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Taking It

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The thing that made I. Magnin exciting was that the floorwalkers, the detectives who made sure you paid for everything you walked away with, were hard to spot.

In most department stores the security people carry paper shopping bags, except the bags are mostly empty. There is just a little weight at the bottom, a radio. You can tell if you know what to look for. Normal stores have security people dressed in such plain clothes you wonder how they can afford to do any shopping. But the point is, at I. Magnin you don't wonder. You don't see them.

In I. Magnin they have house detectives who look great, cuff links, tailored suits. Plus they have the usual kind, tourist-looking couples in rumpled clothes, badly shaven men with the earmark shopping bags. You don't know who to watch out for, and that makes it exciting.

I promised myself I was just looking. Look at all that perfume, I said to myself. I squirted some on my wrist. I smiled at the clerk. I smelled myself. Nice.

I was not going to do it. I had promised myself months before. No more. I was finished. Besides, you get rusty at it. It gets too dangerous.

I wasn't even thinking about it.

I was going to meet Mother at Nordstrom's in about forty-five minutes to pick out clothes for her to wear on her trip to Banff with Adler, a slightly delayed honeymoon, and all I could think was how much time I had to kill. She had told me I could buy one of those skirts I had seen in the Bergdorf Goodman catalog, calico, one of those flowing, flowery things I used to like last year, which shows how far from each other my mother and I were.

What was I supposed to do, look at the pigeons? Because if BART had not been on time, and the train late or stuck under the Bay the way it usually is, then I wouldn't have been in that situation.

So I decided it wouldn't hurt. I wasn't kidding myself. It wasn't that cigarette smoker's stone lie: hey, just one, that's all. This was really just for old times' sake, just for fun.

Department stores have that wonderful smell, powder puff and floor wax and maybe a little chocolate, although sometimes it's hard to say where the candy aroma comes from. Some stores don't even sell chocolates, but the smell is there. And the smell of new things, clothes no one has ever taken to the dry cleaners.

Mom had just married Adler Harrison, the world's sweetest man. Mom didn't have the sense to know all you wore on a vacation in Alberta is jeans and walking shoes. Mom gets nervous, while I take after Dad. We get nervous, too, but we like it.

I asked for the ladies' room, saying "women's lounge," making it sound like I wanted to go lie down and sip a potion and watch the banks of the Nile drift by. I slipped in after making it look like I had trouble finding it, hurrying through cosmetics, toward women's shoes, letting a look of exasperation explain my wandering.

I washed the perfume off my hand as well as I could. I looked into the mirror, my green eyes looking back out at me showing no emotion, no excitement at all. Me, a step ahead of everybody else. I look older than I am, at the butt end of my junior year of high school. I look like someone well into college, Daddy's girl from USC, doing some pre-Paris shopping.

I'm not one of those people who give themselves away as soon as they start talking. I know how to sound as smart as I look. The thing to do is don't change your expression, and look at everything like you saw a better one last week in London.

I used to dress all-natural, high-fashion farm girl. Stu said he liked that, but I think it was partly because a full skirt gets hiked up easier than black leather, like I used to wear back in the first months of my sophomore year. Today I was all-silk, navy blue blouse and skirt. Tasteful, a psychology major, maybe, but thinking about law school.

Some thrill. I made a deal with myself last time, but that was because I had to. I promised myself I would stop. It had gotten so bad the Emporium had someone meet me at the door every time I ran in to buy pantyhose. They never called the cops. I never gave them a chance for that, and besides, Dad would skin them alive.

I decided to make it easy on myself by picking out one of the big silk scarves, a teardrop pattern with what I took to be a hand-knotted fringe. I fell in love with a cabled cashmere sweater, and made a show of myself holding up the navy and then the green, the tissue paper falling out of each.

I held up the sweaters, turning from side to side, shaking my head. Mirrors fascinate me, the way the image stands in a world much smaller than the one we inhabit. We think: There I am.

I made a show of giving up on the sweaters, watching the shoppers and the clerks in the three-way mirror. Nobody was watching.

People have no idea how much you can get away with. They never even try, like people living beside a lake they never even go wading in, much less swimming.

Stores keep an eye on jewelry. They put it out on that little velvet tray, letting it spill into the light so you can admire the quality, or recognize the lack of it. But jewelry is just the right size if you want to have some fun, and I had an eighteen-karat Venetian bracelet in my hand, my fingers hooked so the overpriced halo hung there, catching the eye of the clerk in charge.

"I want to see the earrings," I said, pointing to the ones with rocks the size of horses' teeth.

There was an instant of pleasure. I knew. They had me. One of these people had looked in my direction once too often, passed by once again just a little too slowly. The clerk looked over my shoulder, a thin woman with the makeup on one eye just a little more hastily applied than on the other, making her right eye look slightly smaller.

"Not today," I said. "I'm sorry."

"That's quite all right," she said, smiling, good at it, in on what was happening.

Now the main effort would be to get me out of the store, out on the sidewalk, out in the sunshine across the street from Union Square, where the script would be very predictable.

The man in the navy pinstripe or the man in the white jogging shoes would open a door for me. And then the difficult part for them would be to cause the offending article, the stolen item, to tumble out of my person without seeming to touch me. They do it all the time, and what a pickpocket does routinely is so much more challenging.

I circled, stalling. I trailed my fingers among neckties, fingering men's undies, big silk ones with a Hawaiian motif, nothing like what Stu would wear, a little outrageous for this store. I admired the way perfume comes in so many shapes. No, I said with a smile, I already sampled some.

I was waiting, wondering how many security personnel would be in on the setup, and they were good. There was only one I was sure of, the man in the blue blazer. These people were all directed by someone sitting at a TV screen, and they were doing the job the way it ought to be done.

I pushed against the door, feigned mild surprise at the assistance shown me by someone apparently on his way in. What a disappointment — it was one of the scuzzy detectives, white Levi's and a button-collar shirt with the collar unbuttoned. He was a big man. Maybe they expected trouble, a teenager who was half banshee, all fingernails and maybe even a weapon, a nail file Super Glued to a stick.

The man was sucking a breath mint, and stopped sucking only for a moment, when he put a finger up my sleeve, and tugged.

You could tell just before he did it that he knew he was making a mistake. His finger crooked just a little, and had the look of a finger about to push the wrong button, or, in this case, reach in and find nothing. He gave it a good try. His finger pinched and tugged, felt in a little farther, and tugged again, but all he found was the sleeve of my navy blue silk blouse.

I fell back, like a person pushed hard. This was an exaggeration, pretty good acting. Then I bore down on the mint sucker, and it would have been technically legal if I had done something in self-defense, a push of my own, a woman fighting back against open animal behavior. I took a course after school, and I know what to do, where the outline of the body was decorated with red arrows: Kick here.

We were surrounded by people in suits, and you could tell what they were thinking. They were thinking: Don't touch her. Don't lay a hand on this little woman with the blouse that suddenly slipped down off one shoulder, bra strap and wide-eyed innocence, and shock, and tears.

They were thinking, whatever else we did we didn't touch her. Did we?

The manager was a woman with fine bones and high cheeks, someone who didn't have to pretend to be bored.

"We get wealthy women in here, well-known, good people. You might be surprised. They try to leave with cosmetics, a pair of gloves. Nothing of any particular value. They want to be caught, I think."

I smiled, waiting. I was a little irritated because she was not irritated, or embarrassed. It's no fun if you don't watch them squirm when they realize who I am.

She continued, "It wasn't the scarf. It wasn't the bracelet. It was the bit with the sweaters."

Bracelet, I thought. Who would want one of those? "My Dad won't like this," I said.

"I know," she said thoughtfully.

"You have to train your people to be more careful."

There was a knock, and the navy and the green sweaters were both brought in by the scuzzy detective. He even gave me a nod, but he didn't leave.

The manager unfolded the green sweater and shook out what looked like the teardrop-pattern scarf. "You like to tease, don't you?"

She was indulging herself now. She had that mix of refinement and experience that allowed her to say whatever she wanted. I have an aunt like that, my mother's older sister. My aunt wouldn't marry anyone like Adler, who thought a trip to Lake Louise was great fun.

The manager was smiling, being nice about it. Besides, she recognized a change in me. I was suddenly not so self-assured.

I was unable to say anything, unable to so much as twitch.

This was not the teardrop scarf. This was another scarf entirely, one I had never touched.

"I've never seen that scarf before," I said. My voice came out sounding really bad, crinkly and childlike, a nine-year-old about to cry.

She waved a finger, dismissing this remark.

But it was true. It was going to be wonderful, perfectly great, I raged silently at myself, if after years of toying with this little sport of mine I got into real trouble over something I had never even put a pinky on. This was a scarf with little yellow triangles, a nice scarf, but not the one I had picked up.

The manager considered the scarf in her hands, and my new driver's license, which she had lined up so that the card fit the corner of her desk exactly. Anna Teresa Charles, my license read, with my weight now inaccurate by two pounds and my hair too blonde. I use a rinse to keep it dark.

I must be losing something, I thought. It happens. Or, even more likely — I'm deliberately screwing up.

They'd love nailing me, a daughter of one of the Big Names in town, always getting his photo in the Chronicle over a few column inches describing an out-of-court settlement. None of the stores had ever got where they could hurt me. I suddenly hated this woman with her lip-colored lipstick, and her tasteful mascara, done so right you wouldn't think she was wearing any.

I was seventeen years old. It was time to give up stupid childish things. I never really committed a crime. I never even came close. But what if I made a Freudian goof, tucked something in a pocket when even I wasn't looking?

I was sweating and cold. There was a sour taste in my mouth.

"You can understand why we have to be careful," she said. She was not acting like any of the other managers, like she had me, and I knew she didn't.

I said, "Your security man put his hand on me."

"We have it on video," she said.

Like that proved something in their favor, not mine. "I didn't do anything."

She was fingering her way through a Rolodex. She found what she wanted.

"You can't keep me here," I said.

What she said next made me shut up. She wasn't talking to me, she was talking into the phone. She was identifying herself, giving her name, Jane Murray, speaking in one of those Genius Android voices that tell you the time.

"I'm fine, Hal," she said, calm and looking at me with an expression almost kind, but not quite. "But I think I can do you a favor." She listened, and laughed, not loud — kind, thoughtful, regretful. If my Dad wasn't with one of his personal therapists, he would be clearheaded enough to know what was coming.

How did she know him?

I could hear his voice, reduced to a fly-size buzz. It was him, no question. "Yes, very personal," she said, sounding a little sexy, the way my dad got every woman to sound, sooner or later.

Every time I feel like this I think if I close my eyes I can imagine what it's like to be a thousand miles away, in the middle of a desert. I can picture it, cactus, sand, ants. Or a thousand miles up, cold, ocean down there, big clouds, my skin ice.

"Your daughter is here," she was saying into the phone. "Right here in my office. I think we need to talk."

My brother says that we don't know anything about anything. He said the Greeks knew how to think. He says all we are doing is filling out the questionnaires they left around, Examine Your Life and Make It Worth Living, those Twenty Questions That Will Improve Your Sex Life quizzes you see in magazines.

I hurried past shops, and didn't bother watching my reflection in the windows I passed. Don't think, I told myself. Just shut up and walk.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit stations are sometimes surrounded by people who look like trouble, people with nothing to do but look at you hard and ask for money. But when you take the escalator down into the subway station, you're in a different world. The light is bright, and steel machines take your dollar bills when you feed them into a slot and then give you a ticket.

Sometimes one of the dollars is too wrinkled, and the machine won't swallow it. Then you have to stand there trying to straighten out the wrinkled piece of money. People line up behind you, but they tend to act patient and a little bored because this happens to everyone.

I took BART back across under the Bay, heading east and not thinking, reading a Chronicle I found on the floor, the horoscope saying my romantic life was on hold. I looked for an article by Adler, one of his columns on how to live a better life, but I couldn't find anything but want ads and a weather map.

Sometimes it's hard to breathe as the train roars through the tunnel under the Bay. You might not see sunlight again.

I got out of the BART station, the machine spitting out my ticket with twenty cents left. I gave the ticket to a man with a cat tied to a long piece of red yarn.

I got into the Mustang, which I should have taken across the Bay, except that I was trying to conserve gasoline the way we are supposed to, and the last time I tried driving in the City, I scraped the chrome off the right front bumper getting out of a parking place in a hurry.

Dad gave me the car because of my grades, a '67 automatic transmission with a new paint job and new vinyl interior, but the car had an old, tired smell, and I had already gotten a ticket for going eighty through the Caldecott Tunnel, although that was not my fault. Stu was with me that night, pissing me off talking about how I should get more exercise, take up jogging.

I had to stand there in the BART parking lot, yanking at the door. It wouldn't open. I was tugging at the car so hard the chassis was rocking. My feeling was that the car was in a collision at an earlier point in its history, and that it never entirely recovered.

I finally got inside, and then I had to wait for the interior of the car to cool. The steering wheel was too hot, and I don't have one of those cardboard windshield screens. I tried to crank down one of the windows and it would lower only about one-fifth of the way.

"You look strange," said Maureen.

I wanted to tell Maureen what had happened, but one look at her told me she had her own problems, as usual. "There's nothing wrong with me," I said. I stood peeking through the living room curtains of her house. My own house was across the street.

"You look ..." Her voice faded. "Anxious."

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Excerpted from Taking It by Michael Cadnum. Copyright © 1995 Michael Cadnum. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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