Land Mines
Dana stands at a table of scarves in the men’s department of Bloomingdales, feeling the softness of the cashmere, wondering if the price is too high for an apology. Does admitting you’re sorry always have to cost more than you can afford? The pale gray Burberry check scarf is handsome, a perfect match for Jeremy’s tan overcoat. Its expense makes it an even greater act of contrition. She glances around the store as she strokes the delicate Scottish wool. The nearest salesgirl is walking toward the dressing rooms with another customer. Dana’s heart pounds, her stomach flutters, adrenaline courses through her. It’s been years since she did this, but she quickly folds the scarf and stuffs it inside her large purse.
***
She started stealing at twelve, about three months after they moved to Los Angeles so her father could teach painting at Cal State Northridge. The San Fernando Valley wasn’t a place she would have chosen to live. Then, her father and Robin never asked her. The ugly public school—a bunch of low buildings surrounded by cement and a steel fence—wasn’t her choice either. Only shoplifting was.
At first, she took only what was small enough to fit inside her pocket—bubble gum, candy, lipstick, a pressed flower key ring. She did most of her shoplifting at the Rite Aid a few blocks from her new school. To avoid suspicion, she always bought something else. Buy a Coke, steal a compact. Pay for the chips, but not the M&Ms.
The first time her heart was racing so fast she felt she would faint right there at the register. When she finally caught her breath—a block past the drug store—and bit into the stolen Almond Joy, her stomach recoiled. She quickly ditched the candy in the street. Yet two days later she was at it again.
What she didn’t eat she kept in a shoebox in her closet. Sometimes she’d take the box out at night and lay her treasures on her bed. Pathetic, most of them, cheesy, made in China junk she’d never think of buying. They gave her pleasure nonetheless. Like postcards or souvenirs of places she’d visited. She remembered where and when she’d stolen each of them. Mementoes of her secret life, one that set her apart from all the other fifth-grade rejects.
The teachers at Topeka Drive Elementary were younger and peppier than in her last school in Chicago, but the children were no friendlier. All that made school bearable was that she could walk there by herself. While her teachers droned on about math problems that bored her, or vocabulary words she never used, she planned which stores to steal from. The anticipation, the uncertainty, the risk of getting caught, was more exciting than any video game. The sweaty palms, the knot of fear in her stomach as she entered a store, the mix of relief and exhilaration when she emerged safely, thrilled her.
After a few months of petty drugstore theft, she lengthened her route home to include the mall, moving upscale to brand names. Glittery Monet earrings, a pink-and-turquoise Tumi change purse, Ralph Lauren sunglasses. She never entered a store with a particular object in mind. She would just wander around and see what caught her eye. The items had to be small, something she could fit in the pockets of her father’s navy peacoat—a coat he wore all the time in New York before her mother ditched him for a more successful artist. She’d rescued it from a pile of clothes Robin was donating to Goodwill when they moved from Chicago. Perhaps the coat was a mistake, called unwanted attention to her. The cuffs were frayed and the wide shoulders spilled over her slender frame. Other kids mocked her for it. “Where did you steal that? From some homeless bag lady?” Still, the jacket was warm and comforting on cool mornings and the pockets deep enough for all kinds of booty.
She knew stealing was wrong, but she couldn’t stop herself. Shoplifting was like rollerblading through a minefield. All her senses were heightened. She saw more, heard more; even her gum tasted sharper. Although she feared that at any moment there might be an explosion, the danger made her feel alive.
One rainy day, walking out of Nordstrom with a purloined Liz Claiborne scarf, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to face a twenty-something blonde with too much lipstick and too smug a look. “Can I see your sales slip, please?”
She felt a heaviness, like wet cement, slowly fill her body. She’d finally hit a mine. She wondered if this was how soldiers felt when one exploded.
***
“A classic choice.” The voice behind her at Bloomingdales is male.
Startled, Dana whirls to face a slender Black salesclerk she failed to notice before.
“But way too expensive.” She tightens the grip on her purse to contain her panic and steps away from the table, her heart pounding against her ribs.
“You can’t go wrong with Burberry.”
“I could. You can’t imagine how much.” She laughs shakily at her narrow escape. “But thanks, I’ll remember that.” She laughs again, too loudly, as she rushes away from the puzzled clerk. She has to be unhinged to let another scarf tempt her into shoplifting. Is she trying to be caught again?
***
They made her wait in the office of Nordstrom’s security chief, a short, mustached man in a pale-blue shirt who looked as bored as the uniformed guard at her school. She sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair beneath a bank of television monitors bolted to the wall above her. The security chief sat across from her at his bare desk, cleaning his fingernails with a paper clip.
He asked only which parent he should telephone. After that, silence.
He remained at his desk, eyes flicking back and forth between his nails and the monitors above her, ignoring her on purpose, she supposed. Let the kid squirm a while, worry what will happen next. She had no clue what that would be. They didn’t throw kids in jail for shoplifting, did they?
Her father took only a half hour to get there, less time than when he forgot to pick her up from her guitar lesson the week before. He was in his studio when they called and he arrived in jeans and a paint-spattered T-shirt underneath his windbreaker. He glanced at her in bewilderment as he entered the office, as if unsure she really was his daughter.
The security chief sat them both down across from his desk. “Your daughter’s very young to be stealing,” he said, handing her father the gold paisley silk scarf she’d swiped.
Harold ignored the evidence, reached for his wallet instead, and pulled out a credit card. “I’m happy to pay for it,” he offered.
“That’s not the point.” The security chief pulled the scarf back. “Shoplifting’s a serious offense.”
“I realize that. I understand how serious this is . . .” Harold launched into a long and conciliatory apology, explaining that they had just moved to Northridge in August, that it was a difficult adjustment for the whole family, that Dana had never been in trouble like this before. They often shopped at this store, always paid their bills on time. He repeated his willingness to pay for the scarf.
The longer he talked, the deeper Dana plunged her hands into the pockets of his peacoat. Did all parents of shoplifters grovel like this? She wanted to scream at him to stop.
Perhaps his pleading embarrassed the security chief as well, because after a few minutes he agreed that there was no need to report this. “Just keep your daughter out of our store,” he warned. “Because the next time we catch her, my first call is to the police.”
They were both silent in the car. “I don’t get it.” Harold finally spoke. “You don’t even wear scarves.”
“I thought it was pretty.”
“A lot of things are pretty, Dana, but stealing? What the hell were you thinking?”
The scarf was the kind her real mother wore. She’d thought of giving it to her if she ever visited L.A.
Harold kept staring at the road, waiting for an explanation. She had no answer that would please him.
“I know it’s hard starting all over again,” he finally said when they pulled into the driveway of the ugly ranch house they were renting. “But if you don’t talk to us, Dana, we can’t help. We want to understand . . .” He let the question dangle.
“I messed up, okay?” she muttered because she wanted to end the conversation.
Robin didn’t want to talk about it either. She went into the bedroom with her father and shut the door. When they emerged an hour later, her stepmother had arranged an appointment for her with a shrink.
***
Dana’s pulse throbs in her temples as she ducks into a gastropub. She sits in a booth and orders an Old Fashioned to collect herself. Although she rarely drinks more than wine, and certainly not at three in the afternoon, she needs to calm her agitation. It was truly mad to steal the scarf. She thinks of the shame and humiliation she just avoided; she imagines Jeremy’s mortification if he had to retrieve her from the police station. Would he grovel like her father? Would he even come to get her? She’d hoped that moving in with him might bring them closer; it only magnified her faults. After fifteen months living together, the qualities that had attracted him—her breezy, free spirit and disregard for convention—had become grave defects of character. His discovery yesterday of a stack of parking tickets in the glove compartment of her Honda reminded him again of all her flaws.
“Jesus! Don’t you put money in the meters?”
“Sometimes the time runs out.”
He added up the fines. “There are two hundred bucks of tickets here.”
“I know. I’ve been meaning to take care of them.”
“You mean you haven’t paid them yet?” Her negligence launched a tirade of indignation. A computer programmer who never missed a deadline, he couldn’t understand how she could just ignore the tickets.
“You’ve made your point,” she said after a minute. Yet he wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. The tickets were part of a larger pattern that somehow she failed to grasp: the unwashed pots left overnight in the sink; the clutter on her desk and dresser; the laundry piling up in her closet. And couldn’t she even make the bed in the morning? He was still railing about her failings when she pulled into the parking garage of their North Hollywood apartment building. What the hell was wrong with her?
“Say something for Christ sakes,” he shouted.
***
“So, dear, tell me about yourself.” The psychiatrist was short and squat, with graying hair and little makeup. Dr. Rosenthal leaned back in her leather chair and peered intently at her.
Dana shifted uneasily in her chair.
The doctor waited.
Dana’s eyes wandered around the cluttered office. She took in the children’s drawings on the wall, the wicker basket stuffed with toys, the wild-haired Barbies and helmeted G.I. Joes, the Victorian dollhouse with the tiny, uniformed maid standing at its front door, the large sand tray on a side table. Her gaze kept drifting back to the small but conspicuous stain on Dr. Rosenthal’s cream silk blouse.
“You have a spot on your blouse,” she said.
The doctor looked down at the offending blotch. “I’m sure the dry cleaners can get it out.”
The stain looked like salad dressing or maybe grease, something fattening the shrink shouldn’t have had for lunch. “What if they can’t?”
Dr. Rosenthal looked at her a moment. “Are you asking about the blouse or about yourself?”
She felt her cheeks go hot.
“This isn’t the dry cleaners, Dana. You’re not here to be cleaned up or repaired or for me to remove whatever spots or defects you or your parents might think you have. My job is to help you understand your feelings so you can make the best choices for yourself. Do you understand?”
She stared at the stain again. She was sure the blouse was ruined. She glanced at her silly Cinderella watch with its cheap fabric strap to see how much longer she had to sit there. Though her stepmother could force her to see a shrink, she couldn’t make her speak.
Jeremy provoked the same stubborn wordlessness as Robin. Her silence drove them both to despair. “You’re depressed, listless. In a terrible rut,” Jeremy said when they entered the apartment. “You need to see someone—a therapist, a psychiatrist, somebody who can shake you out of it. It’s obvious I can’t.”
She was so hapless, so deficient, that only a professional with advanced degrees could fix her.
***
“School okay today?” her father asked as he drove her to her third appointment with the shrink.
The truth, she knew, wasn’t what he was asking for. Did he really want to hear how she spent the day trying to be invisible? It was a strategy she’d adopted in her last school in Chicago, one of four cities in which she’d lived because her father kept moving from one teaching job to another. Never speak in class unless the teacher calls on you. Avoid talking to the other girls. Eat alone rather than sit next to a weirdo or a loser. Better to be ignored than shunned, although it was always hard to tell why other kids weren’t speaking to you.
To fend off more questions, Dana popped a piece of bubble gum in her mouth and turned on the radio.
“Would you please just pick a station and stick to it?” Harold stopped her hand as she switched from station to station.
She was happy to see his irritation surface. She didn’t trust any of his and Robin’s fake solicitude. They both had been acting as if they’d just read some book on how to be a good parent and were faithfully following its advice. Do not nag your child. Do not ask uncomfortable questions. Be patient, respectful. Give your child the space she needs. Or maybe they were just waiting for Dr. Rosenthal’s miracle cure to kick in.
She clicked the radio off. “You ever go to a shrink?” she asked.
He hesitated a moment before answering. “As a matter of fact I did.”
“When?” She eased up on the gum.
“In college.”
“You never told me before.”
“I only went a few times.”
“You get cured that fast?”
“I was having trouble sleeping at night, so I went to the health center for some sleeping pills. They wouldn’t give me any unless I saw a therapist.”
“Oh . . .” Her father’s insomnia was disappointing. She had hoped for a fault or an affliction that they shared, a reason her mother had left both of them. She started to form another bubble with her tongue.
“Why do you ask about the shrink?” he said cautiously.
The bubble broke and she cleaned the gum off her face. “Just wondering.”
“Well, I dropped out of school shortly afterwards and had no trouble sleeping after that.”
“Yeah, but you can’t drop out of grade school, can you?” she said and turned to the side window.
“If school’s the problem, Dana . . .”
“Then what? We’ll move again.”
“I wish . . .” he started, then changed his mind.
“Yeah, if wishes were horses,” she repeated the nursery rhyme her birth mother had often recited and flipped the radio on to end their conversation.
Harold remained silent until they pulled into the driveway of Dr. Rosenthal’s office, which was attached to her hillside home. She quickly opened the door and started up the stone steps to the doctor’s office.
“Have a good session,” he called after her, as if he were dropping her off at her guitar lesson.
***
Dana orders a second Old Fashioned. Although the first slowed her heart rate, her mind is still racing. She isn’t sure what she expects from the alcohol. Will there be revelation or amnesia at the bottom of the glass?
If she’s so screwed up, so defective, why did Jeremy invite her to move in with him? And why is she always the one who must apologize? What about his flaws? The defects in his character? His self-righteousness, his constant faultfinding and disapproval. She wonders what Dr. R. would say about him. Would the psychiatrist be surprised if she showed up on her doorstep again? What would she say about the stolen scarf inside her purse?
***
Each appointment, Dana expected her to bring up the shoplifting, but she never did. She suspected that the therapist was sneakier than she looked. She wanted you to believe she was a kindly Jewish grandmother who never heard a problem that couldn’t be cured with chicken soup, while all the time she was just luring you to confess.
“I received the test results from your school today,” Dr. R. announced at their fourth session. “You are a very bright girl, Dana, yet you’re not doing very well in school.”
“School’s boring.”
“They often are.”
Dr. R. waited. She had the patience of a rock. At the rates her parents were paying, Dana imagined the shrink could wait happily for years.
“I don’t give a shit about school.”
“What do you give a shit about, dear?”
Dana laughed. It was funny to hear Dr. R. swear.
“Well?” The shrink smiled.
Dana looked around the office at the toys and objects Dr. R. had collected over the years. On the end table by the couch was a pretty carved wooden bird, from Mexico she guessed. She wondered if it was valuable.
“What about your parents? Do you care what they think?” Dr. R. was uncharacteristically pushy.
She shrugged. “My father and Robin are already disappointed in me.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I see the way they look.” Her stomach tightened. “They want a different daughter.”
“Different?”
“Yeah . . .” The tightness rose to her chest.
“And what do they want you to be?” the shrink prodded.
“What I’m not,” Dana snapped. “Prettier . . . chattier . . . thinner. I don’t know. Different . . .”
“That makes you angry.”
“Duh,” Dana mocked her.
“And now I’m making you angry.”
“This is stupid.”
“Feelings are never stupid, Dana. They give us information about ourselves and about the world. But when we don’t pay attention to them, we can become dumb. Even a girl as bright as you are.”
“So I am dumb then.” Her whole chest began to ache.
“About your feelings, yes.”
“Well, my parents must be too, because they’re paying you a lot of money for nothing.”
“Go on,” the doctor encouraged. “It’s good to see your anger.”
“Fuck you!” The force of it surprised Dana almost as much as the words. She sank back into the couch, wanting to vanish. She wouldn’t let that happen again.
“And your birth mother, does she feel that way too?” Dr. R. persisted.
“I haven’t seen her since New York. She just sends birthday cards.”
“That must make you angry too.”
Dana stared at the wooden bird on the table to avoid the shrink’s gaze. She wondered what Dr. R. would do if she smashed the carving.
“It’s not going to bring her back,” Dana said.
“Neither will holding back your feelings.”
The pressure in Dana’s chest swelled like a balloon about to burst. The roaring in her ears drowned out everything the shrink was saying. She had tripped on another land mine and there was only one way to keep it from exploding. The moment the doctor opened the door to release her, Dana palmed the wooden bird on the table. As soon as she slipped it into her pocket, she was able to breathe again.
Her relief lasted only through dinner.
After dropping her at home, her father had returned to his studio to work. He often retreated there when he and Robin were fighting. Dana rarely heard them argue. When they were angry at each other, they just stayed away. Now she was alone with a sullen Robin.
She ate quickly, placed her dishes in the washer, and fled to her bedroom. She closed the door and took out her box of trophies from the closet. Spreading them across her bed, she saw how pitiful they were. She wondered now why she had stolen any of them. Only Dr. R.’s beautiful carving was worth keeping. The multicolored bird with its huge red eyes was the most striking object she’d ever stolen. The thought that Dr. R. would be bereft at its loss had made her strangely happy. But imagining Dr. R. now, rummaging through her cluttered office for the carving, Dana felt a queasiness in her stomach. The thought that the bird’s loss might pain the doctor made her ashamed. It was one thing to steal from Nordstrom, another to swipe something valuable from someone who would miss it. A sour taste of the leftover lasagna Robin had warmed for dinner rose in her throat. She swallowed hard to keep from heaving.
Suddenly the door swung open and Robin stood at the entrance to her bedroom holding her backpack. Her stepmother’s stunned look at the loot scattered across the bed revealed her dismay. Dana instinctively shoved the wooden bird under her pillow. “You’re supposed to knock!” she yelled and rushed toward the door.
Robin backed away before Dana slammed it.
“I’m sorry,” Robin apologized from the hallway. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you’d want your books.”
Dana quickly propped a chair against the door to make sure Robin wouldn’t re-enter.
“You don’t have to do that, Dana. I promise I’ll knock next time. Really, I’m sorry . . .”
Dana flung herself on the bed. Robin could make all the promises she wanted, but Dana had seen the horror on her face. There was nothing she could do to erase it or change her stepmother’s despairing view of her; she was as hopeless as her father’s tattered peacoat, which Robin was so eager to toss out.
***
The nose-ringed, punk-haired waitress asks Dana if she wants another cocktail, as if she’s a sorry lush who drinks by herself in the afternoon. She doesn’t want another Old Fashioned; she doesn’t want to return to the apartment either. The alcohol or the memory of her stepmother makes her stomach squish. Or maybe it’s the Burberry in her purse that’s roiling her gut, forcing her to her feet. She grabs her purse and rushes to the restroom. Standing over the toilet, she can only retch.
She splashes cold water on her face at the sink and takes deep breaths to calm herself. It sickens her that she’s stolen the scarf. The gift would hardly make up for all Jeremy finds lacking in her. If caught, her arrest would only have confirmed his worst beliefs about her. A familiar heaviness comes over her, an ache and weariness that makes her want to sleep.
***
The moment she started up the steps to Dr. R.’s, she felt the pressure mounting in her chest again. Her stomach clenched and her palms were sweaty. But Dr. R. said nothing about the stolen bird.
What was she waiting for? She had to have noticed it was gone. Yet here she was asking about Chicago? Did Dana have friends there? Did she like her old school?
Dana barely heard her. The shrink swam in and out of focus.
“Are you all right, dear?” Dr. R. reached out to feel her forehead. Dana instinctively recoiled.
“You look so pale. Do you have a fever?”
“I . . . I stole your bird . . .” Dana blurted it out without expecting to.
“I thought you might have,” Dr. R. said calmly. “It’s a beautiful carving, isn’t it?”
Tears stung Dana’s eyes. “You’re not angry?”
The doctor shook her head. “Did taking it make you feel better?”
“For a little while . . .”
“That’s one of the troubles with stealing. The pleasure doesn’t last very long. Then you have to steal again.”
Dana had discovered that herself.
“There are other ways to tell people you’re angry with them,” the doctor continued.
“I’ll bring it back.”
“I’d appreciate that. I’m very fond of that bird. My husband bought it for me in Oaxaca.”
Tears spilled down Dana’s cheeks.
Dr. R. passed her the Kleenex box. “Maybe you were angry at me for what I said last week and wanted to hurt me, but look at how much you’re hurting yourself. You don’t have to punish yourself like this for feeling angry.”
Dana’s tears kept coming. “They all want someone different . . . My dad, my stepmom . . . My real mother left because she hated having me . . .”
The doctor leaned forward and handed her another tissue from the box. “I don’t know your mother, Dana, but I do know this, and I know it from all my experience as a doctor: you’re not the reason your mother left you. When a parent gives up her child, it’s never the child’s fault.”
Dr. R. leaned back in her chair and let Dana weep.
***
Dana pays the check and leaves the restaurant. The late afternoon light is already fading as it had years before when she slowly descended the stone steps from Dr. R.’s office to her father’s waiting car.
Harold looked closely at her as she fastened her seat belt. “How was it today?” he asked.
She thought she’d left all her tears at Dr. R.’s. To halt them, she flipped on the radio as they pulled away.
Her father reached over and turned it off. “I’m sorry things have been so hard for you.”
She didn’t answer, just dabbed at her eyes with the frayed sleeves of his ragged peacoat. She turned the radio back on and saw him staring at the high-tech watch on her wrist with its bright red plastic band. “That’s a new watch, isn’t it?”
She avoided his eyes.
“Where did you get it?” he persisted.
“At Nordstrom,” she confessed.
“Oh, Dana . . .” He reached over and gently touched her shoulder. “I wish you didn’t do this.”
“I know,” she mumbled.
“Then why?”
She wanted him to pull to the curb, lean over, and hug her; the same wish she had the afternoon they caught her at Nordstrom. Instead of cringing with embarrassment, she’d wanted him to look past her petty thefts, put his arm around her, and say he loved her. But now, as then, he kept his eyes on the road and driving. If wishes were horses . . .
“I just don’t understand,” he said.
“I like stealing,” she finally answered. “It’s one thing I’m really good at.”
***
Remembering her father’s devastated look, she knows that wasn’t true. If she’d been a better shoplifter, she would never have been caught. It’s amazing that she escaped arrest today. No, stealing is just her clumsy way of expressing everything she can’t cry about. She saw Dr. R. once more to return her wooden carving and then told her parents she didn’t need to see the shrink again. She no longer had a desire to shoplift.
But now, years later, she’s stealing again. This time she doesn’t need Dr. R. to help her understand her feelings. She just needs the courage to acknowledge what she hasn’t wanted to face.
On her way to her car, she passes a Goodwill store. What synchronicity to stumble on it. A thrift store was where she gave away her father’s peacoat after her final session with Dr. R. The Goodwill store is open and she walks inside. It’s a perfect place to dump the Burberry. Leaving Jeremy will be harder. But exiting the store, she already feels lighter.
