On the Moral Life of 8 -Year-Olds (12.2)

When I was young enough to wear overalls unashamedly I decided to steal a pair of barrettes from Gymboree, the children’s clothing store. It could have been anything. It was the exhilarating act itself. It required courage, cunning, composure and a detached disregard for authority that is and always will be the very essence of cool. And even if I couldn’t understand the meaning of the phrase corporate franchise, I understood that Gymboree was, in its vast abstractness, not a victim in the same way a person could be. So I stood under the electric white of the fluorescent lights and quietly slipped the pair of barrettes into my pocket. As I waited there, adrenaline shooting through me, I imagined becoming a professional thief and detailed a regimen in which I would steal progressively larger items to hone my skills. I would become the best thief, a thief’s thief, a world renowned sleight of hand pick pocket, slipping in and out of well guarded museums and stores with impossibly large treasures. An outraged employee caught me. And all my elaborate dreams came collapsing back into reality. She dragged me to my mother, who had been shopping an end of year sale on the other side of the store. I had never felt so afraid, anxious, idiotic and ashamed in my life and haven’t since. Tangled up in fantasy, I had wandered into doing something awful and absurd. My mother, who had been raised a Catholic and who at heart will always be one, told me I had committed a sin. Even then I did not believe in God, but I understood that the 8^th commandment was the stuff societies were built on; it was rooted in our very deepest, ancient sense of fairness. Worse, I had not succeeded. I was not even competent enough to steal a small pair of barrettes. Afterward, furious and embarrassed, my mother made me write and deliver a letter of apology to the store manager explaining why I had decided to steal. At that point, I no longer knew. I didn’t even wear barrettes. All that remained were clouded fragments of fantasy that I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe. For years afterward when we walked past Gymboree’s colorful façade in the mall my intestines felt as if they were being twisted into a tourniquet.