by Lore Segal
“The checkout girl,” continued Eliza, “called for a manager to O.K. the check. No manager in sight, of course. The checkout girl walked away to look for the manager and I walked out of the supermarket with my sixty-nine-cent spatula, raced to my car which was standing, quiet as could be, illegally, where I had parked it. I’m wanting to get out of there. Where are my car keys? Where is my handbag? It is not slung over my right shoulder where it is supposed to be. Now, I remember the girl from the project standing in the line behind me.”
Ilka and Eliza were friends in the habit of arguing. Eliza had to know this was going to activate Ilka. Ilka asked Eliza how she knew the girl was from the project.
Eliza said, “She was black.”
“How do you know the black girl took your handbag?”
“Because when I walked into the checkout line I had my handbag slung over my shoulder and when I got outside I didn’t have it.”
“Eliza! Eliza, you don’t know the girl took it!”
“So where is it? Where are my keys? Where is my wallet with my money, credit cards, driver’s license?”
“Eliza! Leslie!” pleaded Ilka, “don’t you have to presume the girl innocent till proven guilty …”
But Leslie stood at the sink with his back to both women, washing his hands clean of peach juice.
“ ‘Innocent till proven guilty!’ Interesting idea,” said Eliza and added, “Why don’t you stay? The Bernstines and the Stones are coming over.”
“Wonderful!” said Ilka.
Ilka thought of the saying Teaching your grandmother to suck eggs and it made her blush. Ilka had half a notion that Eliza had invented the black girl and the lost handbag to get a rise out of her, when a tidy old black man with a bicycle rang the doorbell: He had found Eliza’s handbag. The wallet was gone.
“Usually they take the money, and leave the wallet with the papers that you don’t want them to find on you. Good thing they left your library card with your name. Me—I used to pickpocket but I didn’t have the nerve. It’s like everything else: I went into this business. I don’t look in the residential cans—people ’s yesterday’s dinners is disgusting. I do mostly Main Street and the malls. People are glad to have their handbags, whatever they feel it ’s worth it to them.”
Leslie gave the man a five dollar bill and asked him, “So, is it a living?”
“It ’s like everything else: it depends. Got one more this side of town, and one on North Street. You have a nice day now.”
“Thank you,” said Eliza, “But I have other plans.”
The Stones were first to arrive and Alfred was helping Leslie bring chairs out onto the front lawn when the Bernstines arrived. They’d had to bring Cassandra who was driving the neighborhood crazy. “It’s like everything else,” Eliza said. Joe took the dog upstairs and locked her into one of the bedrooms.
Eliza related her Supermarket Adventure. When she got to the part where she walked out with the sixty-nine-cent spatula, Ilka said, “I once stole a roast beef.” Everybody was impressed. Ilka said, “The price tag had come off and the checkout girl said I had to take it back and get another. The meat department was way in the back. I could feel the people in the line behind me breathing, so I said, ‘Forget it.’ The girl checked me through, and then she told me to take the roast beef back to the meat department. I had my bag of groceries in one hand, the roast beef in the other and I walked out of the store. What I want to know,” she said to Eliza, “is why you are so sure it was the girl in the checkout line who stole your handbag.”
Eliza said, “ ‘Will you walk a little faster said the whiting to the snail. There ’s a porpoise close behind me and he’s treading on my tail.’ I had to take a step backward to make this girl take a step back. She stole my handbag.”
“It ’s chemistry,” Dr. Alfred Stone said. “We ’ve done experiments with magpies. Take ten birds. Tag five and inject them with an antikleptin. Put shiny odds and ends in a box. The unmedicated birds dive into the box and fly the things back into their cages. The tagged birds sit there. Crime is chemical.”
“Unless chemistry is moral, too,” mused Leslie.
“How,” argued Ilka, “could the girl take a bag that was slung over your shoulder and you not know it!”
“Beats me,” said Eliza. “Yes? What is it?” she called to the black woman standing outside the wrought-iron gate. The woman was saying “Psst, psst” to attract the attention of the party on the chairs on the grass. She wore a cloth coat that looked too warm for the mild evening. A little girl, some seven or eight years old, climbed onto the gate and stood peering over it. Ilka watched Leslie ’s back move down the path. The child jumped off the gate and hid behind the woman’s coat. Ilka watched Leslie come back up the path. He said, “She found your keys.”
“That’s nice, but we already changed our locks.”
“Come and talk with her, Eliza.”
The group on the lawn chatted while Leslie and Eliza talked with the woman at the gate. Leslie broke off a stem of red cherry tomatoes and gave it to the little girl. The woman and the child left. Eliza and Leslie came back. Eliza said, “One gives little girls cookies, not tomatoes!”
They sat down. The little girl stood outside the gate. “Come in! Come here!” Leslie called, but the little girl ran away.
The woman was back, going “Psst, psst.” She had found two of Eliza’s credit cards. The woman went away.
The woman and the little girl stood at the gate and had found Eliza’s empty wallet.
The woman and the child went away and a girl stood at the gate.
“That ’s her.” Eliza said.
“If that ’s the girl who took your bag she wouldn’t come and stand at your gate!” argued Ilka, but at her upstairs window Cassandra leaped and leaped. They could hear the faint, hectic sound of her barking. Eliza went to talk to the girl at the gate.
“Where do you live?” Eliza asked her.
“In the project. My neighbor,” said the girl, “thought you would give her a reward.”
“I would,” said Eliza, “but someone has taken my money.”
Main Street
Ilka looked into Leslie’s office shortly before noon. “You might want to check your home phone. Your line’s been busy all morning.”
Leslie grinned. “Eliza made a deal with the girl. Eliza promised not to call the police if the girl came and made the telephone calls to cancel Eliza’s credit cards. Punishment to fit the crime.”
“The girl confessed that she took the bag!”
“No.”
There was something in Ilka which believed that other people, if properly argued with, could not but think as she, Ilka, thought. “Leslie,” she pleaded, “I believe that I might be able to continue living in this world if you will do me the incalculable favor of agreeing with me on a point the size of the head of a pin: acknowledge that you don’t know if the black girl stole Eliza’s handbag or not!”
Leslie said, “Betty, Barbara, and Celie were mugged coming out of the Pancake House after work yesterday. Barbara’s elbow got scraped when the mugger dragged her along the sidewalk by the strap of her handbag, which had the institute keys in it. The locksmith is downstairs changing the locks. Barbara says he, or she, was chunky and wore jeans, a jeans jacket and a shower cap pulled over the face. Since when,” cried Leslie, “do muggers mug three people walking down Main Street!”
The Middle of the Street
Officer Right advised women—advised everybody—to walk down the middle of the street. Officer Right had never in his years on the force known anybody to get mugged walking down the middle.
That night a mugger approached Alvin and Alicia walking down the middle of the street. He took Alvin’s wallet and disappeared into the shadows of the sidewalk.
Walking back from babysitting, Bethy kept on the sidewalk; it was only a block and a half to her house. In the circle of light from the street lamp the small rain came down in oblique lines like the first stage of cross
-hatching. Presently the child knew someone walked behind her. She walked faster and so did the other. He came so close that he could, like Alice in Wonderland ’s duchess, have hooked his chin over her shoulder. “Take me home,” said his hoarse whisper as if inside Bethy’s own ear. She turned fiercely on the face inches from her own—sick eyes, dripping stubble. The man was no taller than herself. He had drawn his head down between his shoulders in the forlorn hope that this might keep him from getting wetter. “Go away,” barked the terrified girl. The man said, “Oh, O.K.,” and backed into the black and the rain coming down really hard now.
Bethy deduced that the wet bum had not really liked her. She told nobody.
On Campus
Yvette was mugged on campus at broad noon.
A man in a baseball cap asked her the way to the library. Yvette pointed out the stone building behind the glass building. The man in the baseball cap said, “I’ll take your pocketbook. What’s in the paper bag?”
“Apples,” Yvette said. “I’ll take the apples,” said the man. Yvette saw Officer Juan Jose and yelled and the man in the cap ran away almost knocking down Ilka who was coming in by the South Gate. “He shoved me,” she reported. “I don’t think I ever experienced anything as powerful as this wanting to get away. It was kind of fascinating.”
“Was he white?” asked Eliza
“What’s that got to do with it?” yelled Ilka.
“What is going on!” said Leslie. “What happened to thieves doing what they do decently under cover of night!”
The Bernstines’ Bedroom
It was in the night that a thief came into the Bernstines’ bedroom. Cassandra had been barking and barking, Joe reported in the institute kitchen the next morning. “All we did was curse her and try and go back to sleep. Officer Right says the thief squeezed the plastic accordion together and got in between the air conditioner and the window frame.”
“He was so thin!” said Jenny Bernstine.
“How do you know?”
“Because he turned on the light.”
“The thief turned the light on?” cried Leslie.
“To see what there was to steal, I guess. My gold bracelet was on the dressing table—Cassandra, the thief is gone! Have a heart, Cassandra, you’re among friends here!”
“Never send to ask at whom the dog barks,” said Ilka, “she barks at me. The roast beef!”
“That wasn’t stealing,” Eliza said, “because you didn’t need it.”
Cassandra barked at Eliza: the sixty-nine-cent spatula.
“I was in a hurry. And maybe dogs don’t know the little thrill of getting something for nothing,” said Eliza.
“What about the thrill of getting something when you’ve got nothing,” shouted Ilka.
Cassandra barked at Leslie, who said, “Oh, Cassandra, that’s a long time ago,” and, surprisingly, blushed.
Cassandra barked at Teddy. Perhaps he had got his hands in the cookie jar or because he was choking her.
Cassandra barked at her own front paws, gnawed and chewed at the fur between her toes, and barked and barked and seemed never to be going to stop.
A GATED COMMUNITY
Celie called the members in their offices: Leslie wanted everybody in the conference room, spouses welcome since it affected the whole community.
“You all know Officer Right from Security. I’d like you to meet Mr. Charley who comes to us from the Planning Commission. You all know Marvin.” Marvin was the institute’s lawyer. “Marvin is going to check into the options in light of the neighborhood situation …”
“We have a situation?” Alvin said.
“The garbage situation,” Eliza said.
“Parking on campus,” said Zack Zee.
“The project.”
“Why is the project a situation?”
“Drug rings,” said Zack.
“Please!” said Leslie. “We’re talking about a sudden wave of crime. The standing lamp disappears from my office, the copier walks itself into the mailroom hatch, Betty and Barbara are mugged coming out of the Pancake House and so are Alvin and Alicia walking down the middle of the street! A robber squeezes past the Bernstines’ air conditioner and turns the light on! Yvette is robbed on campus at noon.”
“The girl from the project steals my wallet,” Eliza added.
“You don’t know that,” said Ilka.
Ahmed was arranging the stand for Mr. Charley’s charts and maps. “You’re fortunate,” said this gentleman, “that Concordance University, originally conceived as the Concordance School for Higher Women, was a gated community. There’s still a quarter mile of wall here, on the right side of Southgate, and another hundred feet here.” The Man from the Planning Commission flipped to a new map, “and here and here.”
“A wa-all!” said Alvin, Alpha, Ilka, and the two Bernstines on a descending note. “A wall?” mused Zack, Maria, Yvette and Eliza Shakespeare with rising interest.
The lawyer said, “Leslie wants me to look into the charter. The city might have been liable for the upkeep of the wall for half a century. The city might be liable for rebuilding.”
“A wall is a thought!”
“We’re not having a wall!”
“You put a layer of cement on it and embed broken glass,” said Officer Right.
“Keep Una out,” said Eliza.
“Dear,” said Leslie. To the members he said, “I would urge that we allow our experts to explain our options which we can discuss at leisure on our own time.”
The Man from Planning said, “You’d have to reinstate the old gatehouse.”
“How many guards would it take on a twenty-four-hour basis?” wondered Leslie.
“At the time it was built”—the Man from Planning turned to a large scale map—“it would have enclosed only the buildings erected before 1910—the library, Philosophy Hall, the President’s residence which is now Concordance Institute, and the South Meadow—but you might want to include the streets adjacent to the university as well.”
“Keep out the garbage thief,” said Eliza.
“Permanently padlock the smaller access gates here, here, and here, creating a series of dead-end streets. It would solve the parking problem around the campus.”
“How would the folks from the project get to Concordance Supermarket?” asked Alvin.
“It would solve the parking problem,” said Maria Zee.
“Why couldn’t they go around to the west, or go east to the Bottom Dollar Market?” Eliza Shakespeare said.
“It would solve the parking around campus,” Zack Zee said.
“What’s involved?” Leslie asked the Man from Planning.
“You would need to zone access and parking. Have city planning call an all-agency conference: the housing authority; management and maintenance; the department of streets; the keeper of the official map, tenant selection policy and defensive architecture dedicated streets restricted and controlled entry. You have to de-map the mapped streets and deed them to the city, fenced guarded locked at sundown privately accessed in return for easement of utilities, but check your minimum maintenance contracts with fire sanitation and police or you might find yourselves minus municipal services, without water, outside the postal zone, and nobody picking up your garbage.”
“Something has got to be done about the project,” Zachariah Zee said.
“I always wanted to fund a project project,” Joe said.
“Get the city fathers to cough up the funds for the upkeep,” said Alvin.
“What they’d like is to turn it into middle-income housing,” said the Man from Planning.
Zack Zee said, “Drug rings.”
“Parking,” Maria said.
“The garbage thief,” Eliza Shakespeare said.
“What’s wrong with picking something up for nothing and peddling it for something!” Ilka shouted.
“It makes a mess on the sidewalk,” Eliza said. “They take their shirts off,” she said. “The grass will never be the
same.”
Parking, garbage, the garbage thief, drug rings, robberies at noon, walls, no walls. No glass embedded in cement, they argued back in Leslie’s office after Officer Right, Marvin the lawyer, and the Man from Planning had left.
Deaths
FATAL WISH
“Do you want me to disqualify myself,” Ilka asked Director Leslie Shakespeare, “because I know Jimmy?”
The members of the Concordance Institute continued turning the pages of the candidate’s vita on the table before them, but their ears pricked up. The young man was understood to have stayed the night in Ilka’s little rented house, and they had been rather wondering.
Was Ilka sleeping with Jimmy Carl? Not any longer, and not yet.
Ilka had picked Jimmy up accidentally at her very first New York party to which she had come with another man with whom she had been falling in love. The man’s name was Carter—a large, stout, distinguished black man, in his fifties, and ill. When he walked off to get his whiskey, Ilka stood and watched a bespectacled man who held his head at an excruciating angle, pretending to be reading the spines of the books on the glass shelving. He was, like Ilka herself, young, thin, Jewish, and embarrassed. He appeared to be alone. It was because he did not attract her that Ilka had smiled at him, and because she wanted to practice her English that she asked him if he was a friend of the bride or the groom. The young man’s brow contracted over his left eye, his nostrils dilated, his lips parted and he told Ilka the dates from and until which he and the groom had interned for which Washington congressman. Ilka was trying to remember whom the young man reminded her of—someone she didn’t much care for. She said, “I must go and search my friend,” but the young man had kept at her side and was never going to be lost again.
