Stealing Time
Ingrid met them on Wednesdays in the food court. Just Gerry the retired warrant officer and Helga from the German bakery and Lotti who was Estonian but pretended to be French. She sat with them at the Starbucks because she had nothing else to do. Her garden was cut back for winter and her house was clean and her son didn’t call unless he needed money. He was over forty now. He didn’t work, and he hadn’t finished school. Worst of all he was too soft with his boys. When she said something he just blinked those brown eyes and it wasn’t any use.
She pulled her chair closer to the table. The four of them talked about the same things every week. Their failing eyesight and their new prescriptions and how the base used only generics. Gerry was certain the army pharmacy gave out expired medications. “Look how they disrespect us retired folks,” he’d say. “It’s just another example.” They sat and watched the young people who wandered around the mall. They had tattoos and strange eyebrow piercings, and once Ingrid saw a girl who had a ring in her nose with a chain that connected to her ear. By God she looks like one of those old toilets, she thought. With those chains you need to pull. They wore black and even the boys lined their eyes and they were delicate as girls, some of them. Their skin never saw the sun.
Gerry was talking about his gout again. How his toes swelled big as those pig knuckles his mother used to keep in jars. “You even look at my foot and I feel it,” he said.
“A bed sheet hurts worse than a hammer. I can’t cover it at night.” Helga nodded, and her lips were painted orange. She was an autumn according to her colorist, and the only lipstick she used was Salmon Ice.
“Growing old is an art,” Helga said. “It’s no easy thing.”
“It’s a curse not an art.” Gerry held his empty coffee cup. “These cups are smaller than last time. Three dollars and not even a refill.”
Ingrid uncrossed her legs. Her left hip was bothering her again, and she shouldn’t have come because they made her feel older than she was. Helga would say no, the cups weren’t any smaller. They were just the same, but the boy at the counter didn’t know how to brew the beans. He burnt them, and the coffee tasted like asphalt. Lotti would try to turn the conversation around to Europe because things were better there. Ingrid did her best to listen. She tried to be patient, but her life seemed to shrink when she sat with them.
“They need to fire that boy,” Helga said. “Somebody should tell the manager.”
Ingrid cleared her throat. “Rich people are eating cockroaches. I saw it on the news.”
“I saw that, too,” Lotti said. Her accent was Estonian, with a touch of French from a long stopover once at de Gaulle. “They eat roaches and grubworms and cake with gold foil. They were big as a teacup those roaches. They come from Madagascar.” She shook her head and folded her fat hands together.
“People are strange,” Gerry said. “And money only makes them stranger.” He was still holding his empty cup. The ladies always bought him another. He’d be lost if another man joined their little group, Ingrid knew, and God help him if it was a retired officer. A lieutenant colonel maybe who wore good leather shoes and wasn’t losing his hair.
There was a shout down by the pretzel bakery. Two security guards had one of the pale girls by the arm. She was pulling against them and holding tight to her bag. “Let go, she said. “You’re hurting me.” Ingrid turned around to get a better look. She put on her bifocals.
One of the officers took the girl’s canvas bag. It was one of those messenger bags the young kids carried, and its straps were reinforced with duct tape. The shortest security guard in the mall clutched it like a trophy. His hands were tiny and hairless, and he always held his baton while he walked his rounds. He never smiled and he never talked, not even when Ingrid wished him a good morning. He turned the bag upside down and emptied it on a table. Magazines fell out and a bra with the tag still attached and half a dozen packages of panty hose. Lipsticks and razor blades and one of those sonic toothbrushes still in the box. It was a wonder it all fit.
“Take a look at that,” Gerry said. “She’s got a whole Walgreens in her bag.”
The taller guard was calling somebody on his radio, and the other one had the girl by her arm. He twisted her wrist behind her back just like the cops did on TV. The girl arched her back. “You’re gonna break it,” she said. “I swear I heard it crack.” They took her away, and she was crying when they left. She slumped like a broken doll.
“What does she want with panty house?” Helga asked. “Those young girls don’t wear hose, not even in winter.”
“It might be for her mother,” Gerry said. “Maybe her parents are sick.”
Ingrid shook her head. She let her glasses drop on the chain she wore around her neck. “It’s for the thrill, I bet. She’s probably just bored.” Bored like everybody else who came to the mall. Like those old folks in their velour jogging suits and the mothers with strollers who walked from end to end, back and forth between the Dillard’s and the Sears. They looked at the same window displays and went to the same stores, and the days were the same, too. Gray on gray on gray.
“It’s a shame,” Lotti was saying. “People don’t steal as much in Europe.”
“They steal there even more,” Helga said. “I just read it in the Spiegel.”
Ingrid tapped her fingers on the metal table. Gerry was twenty years out of the Army and still he sat straight as a soldier, and Helga was always dressed for lunch. Her nails were freshly polished. And what was the point if all they did was sit at the mall table? Ingrid looked up the long corridor toward the movie house. People were lining up for the matinee, and a little boy pulled free from his mother’s hand. He ran back and forth beneath the velvet rope. Everyone in the mall looked pale. They wouldn’t get their color back until May, and it was hard to remember how soft the air could be in summer. If her husband were still alive they’d be driving the country now. They’d have a little RV, and they could go as far as Florida if they wanted. They could camp in the Grand Canyon.
“We’d be better than those kids,” Ingrid said. “We could drop things in our purses and nobody would know.”
Gerry shook his head. “Are you mixing your medications again? You’ve got to be careful with those blood pressure pills. My sister she started seeing her dead husband in the shower stall. Every night he came to visit.”
“I’m telling you, we could do a better job,” Ingrid said. “We could take things and bring them to the veterans. We could drop them off at the Old Printers’ Home.”
Lotti looked more awake than she had in weeks. “They mark things up at that Walgreens. From one week to the next they doubled the prices on my test strips. How am I supposed to check my sugar now? Five times a day the doctor says but those strips cost more than my food.”
The talk turned to prescriptions again. It went the way it always did, but the promise of something else hung over the little metal table. They ignored it at first. They drank their coffee and Ingrid bought Gerry his second cup, but the idea grew anyway. It set down winter roots.
#
They agreed to start with batteries because they were easy. 9 Volt and those big 16-packs of AAAs. They hung on hooks at the back end of the magazine aisle, and the girl at the counter wouldn’t notice because she was preoccupied. She watched the boys walk by in their parkas. She looked at pictures on her cell phone and worked the register with a pencil. Her nails were painted with stars and blooming roses. They curved around like talons.
Ingrid’s hands shook when she reached for the battery pack. She almost dropped it, and her heart was thumping so hard she could see her sweater move. She looked from side to side and over her shoulder at the pharmacy counter. The assistant was counting out pills. He was leaning over, and she couldn’t see his face. She’d folded her wool coat and carried it over her arm, and her purse was open beneath its folds just like she’d practiced in the mirror. She pretended to read the battery label. They were made in China now just like everything else. She felt the floor tilt under her shoes the way boats sometimes do. Someone a few aisles over sneezed and a baby was crying by the register, and she held that package. She pressed it against her coat. She heard every sound in the drugstore. She heard every sound in the mall corridors. How people shuffled along in their wet boots and the fountains were running outside and the air smelled like chlorine and fresh pretzels and the perfume those ladies sprayed whether you wanted them to or not. She took a deep breath and let the batteries fall into her purse.
Her hands were shaking when she got to the table. The others were already there. Gerry was sitting even straighter than usual. He didn’t complain about his gout or how they were cutting back his benefits. Helga’s cheeks were pink, and she was fanning herself with a menu from the sandwich bar.
“I saw a boy once,” Gerry was saying. “He caught a starling in his fist.”
“You’re making things up,” Helga said.
“You could hear its wings beating. They sounded like a heart.”
“My boy was always catching things,” Lotti said. “He brought home spotted frogs.” Lotti’s son was long dead. He crashed his car near Calhan, and the doctors worked on him for days. “He wasn’t scared of anything, my Gerhard. He always went too fast.”
Ingrid squeezed Lotti’s hand. Maybe Lotti liked Europe because her husband and her boy weren’t buried there. Maybe it wasn’t the politics or food or how the coffee tasted. Ingrid looked around the table. She knew her friends and how they talked, but today they surprised her. “Let’s do flashlights next,” she said. “Or maybe reading glasses.”
They were giddy as school kids when they said good-bye in the parking lot. Ingrid held the steering wheel tight as she pulled out. Her hands were still a little shaky. She took the long way home, up Bijou and Twenty-Third Street toward the old West Side. For once the snow didn’t look dirty in the streets. The sky was crystalline the way it gets in winter, and her heart was pounding hard. The city looked how it did the first time she saw it. They’d gone together to the Garden of the Gods to see those strange orange rocks, and she held her belly while he fussed with the camera. She knew it was a boy and any day now he’d come, and the sky was bright as cornflowers. Brighter than it had ever been in Boston. “Hurry up,” she’d told him. “I’ll have him right here if you don’t take the picture.” She threw her head back and laughed, and that’s when the shutter opened. Forty-two years. Forty-two winters in the shadow of those mountains, and now she was old and her boy was grown but the mountains were just the same.
She drove through the park and back along the city streets, and she called her boy when she got home. She didn’t wait to take off her coat. She called him and asked if he needed money.