Excerpt from “Shoplifting,” from
What Some Would Call Lies: Novellas (Five Oaks Press, 2018)
Standing in the aisle of her local K-Mart, Monica Evans held up a toddler T-shirt for inspection. Every boy’s shirt featured an image of a race car or a monster truck, a baseball player or a superhero. It seemed so primal. Like, get me a sharp stick and a loincloth, already! She wandered across to the girls’ section. Here, everything was flowers and birds, yellows and pinks. Equally cliché, she knew, but if you must live your life as a cliché you could at least choose lavender.
Browsing, she found the cutest flower-print dress, sized for an eighteen-month-old. And it was on mega-reduction. She hesitated, thinking of what her husband would say.
Nothing a sharp riposte couldn’t tame. Into the cart it went.
Jacob began squirming in his baby seat. The little guy was probably hungry. “Almost bottle time,” Monica cooed, hoping to soothe him. At the sound of the magic B-word he let out a yelp and began thrashing as if stung by a bee. In a moment of poor judgment, Monica unstrapped him and set him on the floor. Immediately, Jacob took off. She caught up with him two aisles later, in the toys. With what could only be described as animal ferocity, the child ripped items off the shelves faster than his mother could replace them. Finally, she scooped him up and quickly made her way to the checkout line, leaving the toy aisle looking like a tornado had hit it. Jacob wriggled and writhed, a yellow stuffed animal, a giraffe or something, firmly in his mitt. She planned to rip it out of his hands at the last possible moment. Yet by the time they’d made it through the check-out line, he wasn’t holding it. Unceremoniously dropped, she’d assumed, somewhere along the way.
Later that afternoon, Monica dug a hand into her shoulder bag, rooting after one of Jacob’s pacifiers, and there, wedged between a spare diaper and her copy of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, she found Henry the Hammer: a plush, stuffed toy, golden yellow, with fawn-like eyes on either side of its head and a distended, goofy grin on its neck. Surprised, she held it before her like some Egyptian artifact.
“Hammah!” Jacob shouted, hurtling across the room like a troglodyte, arms outstretched. Before Monica knew it, Jacob had grabbed Henry the Hammer and was merrily thumping away on the hardwood floor of the family’s living room. She was quite content to let him continue. She knew she had not paid for Henry the Hammer. Her son had stolen it. Unwittingly, mind you. But a theft had occurred, and she was technically an accomplice.
Her first thought was to return the toy with an apologetic explanation. Surely Jacob was not the first toddler to stuff something surreptitiously into his mother’s purse. Or, she could fork over the money and keep the kid happy. The price tag dangled from the end of the toy on a little plastic hoop. She wondered how much Henry cost. But with Jacob joyfully pounding away, Monica wasn’t about to interrupt. She wanted five minutes of peace. Just five minutes. If those five minutes were the product of unethical or illegal behavior, so be it.
Quietly, she stepped into the kitchen and fixed herself a cup of tea. She picked up her copy of A Million Little Pieces, which she was re-reading after having watched Oprah scold its author for falsifying certain episodes from his past. Seeing Frey cower under his hostess’s onslaught, watching him apologize and back down had made Monica so angry she actually threw a Nerf ball at the television, screaming “Plead your genre!” Herself the author of a partially-completed memoir, she knew something about being attacked. A month ago, she’d mailed the first four chapters of her opus-in-progress to her mother in Indianapolis. Claudia had phoned not to praise her daughter’s eloquence or her gift for characterizing her beloved but departed sister, Saundra, but to accuse her of stealing from the dead.
“It was your sister who got lost at the Tippecanoe County Fair in 1974, not you,” Claudia said.
They argued about that for a while. Monica was convinced that it was she who’d found herself stranded, alone on the midway, clutching a tower of pink cotton candy in one hand and a stuffed penguin in the other. It was she who’d broken down in tears, wailing as only an abandoned six-year-old can: hopelessly, existentially lost.
Claudia challenged her on that, too, insisting that a six-year-old cannot suffer an existential dilemma. Monica said it’s all relative. What’s existential when you’re six would only be a temporary annoyance when you’re sixteen. And the existential dilemmas of sixteen-year-olds are, of course, completely laughable. But Claudia Barnes, Ph.D., Doctor of Ethics and Philosophy for All Time, whipped out some textbook definition of existentialism, citing Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre.
“Bo-ring!” blurted Monica. “Words like ‘existential’ start out specific, but eventually become generalized. They get appropriated, colloquialized. That’s when ordinary people start to use them. Like when you call your grocer a fascist.”
“I would never call my grocer that,” retorted Claudia. “That’s hyperbole, and it’s worse than wrong, it’s dangerous. You’re devaluing the term. Save a word like ‘fascist’ for when you really need it.”
“But my grocer is a fascist. Do you know what a gallon of organic milk costs?”
“Why steal your sister’s memories, anyway?” Claudia finally asked. “You’re twenty-seven and the mother of a toddler. You’ve done things. You were in that band. You’ve had a kid. You almost finished your M.F.A. Good grief, you grew up in Indiana, the most conservative state in the nation, and now you live in California, the most liberal. You have plenty to write about.”
“Ha! That just shows what you know,” Monica snapped. And she explained to her mother how, once you moved inland from the coast, northern California was essentially a Republican stronghold. “Chico is a little hamlet of progressive thought surrounded by a wasteland of backwater conservatism,” she concluded.
“Great! Write about that!” Claudia fired back. “But leave your sister alone.”
You’ll just get it wrong, Monica thought, silently completing her mother’s argument for her, like you always do.
“We were sisters, Mom. I grew up with her. I don’t see how I can write a memoir of my childhood and not write about her.”
Claudia didn’t know what to say to that, so she simply repeated her request before saying good-bye.
Monica stood in the middle of the room, phone in hand, for a long moment before dropping the phone into its cradle. It answered with a sharp beep. Monica shot the phone a quick middle finger, cursing her mother for the millionth time and wishing, for the billionth time, that her sister were still alive. She would’ve laughed and found the mistake funny. She would’ve told Monica not to worry, to go ahead and keep it that way. To just keep writing. Saundra believed in people. If you said you wanted to be a writer, then that’s what she wanted you to be. Saundra did not trot out old mistakes and remind you of them every chance she got. Saundra did not sit in quiet judgment, a scorn fueled by bitterness and unreconciled loss.
Monica understood she’d made a mistake in showing her work to her mother. Of course her mother was going to show resistance. That was Claudia! What Monica needed to do was take a deep breath and start again. Ignore her mother, that naysayer. That critic. Few people on earth are more oriented toward dissecting the flaws in others—while demonstrating a remarkable inability to train the microscope on one’s self—than the professor of philosophy.
There was another, subtler issue that perplexed Monica, and that was the question of how she had mistakenly appropriated Saundra’s experience. Memories of early childhood are fluid, of course, as likely to be the product of a parent’s repeated storytelling as an actual memory of the event. But to substitute yourself for your sister? And to believe whole-heartedly that it had happened to you? That was spooky. Almost like somebody planted it there. Almost like her sister wanted her to remember the scene for her.
There was no question about it: she would keep writing. She just needed to focus, to concentrate, to apply herself. And so Monica, sitting in her kitchen in a patch of late afternoon sunlight, made two resolutions. First, to return to her manuscript. Second and most importantly, to write what seemed true and then to hold her ground, no matter what anyone said.
“Hammah!” cried Jacob, running through the room, waving his newest toy. His eyes blazed with the unmitigated pleasure of total, uncontested ownership, a joy known only to toddlers and certain obscure, eastern European dictators.
Resolution number three: return Henry the Hammer to his rightful home.
•
Monica did not return Henry the Hammer. Soon her husband Jeff was home and it was time to think about cooking dinner and bathing the baby before putting him down for bedtime. Next thing she knew, it was nine o’clock and all she wanted to do before collapsing into bed was clean up the apocalypse of toys strewn in every conceivable corner of the living room. She enlisted Jeff’s help, and it was he who bent down to pick up Henry the Hammer. “You forgot to clip off the price,” he said, twiddling the white cardboard tag with a finger. And then, in an instant, he snapped the plastic hoop and tossed the tag in the trash. The toy went into a plastic bucket, promptly buried beneath a dozen other toys.
That might have been the end of it, but when Monica saw the toy the next day, her conscience was pricked, however lightly. Yes, she should’ve paid for it. It wasn’t Jacob’s, when you got right down to it. But then it was only an over-priced bit of stuffed polyester. Nothing truly valuable. Come to think of it, charging six bucks for that piece of crap was highway robbery. It’d probably been assembled by a starving child in southeast Asia working fourteen hours a day in a sweatshop. Stealing the damn thing was almost a form of protest.
She knew stealing was wrong. It’s a lesson every child learns, one way or another. As a kid, she’d never stolen much. But her late sister Saundra—well, come to think of it, that was a different matter entirely. Yes, Saundra, the hotshot lawyer, Momma’s golden child with the full ride to law school, Miss Jr. Ethics and Philosophy for All Time, yes, that Saundra had had a little streak of trouble in her early teens. Saundra and her friends had taken to stealing make-up and jewelry from local department stores. They’d started out with plastic trinkets and junk, slowly working their way up to silver and name-brand items. Then came the fateful day when Saundra tried to walk out of a store wearing a pair of brand new Ray-Bans. She was stopped at the door and rather roughly pushed into the manager’s office, where she was read the riot act and threatened with arrest. By the time their mother had arrived to rescue the poor thing, Saundra was hysterical, convinced that she was going to be led off to prison in chains. This man so terrified her that for years to come she would not step foot in that store—wouldn’t even go near the mall where it was located. Claudia toyed with the idea of suing for some kind of mental abuse. But the family should have been grateful. Whatever that ape of a manager had said to Saundra, it cured her of a bad habit. And it probably changed the course of her life. Everybody knows the best priests were hell raisers in their youth; it follows that petty thieves make the best lawyers. They know their kind.
Rob Davidson’s most recent book is What Some Would Call Lies: Novellas (Five Oaks, 2018), praised by Reader Views as “A fascinating collection… extraordinary works that are a pure treat to read.” His previous short fiction collections include Spectators: Flash Fictions (Five Oaks, 2017), which Kirkus Reviews commended as “A small but mighty collection of textual snapshots… Flash fiction at its best that’s definitely worth a look.” Davidson’s fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in Zyzzyva, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, New Delta Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. His honors include a Fulbright award, multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award in fiction. He teaches creative writing and American literature at California State University, Chico. Find out more at robdavidsonauthor.net
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