Kleptomania
A Short Story About Unusual Marital Problems
By Cera Pack
He sits across from her, alternating between spinning the gold wedding ring around his finger and picking at the threads on the seam of their black leather sofa. The week previously they celebrated 9 years together. Marvin glanced up at Jannette, searching for any subtle sign that conversation was welcome, and not just expected.
She was pulling at the spare pieces of skin on her always cracking lips. It was an anxious habit that he used to pester and chastise her about, until he realized that telling Jannette not to worry was like telling a fire not to crackle.
After nearly 20 minutes of this he croaked out half a stuttering syllable, finding that the silence between them had left his voice unprepared. Marvin cleared his throat and sat up straighter, putting his hands on either side of himself as if to steady a dizzy spell.
“We can’t ignore this again, Jan.”
He had started this conversation before, and never really ended it. Marvin was an even tempered, peace-loving, quiet man, and upsetting Jannette wasn’t something he did often or took lightly.
“You know I love you.”
Jannette paused her obsessive lip picking to meet his eyes and acknowledge his tenderness, although she knew very well that this was one of those clammy, guilty, embarrassed, uncomfortable conversations that she and her husband of 9 years had not yet grown accustomed to.
“Jan, you know I’d get you the things you need, or even just want, if you’d only ask me for them.”
Jannette looked back again at the polished wood floors in their clean front room. Everything in their home was clean, new, and nice. Sometimes she still felt like a middle schooler, invited to a rich classmate’s house, playing pretend.
“Why do you do it? Why do you steal, when you know all of these things could be bought and paid for properly?”
The question had been met with a variety of responses in the past. The first time, 8 months into their marriage, Marvin stumbled upon a drawer full of leather gloves, golden earrings, hair barrettes, and ribbons.
“Well where did these all come from?” he asked his new bride, innocently. If it wasn’t for the fact that Marvin could see guilt on Jannette’s face from 2 football fields and a snow storm away, he might not have thought much more of it.
Jannette tripped though some barely baked explanation about gifts and surprises, but while Marvin was a trusting man, he wasn’t stupid. They resolved to keep the “one-time” mistake between them just this once, and she promised not to do it again.
A year later, Marvin raised his voice towards his pretty wife for the first time in their young marriage.
“What am I supposed to do then? You need to take all this shit back! We can afford this stuff now, you know that, right? Right?”
Jannette sputtered out a confused, weak apology, littered with self-deprecating wallows and begs for mercy, as if Marvin could ever have it in him to do anything that could even threaten to harm or discomfort Jannette, whether or not it was for her own good.
When Marvin and Jannette met, she was waiting tables during the night shift and attending university. She was the first in her family to do so. It took Marvin months of tender kindness to build enough trust between them to learn anything about her besides what her life was like at that very moment, to learn about the loud, poisonous, broken, destitute family she left behind. She had told Marvin before that her parents were dead. For all she knew, they were in fact, dead.
She remembered little of what her life looked like, except that there was always trash in the yard, and trash in the house. Her closet of a room was to her a haven. She filled it with shiny ocean glass and stolen library books. Hundreds of pieces making up a reality that wasn’t this one: with the trash in the yard, the house, and everywhere else.
On their 5th anniversary, Marvin found that the watch his wife had gifted him was the product of another fast handed episode. After the discovery Marvin said nothing of it until it burst out of him during a quiet moment at dinner 3 nights later.
“Why do you do it, Jan? Why? I know it was stolen.”
She answered only by falling off her chair and to his feet in a mess of tears. Eventually, when Marvin did not stoop to comfort her, she looked up at him through the mascara streaks and cried, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe you would be better off without me, I’m so much trouble, always.”
This was enough to break him, and he dropped to the floor, wrapping her up, and muttering to her how she should never have even thought something like that. He loved her, he always had, and he always would.
They did not speak again about her sporadic but chronic habit until the Sunday after the previously mentioned 9-year anniversary, when they sat uncomfortably in their comfortable North Carolina home.
“Why can’t you just stop?” Marvin looked desperately at the girl across from him, ready to beg.
She closed her barely wrinkling eyes, stammered only for a few seconds, then gave up. This time Jannette didn’t search very far for an explanation or a distraction. She dropped both hands in her lap and shook her head, shrugging.
Marvin only waited a minute longer for a reply. He knew there was none coming.
“Should I put on some tea, then?” He asked blandly, already moving for the kitchen, erasing the one-sided conversation. “Will you have black or green, dear?”