up a day after she gets it, completely impressed, almost speechless with delight.

It’s a nice purse, I allow.

“Nice?!” she screeches.  “It’s … it’s… it’s real leather! Real leather!”

“Yes,” I murmur.  I’m a little embarrassed.  After I get off the phone I go upstairs and look at the four other purses I’ve taken (“taken” is the verb I use in my head this summer.) 

Four seems like more than I might need.  I earmark one for my sister, one for my cousin, and the biggest one  – really more like a brief-case, in buttery blue-tinted leather, an adjustable strap, a clever and elegant snap clasp – the biggest one, I decide, I will give to my Mom for her birthday. 

When I give it to her a week later, a day after her birthday, she too is speechless.  Unlike Emily, she does not squeal about the leather or how happy she is.  She looks blankly at me, sets it aside, says nothing.  Then she starts talking to my brother, who hasn’t gotten her anything but told her he would cut the lawn.  She reminds him there is no lawn.  He tells her he will wash her car.  She is thrilled. 

She does not use the purse.

The last week of work, I decide to take a cashmere bathrobe and a vintage nightgown.  The cashmere robe squishes into a smaller bundle than I thought it would, and the nightgown doesn’t add any weight or volume either.  Rather than trying to wear them out, which would be difficult – they both go down to my ankles -- I try folding them very tightly and stashing them in the bottom of my bag, since it looks like they fit there without much trouble.  I set the bag down, look at it from a distance.  I still have to take the bulky tags off, but even so, the bag looks fine, not packed or loaded down. 

Miriam comes back. 

I start chatting with her, pushing the bag under the shelf where I’m standing, and remind myself to grab it on my way out since two customers have just walked in and the least promising one will be mine.

A few more customers come – it is a busy day.  The day goes by quickly, and when the customer rush slows down, I think about how I will be back in school soon. That morning and the previous weekend, I began packing my clothes at the condo; I still need to give my notice to Mrs. Sutter, who thinks I will be here indefinitely.  I try to remember what I told her, hope it wasn’t too specific.  I should, I think, give notice today:  if I do it today, that will be … yikes, I only have one more week here when I actually calculate the dates.  Okay, well, then, two is normal but I’m only going to be able to give one week’s notice.

I feel my heart rate speed up considerably, but it is Friday and if I don’t tell Mrs. Sutter today it will feel even worse on Monday, I know. 

At five o’clock, I grab my bag from under the shelf and go downstairs, where I get my sneakers out of the locker room, then take the elevator to the third floor. Nick presses “three” for me, and I pretend to faint with delight that he is saving me the backbreaking labor of hitting my own elevator button:  our private joke.   I tell Nick I’m giving notice.  He looks at me and smirks. 

“Can I watch?” he says. This flusters me but I have no time to recover. The elevator screeches to a halt, Nick pushes open the door and hits the hold button. 

I step out and walk down the hall to her office door, which is slightly ajar. 

I knock knock knock and peek in.

“Yes?” she says.  She does not look up.

“Mrs. Sutter, I need to speak to you.”

“Yes,” she says, not looking up again. 

“May I speak?”

“Yes,” she says, and sighs.  I open the door and walk in. 

She is working on an accounting sheet, with a ruler that she is slowly moving down the columns of numbers.  Inventory.  A pair of plain grey reading glasses are perched low on her nose.

I start talking.  I mean to say one weeks’ notice, but cannot bring myself to say the number “one,” since I am suddenly sure that the right thing to do is to offer two-weeks’ notice.  I know that.  And although I know I should give two weeks’ notice, I absolutely have to leave a week from today.  But I cannot bring myself to tell her the truth.   

The lie rushes out of me. 

“I need to offer my two weeks’ notice.” 

She closes her eyes, and when she opens them, she is looking at me.

“Two weeks’ notice.”  

“Yes, I –“

“That wasn’t a question.  That was a statement.”  I am silent.

“Is that all?” she says.  The pencil makes a zipping, cutting sound as she draws another line.  She is no longer looking at me.   

“Yes ma’am.” 

I can’t remember if, in my life, I have ever, even once, used the term “ma’am.” 

She is looking at me again. 

“Tell me what you plan to do after you stop working here,”  she says.  I hesitate before I answer.  “Do me the favor of either telling me the truth or staying silent.” 

I freeze.  I think of Nick, in his elevator suit, of Rafe, in his guard suit;  I think of Melly, her formless clothing pooling around her shapeless body as she kneels next to the racks of Ready-To-Wear, of the picture of her husband, dead or gone or whatever, I think of Jacqueline and her frayed sleeves.  I can’t breathe.

I stay silent. 

“Well, “ she says. “Best of luck.” 

She goes back to her accounting. 

After a minute of silence, during which time she neither looks at me nor deviates from her rhythm of drawing another line, sliding the ruler, drawing, sliding, I work up the nerve to move my numb feet and walk back to the elevator, where Nick stands. 

He smiles again. 

“How’d it go?”

I do not answer.  His smirk hardens. 

“Just be glad you’re getting out,” he says and the elevator door opens on the first floor.  I walk past the clothing displays to my right, my shoes clipping along.  I feel numb, relieved, and deeply ashamed.  I want to hide.

I adjust my purse and my bag with my raincoat in it on my shoulder, and look down the hall.  At the end of the hall, in the direction I’m walking, is the nearest door – the one we’re never supposed to use.  The Red Door.  The one I’m supposed to use will require a longer trip, will require conversation with several people.  All I can think is that I want to leave.  I need to get out.  I can’t breathe.  I can barely see.

I ask Rafe, standing nearby, if, just this once, I can leave from the front door.  I must look white, or sick, or sweaty, or all three, no doubt, for he reaches over and squeezes my shoulder.

“Sure honey,” he says, and waves me through.  Robin, behind the counter, smiles as I walk by, sympathetic, busy.  She is just finishing her last sale, putting the merchandise into a bag.   

I smile back at her but she is already turning away.  I feel exhausted, so sick of being me, sick of my summer, sick of everything. 

I walk through the frame of the electrical detector – the one that rings if one is carrying something that has, say, metal pins in it.  Metal pins on security tags from, say, stolen clothing. 

The machine screams.  I startle hugely, lose my footing for a second, recover my footing.  I am instantly bathed in adrenaline.    

I look at Rafe. I look at Robin. 

I am terrified because the sound startled me, but I do not remember, in that instant, that I have anything in my bag except my raincoat and my lunch bag and my novel.  I remember quite well that I looked at the cashmere robe, that I fluffed out the nightgown and looked closely at the lace; but in my mind, the theft is only half done, the deed only planned, practiced;  the theft, in my mind, is not yet executed.  So why would this alarm be going off? 

I laugh.  I can hear this laugh today, almost thirty years later:  it rings in my ears.  It is the clear, innocent, amused laugh of someone who has caught someone else misbehaving in a naughty but not serious way.  It is open hearted, happy, relieved all at once.    

“What made it go off?” I ask.  My voice is curious.  I move the bag I am carrying closer;  it rings again.  I move it away;  the machine falls silent.  I do this a few times, as if playing a game.  Rafe tilts his head, curious too.  “You got something in there?” he asks. 

I open the bag wide, without looking into it.  “Want me to dump it on the ground?” I ask, and I start to do this.  “Let’s see, what have I got here?”  I laugh again.

He waves his hand in that “Go on, gedd-oudda here” gesture.  He turns and walks away, already turning pink as I make a big show out of dumping everything on the ground.

Robin is still busy with her customer, her back to me as she reaches for a bottle of something, adding it into the bill of sales.  She waves her hand just like Rafe as I stand, holding the bag open by the bottom, on both sides, shaking it, spilling everything onto the floor, laughing, and she laughs too. 

“Go on, go home.”  The contents of my bag spill over the marble floor, a beautiful tangle of cashmere and lace.  I see the nightgown, the robe, everything, and I gasp, as Robin continues.  “It’s broken or something.  They’re unreliable, everyone knows that.  Unpredictable.” 

I reach down into the soft masses of material on the floor:  my raincoat, the pink fluffy cashmere, un-wrinkling itself, the tag laying right on top, the lace of the nightgown next to the lunchbox, the raincoat woven through it all, and I push it all into a heap, smashing it all back into the bag.  The klaxon goes off again as one of the tags moves slightly closer to the machine, and I move towards the door in a blind and deaf panic, I lurch through the door, and the klaxon stops, and I feel sweat break and fall down into the small of my back.  I still cannot hear anything, can barely see anything;  I feel and resist the urge to vomit. 

I walk for five minutes, away from Grand Central, the Saturday afternoon traffic and people growing thinner as I move farther away from the train station, and then I finally put it together that I am walking the wrong way. 

I stop, lean against the building, and cry.  Someone looks at me:  a business man in a business suit. 

He looks concerned but he doesn’t stop and he doesn’t speak to me.  I wipe my eyes, stay there for a few minutes, and put my sunglasses on.  I re-orient myself, and after another few minutes, I start walking toward Grand Central. 

It takes me a long time to get to the station because I make a detour around Fifth Avenue.  I get lost but I will not do the thing that would help me to get unlost, I refuse to walk over to Fifth Avenue.  Eventually I find my way home. 

I get home at 7:30, and the condo is empty. 

I go upstairs, and find everything that I have taken. 

Everything that I have stolen. 

I get a paper grocery sack downstairs.  I unfold it and realize I will need several of them. 

I fill them all up, and then I put them into the suitcase that I am packing, and I cover them with a blanket, and when i go back to school, I bring them with me. 

I do not go back to the store.  Every day I take the train in to the city, and each day I find a different morning place to sit quietly.  I walk quite a bit.  I tell my mother I have some long lunches that I am due because I have covered other people’s lunches during the summer.  We meet at the cafeteria every day that last week.  We talk, cautiously, about nothing, and by the end of the week, we are nearing a state that resembles truce. 

After these lunches, I get on the Metro North and go back to Fairfield, and use my beach pass to go sit on the beach and feed the seagulls.  It is a quiet week and I do not try to make it un-quiet.  I help my mother unpack the boxes that remain in the condo.  I wash the windows and drive my brothers where they need to go.  I finish packing. 

I do not know what my mother has done with the purse I gave her;  I never see it again.  She does not mention it to me.  I do not give away any more of the stolen merchandise. 

When I go back to school, I make of point of wearing the dresses, the blouses, the belts;  I use the necklaces, the sunglasses, and the scarves.  I use the purses.  In fact, I wear them out.  I wear everything out;  I wear everything until it is thin and torn.  I wear them and use them until they are tattered and worn out and shabby. 

I wonder sometimes about Melly;  I think I see Jacqueline when I am at school, just ahead of me on Duke of Gloucester Street, but it is never her of course.  I think about Rafe;  about Nick and Robin.  Did they every square the inventory with the missing items?  Ever notice that the theft stopped when I left?  For a long time I wondered if someone would chase me, pursue me, accuse me.  But that never happened.  I never do get punished.  I never do get punished.