The twisted metal hardware of the door at Anthropologie is cool under my sweaty palm. I’m passing between the alarm towers, wrapped in lace and crochet like some bohemian art installation instead of antitheft devices, and the meaty bird of my heart is already banging against its cage when the ringing begins.
Fuck.
I turn slowly, feigning confusion, trying to block out the knowledge that I’ve got a two-hundred-dollar dress under my clothes. A short brunette with glasses and an elfin face approaches me.
“Excuse me,” she says, her voice barely audible over the blood rush in my ears.
“Maybe it’s my phone,” I say, pulling it from my pocket and offering it up. Portland is Apple Mecca, and my old, chunky Android is heavy in my palm. “It makes my car radio beep when I get texts.” That is true. I’m even convincing myself.
She raises an eyebrow, so I unbutton my coat, pull it open. I hold out my other empty palm, all innocence and surrender.
“That skirt looks familiar,” she says.
“Yeah, I bought it here,” I reply. This is not entirely true. I stole it a couple of months ago from this store. The alarms have stopped and I step between the towers again. Silence. I shrug. The girl shrugs, her red-glossed lips part, then close. I push through the doors into free air.
This moment is the closest I ever come to being caught during my two-year stint as a shoplifter in my late twenties. Instead of scaring me straight, I feel reassured—the alarms went off and I still escaped. And until I write down and share these words, only four people know about my brief affair with crime. Only one, my therapist, knows how much I enjoyed it.
Before this spree, I’d stolen once in my entire life. I was a junior in high school and had just made the tennis team. My coach informed us that everyone needed athletic shorts with pockets. I knew without asking that my parents would not buy them: my stepfather refused to pay for anything but the barest essentials—socks, underwear, a winter coat—and even those meant a fight. I had a job at the local Tastee Treet making milk shakes and swirl cones and running the cash register, but my 1978 Dodge Challenger’s clutch had just gone out. The repairs left me with about ten bucks, and that was after I dug under the floor mats and checked the pockets of all my jeans. I also had a half-empty gas tank and another week before payday.
I drove to Shopko and tried on a pair of black Nike shorts that made a rustling noise when I walked. They had pockets. They were $18.99. I stared in the mirror at my winter-white legs, feeling my anger rise. I knew my teammates’ parents would buy shorts for them. They would also buy new tank tops and expensive shoes, and be stoked that their kids had made the team.
I surprised myself by yanking my pants on over the shorts and buttoning them up. I examined myself again in the mirror. Not too bulky. The empty hanger swung on its hook. The dressing room wasn’t monitored. I put on my jacket and browsed around casually for a minute. I didn’t want to beeline for the door—that seemed obvious. Finally I took a deep breath and walked out of the store. Nothing happened.
At practice the next day, I slipped tennis balls in and out of the pockets, ignoring the pricks of guilt until they faded. I never told anyone; I was too ashamed.
A few weeks later, two of my classmates were arrested for shoplifting from that same Shopko. They lived in my neighborhood—a wealthy area we’d moved into before it was bourgeois, where our neighbors spent Christmas in Sun Valley on new skis while I based my wish lists on my mom’s whispered budget, debating how to parse the hundred bucks. I remember wondering, why would those guys steal?
After my close call at Anthropologie, I yank off my clothes in my bedroom and stand in my underwear, inspecting the soft folds of the dress for security tags. I had removed one in the dressing room; were there two? But I can’t find anything. Finally I do a Google search on the company’s antitheft measures and find out they’ve got chips hidden in their price tags.
I hold the tag up to the light. Sure enough, I see the dark outline of multiple thin squares. I pull out a pair of scissors and slice it down the middle. It cuts easily. My online source says this is how to disable them. I wonder if I can believe them. I slip the tag into a shoebox half-filled with price tags that I keep on the floor of my closet. Each one holds a little thrill of victory. I begin carrying my hair-cutting scissors in my bag.
Sometimes I wonder what my family would think if I died suddenly and they came across the shoebox. Would they figure it out? I try to think up a good lie, especially in case my boyfriend, Russell, ever finds it.
Russell buys all his clothes at Goodwill and still manages to look dapper. We have fancy dates, where he wears a vest and tie and I wear a garter and stockings under my dress, and by the end of the night we’re kissing and unbuttoning and tugging and laughing as if we can’t undress each other fast enough.
“I love that you dress up for me,” he says, and I hear, “I love you.” I use my credit card to buy corsets imported from Europe. I finally understand black lace and push-up bras and stiletto heels. But we also argue over clothing, specifically which of us is more oppressed by fashion.
“I will never get as much respect as you in a suit,” I tell him. “I’m either a slut in a skirt or a bitch in pants.”
“Menswear is more restrictive,” he counters. “Men are attacked for wearing women’s clothing, while you get to wear anything you want.” We argue about power versus freedom until, finally, we agree to disagree. He doesn’t give any ground, and I’m left simmering.
I never win any of our debates, and I feel mounting guilt for buying brand-new clothes. I feel guilty for having credit card debt and tens of thousands in student loans when Russell uses only a debit card and is quickly paying off one small student loan. Sure, my credit score is great and I pay all my bills, but I wonder if the sensation I have—this distinct feeling that Russell has one foot out the door—is because of my debts. He takes me to Goodwill and I flip through rack after rack. He finds long slacks and suspenders and then browses kitchen gadgets while I try on a pile of dresses. They all look tired and slack in the fluorescent lights. Nothing smells new. I fight tears of frustration and leave empty-handed.
It was about a year and a half into our relationship that I began shoplifting. At the time, the nonprofit I worked for was housed in the Wieden + Kennedy ad agency. Every morning when buying coffee, standing next to über-swanky hipsters oozing cool, I felt embarrassed by my ill-tailored, cheap wardrobe. When I left the building to get lunch, I walked past Anthropologie’s soaring display windows. One day I went in.
As a bookish, urban white girl in her late twenties, I was doomed to love Anthropologie. I checked a price tag and nearly fled, but I felt a bold, reckless rush as instead I gathered items and headed to the dressing room. In that well-lit private space, I put on a soft purple shirtwaist dress that I could never afford. I longed to wear it, and this longing was tied to a fifth-grade memory of the popular girls asking, “Why are there holes in the knees of your jeans?” as though I was simply being perverse—as though I hadn’t begged my parents for new ones and been offered patches (which I refused, knowing that only the poor kids came to school with visibly repaired pants). Grunge came to Idaho too late to save me. I was never cool.
My heart began to pound as I pulled my clothes on over the dress. This wasn’t Shopko. I put on my wool coat and cinched the waist. My cheeks flushed and I took a few deep breaths.
There is nothing under your clothes, I told myself. You came in to try on a few dresses and didn’t find anything.
Eventually I calmed down enough to leave the dressing room, squeeze past the line of women with armloads of soft, vibrant fabrics, and force myself to walk normally out of the store. Nothing beeped. I made it halfway down the block and my breath burst from my lungs into laughter. It was easy. Too easy. So I did it again.
I got several compliments on that purple dress the first time I wore it. Each one was a little tic of validation. I did look good in nice clothes. I did have good style—I just never had the budget to express it.
In addition to being a compliment whore, I’m a glutton for information. I begin researching security systems, store policies, and devices to remove security tags. When I scroll through top-ten lists of why people steal, none of them resonate. I keep telling myself, See? You’re different. Better. But one catches my eye: “rebellion/initiation: to break into one’s own authentic identity.” What if my authentic identity is deviant? What if I have some pernicious need to buck conformity—to break the rules without retribution?
More than anything, I fear becoming one of those out-of-control stereotypes in magazine articles with headlines like “Confessions of a Kleptomaniac.” But those women stole recklessly, compulsively. I am different. Careful. Discerning. I never steal anything I wouldn’t wear.
Wait, that’s not true. I stole a silk dress from Banana Republic that was a size too small but easy to stash in my tall boots—I wrapped it around my ankle under my sock and zipped the boot, thanking god for skinny calves. Two days later I sold it at Crossroads Trading, but the girl gave me a curious look. Was it because this dress was clearly never worn? Because it was still in the display window at Banana Republic? In any case, I took the measly thirty bucks for a hundred-and-forty-dollar dress and concluded that the payoff wasn’t worth the risk. Thievery wasn’t going to pay the bills.
To further convince myself that I was not a cliché destined for jail time, I set some rules:
1. No stealing from people. Only stores.
2. No stealing from local, independent stores. Only corporate.
3. No stealing with other people around. I don’t want them to be implicated.
The first rule is easy, but sometimes I contemplate breaking it, just to feel the reassuring gut-plummet of guilt. I know I’m still trustworthy with my friends, but I can’t tell them. Who would trust a thief?
Russell certainly has his own secrets. We pass our three-year anniversary and I’ve hung out with his friends only a handful of times. He isn’t on Facebook; he doesn’t tweet. I give him space—so much that we can go days without talking. I trust him completely, tell him more about myself than I’ve told anyone, and give him an all-access pass to my heart and my body. But the vulnerability of such openness makes me tremble, especially because I can’t shake the sense he’s holding back.
Everything I read about shoplifting says I should feel intoxicated, erotically excited, a “monomania of possession.” Instead, I feel like I’m onstage. When I’m in Nordstrom, I’m a woman who doesn’t need to look at price tags. I breezily flit between sale and designer racks. A little giddiness bubbles up when I realize, for the first time in my life, that prices have become irrelevant.
When the store employees approach me, I hand over my piles with a smile and a false name. When they offer to help, I say I’m simply so bored with my wardrobe. “First world problems, right?”
They always laugh. I thank them profusely for grabbing extra sizes (a good technique to help them lose count), ask their advice, and commiserate over body woes. I try on bright-colored dresses and parade in front of mirrors so they’ll remember me as the fuchsia maxi girl and forget about the slinky blue sweater that I’ll stuff under my layers.
“That is gorgeous on you,” the saleswoman says.
“Aw, you are so sweet,” I reply. “I love your style.”
We talk and laugh and for this brief moment I’m the person I’ve always wanted to be: gregarious and witty, confident in my body, and, above all, totally unconcerned about money.
At first I tried to be unnoticeable in dressing rooms, but my body is not built for discretion, as I am six feet tall with blond hair. Attention is unavoidable; I’ve learned that my only choice is to direct that attention, to make it flow in ways I want. To control it. I am always in performance mode.
I am also a low-tech thief. Most security tags can be ripped off and leave only a tiny hole. This means I rarely steal denim, corduroy, or other material that is difficult to tear. Ironically, expensive materials rip easily, and I’m a good enough seamstress that I can repair them perfectly with fifty cents of thread.
One day Russell is driving us home after a couple of hours of browsing aisles at Goodwill and he asks if he can tell me something. I cringe. The last time he told me “something,” it was that he just couldn’t commit to me and we took a six-month break from dating. But this time, he simply pulls a small metal item from his pocket.
“The matchbox?” I ask.
He hands it to me. I palm its weight. He’d showed me the small metal box when we were sifting through junk and I’d shrugged. It was nothing special, and it was five dollars.
“You took this?” I ask, avoiding the word stole.
“Yup,” he says, grinning. “I nicked it.”
“You would do that?”
He shrugs. “It’s small. And I buy things there all the time.”
“Your mother would be so disappointed.”
He rolls his eyes. “I can get away with anything.”
I slide the lid open and shut, worrying the latch with my thumb.
“What?” he asks, still grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
I shake my head and swallow the urge to laugh. Russell regularly sparks my competitive side, to the point at which we cannot play tennis or basketball and can barely handle Scrabble because he always wins and is infuriating about it. Now here he is, so pleased about a goddamn matchbox. The urge to tell him, to outshine his pathetic little victory is so strong that I choke a little.
But I just say, “I’m surprised.” I reach over and place my hand on his thigh. He puts his hand over mine, his wide palm completely covering my narrow one. My secret sits in my gut and, instead of guilt, I feel safety. My boyfriend is unknowable but so am I, and this makes me feel less exposed. I relax a little.
“Really,” I say, flipping my hand under his and squeezing, “it’s the most anti-capitalist crime, right? Screw the system?”
He smiles and his eyes crinkle. He is so adorable. “Right. Like Robin Hood.”
I resist pointing out that we’re hardly misers. He owns his house and drives a new car. I’m much more impoverished. But still, I worry this won’t quite justify my own shoplifting, not for him. Russell cringes sometimes when I swear. Our first real fight happened at a friend’s thirtieth birthday party when I, dressed in a fluffy pink prom dress from the 1980s, jokingly gave him a lap dance. He pushed me off, saying I was making other people uncomfortable. I got angry and walked away but later apologized and promised to be more appropriate. If swearing and lap dances make him uncomfortable, I’m sure being a thief would get me dumped.
When I get home that night, I pull the shoebox out of my closet and dump its contents on the bed. I use my phone as a calculator to add up the tags, giddy as Mr. Scrooge and his gold coins. The total is nearing four thousand dollars. I vow to quit. I tell myself this is enough. But the words don’t feel true.
A few months later, after I’ve taken Russell home to meet my family, after I’m in his family photos, I discover the secret I’ve been sensing for months: He cheated. Just before I began stealing, he had a three-month relationship with a friend of a friend, telling her I was an ex. When she pressured him for a commitment, he broke up with her, but now he’s been pursuing her again.
The news guts me. It carves out every appetite, every pleasure, every emotion and leaves me robotic. I stop shoplifting. I stop caring about compliments, just wearing whatever is professional enough to get through work until I can come home and stare at the ceiling until the tears rise again and wring me out.
For a while, I think I am cured of my deviant behavior. But along with my appetite, my libido, and my ability to laugh, the urge to take something seeps back into my body. I’m in a dressing room and realize there’s no security tag on the shirt I’m trying on. My fingertips twitch. I bolt out of the store and, panicked, decide to puncture my little secret. My best friend is visiting the next week and I decide to tell her, thinking this will make shoplifting less appealing.
When I go over my closet and show her how much of it is stolen goods, she just laughs at me, saying, “Damn, girl, steal something for me next time!” I don’t quite know if she’s serious, but nothing changes between us. I love her for treating me like her funny, crazy friend—for still trusting me.
I decide to tell Russell. We’re still in touch, attempting to forge a friendship from the wreckage. I realize there’s no use in keeping this secret, in trying to be invulnerable anymore. I’ve already learned that a few stolen dresses are not insurance against betrayal.
When he comes over that evening, he sits stiffly on my couch. It’s awkward that we no longer touch. I hate it all: the way desire still sharpens my senses in his presence, the way touching him would only make me cry, the way he ruined us.
I bring over the shoebox and dump its contents. “You’re not the only one with secrets,” I say calmly. “I’m a very, very good thief. Over four thousand dollars in two years.” I wait for him to stand up, to say that I disgust him, and to walk out.
His eyes widen a little. He fingers one of the tags. I can’t even remember what item in my closet it was once attached to.
“I wondered how you were affording so many new clothes,” he says, “but you didn’t seem too concerned about it, so I figured. . . .”
We’re silent for a moment. Our conversations are now full of these tiptoe moments.
“So you don’t hate me for it?” I ask softly.
“No. Just surprised.”
A small part of me wants to make a snarky remark about how I’m the better thief, but I already know he would tell me not to be crass. There is no triumph here, just fumbling for words that don’t hurt. We can’t find very many. He leaves and I flatten out on my bed, stunned. It didn’t matter. All that anxiety, and it didn’t matter. The tears return.
When I tell my therapist that I shoplift, I wait for some analogy about my lack of impulse control, some link to my terrible childhood and daddy issues—all that shit we hash through every session. I wait for the reprimand.
Instead, she laughs. I’m startled. But her laughter allows me to laugh as well, and to confess to liking the part of me that gets away with it.
She continues laughing, surprisingly hard. “That doesn’t surprise me,” she says. “You’re smart, and you can be charming.”
I sit quietly for a second. I’ve just told her the most horrid thing about me—not just that I steal, but that I enjoy it—and she isn’t repulsed.
“Perhaps you should try channeling that deviant behavior into something else,” she says, still smiling. “Something that won’t get you arrested.”
I’m not going to claim an overnight reformation. The shoebox is still in my closet. But now when I get the urge to add to my stash of tags, I remind myself that being a good thief is not a talent that needs to be regularly sharpened; I can still know how much I’m capable of, even if I’m not actively doing it.
And there is a different thrill in opening the shoebox these days. Every time I share this story with someone, the power of that box of secrets deflates a little. In its place is the realization that, when I share the dark, ugly parts of myself with another person, it frees us both to be human. This still astounds me. My best friend trusts me, my therapist laughs with me, my ex has never condemned me, and I continue to be surprised and a little giddy when someone discovers my imperfections and likes me anyway. I was wrong about secrets; the safety I bought with them came at the steep price of authentic connection. Being honest feels vulnerable, but I also know that a thousand shoeboxes couldn’t save me from getting hurt.