caroline mccoy swept away

claire had rubbed the lace between her fingers, assessed its cheapness, before sliding the four-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent thong inside the sleeve of her jacket. That was a mistake, lingering over the merchandise, pawing a pair of garish green underwear that she neither needs nor wants.

The usual assumptions will work in her favor. It goes without saying that she has five dollars to spare. Just look at her. Pale face free from all but the berry-hued lip balm she swiped from the grocery checkout aisle. Hair pin straight and glossy with a leave-in treatment she “forgot” to scan during her last trip to Walmart. She is dressed plainly, in jeans and an ivory-colored sweater. Her jacket is a crisp, gray wool. A woman like Claire wouldn’t be caught dead wearing this failing regional depart- ment store’s tacky panties…. Or maybe it’s better to feign confusion, say she recently suffered a concussion and might she borrow the phone to call her husband because—well, look at that—she’s misplaced hers, along with her driver’s license and all identifying cards—credit, library, Costco, insurance, AAA.

She’s planning her defense while being herded about the store by an adolescent-looking security guard who has said nothing other than, “Please come with me, ma’am.” It seems that overnight Claire has transitioned from a miss to a ma’am, as if all of central North Carolina convened on the eve of her thirty-third birthday and decided that it was time to stop humoring her. The kid ushers her past cosmetics and through shoes toward a mirrored door at the rear of the store. The two-way glass isn’t fooling anybody. Beyond her reflection, she sees movement, the lurch of a shadow.

The door swings open and reveals a woman Claire takes to be a manager. She is trim, angular, and wearing a well-tailored suit. Her silvery hair is pulled tight against her scalp, accentuating the penciled peaks of her eyebrows and the burgundy pinch of her lips. She smells sweet with the kind of fragrance that appeals to both teenage girls and old ladies, but her appearance is sour. She does not seem like the kind of woman who yields easily to indignation, so Claire decides right then to proceed with polite bewilderment. She smiles expectantly at the woman, as if she is awaiting something as banal as directions.

The woman steps aside and motions for Claire and the security guard to enter. The room is dimly lit and cramped, with a metal filing cabinet, a narrow desk and rolling office chair, and rows of mounted shelves holding cleaning supplies and busted inventory affixed with round red stickers. Claire’s gaze rests on the desk and the boxy security monitor stationed there. It is blessedly outdated, flashing black-and-white images captured by poorly positioned cameras—the glass-topped corrals that populate the cosmetics section, a register abutting a dishware display, a sea of circular garment racks. Grainy customers and employees filter in and out of each shot, occasionally revealing their faces but more often only the crowns of their heads. The rent-a-cop who oversees this makeshift security station is still standing behind her, so Claire steps toward the woman and allows him to pass and take his seat in front of the glow- ing screen. She senses that the woman’s eyes have remained fixed on her since she entered this room, so she meets them now and smiles again, conservatively, without teeth.

The woman appraises Claire. Stares at her, really, with an intensity that makes her cheeks grow hot, a sensation that is never not accompanied by an angry flush. As much as she’s tried to master the erudite poise of a professor’s wife, her nerves, her humiliations, her irritations always show up on her face, plain as day. Even this gloomy back room can’t hide them. The woman smirks. She seems pleased by the day’s turn of events, by the fact of Claire’s thievery and her red, red face; and, for a moment, Claire wonders if they’ve met before. She relaxes only slightly when the woman says the thing Claire has been counting on, the thing that always seems to exonerate her: “You don’t look like the shoplifting kind.” the first thing Claire stole was somebody else’s husband. She was twenty-one, in her last year of college, and trained only in the biblical implications of adultery—that is, how it might impact her soul and no one else’s. Dan had mentioned his wife and two boys, and Claire knew their faces from the framed, four-by-six family photograph positioned at the corner of his desk. And yet she could not imagine them beyond the borders of that picture. In her mind, they lived only against a cheesy blue backdrop, three endlessly smiling concepts—Nadia, Jack, and Cooper.

At first, she tended her crush in juvenile ways, referring to Dan as “The Hot Englishman” among her friends and recounting to them the unremarkable things about him that she then found dreamy—the way the hair at the back of his neck curled with sweat by the end of each class, the way he lingered over every word when he read the Romantic poets aloud, the way he licked his index finger to turn a stuck page.

To Claire, Dan was exotic and wholly adult—much too adult to waste time with college girls—which is why she was surprised when his interest in her became unmistakable. He had invited her to his office to discuss her midterm paper, a bumbling argument that Shelley was a misogynist. How else could a man who abandoned his child and pregnant first wife, who tethered women like moons to his orbit, write with such self-satisfaction about ethics? She had pondered such questions over ten discursive pages. This was well before she had understood that all that art-versus-artist talk drives Dan crazy. He considers it an American breed of discourse, subjective and irrelevant, as interesting as hearing about someone else’s dream. “Of course the art is better than the man,” he’d told Claire recently, when she reminded him that Picasso believed women were only good for worshipping or stepping on. “What would be the point otherwise!” But in his office so long ago, he offered no indication that he found Claire’s argument about Shelley as irritating as he must have. He only complimented her writing and recounted his own study at Oxford, how he had wept upon seeing the university’s marble memorial to the drowned poet. He had asked her, then, what moved her. No, he had asked her what turned her on. “Is there a work of art that inspires passion in you? Something that makes you want to weep or fuck?” he said. That his question made her uncomfortable felt to Claire like confirmation of her immaturity. She answered as best she could, by sidestepping Dan’s quest for some intimate piece of knowledge with a joke that now makes her cringe: “I cried over a Yeats poem once, but I think I was getting my period.” claire learned long ago that it was best not to correct other people’s assumptions about her. When she was in high school, her pastor father probably figured she didn’t drink or ride in cars driven by other teenagers or lie about where she went on Saturday nights. When she was the other woman, Nadia probably figured she was a mousy girl who couldn’t attract anyone as vain and self-important as Dan. And the first time, when she slipped a tube of mascara into her pocket, the cashier probably figured she was the kind of woman who paid for what she carried out of a store. Who was Claire to correct any of them? In many ways, she saw herself how they had seen her—as good and principled. Even the mascara had been a mistake.

They had been together for three months before she saw his wife in person. Nadia arrived at Dan’s office wearing gym shorts that showcased her lean, toned legs, and Claire realized immediately that she was beautiful. Her dark hair was pulled into an unruly ponytail. Her cheeks were full and glowing from whatever aerobic activity had occupied her morning. She knocked as she opened Dan’s office door and seemed startled to find him not alone but with a female student, Claire, sitting across from him. But as quickly as her jaw had clenched and her eyes had widened, Nadia’s pretty face relaxed and she smiled broadly. “I apologize for interrupting the scholars at work,” she said, addressing both Dan and Claire. Then, to Dan: “Your planner, love, and a little treat from Coop. He drew a picture for you but was too shy to show it to you himself.” She handed Dan a folded piece of yellow construction paper and the leatherbound calendar that, as far as Claire had been able to tell, never left his office.

Dan introduced Claire, then. He referred to her as his top student and told Nadia that the two of them had been discussing Claire’s complaints about the course syllabus. “Not enough women for this one’s taste,” he said, smiling first at Nadia and then at Claire.

He was lying, of course. Claire had said nothing about the syllabus. In fact, she’d said very little at all that morning. She had awakened earlier than she would have liked to visit Dan at his request. Before Nadia had arrived, he’d done most of the talking, telling Claire about a waterfall near his mountain house and promising her that he would take her there very soon. The view from above, he’d said, was intoxicating, almost spiritual in its way of making you believe that green was the only color worth knowing and that forever was the depth of your perception. Even for Dan, it was early in the day for such effusiveness, but Claire pictured that view anyway, imagined herself at the slippery edge of a rushing stream. By the time she looked up to see Nadia in the doorway, she understood that he had orchestrated this meeting between wife and girlfriend, that he had guided the three of them to a precipice.

She’d taken it after a fight with Dan about a paint color he’d selected and then despised. “Too blue,” was all he’d said when he walked into the bedroom, suitcase in hand, after spending his weekend at a conference two states away. The color was pretty, Claire thought. She even liked the name, “Swept Away.” It was the softest blue they’d considered, and Claire had cut the color further by blending three parts with one part white.

“You picked it,” Claire said to Dan’s back. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, untying the sneakers he’d originally bought for Cooper’s eighteenth birthday.

“If that’s true then I did so under duress. I thought the room was fine as it was.”

“What color was it?” Her voice came out tight and high. She hated crying in front of him.

Dan sighed. “You’re overreacting, Claire.”

“No, I’m not. What color was this room three days ago?”

“Oh, I don’t know, a whiteish color, something less repulsive than this.”

“Nope.”

She left him in their freshly painted bedroom, already spoiled in her mind. The walls had been a soft gray, not even slightly white or whiteish. She planned to show him photographs of the room before, to prove her point that he was being disagreeable—mean, even—despite having no real interest in their bedroom décor. She could have painted it without telling him, and he never would have noticed. She could have saved herself the trouble by not trying to involve Dan. That’s what she was thinking as she drove around town and while she wandered the aisles of her favorite discount store and, likely, when she tucked the mascara into her coat pocket. She was already in the store parking lot, having legitimately purchased a vegetable spiralizer and a set of hand weights, when she realized she’d taken the mascara by mistake. Standing beside her car, she dug around for her keys and found the slender cardboard box. It was one of those designer brands that had been marked down for the masses. The store’s tag advertised the original price and their price. Instinctively, she turned back toward the store, prepared to pay her eight dollars and ninety-nine cents. And then she just ... stopped. Holding the mascara in her hand, knowing that she’d walked out with it undetected, she felt an odd sense of relief. It was a calm and steadiness she had no idea she’d been missing until that moment. So she slid the mascara back into her pocket, returned to her car, and left.

That was six months ago. The bedroom remains “Swept Away,” and Dan has warmed to it. Or, he has stopped complaining about it. But there have been other fights and long silences and now the time away Dan is taking, the four-day weekend he’s spending at the mountain house. Claire can more or less match these incidents to the number of items stowed in the bottom drawer of her dresser and the cabinet below her bathroom sink. She has no occasion to wear or use half of what she takes. Not one thing cost more than twenty bucks. Most—like the stupid green thong she’s still concealing inside her jacket sleeve—were

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cheaper. Not that taking inexpensive stuff is okay. But she’s not actually hurting anybody. No store will go under and nobody will lose their job because of her. At least there’s that.

Her father would say that this new habit speaks to her lack of integrity, some defect deep within her. She would die of shame if he knew of the chasm in her marriage, let alone her impulse to fill it with cheap underwear and beauty products. In her worst nightmare, he peers into her collection of neon and animal print, iridescent eye shadows and press-on tattoos, and says that she is not his daughter, that he has no idea who she is anymore. In the nightmare she cannot summon her voice to explain. But an explanation evades her conscious mind, too. All she knows is that taking these things makes her hate her husband—her life—a little less.

the stern-looking woman seems impatient for Claire to do or say something, to prove that she is or is not the shoplifting kind. Claire has always found it difficult to disappoint the person in front of her. It’s hard not to be whatever they seem to want or need. But she holds her ground and says nothing. She regrets obliging the uniformed kid who steered her here. What would he have done if she’d run or simply refused to cooperate? What would he do if she turned around right now and made a break for her car? He’d have to chase me, she thinks. Or call the real cops.

“Our cameras caught you stealing,” the woman says.

“I think you are mistaken,” Claire says. She is trying to project calm, coax the pigment from her cheeks.

“Carl saw you, too. He was watching you. Apparently he’s suspected you of stealing before.”

“Who is Carl?” Claire says, even though she already knows.

The woman gestures to the security guard. He raises a limp hand as if announcing himself present.

Claire nods in acknowledgement. “Nice to meet you,” she says, automatically. She underestimated this kid. This is only the third time she’s stolen from this store. Tried to steal. Technically the merchandise has not left the property.

The woman emits an annoyed grunt and motions for Carl to get on with something. He straightens himself and turns toward the security monitor, clicks an ancient computer mouse several times, and suddenly

Claire is watching herself on the screen. Despite the distant camera angle, she recognizes her own careful movements, the way one of her ears pokes out from a curtain of hair. Her head turns left and right and left again, mimicking the ingrained motion of a conscientious driver. Her arm reaches across an underwear display, hovers over a section for a beat too long. When it returns to her side, there is left on the table a small gap among the tight assortment of items.

“There!” the woman says. “Right there. You stole a pair of lacy underpants. Maybe more than one.”

Claire has Googled this scenario. What to do if you are caught shoplifting. She knows not to admit fault in writing. She also knows that she likely won’t be charged, if the people in this room even plan to call the police. She’s a white lady without a record. The item in question is caroline mccoy negligible. The world is fucked in her favor. This has always been true, though Claire didn’t know it when she was young, when youth itself was another advantage she failed to recognize. That’s how Nadia must have seen things when she realized Dan was cheating with a twenty-oneyear-old—that Claire’s age was her advantage. Nadia has always been cool to her but not unkind. After Dan announced their engagement, she even invited Claire to lunch to discuss her integration into the boys’ lives, their soccer and band schedules, what they liked to eat, and the tricks they pulled to extend their bedtimes. Claire didn’t appreciate Nadia’s composure, then, her absolute fortitude and grace. She only felt burdened by her existence. Nadia was someone she wanted to impress and outshine.

There is no saving face now, no denying or excusing what Claire and the other two people in this room know she did. She reaches into her jacket sleeve, pulls out a wad of lime-colored lace, and extends it to the woman, who snaps her fingers around Claire’s wrist and begins to squeeze.

Claire gasps at the strength of the woman’s grip. “Hey,” she says, trying to tug herself free. “Let go of me!”

The security guard stands, seemingly dazed by the scene before him. “Lorraine, let her go,” he says.

The woman tightens her grasp and yanks Claire toward her. “I know what you are,” she says. Her slender fingers slacken, but her face remains hard. “Remember that next time you think about setting foot inside my store.” She lets go, but not before grabbing the pair of underwear from Claire’s palm.

Claire steps back and pulls her arms to her chest.

“Just leave,” Carl says. “We won’t call the police this time.” He remains standing before the security monitor, his eyes darting between Claire and the woman, who is smoothing her suit jacket and staring at the ground.

“See her out,” the woman says. “Escort her to the parking lot and make sure she goes.” Her voice is hollow. She sounds defeated, even though she is the clear victor in this embarrassing exchange.

The walk to Claire’s car feels endless. Long-legged Carl trips twice trying to pace her slow steps. People glance in their direction, but Claire trains her gaze on the store’s revolving door, on the brick pathway curv- ing around the building, on the dusty hood of her dark-blue Honda. When she stops in front of her car, Carl does too. He’s waiting for her to go, like the woman instructed. Claire doesn’t have the energy to care what this kid thinks of her, but she is sorry—for stealing those other two times and trying to steal today, for that scene with his boss—and she says so. Sorry is a floodgate, and once she’s uttered the word, acknowledged her bad habit for what it is, she wants nothing more than to empty herself completely. “This isn’t who I’m supposed to be,” she says, but her words come out cracked and misshapen.

“It’s fine, ma’am,” he says.

He takes a step back, and Claire pulls herself together. She tells him, “My husband is having an affair.” She laughs when she says, “The woman he’s seeing is basically me twelve years ago.”

Carl nods knowingly. “My parents are divorced. It sucks.”

Claire has not said the word “divorce.” She’s barely let herself think in those terms—lawyers, assets, alimony. She can’t bring herself to imagine losing contact with the boys. She has no idea how she’ll earn any kind of living. She is in the middle of her Jesus Year and completely unskilled. She was an English major. Most of her friends—if she can call them that—belonged first to Dan. Her father is the only person she is sure would take her in. He’d be smug about it, but he would help. “Yeah,” she says to Carl.

“Lorraine shouldn’t have grabbed you like that,” he says. “She isn’t a bad person. She’s my aunt—my mom’s cousin, technically, but I call her my aunt. Her dad opened the first store in Charlotte like seventy years ago or something. That one’s barely hanging on, and she’s about to lose this one and the one in Raleigh.”

Loss itself defies Claire’s comprehension, but the messy grappling with it, the struggling against it—nothing makes more sense than that. She leaves Carl standing on the curb beside the building. She’ll do as the woman asked. She won’t return to this store. And a few months from now, when the building has been vacated and a For Lease banner has been draped across its prominent eastern wall, she’ll avoid driving by.

“meet me at nine,” Dan had said to Claire on the morning she and Nadia first laid eyes on each other. In the years since, Claire has wondered whether she and Dan would have married had he not piloted his first marriage off that cliff. She’s wondered what the course of her life might have been had she not shown up to his office that day. He’d have moved on, she knows. If it hadn’t been Claire, it would have been a girl like her—quiet, admiring, eager to please. These very aspects of her nature are what makes a scenario in which she defied Dan, dumped him, never slept with him in the first place impossible. It would have taken an act of God to keep her from arriving at his office at eight fifty-five, jittery with specialness at having been beckoned by this man who seemed to adore her. And after Nadia became real to her, after Nadia knew and had filed for divorce, Claire turned almost militant about her own passion. She was unwilling to entertain the doubts and disappointment expressed by her father, let alone her own transient panic at the absolute certainty of it all—a marriage to a tenured professor, a ready-made family. Then and for much of her marriage, she believed she was loved and in love.

But this is the effect of her predicament: her whole life with Dan is now in question. Even what was good strikes her as an illusion. Their many giggling attempts at assembling toys and play structures for the boys (all of which Claire finished alone). Their dinner parties for Dan’s colleagues that always transformed into table-tennis tournaments (in which Claire, if she wasn’t clearing plates and cleaning the kitchen, played the part of spectator). Their lazy weekends and summers at the mountain house (which Dan spent mostly at his writing desk). In their decade of marriage, he has published four books and dedicated all of them to Claire with the same inscription: The winds of heaven mix forever. She was touched, at first, then perplexed. Had Dan forgotten that she hated Shelley? Certainly not. But the sliver of academe that engaged with Dan’s work might imagine that he and his wife shared a deep affection for the poet, and that was probably the point—to pad his public persona with some romance. By the fourth book, she had begun to resent the disingenuousness of the dedication. And now, she interprets it as a measure of Dan’s respect for her. What mattered to him was that he liked Shelley.

At home, away from the site of her humiliation, Claire can still feel the woman’s hand circling her wrist. She’d said, “I know what you are.” Not who but what, a thing, a thief. She walks from the foyer through the den and into the bedroom, hers alone while Dan is away—thinking, he says, though Claire knows better. She assesses the cozy room, the king bed made fussy with oversized pillows, the matching marble-topped nightstands, the chaise that no one ever lounges in, the abstract beach scene they felt pressured to purchase at an art show. In terms of property, she brought little into the marriage, no furniture and not any real money compared to Dan’s own inheritance. She had a ring that once belonged to her mother and that she has since lost. It was a plain gold band set with an opal that Claire loved to watch glimmer multicolored on her finger. She had some knick-knacks from her childhood home, the sixpiece silverplate flatware that had belonged to a grandmother she’d never met, and a sizeable collection of books. Those things are mixed in with everything else—Dan’s possessions, gifts he’s given her, furnishings and photographs and souvenirs they’ve accumulated together, all the stuff that no longer feels like hers.

Claire spins loose her wedding ring as she walks to her dresser. She opens her jewelry box and places the ring in its usual, prominent spot. Her hand lingers over the collection of jewelry, grazes the smooth garnet beads Dan picked out at an estate sale one summer and the velvet case that contains a set of pearl earrings he gave her on her twenty-eighth birthday. She fingers a small emerald pendant and its tangled gold chain. The stone came from one of her mother-in-law’s gaudy dinner rings, which the family dog ate and expelled without damaging anything but that single emerald. Her mother-in-law had the stone recut and made into the necklace for Claire. Dan has always found its provenance hilarious, and Claire occasionally wears it to make him laugh. She disturbs a stack of bangles brought back from an anniversary trip to Peru, finds beneath it a Timex still ticking on a cracked leather band. It’s not valuable or memorable, just a relic from whenever she last found it necessary to wear the time on her wrist. She returns the watch to its place and looks again at her wedding ring. It’s worth more than everything else combined. The oval diamond sticks up too high and snags her sweaters, but Dan chose it so she has loved it. Her naked hand hovers over the ring for a moment, before she closes the box and steps away. ◆

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