strange how things that unfold into such monumental events begin with such tiny, mundane, and ordinary moments.
“Oh . . . thank you.” She smiled. It was warm and sincere, like her eyes as they focused on me and the tone and timbre of her words.
She looked down at the pencil and paused for a long second. I was paralyzed and failed to realize that she was politely (without a trace of presumption) offering me an opportunity to be chivalrous and pick it up. I was clueless and missed my cue. I just stood there timid and unsure.
I watched as she started to bend at the waist. A black shirt strained to stay tucked into a black skirt, but a small field of white flesh surrendered on the left flank. My brain reengaged itself and responded to the stimulus. Moving faster than I ever thought possible, I swooped down and scooped up her number 2 Ticonderoga. It was new: fresh-honed and stiletto sharp.
I handed it over. Standing closer to her than ever before, I was enveloped by an invisible fog, a cloud of sweet smoke and flowers. Essential oils of rose and lilac, I would later learn. It intoxicated me, made me high. I lost my bearings and my breath.
I knew her name was Veronica only because I’d heard Ms. Baker call out to her as she left the art studio one day. We had no classes together that semester, but I would see her in the halls between periods two and three and later between fifth and sixth. I knew nothing else about her.
“Who do you have for science?”
I have no recollection of saying this but Veronica later swore that I did as I gave her the pencil. I cringed when she first told me, but it doesn’t really shock me that I’d say something so idiotic at such a critical moment. No surprise at all. It’s a particular skill I have.
Veronica was Nica if you knew her well, but never Ronnie. Ronnie was too casual, too common, and too male for such a perfect specimen of human female. She was a beauty and a genius. She was open and innocent. Yet worldly and wise beyond her years.
She was also a Suck.
But she was one of the few, perhaps the only, Suck who hid her true identity from the population at large. This was a tribute to her intelligence and resourcefulness. Yet it required her to keep a distance from her classmates and create a persona of aloofness and eccentricity. Black clothes, eyeliner, fingernails, and hair. Clove cigarettes. Quiet, imperious, haughty, and disaffected. Nietzsche, Plath, and Yoko Ono. No interest in the school’s social scene or strata. No policy with the Hobart boys. No gossiping with the girls. A loner.
And the character she created had the desired effect: she gave off no Suck vibration and she was rumored to be very, very rich. But as compensation for her nonconformity she was branded a slut and a whore, a VD-ridden nympho who’d had an abortion. Maybe two.
Veronica was an autodidact (her word, not mine) who taught herself German and Italian over two consecutive summers after the sixth and seventh grades. This was in addition to fluency in Romanian, French, and English. She had aced the Hobart entrance exam with a perfect score. The first in the school’s history.
Her fingers were always stained with violet ink and she was endlessly filling up pages of notebooks during, in between, and after classes. She was a writer and said so. Not “one day I hope to be a writer.” But was in fact at work on her second novel. She had read in an interview with Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal or someone like that that one’s first novel should be put in a drawer until the second novel was finished. True to this axiom, she stowed her debut in a box under her bed as she toiled away on volume two.
“Never give them any ammunition.”
This was the reasoning behind keeping herself a mystery to our fellow students.
“Subvert them from within their own rank and file.”
Brave words from a courageous young woman, but deep down I think she was embarrassed about being poor. I think it made her feel ashamed.
nine
My mother thought it would be a good idea if I got a part-time job. I agreed with her. I liked to work and I liked having my own money. It made me feel mature and manly. When I was fourteen I got a job stocking shelves in a small hardware store not far from our house in Jackson Heights. The store was called Halloran’s Hardware but it was owned by a Jewish man named Lippman.
Mr. Lippman was very old by the time I started to work for him. I gathered through his stories and reminiscences that he probably bought the business sometime before World War II.
Mr. Lippman liked me a lot. The day I started my second week of work he bought us egg rolls, fried rice, and steak kew from Lum’s Chinese restaurant. It became a weekly ritual. We would eat together at the counter and he would talk about the history of the neighborhood and how sad it was that things were changing so quickly and that soon we would all be speaking Spanish. I wasn’t so aware of the rapid metamorphosis that was happening around us but it made Mr. Lippman sad.
Mr. Lippman lived with his wife above the store. She had become sickly in recent years, so every few hours he would go upstairs and check on his beloved Zohra, leaving me alone behind the register. He trusted me that much. And in return, I stole from the man.
I justified the thievery by convincing myself that I wasn’t being paid enough. But this didn’t help. I still felt horrible doing it, though not horrible enough to stop.
I never got caught.
It was a very simple scheme: when a customer would pay for something small like a box of nails or a bottle of glue, I would “accidentally” push a pen off the counter so it fell near the customer’s feet. As the person bent to pick it up, I would hit No Sale and open the register without entering the price of the item. By the time the customer stood back up I would be handing him the change and bagging his order.
My fear was that Mr. Lippman would notice a discrepancy between inventory and sales, but that never happened. What did happen is that I put a few extra bucks in my pocket and felt like a royal piece of shit. And after each heist, I vowed to never do it again. But I did it many times.
The worst was always when he came back downstairs from god knows what kind of miserable scenario with his invalid wife.
“No fires or tornadoes?”
This was always the first thing he would say upon his return and he would crack a little grin. I couldn’t face him as I answered, “No.” I couldn’t bring myself to return the grin.
They say the first time you commit a crime is the hardest and that the subsequent crimes become easier and easier. You become immune and hardened to the transgression and whatever suffering is inflicted on the victim. This was not the case for me. I felt worse and worse each time I did it. And the question “No fires or tornadoes?” became more and more unbearable.
When Mr. Lippman’s wife died he closed the store, ending my life of crime and relieving me of the shame of facing his bushy gray mustache, his heavy shoes, his kind and trusting nature, his shuffling steps on the weary stairs.
I promised myself things would be different now that I was older and had started my life over in a new city (or borough, to be precise). I vowed to never steal again as I walked down the street to the Wellington, my favorite place in the neighborhood so far. I asked the woman behind the register if they were hiring. She stared at me while poking at her teeth with a toothpick.
“What do you
