Free The Imperial Wife by Irina Reyn Page B

as stealing—it was a child’s logic, a kind of immigrant magical thinking. I was just ten years old, just a few years in America, and allowed to roam alone on the streets of Rego Park. At first, my parents hired a Polish babysitter to pick me up from the bus stop and feed me dinner, but after a few months, Agnieszka started skipping hours and days, and it was agreed that I was old enough to care for myself. My parents, distracted by the need to make money, to learn the intricacies of a new language, sprung me free among thrift stores, worn-down supermarkets, Korean delis, Russian hardware stores, the busy spokes of numbered streets that intersected Queens Boulevard. The extraordinary circumstances of immigration meant I was kind of an adult now, my mother explained when Agnieszka disappeared from our lives. She held my gaze so I understood. In Russia, girls younger than you are responsible for their brothers and sisters.
    It was frightening at first, this sped-up graduation to adulthood, but what was the point of being a child when yeshiva did its best to exclude me, to separate me from the American Jews and the Israeli Jews, when there were no friends with whom to pass the long after-school hours that bled into evening. There was nothing to do but make peace with loneliness, make the best of it.
    Daily life was just me and the city. Plunging into the music of honking cars, the coarse Russian language tossed about on the streets, the gangs of kids prowling Queens Boulevard, the thrum of subway underfoot. I felt the city whispering in my ear. You’re special . The world as through tinted glass, dim and contorted, the neon of bars and movie theaters, stores hawking the silliest, expendable things like greeting cards and coffee, sequined bandannas and fingerless gloves. Wandering through a cacophony of languages that made no sense at all.
    I dipped in and out of local bodegas, appraised their aisles. In Moscow, there was so little to buy, to want, and here, it seemed as though desires were so much greater than one’s needs that there was a persistent ache in the heart. The impulse to take came on suddenly, but naturally. It would be up to me to care for my mother and father and ailing grandfather. At yeshiva, the rabbi droned on about the imminent arrival of the Messiah, and the Hebrew teachers passed me without even a glance at my essays on the mitzvot of the Torah, the foundations for Talmudic life or how to kasher a chicken. At home, my parents counted the dollars between them, ordered ribs from the Chinese takeout place for dinner, and stayed up all night arguing like they’ve never done before or since. My grandfather’s medical bills, applications for services they were not sure existed. My Jewish moral life and real life were split in two.
    I began with candy bars, then rolls of bread, then bags of soup noodles. And those items were easy to cart away, what with my angelic features, hair parted in the middle, enormous bows tethering my ponytails, neat flared corduroys. I never shoved things surreptitiously in my bag, but brought them out of the store in broad daylight, daring someone to stop me. Look, I wanted to tell my parents, I can take care of us all. But instead, unable to admit what I did, I ate the food in private, quickly, with trembling fingers, stuffing my mouth with bread and stale chocolate and unripe pears. Or I would feed it to a grandfather whose head lolled, whose eyes glassed over, and who called the bread “cotton, nothing more,” and spat it all out.
    One day, I targeted a store called Ninety Nine Cent Things. It was smaller than the faceless superstores I preferred, a cluttered hodgepodge of plastic items piled high in metal baskets with no particular order or organization. The inventory seemed to be stocked by a kid barely older than me, his cherrywood complexion and rapid speech on the rotary phone pinned him as hailing from somewhere in the Georgian Republic. I