Lift

When she was sixteen, Stella began to steal. Specifically, she lifted magazines from waiting rooms.

It began innocently enough. She was waiting to have her teeth cleaned, and her name was called before she had finished an article in Vogue, an article that had somehow hooked her. Something about some celebrity, she supposed. Or perhaps she had simply wanted to continue leafing through the glossy pages of beautiful people. Whatever the motivation, she rolled up the thick issue, slipped it into her oversized bag, and took it home.

After this, she couldn’t enter a waiting room without pilfering a periodical.

She lifted magazines from doctors, veterinarians, chiropractors, and acupuncturists. She lifted them from hair stylists, manicurists, mechanics, and psychotherapists. Sometimes she wasn’t even waiting for her own appointment. Sometimes she was waiting for a friend.

She kept every issue she ever stole. Over the years, she amassed a great collection. In her young adulthood, she filled a great white wall-sized bookcase with her finds: the New Yorker, Harper’s, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, People, Real Simple, Runner’s World, InStyle, GQ, Yoga Journal, Seventeen, Esquire. Also Good Housekeeping, Fly Fisherman, Cook’s Illustrated, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Country Living, Condé Nast Traveler, Architectural Digest, National Geographic, Entertainment Weekly, Outdoor Photographer, American Artist. Her interests were varied and vast. Or, possibly, indiscriminate.

She placed the magazines on the bookshelf chronologically by date. Most still sported their original mailing label. In this way, she could often keep track of where she had bagged the trophy.

Some friends told Stella that what she was doing wasn’t stealing—that it’s expected that waiting-room magazines will disappear into client or patient hands. Stella, who loved the thrill, chose not to believe this.

She may have them bound for posterity. She believes she is sitting on cultural gold.