Dollmaker, Inventory, Child

Oren loves the supply closet. He loves to go in and close the door behind him, to breathe deep the Christmas scent of adhesive, to run his fingers over the open boxes of Onyx micro-tips, G-2 refill cylinders, and unsharpened No. 2 pencils. He loves to choose these things and, finally, to steal.

He works in the corporate offices of a locally owned grocery chain, in center-store nonperishables. He started in ethnic, then moved over to bulk, and is now settled into a swivel chair in canned. He grew up with some of the owner’s kids — lanky, buttermilk children with hair so fair it looks as though they’ve shaved their eyebrows off. The owners have big lakefront houses and buy their children boats for their birthdays. Their kids drive them in circles around the lake, other Hitler Youth — as their enviers call them — in tow.

A few years into his tenure at the grocery offices, they move into the top two stories of a new building — a clean place with hardwood floors and fresh flowers in the lobby. He likes the shiny confection of it. When his boss shows him the fully stocked supply closet, he inhales deeply, feeling relieved of some burden he hadn’t known was there.

Before his near-decade-long stint at the grocery offices, he spent his time hopping trains and living in squats. During that era he watched peoples’ faces go from pink to blue and brown to ash after too much heroin, witnessed a girl get raped by some tweaker crusties, had friends — road dogs, they called each other — who died in a squat fire in St. Louis days after he left.

These events didn’t mean much to him at the time. If he felt anything, it was only second-hand irritation, convenient to pick at when he was bored. But when he found out his mother was sick during a rare call home, a vision of her, coiled and blue, surfaced and led long-neglected memories back into his mind, as though she were the engine of some morbid train. The open palm of a friend’s severed arm, the burnt square stamp of the building his friends died in, the time a girl people called God lost her pointer finger after landing on it. That was the caboose — the memory of God’s finger, bloodless and bent back at an irreverent angle. He hopped an Arizona-bound train home, watching his freedom slip away on the tracks beneath him.

On his way home, riding slowly through Midwest ghettos, he watched young black men standing on stoops and street corners or walking languorously through the heavy summer air. What interested Oren was how impeccably clean they always looked, their long white shirts so fresh they must have been straight out of the package, their hats an array of bright colors, stiff and unwrinkled with stickers still attached, their hair in neat twists or shaved close. Traveling through Kansas City during a midsummer deluge, he saw some of these men take cover under a crumbling cornice and sheathe their shoes in plastic bags in order to keep them unblemished. He’d looked down at his own shoes then — decaying white Converses, he’d stolen from a store in Portland — and recognized for the first time that what he was doing — intentionally donning filthy clothes, going without showers and college education — was a privilege. He felt ashamed, scared that somehow those men would find out that he’d chosen poverty, that he could opt out at any time.

Back home he took a temporary position as a checker in a local grocery store. When something permanent opened up in the corporate offices, he applied and was quickly hired.

He is thirty now and can feel his momentum slowing, or speeding up, depending on how he looks at it. He doesn’t begrudge himself the time he spent on freighters. He thinks there is value in the decisions he made, however naïve or privileged. If poor people had the...