I don’t really know what to make of it, though it was so odd that there must be something to be made. It was Wednesday. It was mid-morning. And it was on the subway.

I was riding the F. I had all my bags in my lap and a New Yorker in one hand and in the other, a travel cup full of coffee that was burning the undersides of all my fingers. I was sitting in a seat on the end of a bench, by one of the doors, the one everybody wants.

The pages of my magazine were coiled around the spine and I was holding it upright but blatantly, as in not even pretending, not reading it. And that’s why I noticed when Constance came lumbering down the car. She tossed her tote bag on to the pair of seats that face the front of the train and then crashed herself into an empty seat-and-a-half on the opposite side of the train.

The weary haze across her eyes seemed a veil between her and the other passengers, but it took just a few moments for her to focus in on a guy sitting near by. Her expression sharpened and she shot forward in her seat and implored him to “listen, listen to me. Listen to what I’m saying.”

Constance rides the F a lot. Constance isn’t her name. It would be a mind-blowing coincidence if it were, anyway.

(more…)

People are talking about Found Objects, the short fiction piece in today’s New Yorker. The accompanying artwork is what captured my attention. In print, the photo is large. The scattered objects are almost life size and tactually inviting on the page. The primary color scheme is reassuring. It’s an ill-lit still life of what might be the contents of a junk drawer.

Turns out, it’s the contents of one of the tables on which Sasha keeps, stores, displays the belongings that she has stolen from someone else and taken home with her for keeps.

Sasha is, in what might as well be sitcom terminology, a kleptomaniac. Her disorder is often misunderstood because, unlike compulsive hair plucking or step-counting or cleaning, the percieved payoff seems obvious. Sasha isn’t interested in the monetary value or even the sentimental value associated with the objects that she takes. She’s only concerned with the taking.

Sasha thinks she wants to stop, so she’s seeing a therapist to help her get well. It seems like the thing to do, but it’s hard, because without her objects, what will she have? Without her collection, what will she do? Without her compulsion, who will she be? She’s got to have something and this is all she’s got.

The objects themselves, on private exhibit atop two tables in Sasha’s apartment, hold only souvenir appeal. They are trinkets that represent the moment of possession. So while there are, of course, wallets among her collection, they have not been plundered. Sasha tells her therapist about lifting a wallet straight from another woman’s handbag. Its shape and density catch her eye; its proximity tempts her hand. Its foreign presence in her own handbag lifts her spirit. She never even unfolds the other woman’s wallet.

To Sasha, the wallets are “embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration.” The contents are irrelevant. They might as well be a screwdriver or a bar of soap or a child’s scarf or a stout pen or a mechanical pencil.

A wallet is just a thing that gets stolen. The same way a newspaper gets swatted at a fly and a marble gets shot across a ring on blacktop. In a way, Sasha takes Alex’s wallet because she’s supposed to.

The slip of paper that she finds inside, the one with “I BELIEVE IN YOU” handwritten on it, doesn’t mean anything to her. She wants it to. She knows it could. It’s supposed to make her feel something besides the thrill of simply having it.

That scrap of paper embodies every thing I have or do or say because I’m supposed to or because I might as well or because it seems like the thing to do. The things we hold on to just to have something, even a collection of bookmarks and stopgaps. I want to sweep it all of the table. But then, the mess. And I don’t want to break anything.

Chelsea and Jim are on opposite ends of the sofa with their stocking feet mixing together in the middle, but closer to her side because he’s got longer legs and she’s wearing a skirt. Floral-print pillows sail between them every few moments. Mostly from Jim’s side because Chelsea is lazily passing them over to him to lob back at her.

It’s getting late and we’ve been teasing and nagging each other for ages, treading lightheartedness. We’re all grinning placidly, appreciating the company.

I accuse them of flirting for a few reasons. Mostly because I’m feeling left out. Chelsea doesn’t even raise her voice in dissent, that’s how preposterous the idea is. Unruffled, still mostly concentrating on the pillow exchange, she informs me that to flirt with Jim would be incestuous. Because he’s like her brother.

And that gets a whole something else going.

“Except I don’t have a brother. So how can he be like my brother? The brother that I don’t have?” I try to shrug and shake my head to deflect and pretend I never said anything, but my shoulders are lost in the extra space inside my jacket and the arm of my chair is digging into my temple, preventing any appreciable gesture. I have my eyes closed now and I’m just thinking that I don’t know ‘how’ and she’s the one who said it, so.

Her not-brother asks what she’s talking about and Chelsea tries to rephrase the logic. “If you’re like my brother, but you’re not my brother . . . because I’m an only child . . . I don’t have a brother so how can I know what having a brother is like?”  Jim ohhh-kays her and launches another pillow and they forget about it.

I think about it for a long time.

I sit there feeling cheated, somehow. It’s a little like remembering suddenly that there’s some place else I’m supposed to be. I remember the promise to myself that I would to stop needing to be everything to everyone. Needing and wanting are just two different promises.