Debra Anne Davis-Thief

Published in Small Spiral Notebook, Volume III, Issue 4, Winter 2005

To steal home, a runner needs a tremendous jump,
tremendous speed, tremendous courage.

My boyfriend, Bobby, was in the small, sunny room off the kitchen, talking to our landlord on the phone, and I was in our bedroom, listening in on the extension. We were not in the apartment we had been renting from this landlord; we’d fled that place a week ago.

“I’m calling because we’d like to get our deposit back,” Bobby told the landlord.

“But you didn’t clean the place up,” the landlord told Bobby. These were the rules; we knew these rules.

“Yes, but we left under great duress,” Bobby said. He thought maybe the rules would be bent this time. We needed the deposit money, but we understood we had broken our lease. The landlord knew why we’d left, run away from the apartment taking our stuff with us but leaving the toilets unscrubbed, the floors unswept. He knew because the apartment complex manager had called him the week before and told him that one of the tenants had been raped by a stranger in her apartment. I was that tenant; the apartment had been ours.

Maybe the landlord didn’t know what “duress” means?

“The place was a mess,” the landlord whined. “Took us three hours to get it cleaned up.”

Guilty as charged. And he wasn’t talking about the fact that we hadn’t bleached out the kitchen sink. There had been fingerprint ink all over the place, on the bathroom cabinets, on several patches of the floor, all over the front door, and we’d left it there.

As they continued their conversation, I wondered about the landlord. This guy, the owner of the complex we had lived in for only three months (we’d signed a one-year lease) was different. He was the first person I’d come across who didn’t express sympathy for what had happened to me. I suppose an expression of sympathy, he worried, might have been interpreted as an admission of partial culpability. But he wasn’t responsible: I’d opened the door (there had been a very loud knock) and let the rapist in myself. No, I didn’t blame the landlord. He wasn’t the one who’d done this to me.

In a baseball game the man on third can steal home if the other team isn’t watching closely enough. The runner sees his opportunity, makes his decision, crosses the plate. No one knows what’s happening until it’s too late: he’s in.

One night, about a month before this phone conversation with our landlord, I had heard something out the window. Bobby was out for the evening. I was alone in the apartment, sitting on the couch in the living room, reading. It was a very warm, humid evening, and so we had left most of the windows open, as we often did. Our living room windows were high and small and faced out onto a chain-linked fence with barbed wire looped along the top. Between the fence and the windows there was a two-foot section of dirt, not a path really because it led from nowhere to nowhere, but just some ground separating the building from the fence. This dirt bank was high; it reached about half-way up the side of the building. So, a person walking along this path would be able to look in the high windows of any first floor apartment, and that’s what happened that evening.

Alone, absorbed in my book, I suddenly got that feeling, the feeling that I was being watched. I put the book down. Then I heard something, a rustling, a shuffling. Someone was out there. I walked over to the window. My lights were on, and it was dark out, so I couldn’t see anything. But I had heard him. “Hey! What are you doing?” I yelled, as fiercely as I could.
To my surprise, there was an answer. “I’m just walking around,” a man’s voice said. He sounded both nervous and disgusted. Nervous that I’d caught him, disgusted that I’d dared question him.

I accepted his obvious response, trite though it was. He had been “walking around.” I realized then that what I really wanted to know was not “what” but why? But, since I didn’t find that out, I just filled in some logical details myself. Maybe he lives here, I reasoned. He forgot his key? He’s looking for something?

I shut all the windows and closed the curtains. Then I turned off the lights and went to bed. I don’t think I fell asleep, but maybe I did. When Bobby came home later, I told him about the guy lurking outside. Bobby asked me a few questions, and I answered with the vague information I had. It was so stuffy inside that we then opened the windows back up and went to sleep. I never heard anyone out there again. But a couple of weeks later, I heard the loud knock on the door.

I learned the rules of baseball decades ago in some P.E. class. But as I was working on this essay, I wanted to make sure I was remembering the rules correctly, so I checked a book out of the library: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Baseball, written by “Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench.” (Bench is the one who emphasized the importance of a base runner’s jump, his speed, his courage.) I know what the Hall of Fame is, and I’d certainly heard of Johnny Bench—even if I’d had no idea that he’d been a catcher. I am not an idiot, but nor is baseball a big part of my life.

I just couldn’t let it go, though, once the words had popped back into my head after all these years: stealing home. Such an odd phrase.

When you steal, you take something that doesn’t belong to you, something that is not rightfully yours. But a home is a home—it’s a building, a solid structure, a object that’s much much too heavy to lift. A home is also a personal place, an adapted, nested space; it’s sweet, home is, because it’s mine, because it’s ours. How could such a thing be stolen?

This had been our third apartment in Austin. It was bigger than our first apartment and nicer than our second. We’d rented it “furnished,” and it was decorated with fairly new and comfortable (if not exactly chic: a gold and brown plaid couch, for instance) furniture. It had central heating and (more importantly) air conditioning. It was close to the school where I worked, close to the food co-op, a drugstore, a coffee shop, a bakery.

We wanted a ground floor apartment so Bobby wouldn’t have to lug his amplifier and pedal steel cases up and down stairs all the time. I knew it was supposed to be safer to be on an upper story, but the building seemed secure. The apartment complex was on a busy street only a mile or so from the university. And there was that barbed wire on the fence. For some reason I thought this made it “safe.” (And the arms of the umpire swing diagonally out from his body, his flat hands point their fingers at the ground.) I’m not sure whether these factors, constant traffic, proximity to UT, a fence, made it especially safe or unsafe. I realize now that I wasn’t really looking for safety. I was looking for peace of mind, and that was easy enough to get. I just glanced around a bit, didn’t see anything “dangerous,” and decided we would be fine. I didn’t have a checklist, didn’t use any rational process. I went on my gut feeling, and I felt good about the place. I know now it’s not the buildings that keep us safe, but the decisions we and others make.

Just a few weeks after we’d moved in, I sat drinking my coffee one morning at the little dining table. It was the first day of school, and I was excited. I would be beginning my second year of teaching. I felt confident and happy. This will be a good year, I thought. I sat with the heels of my feet on the edge of the chair. The pale morning light brushed in from the high window in the living room. I squinted and sipped.

One evening about three months later, I was sitting at the kitchen table, reading an old newspaper. Bobby had asked me to buy it so he would have the music listings when he returned home early the next week. I had had a relaxing day—got up late, went for a walk, and bought the paper. Now I was listening to an album on our stereo.

I was having a pretty nice time, hanging out with myself, listening to music, reading the paper, ignoring the dishes in the kitchen sink; I had a load of laundry in the machine in the laundry room. I was thinking about going to take a shower; I planned to go out that night to hear our friends’ band play. I was in the middle of an editorial about cigarette companies and knock knock knock it sounded like some kind of an emergency, someone might be in some kind of trouble and need my help. I ran to open the door.

In a different scenario, a man on third, with the bases loaded, can be forced out at home. After a good hit, the batter’s running to first, pushing the other base runners on. It might be that this man on third doesn’t even have a fighting chance to get to home. The catcher could reach out his glove, plop, move his foot, stamp, and just seconds after the hit, in less time than any human could run the distance between the base and the plate, the runner’s out.

I sat on the floor of the apartment’s second bedroom, the one I used as my office. There was a musty cardboard box near my left knee. I leaned my right shoulder against one of my bookcases. I took one book out, a small paperback, heavy as lead, pinched it between my fingers, swung my arm over the box, dropped the book in, thud. Now I rested my head as well against the bookcase. I wanted just to rest, or to leave. But, for about the millionth time that week, I had no choice. I had to pack. My index finger reached down for another slim volume, tilted it out. The book fell two inches to the carpet, thud, bounced once on its spine, lolled on its side, crash. I leaned over, slid my hand under the book, clamped it with my thumb, hoisted it over the side of the box, and let it fall, slap, on top of the one that was there. I had three bookcases of books to pack up. And then I’d have to move on, to my clothes and shoes, the pots and pans in the kitchen, all the toiletries in the bathroom, the blankets and sheets, the towels, the toaster, my desk.

My home was stolen. The rapist did not have tremendous courage, but he did have a jump on me, and speed. He’d planned his move; I, unwary, was focused on other things, on living my life. I opened the door, and that was the last moment that this apartment was my home.
I was forced out of my apartment. Not physically pushed, just emotionally shoved.
The landlord rented the bed I was raped on to someone else the next week.

“So, you won’t give us our deposit back?” Bobby asked, finally.

“No, sir, I won’t.”

Bobby hung up.

The landlord was right, in his narrow way. He’d probably even actually used our deposit money to pay the person who had to clean the apartment. We were, in fact, asking for charity, and he chose not to give it. I think it’s because he felt no empathy for us. He believed nothing like this could ever happen to him. That his wife, mother, daughter (if he had any of those) would never be attacked. And certainly that he would never be raped himself. This situation, he believed, was outside of his life, completely outside his realm of responsibility. He was safe.
Bobby and I went back to the complex one last time, a few days after we’d moved out, to talk to a neighbor. We went around back to take a look at the fence, the dirt, the windows. The man I’d startled back there, had that been the rapist? Had he been spying on me from these stands, his own private box seat set snugly behind my home plate?

But we couldn’t get back there because the gate was now chained and padlocked. Very dramatic, actually—a thick, shiny chain twisting several times around the posts, a cartoonish oversized lock. Maybe even the landlord didn’t feel completely safe, even at home.

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