before. Maybe it’s just certain narrative demands, a need for neatness compelling me to say
that was the night
or
and this led surely to this
, my life a long link of daisies, a bolt of cloth unbroken, I wish it were.
So, that night. If not that night, I assure you it was around then.
I stepped onto our lawn. Around me, I could see the more modest homes of our neighborhood, and they comforted me in their familiar size and shape. Across the street from us, the Slotnicks grew cherry tomatoes in the summer, and Mrs. Slotnick always brought me some, vitamin C, she said, being the cure for every disease.
Now, I walked toward the Slotnicks’ house. I remembered how, years ago, when I was ten, I had rung people’s bells and waited in the bushes, loving it when, for just one moment, a door opened toward me, a place of possible comfort.
I thought I would do that again, ring a buzzer and hide, nothing more. But, instead, when I got to the Slotnicks’ front door, I turned the handle and slipped in.
Houses hold us, and all that is dear in our worlds. I slipped in, and felt the walls curve to cup me, and smelled roasted chicken and other just general living odors, sweatand steel wool pads leaving swaths of blue soap that are beautiful. A home has many purposes, but it should primarily be a place where you can cry and run a good fever.
And as I stood there, hunched in the Slotnicks’ front hall, I had a sense of immense peace, and then longing. This is how it started. I looked around me. I heard someone moving in the next room. I didn’t want to be caught. On the hall table was a hat. There was an umbrella with a few broken ribs and on the wall, surrounded by other photos, a picture in a plain wood frame, an old-fashioned photograph of a lady in a garden, her hands heaped with greens. “My Aunt Henrietta,” Mrs. Slotnick had once told me.
I looked at Aunt Henrietta, happy in her garden, her whole body sepia-soft, and I thought how good it would be to have her. So I took her. It wasn’t a big deal, it was just one picture, and a little one at that, so I took her. I slipped her in my pocket, and before I left the house I saw the small space I had made on the Slotnicks’ wall, a gap in the middle of human history where Henrietta used to be, and for a minute I felt full, the emptiness now outside of me.
• • •
Things become addictions for no good reason except that you started them. If that night I had gone to my parents’ liquor cabinet and poured myself a shot of Scotch, then it probably would have been Scotch that sang to me forever after.
However, it wasn’t Scotch. I became addicted to tchotchkes, anything solid and small enough to fit in the palm of myhand, people’s personal possessions with their personal smells still on them. What I liked even more was the thievery itself, the rush and spice of it, how for one moment I could step into a place so steeped in adrenaline the world was real and rimmed with red. I didn’t know then that the word
epilepsy
comes from the Greek word
epilepsia
, which means “to take, to seize.” My body had become epileptic years ago, but when I turned thirteen, so did my soul.
What I stole: a small tin filled with pennies from the Shocketts’ house; an egg timer, also from the Shocketts’ house; a mug with Bugs Bunny on it; an anchor-shaped paperweight. I never once stole from a store. (All right, once.) I stole from the houses in the neighborhood where I lived, edging my way in, the carpets sucking up the sound of my footsteps, the family, unsuspecting, eating meat loaf in the kitchen. I stashed all my goods in the toolshed out back, the one my father never used (“He can’t even figure out how to hold a hammer,” my mother would sometimes say, scornfully). The toolshed was itself like a little house, brown flower boxes beneath its windows. It was a world, and as it filled with my goods, it became my world. Sometimes I would go out there at night, just as the
that was the night
or
and this led surely to this
, my life a long link of daisies, a bolt of cloth unbroken, I wish it were.
So, that night. If not that night, I assure you it was around then.
I stepped onto our lawn. Around me, I could see the more modest homes of our neighborhood, and they comforted me in their familiar size and shape. Across the street from us, the Slotnicks grew cherry tomatoes in the summer, and Mrs. Slotnick always brought me some, vitamin C, she said, being the cure for every disease.
Now, I walked toward the Slotnicks’ house. I remembered how, years ago, when I was ten, I had rung people’s bells and waited in the bushes, loving it when, for just one moment, a door opened toward me, a place of possible comfort.
I thought I would do that again, ring a buzzer and hide, nothing more. But, instead, when I got to the Slotnicks’ front door, I turned the handle and slipped in.
Houses hold us, and all that is dear in our worlds. I slipped in, and felt the walls curve to cup me, and smelled roasted chicken and other just general living odors, sweatand steel wool pads leaving swaths of blue soap that are beautiful. A home has many purposes, but it should primarily be a place where you can cry and run a good fever.
And as I stood there, hunched in the Slotnicks’ front hall, I had a sense of immense peace, and then longing. This is how it started. I looked around me. I heard someone moving in the next room. I didn’t want to be caught. On the hall table was a hat. There was an umbrella with a few broken ribs and on the wall, surrounded by other photos, a picture in a plain wood frame, an old-fashioned photograph of a lady in a garden, her hands heaped with greens. “My Aunt Henrietta,” Mrs. Slotnick had once told me.
I looked at Aunt Henrietta, happy in her garden, her whole body sepia-soft, and I thought how good it would be to have her. So I took her. It wasn’t a big deal, it was just one picture, and a little one at that, so I took her. I slipped her in my pocket, and before I left the house I saw the small space I had made on the Slotnicks’ wall, a gap in the middle of human history where Henrietta used to be, and for a minute I felt full, the emptiness now outside of me.
• • •
Things become addictions for no good reason except that you started them. If that night I had gone to my parents’ liquor cabinet and poured myself a shot of Scotch, then it probably would have been Scotch that sang to me forever after.
However, it wasn’t Scotch. I became addicted to tchotchkes, anything solid and small enough to fit in the palm of myhand, people’s personal possessions with their personal smells still on them. What I liked even more was the thievery itself, the rush and spice of it, how for one moment I could step into a place so steeped in adrenaline the world was real and rimmed with red. I didn’t know then that the word
epilepsy
comes from the Greek word
epilepsia
, which means “to take, to seize.” My body had become epileptic years ago, but when I turned thirteen, so did my soul.
What I stole: a small tin filled with pennies from the Shocketts’ house; an egg timer, also from the Shocketts’ house; a mug with Bugs Bunny on it; an anchor-shaped paperweight. I never once stole from a store. (All right, once.) I stole from the houses in the neighborhood where I lived, edging my way in, the carpets sucking up the sound of my footsteps, the family, unsuspecting, eating meat loaf in the kitchen. I stashed all my goods in the toolshed out back, the one my father never used (“He can’t even figure out how to hold a hammer,” my mother would sometimes say, scornfully). The toolshed was itself like a little house, brown flower boxes beneath its windows. It was a world, and as it filled with my goods, it became my world. Sometimes I would go out there at night, just as the
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