Failing at stealing

I was in my first year at an elite East Coast women’s college in the late 1960s when I was introduced to shoplifting. It was near the end of the fall semester, and Pam, a fellow Californian who lived in my dorm, showed me the Christmas gifts she was bringing home to her family. I was amazed by her generosity—Pendleton shirts and cashmere sweaters. “I stole them at the mall,” she told me. She said she put them on under her clothes in the dressing room and simply walked out with them.

 I mentioned Pam’s stealing to my roommate, Chris. “Oh, I never buy anything,” Chris said. She showed me her “stealing cape,” which had pockets sewn into the lining for the express purpose of hiding merchandise. 

 When I asked Chris and Pam what made them steal, they both told me they felt the world owed them something, and stealing made them feel as if they’d gotten even. Pam was an African-American army brat who had had to change schools a lot but had been a cheerleader in her senior year of high school, so the world had given her popularity, at least. Chris was an out-of-phase white freshman on a scholarship who was alienated from her family and had worked for a couple years before going to college. When I asked them if they were afraid of getting caught, neither seemed to be.

 I didn’t exactly feel the world owed me anything, but the idea of getting something for nothing was appealing. Plus, I wanted to see what it felt like. So a few days later, I took a bus to the mall and very, very nervously entered a drugstore and pocketed a fancy hair barrette and returned with it to campus. Realistically, the odds that I was spotted stealing were minuscule. But I found myself getting more and more anxious. It wasn’t guilt. It was solely fear of getting caught. 

 That night the anxiety became unbearable, and I couldn’t sleep. The next day I took the bus back to the mall and put the barrette, still in its package, back on its peg. I probably faced a greater risk of getting caught returning the barrette than stealing it in the first place. 

 Shoplifting is wrong, of course, and I certainly don’t condone it. But I felt a little inferior to Pam and Chris, who could do it with such insouciance. I dropped out after my freshman year and later ended up at a different college. I don’t know what happened to Pam, but I ran into Chris a couple years later. She had dropped out too and taken off for Mexico, where at one point, she said, she had turned to prostitution to make money to pursue her travels. I have to say I was impressed by her toughness, but I did not try to emulate her this time.

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