POCKETING by Peggy Shinner
The first and last time I shoplifted, if you don’t count the time I stole something from a neighbor’s house – and that was a singular occurrence as well – I was in my mid-20s, living alone in a moss green apartment across the street from the William H. Prescott Elementary School. The weekday ringing of bells marked the time. I’d hear the mid-morning bell going off, the children spilling out for recess, the shrieks and scuffling, another bell, and then the capping silence as the kids lined up and squeezed back in again.
At the time, I was part owner of a failing batik and tie-dye shop. This was the mid-70s – Roe v. Wade, Nixon’s resignation, the Jackson 5, Tom Wolfe’s the Me Decade. Feminists were wearing Woolrich plaid flannel shirts (I myself had several dreary favorites) and reading Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (my copy, unfinished, still sits on the shelf); no one was interested in batik anymore. One of my partners was a soft-spoken, dark-haired, freckled woman, originally from Oklahoma, whom I found earthy and ethereal at the same time. She’d co-authored a well-known book on rape. The other was a frenzied, talented, bulimic painter who had once gorged herself on a bag of flour. My credentials were less remarkable.
My theft was unremarkable too.
I suppose you could say I was young (i.e., immature), although research indicates that a quarter of all shoplifters are between thirteen and seventeen. (In 1918, six-year-old Gretchen Grimm, the youngest of seven and the only girl, stole a lipstick at Woolworth’s and gave it to her mother in an attempt, she later said, to get some attention. Grimm shoplifted into her 80s.) I was, in any case, a late, or non-bloomer. I didn’t do drugs (indifferent), I didn’t hitchhike (sorely wanted to), I didn’t masturbate until I was over twenty-one and then only with the aid of a book – not something appropriately erotic, rather Our Bodies, Our Selves, a staple of the women’s self-help movement – and I didn’t have sex with someone else until I was twenty-five.
You could say I was misguided. I was in the midst of some sort of existential sturm und drang (often translated as storm and stress, but more literally storm and urge, storm and longing, storm and drive, storm and impulse), and I stole a jar of nutmeg from the Jewel.
Where I had gone grocery shopping. Where I had, in fact, filled the cart with my small stash of weekly necessities. I was the occasional baker, and the nutmeg, I dimly reasoned, could be used in zucchini bread later on. I concealed the jar in my pocket, which no sooner hidden there seemed exposed, and waited in line to pay for the rest of my groceries. (“Many shoplifters buy and steal merchandise in the same visit,” according to the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention [NASP]. “Shoplifters commonly steal from $2 to $200 per incident depending upon the type of store and item[s] chosen.”) It was a shabby Jewel in a shabby neighborhood. Many of the shoppers were Latino. I was a diffident white woman who would not have caught anyone’s attention. I left the store unnoticed.
In the 19th century you might have said I was a hysteric. That’s what medical and legal experts said about middle class female shoplifters who, in fact, were not called shoplifters but kleptomaniacs. If you were lower class and stole, you were a thief. If you were middle or upper class and stole, you were sick. You suffered from kleptomania. Edwin S. Porter captured this class division in his 1905 film, The Kleptomaniac. A wealthy woman goes shopping at Macy’s and is caught hiding a few articles in her muff. A poor woman, desperate because she has nothing to feed her two children, steals a loaf of bread from a basket outside a shop. Both women turn up in court on the same day. The wealthy woman, head bent, crying, is exonerated, while the poor woman, castigated by the judge, is roughly led away. Lady Justice, shown in the last frame of the film, appears to peek out from her blindfold.
And the source of the kleptomaniac’s illness? Like hysterics, kleptomaniacs experienced physiological disorders linked to the womb. “Women with regular or difficult pregnancies . . . irregular cycles, menopause . . . were all considered prime candidates for the designation of kleptomania,” noted one historian. (Bad marriages, dead husbands, nervous conditions, ill health, and suicidal inclinations could also contribute.) With the emergence of the department store (two of the earliest: were Le Bon Marché in Paris, 1838, and the Marble Place in New York, 1848, where Mary Todd Lincoln later racked up a bill of $27,000 in clothes), women, who had assumed the role of primary consumers in society, roamed aisles overladen with plush silks, ivory combs, linens, handkerchiefs, stockings, camisoles, and shawls and, held hostage by their miscreant uteri, unable to control their aberrant urges, slipped a little something under their skirts. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word shopper first appeared in the letters of English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, known simply as Mrs. Gaskell, who in 1860 wrote of an acquaintance, “She is very dainty-fingered, a beautiful ready workwoman, a capital shopper.”)
Take Ella Castle, for instance. On October 5, 1896, Castle and her husband Walter, wealthy American tourists, were picked up in London for shoplifting a sable muff. Because of their social status, the arrest made headlines immediately. Mrs. Castle, known in her youth for her “comeliness,” had once been chosen to represent North Carolina at the Great Southern Reunion, the New York Times noted. Mr. Castle, a tea importer, came from a prominent San Francisco family. The U.S. State Department rallied in their defense, as did Baron Rothschild. When London police searched their belongings at the Hotel Cecil, then the largest hotel in Europe with 800 rooms (and later the first headquarters for the RAF), they found, among other articles, eighteen tortoise shell combs (“certainly in excess of their requirements”), seven ivory-framed hand mirrors, seven gold watches, seventeen fans, sixteen brooches, nine clocks, two sable boas, two neckties, and a plated toast rack and creamery jug, both bearing the stamp Hotel Cecil.
How could such thievery be reconciled with the Castles’ social standing? Surely they could buy all these frivolities, and more, if so desired. Or as their lawyer said, focusing his remarks on Mrs. Castle, “There is no reason in life why she should have taken these trumpery bits of fur.” Attention zeroed in on her mental status. “Mrs. Castle is very much depressed.” “Mrs. Castle has been suffering from acute headache and a feeling of intense fatigue, although she has not undergone any exertion.” “She was laboring under the effects of a disease which was likely to lead to a temporary overthrow of her mind.” “No doubt . . . she is a kleptomaniac.” (Didn’t we used to fling that as a schoolyard taunt: You’re a klepto!) Her “condition . . . has been a pathetic secret among her acquaintances for many years.” “Her defense . . . would be mental irresponsibility, owing to her sufferings from troubles peculiar to females.”
Female Troubles. That was the root of Mrs. Castle’s behavior, the underlying cause of her shifty fingers. (The catchall phrase, used to suggest a myriad of reproductive-related conditions, came into common usage in the 1930s: “It’s the female trouble,” says Dewey Dell, seventeen years old and pregnant, in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.) Mrs. Castle pled guilty to kleptomania, that quintessential female malady, while her husband “was exonerated from all responsibility for her pilferings.” She was released into his care (echoes of custody), and they immediately sailed back to the United States, where she entered Philadelphia Polytechnic Hospital. There doctors diagnosed hysteria, irregular periods along with other uterine abnormalities, and hemorrhoids. She had surgery. “The sphincter ani [was] dilated, the fissures cauterized . . . the ulcers treated . . . and the hemorrhoids clamped and cauterized. The uterus was curetted and then the trachelorrhaphy [suture of the cervix] performed . . . with silkworm gut.”
The records don’t indicate if her kleptomania ever resurfaced.
According to some experts, kleptomania derived, not from uterine disease, but from thwarted female sexuality. Call it uterine greed. Mis- or displaced sexual voracity. Light-fingered women needed, or wanted, a roll in the hay. But if they were unmarried? If their husbands were impotent or disinterested? If social sanctions prohibited other partners? They donned their hats and gloves and went shopping. This view was put forth in fin de siècle France, as doctors studied the phenomenon of department store thieves. Roger Dupouy took note of a particularly excitable woman, who reported: “When I grab some silk, then I am just as if I were drunk. I tremble . . . I only think of one thing: to go into the corner where I can rustle it at my ease, which gives me voluptuous sensations even stronger than those I feel with the father of my children.” (Psychiatrist and painter Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault dubbed this sartorial fetish “silk erotomania.”)
In his article, “The Sexual Root of Kleptomania,” published in the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology (1911), Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, a Viennese psychologist and early follower of Freud (they later had a falling out), zeroed in on the impulse that “suddenly compelled [a woman] to touch some object and put it in her pocket.” (Italics Stekel’s.) He explained the dynamic in this way:
These women fight against temptation. They are engaged in a constant struggle with their desires. They would like to do what is forbidden, but they lack the strength. Theft is to them a symbolic act. The essential point is that they do something that is forbidden, touch something that does not belong to them. (Again, italics his.)
Afterwards – i.e., the proverbial morning after – some women can’t remember what happened; others are ashamed; some refuse to touch the stolen object.
And what did these women steal? Stockings, furs, gloves, bags, bracelets, rings, all articles, Stekel pointed out, into which something was put – that is, ersatz sexual orifices; umbrellas which, when opened, suggested erect penises; and in one case, a music-box, clearly representative of a servant’s “homo-sexual desire to play with the genital parts of her mistress.”
We had a plastic radio on the kitchen counter, next to the osterizer, and at nine or ten I found myself caught between two songs. “Around the World” (from the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days) on the one hand and “Que Sera, Sera” (also from a 1956 film, Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much) on the other. I wanted to tag along with Nat King Cole, to “New York or gay Paree or even London Town,” an offer he made liltingly appealing, but at that point in my life I’d gone no further than Nippersink, a resort just over the border in Wisconsin catering to middle-class Jews, and the prospects for a more far-reaching life seemed dim. So there was Doris Day instead, singing cheerfully (if not convincingly) of sacrifice and acceptance – “Whatever will be, will be/The future’s not ours to see/Que Sera, Sera” – and although the song had a certain appeal to the latent martyr in me (the romance of suffering and surrender), I also felt the weight of its dreary resignation. (Today I can’t hear the “Serenity Prayer,” first attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and later adopted by AA and other twelve-step programs – God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference – without bristling at its buck-up note of acquiescence and relinquishment.) Is this what the future will bring? Is this all? And as if to confirm my fear, of a life writ crampingly small, possibilities quashed or diminished, there were my mother’s words, said to me years later in a moment of pique and anger, when my choices weren’t matching up with hers: Happiness isn’t everything.
I don’t know why I took a jar of nutmeg. It seemed like some sort of test. Was I daring enough? Brave enough? Bad enough? (Bad: connoting good; “a simple reversal of the white standard,” says Clarence Major in Juba to Jive: The Dictionary of African-American Slang. A reversal, too, of another standard, the good girl.) I wanted to be transgressive, and although I had come out a year before, apparently being a lesbian – or identifying as one, the term we used in the 70s, the heyday of identity politics – wasn’t transgressive enough, not when I’d been too chicken to actually initiate sex. (Oh, maybe like Dr. Stekel said, I just needed to put something in my pocket.) I wanted to get away with something. Perhaps I wanted to get away with being someone other than myself. It seems like I’ve chafed against the constraints of my self my whole life. Do we all struggle to live within our own skins? Nutmeg, of course, is a spice, at one time highly sought after and expensive, and dare I say, at the risk of being embarrassingly reductive, that when I stole a jar of nutmeg, I stole a bit of exoticism, a little pizzazz to spruce things up? (Nutmeg: aromatic, medicinal, poisonous, narcotic. Its fragrance perfumed the streets of Rome in honor of Henry VI’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. Arab physicians claimed it was an aphrodisiac; the English used it as an abortifacient. Malcolm X took it to get high in prison. “Stirred into a glass of cold water, a penny matchbox full of nutmeg had the kick of three or four reefers.” “You don’t ever want someone to taste something and say, ‘Oh: nutmeg,’ ” Julia Child said.) Well, okay. I wanted to liven things up. Once I’d cheated during an exam at school by deliberately dropping a pencil on the floor so I could get up, retrieve the bait, and sneak a look at the paper of the kid in front of me, and the whole episode seemed as much about actually having the guts to cheat as it did about getting the right answer. I didn’t want to end up like Miss Tubin who, with her quavering timidity, big bosom, Peter Pan collars, buckteeth, was the laughing stock of all the 5th graders.
Instead of transgressive, I was responsible. In high school, I was voted “Most Industrious” in my senior class, which carried, to me, a slight whiff of drudgery. At the batik shop K., in good humor, gave us tag lines, labels that were supposed to reflect our essential traits, and although I don’t remember the others, mine was “reliable.” I smiled and bore it dutifully, but deep down it felt like an unintended barb, like being called a journeyman ballplayer, good enough to go from team to team but not good enough to star on one. And later, when my mother was dying, she told me she wasn’t worried about what would become of me, she was worried about my brother, never as industrious or reliable, a bit of a ne’er-do-well (who eventually moved to San Francisco and, like Walter Castle, became a successful tea importer), and I desperately, childishly, craved her concern. What about me? I wanted to say but didn’t. Worry about me.
It was envy that led me up the stairs of my neighbor’s house to take a handful of costume jewelry. I was about seven or eight. We didn’t have anything like this. My mother didn’t wear rhinestones. They were gaudy, garish, unrefined, low class. The Pickards lived five houses down in a Georgian. We lived in a ranch. I was envious that they got to sleep on the second floor while we slept on the first. They went somewhere when they went to bed. They saw the stars. We just went to bed. I snuck into a second floor bedroom to steal the jewelry.
The mother and daughter were redheads, although Lena’s hair, the mother’s, was brassy. She wore housecoats and flowered muumuus and polished her toenails red. Renee’s hair was orange and unruly. She had a gravelly voice and was exuberant and fat. Her father was some kind of city hack.
My mother found the jewelry, and made me give it back. She was unyielding. She didn’t get up from her chair by the living room window. She didn’t intercede with the Pickards. She didn’t stop smoking her cigarette. She said if I didn’t return the jewelry she would call Mr. Brown and he would punish me. He would come get me. Mr. Brown, an apparition of her own invention, someone she’d conjured up and had on occasion invoked to frighten me into compliance. What child wouldn’t be afraid of a lurking man who took off with misbehaving children? (A shadow man named Mr. Brown. A dark man. Was my mother aware of the racist implications?) Does everyone have his or her own Mr. Brown? Someone whose mere mention curbs aberrant behavior and subdues one into submission? A gatekeeper, an overseer. Mr. Brown might have been summoned, but he never came.
Relief, triumph, letdown.
Now I was a person who shoplifted. I walked from the Jewel back to my apartment two blocks away. Past the school, the empty playground. The children were all tucked away in their classrooms. The bells were silent. I’d gotten away with something. More than a jar of nutmeg. I’d gotten away with taking something that didn’t belong to me but that seemed to belong to other people, women who hitchhiked across the country, waded in tide pools and pried mussels off the rocks for dinner, tramped through the Three Sisters Wilderness, were bisexual and then carted out the lovers to prove it. I was no longer the good girl who, as a child, bumped into a light pole on the street and said excuse me. I was, looking at the jar of nutmeg on the kitchen table, a thief. A shoplifter. A klepto!
I imagine it this way but, in fact, I don’t remember. Did I feel, like my French counterpart almost a century before, “voluptuous sensations”? Did I wave the jar under my nose, reveling in the smell (medieval Romans called it nuce musca¯ta, musk-smelling nut)? The nutmeg was burning a hole in my pocket and I couldn’t wait to make my escape. But beyond the relief of avoiding disclosure or arrest? I don’t remember what I did or felt or if I felt anything. And this disturbs me. Perhaps because, as novelist Mary Gordon once said, it’s corrosive not to be heard; we need an audience for our lives. And my act of thievery lacked even an audience of one as I, myself, hardly seemed to notice. My foray into crime left nothing in its wake, no impression, no indelible mark; it was not a redefining moment. I never stuck out my thumb to Oregon and climbed the Three Sisters. I did eat mussels off the rocks for dinner, yes, but someone else tore them loose and cooked them. There were no lovers waiting in the wings. I was back across the street from the Prescott School, with a few more ounces of nuce musca¯ta in the pantry.
Now, over thirty years later, I feel embarrassed about the nutmeg. Telling my friends N. and S. about it, I laugh, apologetically, so they won’t laugh first. My theft was so puny. Petty larceny, not grand. I’d wanted to make a grand statement, stride across on the big stage (Helen Reddy-ish, mocked and maligned though she was, hear me roar) but I wasn’t a good shoplifter, just like I wasn’t a good cheat. Brave enough to take something, not brave enough to do it with panache. When the pressure was on (self-imposed), all I took was an ounce of spice, which today costs $4.75 and then, probably less. Couldn’t I have set the bar a little higher and taken the cloves as well? Several weeks ago, I saw a bumper sticker on a car at the gym: Well-behaved women seldom make history, and in one of those moments when everything seems to converge, when a slogan becomes a comment on your character, I took it as a coda to my shoplifting incident. The slogan was originally from an essay by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich about Puritan women, and later appropriated for mugs, T-shirts, magnets, buttons, and greeting cards (the Sweet Potato Queens, a rollicking group of women from Jackson, Mississippi, made it an “official maxim,” selling their T-shirt alongside another that reads Never Wear Panties to a Party) before being reclaimed by Ulrich herself as the title for her most recent book. Ulrich’s slogan, of course, is not a call to crime (many read it as a call to action), but it does question an overly pedantic adherence to social mores. See, I thought, as if one part of me had been in a long-standing argument with another, and now, with the bumper sticker chiming in, the dispute was over. Too polite, too well behaved, too cautious, I’d hardly made a splash.
Time to talk about sex. I’ve alluded to it, avoided it, joked about it, thumbed my nose at it (or, in any case, at the messengers, Dr. Stekel, and his French cohorts), and pined away for it. I didn’t plan to end up here, but here is exactly where I am. Now it’s time to drop the evasions. Shoplifting and sex. The relationship, if any, between theft and desire. You might laugh. I did, when I first read Wilhelm Stekel’s analysis. But in writing about my brief flirtation with shoplifting, I myself have repeatedly put the two together. I’ve made note of my sexual history on the same page that I described slipping the nutmeg into my pocket. Was Stekel onto something when he said, “Theft is to them [meaning kleptos] a symbolic act”? (Italics mine.) Or even more explicitly, Dr. Fritz Wittels when he wrote in the Journal of Criminal Psychopathology (1942), “To steal is actually the sex life of Kleptomaniacs.”? I’ve avoided addressing these theories, in part because I think they’re ridiculous. They reflect, more than anything else, a deep fear and disgust of female sexuality. Female sexuality is dangerous, uncontrollable, illicit, verboten. It is a mania, a compulsion. A source of social disorder. It can only be understood, and perhaps contained, in the context of illness, crime and, alas, commerce. Reduced to a kinky transaction.
And although these ideas have been largely abandoned (There are some diehards, like Dr. Marcus J. Goldman, who, in his 1998 book on shoplifting maintained, “Kleptomania, with its excitement and risk, likely serves as a transition between mature sexuality and a more primitive self-gratifying behavior or stance.”) and kleptomania is now classified as an impulse control disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), a part of me is afraid they might be true. Did I steal the nutmeg as a substitute for sex? Was the desire to be transgressive really the desire to fulfill desire? Did I just need a little nookie? Well, I did need a little nookie, there’s no denying that. I was waiting in the wings to be discovered. I’d been waiting, apparently, a long time. As a teenager, in one of those dimly lit basement sessions with friends, when everyone confesses something, I’d said, rather brashly, with some intent to shock, I’m sure (because wasn’t the soon-to-be voted “Most Industrious” also one of the most timid), that if I found out I had six months to live, I’d want to have sex before I died. A grand denouement. A final and exultant exit. I didn’t want to die without living.
But shoplifting wasn’t sex. Shoplifting was, in its aftermath, a paltry and inconsequential act. I did not, in the words of one of Dr. Wittels’ patients, “feel a wild triumph, a lust the like of which nothing else can offer.” I had no urge to do it again, even though it would be a year or so before someone finally took me under her wing and, in the green-walled apartment across from the school, led me to bed. Shoplifting’s a rite of passage, a friend said in her direct, matter-of-fact way. (A common enough observation, with numbers to back it up. According to the NASP, eight-nine percent of teens say they know other teens who shoplift.) Her hands rested on her loose-fitting, wine-colored, tie-dyed top, which, reminiscent of the late 60s, could have come from my long-ago defunct shop. Didn’t everybody do it? she asked. (And in this way I suppose you could say it does resemble sex.) First I felt a jolt of surprise, almost of chagrin, as if I’d been taken down a notch or two – as if some hidden core of self-exceptionalizing had unwittingly been revealed – before being swept up by the easy candor of her comments and the details, much more remarkable than mine, of her own rowdy exploits.
Peggy Shinner’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Daedalus, Fourth Genre, and Another Chicago Magazine. Her story, “Jack’s Things,” first published in Alaska Quarterly Review, was cited as one of the distinguished stories in The Best American Short Stories 2007. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.