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 SHOPLIFTING

In the early 1950s a boy 10 and a girl 11 walk down Metropolitan Avenue . His crew cut bobs up and down as he bounces down the street wearing a green and tan stripped tee shirt, black high-top sneakers. Her blond pony tail sways from side to side; she wears a blue pinafore and low white tennis sneakers with a little blue Keds tag on the heel. It is a hot August day; the black-top street shimmers. A trolley rumbles up the hill, stops at a light. The boy runs out and puts a penny on the track. The trolley clangs and rumbles, the boom sparks against the overhead wires, passes. The boy saunters onto the tracks, retrieves his flattened penny, proudly holds it up to the girl.

“What do want to get this time?” he asks.

“They had some pony holders with bows on them.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe a car or something.”

“Just be careful. That old bat at the cash register has Superman eyes.”

“Don’t worry,” he says, “I can out-run her, got my new sneaks on,” he sprints forward a few feet, then turns and says, “See?”

The sidewalk is empty at 3 that afternoon except for an old woman laboring up the street on swollen legs; a trucker strains as he loads up a dolly with boxes of cans labeled Del Monte Peaches. The green-grocer’s awning is pulled down low over the front window to protect wooden boxes of tomatoes and plums from the sun. The boy and girl walk in its shade, hurry pass a dark alley where rotting fruit and vegetables spilling out of garbage cans is covered with flies; a rat scurries away.

They pause by the meat market where the fan oscillates back and forth disturbing flies from their perch in the window and blows a few specks of the floor’s sawdust into corners. The hooks on which the butcher usually hangs chickens are empty; the plucked birds rest on brown paper in the cooler, their wings tucked close to their sides, their feet tied tightly with white cord. The boy announces, “Once I saw the butcher chop off the head of a chicken, and blood was gushing out of its neck!”

She counters, “I heard that the butcher once caught a kid who stole a piece of meat to feed to his dog and the butcher hung him by his belt on one of those hooks. The boy screamed bloody murder but the butcher wouldn’t let him down until his mother came and paid for the meat.”

“They don’t have any hooks like that at the 5 and 10 do they?” He looked worried.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

They walk by the shoe store—the door is open emitting the leathery smell of new shoes—a reminder of school. They hurry on.

Mrs. O’Reilly, who always yells at children playing in the street near her house, passes by wearing a floral dress and white and brown Spectator pumps. The boy and girl pretend not to see her. The boy mutters, “Old crab.” She ignores them.

They walk on to Woolworths 5 & 10, stop at the door, look both ways and when they are sure no one is looking, enter. The wood floors creak under their sneakers. The boy tries tip-toeing but the floor still creaks. The place is darkened and cool but has the stale smell of n attic where old clothes and a long unused rocking horse are stored. The back of the store smells of moth balls. Hair pins and nets, Peds, nail files, nail polish are all laid out on dark wooden tables which have a lip around the edge making them look like huge trays. A thin woman in a faded plaid dress belted at the waist, perched on a stool by the big brown cash register, is turning pages of The Ladies Home Journal. Another woman, gray hair in a bun, bustles in the back with a customer who is looking for turquoise thread.

The boy and girl sneak down the toy aisle where, little red, blue and yellow cars are jumbled in one compartment with a little plate glass divider between them and toy soldiers, then another with tanks, another with battleships. The girl walks nonchalantly by the hair ribbons and barrettes counter looking at them out of the corner of her eye. The woman behind the cash register looks up at nothing in particular, then goes back to her magazine. The boy slowly glides by a counter with pen knives and scissors. He glances over at the cashier to see if she is watching him. He stops and looks at them for a moment, then moves on. An old woman leaning heavily on a cane comes into the store, slowly works her way toward the counter holding soap and shampoo. A woman pushing her sleeping baby in a stroller walks to the fabric aisle. The baby wakes up and cries; the mother picks him up but he keeps crying. The boy sees the cashier look up at the mother and baby then ease off the stool. The boy quickly doubles back to the counter with the small pen knives, picks one up with a green and brown marbleized handle and puts it in his pocket. He pretends to be browsing at the counter of pads and note books as he works his way toward the door and out onto the street where he blinks in the white sunlight and trots up a few stores to wait for the girl to come out. He stands shifting from foot to foot, looking expectantly toward the door of the 5 & 10.

Finally she comes out. “What’d you get?” he asks, looking around to see if anyone is watching.

“Nothing.”

“Chicken! I got a knife.”

“Let me see it.”

“Not until we get back, I don’t want any one to see me.”

Some years later that knife would appear in his mother’s sewing things and she would wonder aloud in his direction where it came from. He’d shrug that he didn’t know, but if she’d have looked up at him from her sewing she would have seen his mouth turn up slightly at the corners and his eyes look away from her.