“The mail, things like that?”
“Yes, but that’s not the half of it,” Phil Needle said again. His first question was supposed to be about the applicant’s most unforgettable experience, but they had veered off topic and were talking about the job. The conversation they were supposed to be having was like some landmark that had just bobbed out of sight, and for a second Phil Needle felt a little dizzied. “If the position is offered you, you can think of yourself as a bouncing board, or a kind of shadow. I’d need you by my side.” He paused for a moment and felt like he’d said something creepy, but Alma Levine was nodding and he could detect no trace of sarcasm.
Dear Renée, look at this girl’s face. This is how you nod at a boss.
Phil Needle clapped his hands together and fingered his fingers, his wedding ring a tiny ripple in the room. “Tell me something about yourself.”
There was a pause, and during the pause Phil Needle thought,
Now she’ll say “What do you want to know?”
“I graduated from college two years ago,” she said. “I majored in philosophy. I took ethics for so long that I got tired of it, so I’m done with that. Right out of college I met a guy at a show, Ray Droke.”
“Ray Droke?”
“Why, do you know him?”
“No.”
“He ran this marketing agency, Ray Droke Marketing. He moved offices and I started answering phones, but then a few months ago I quit.”
“Why did you quit?”
Levine paused and then sighed and then paused again. “I had a problem with the boss.”
This was probably the worst thing you could say in an interview. Phil Needle looked down at her résumé and saw that Ray Droke was listed as a reference. But below the résumé, there was another item that should not have been in front of him: the printed invitations for the barbecue he and Marina were throwing on July 4. They did it every year, but this year, because there was no girl, Phil Needle was supposed to look at the invitations before Marina had them printed, but he hadn’t had time to look at them, and so nobody had noticed that the invitations left off Gwen’s name. Usually the invitations were signed “The Needles,” and then below it “Phil—Marina—Gwen,” but now it was just “Phil—Marina—nothing,” no daughter, because there was no girl. The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“I’m looking for Phil Needle,” said a man in a loud room.
“This is Phil Needle,” Phil Needle said, and looked at Alma Levine. She pointed to the door and cocked her head. Phil Needle gave her a silent
No, don’t leave.
“Your daughter Octavia, sir,” said the voice, “has been caught shoplifting. We have not decided whether or not to press criminal charges.”
“There must be some mistake,” Phil Needle said sternly, and nodded at Levine.
“It’s no mistake, Mr. Needle,” the manager said. “I am the manager. We caught her red-handed. Listen, sir, I have a daughter myself. That’s why I’m calling.”
“But I don’t have a daughter named Octavia,” Phil Needle said. There was no way to make this sound like an impressive and professional call.
“Do you have a daughter, maybe eleven-twelve years old?”
“Fourteen,” Phil Needle said, getting annoyed on Gwen’s behalf. But he heard the manager ask the question
Is your real name Octavia?
in the noisy room, and it was at this moment in American history that Phil Needle knew his daughter had been stealing. His contact lenses suddenly felt dry and present. He thanked the manager. He apologized. He said she would be fetched. He appreciated the kindness. He agreed that daughters were a handful. Yes. Maybe twenty minutes. He had to call Gwen’s mother. Her real name was Gwen. Tell her, don’t tell her anything, thank you. Goodbye.
“I have to cut the interview,” Phil Needle said, “short. My daughter—”
“I heard,” Levine said. “I’m so sorry.”
It sounded like Gwen was dead. Surely Alma Levine did not think that. “She was stealing,” he said, and thought of a way to make it part of the interview. “What do you think about stealing?”
“I think it’s wrong,” Levine said flatly. He could not disagree. Stealing was wrong. If you were caught they filed charges, or called your father. Phil Needle looked at her and tried to reinvent the day. He needed a girl, and here was one. Maybe she hadn’t had a problem with her boss. She’d said so, yes, but his daughter had said Octavia. People had to say something.
“It
is
wrong,” Phil Needle said, and decided to hire Alma Levine. “Start tomorrow,” Phil Needle said. “Let’s start tomorrow.” The boat of his mind sailed quickly forward to the conversation he had to have with his wife, his daughter, on the sofa in the living room of the condo he could soon afford. He would buy something to eat, so they could eat something while they talked this over, the fact that she was stealing things, cupcakes
.
He wrote CUPCAKES
quickly on the back of the invitation to the barbecue, in such large letters that Levine looked down and read them, and he turned the invitation back over, and could see on the horizon the barbecue on the Fourth of July, when if all went well he’d be celebrating his success and his outlaw spirit. Stealing things. It was wrong. He picked up the phone.
“Yes,” said his new girl.
When Gwen was born Phil Needle planted a tree. This was in their old place out in the Sunset, and the girl at the nursery told him the tree was a native one that would thrive in his yard, but it died when Gwen was five. He and Marina decided to replace it in secret, so she wouldn’t cry. Digging up a stump at night, with a healthy native tree perched next to him with its roots in a bag, was how Phil Needle thought about being a father. It was like taking care of something, or digging something up, fixing it without the other person knowing it, with something identical to what it was that had gone wrong in the first place, or something. Phil Needle didn’t know what it was. Fuck that tree.
He entered the living room with his shirt untucked, holding two cupcakes. Marina and Gwen were quiet on separate couches, Gwen’s legs long on the coffee table and Marina holding a small pillow over her lap. Toby II lay with his body curled up on the floor. Everyone looked at the cupcakes. Phil Needle sighed, knowing from the moment he inhaled that he was already doing it wrong.
“Why did you do this?” he asked her. “Why are you stealing? Is it true?”
“It’s true all right,” Marina said. “They caught her red-handed. You wouldn’t believe all she had in her pockets.”
“So it’s true,” Phil Needle said, losing ground.
Gwen shrugged. “Yes,” she said. “I don’t know, Dad. I was just—I didn’t know what to do.”
“I told her, call a friend and I’ll take you there,” said Marina. “I said go out to the Embarcadero.”
Gwen looked as though she was going to snarl at her mother, and Phil Needle didn’t know how to take this. They had moved out of the Sunset to this beautiful place, with a view of the water and the Embarcadero right outside, full of safe tourists and smilers on roller skates, so Gwen could have someplace to go. Down the way was a farmers’ market and she could take an interest in cooking, for instance, and surprise him when he came home from work with something she made herself from a recipe on a cooking show, while Marina set the table for a change. There was a gym in the building, whenever she was ready, and of course every day they drove her to school. She would never have to take the bus, had been the plan. Not like the Sunset, where every day it was waiting in the fog, squeezing in next to strollers and people with big bags of bok choy. Why wasn’t Gwen into this plan? He could see her moving, if you looked closely at her shoulders, a shivery motion like an extra cup of coffee. He tried to remember the first time Gwen looked so mad she was going to cry, this furious fierceness that had pounced on her while he wasn’t looking.
“I understand that you can be bored,” he tried at Gwen, “but stealing is wrong.”
“I
know
it’s wrong,” Gwen said, like this had happened ages ago. “I never did it before.”
Marina barked this laugh she did sometimes. Toby II looked around without moving. “I looked in your room,” she said. “
Everywhere.
”
“
Mom
,” Gwen said. She stood up.
“You know her cupboard?” Marina asked him. “It was just
stuffed
with stuff.”
“I buy things there all the time!” Gwen shouted. “That’s unfair!”
“I threw it all away,” Marina explained to him.
“That doesn’t seem right,” Phil Needle said. “If it’s hers, then, well, or if she stole it, well, then it’s property of the store.”
“
I didn’t steal it
!
” Gwen stepped over the dog and looked at them. Even Phil Needle could see that she was trying not to cry. “I just did it, I don’t know. And it’s not even stealing. It
isn’t.
It’s not stealing unless you leave the store, and they caught me before that.”
“
Gwen
,” Phil Needle said.
“It’s
not.
”
Phil Needle tried to picture what in the world his daughter wanted from the drugstore, its hideous lights, its buzzing fridges and all the retarded people wandering around in vests making him uncomfortable. He leaned forward and tucked her hair behind her ears, which she had always loved, even though it fell loose again when she shook her head. “I said I was sorry,” she said.
“You didn’t say you were sorry until I asked you to,” Marina said.
“Yes, I
did
,” Gwen said. “In the drugstore I did.”
“When I asked you to.”
“I didn’t say it because you asked me to.”
“Heaven forbid you’d do something because I asked you to,” Marina said.
“
I said I was sorry
,” Gwen said. “How many times do I have to say it?”
“Once,” Marina said, “and mean it.”
Phil Needle tried to turn his cupcake into a Scotch on the rocks with the power of his mind. He did not know anything about a girl who would steal things from a drugstore. Gwen didn’t seem like she could be this girl. He pictured a shoplifter, and it was somebody more glamorous, more methodical, than this shaking thing with one foot on the coffee table and the other on tiptoe on the carpet, quivering and annoying the dog. He patted Gwen’s knee and then Toby II’s head. He knew of course that she had not been sorry while she was throwing makeup into her pockets. She was sorry later, at the moment she got caught. If people were sorry beforehand, they wouldn’t do things.
Gwen had been talking this whole time, through clenched teeth, in a rough whisper that sounded like she was firing someone. “And I
did it
,” she spat, “and it was the
only time
, and I said
sorry.
You never
believe
me. You won’t let me take the
bus
by myself. I never get to go
anywhere.
You didn’t even ask me about the
barbecue.
”
Phil Needle thought about this list of things from his daughter, but he had no idea what any of them were. It was as if Gwen had emptied her pockets of everything but the reason she had stuffed things into her pockets, although to be fair, Phil Needle had not been listening for a minute that could have been crucial.
“If something’s bothering you, honey,” Marina said, “then—”
“Maybe it’s none of your business,
Mom
,” Gwen said.
“All right, all right,” Phil Needle said. It was the tone of voice on
Mom
, as if Gwen’s mother was not really her mother but somebody else. Everyone was nonsense. Still, he had to say something. “You will be,” he said, but
you will be punished
sounded dramatic, or maybe filthy. “There will be punishment, which we will decide on, and in the meantime, for starters, you’re grounded.” He’d never grounded anyone in his life. “You can’t go out”—how did it work?—“or talk on the phone, except for school.”
“And swimming,” Marina said.
“Except for school and swimming,” Phil Needle said, but Gwen was already standing up again, her mouth shaking open and her hand with
shit
written on it rubbing at her crying eyes.
“
I knew it
!
” Gwen said, storming off. “
I knew you’d take her side
!
” It was a real storming off, his daughter thundering and leaving and roaring with tears through the kitchen to the bathroom nobody liked but everyone used. Marina tossed the pillow off her lap, leaned forward and put almost all of a cupcake into her mouth. He hadn’t thought one was hers. He thought one for Gwen and one for himself because Marina was trying to be skinny for the barbecue.
“What,” Phil Needle said, listening to his wife’s lips smack, “was that?”
Marina shook her head with her mouth full.
“She gave the drugstore a fake name?
Octavia.
I guess she was trying not to get caught.”
“She was already caught,” Marina said. “And the magazine.” She reached behind a pillow on the sofa, not the pillow she had been holding, and threw the magazine on the coffee table, rattling the cupcake.
Schoolgirls.