The Steal by Rachel Shteir

Author:Rachel Shteir
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101516287
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-23T10:00:00+00:00

I spent a couple of hours with Harrison one snowy day in the winter of 2006 in her Brooklyn brownstone talking about shoplifting in Exposure and in her life. Reclining on a velvet chaise longue in her living room, the novelist said, “Dumbo has his feather and we have our stolen objects, which are more powerful for having been acquired illicitly.” Harrison launched into a story about her own shoplifting as part of a girl duo in California, complete with monikers—hers was Edwina—and wigs. “I had this friend Nicole—she and I were quite opposite physical types in every way. She was sort of this very dark creature. Daydreamy. We were good girls, late bloomers. This was when we were twelve, thirteen.”

After a while a guy named Jeff joined them. Harrison resented Jeff. He changed the character of their crime. But she nonetheless deconstructed shoplifting as a girlhood rite of passage and as a force that focused her chaotic spirit. She kept shoplifting until she was sixteen or seventeen, when a supermarket detective at Ralphs in Sherman Oaks ended her career. “They called my grandfather, who was apoplectic. . . . My grandmother . . . believed the worst of me. It was Tampax—all the checkers were guys. I didn’t want to pay for it.”

But, Harrison mused, shoplifting was also a game grown-up women played, like flirting or courtship. There is a secret language that shoplifters speak, she said. “Intuitively, I know which women among my friends steal,” she added, repeating that shoplifting amplified the value of any object because of the trouble one took to acquire it. “When you steal, there is a frisson of being connected. If I said, ‘Can you give this to me?’ that would be less powerful. Stealing can make you feel more than you are, arriving at yourself in some way. The act in and of itself is a fetish. Objects then lose their value and you have to do it again.”

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