STOLEN PLEASURES

It takes two years for raspberry plants to begin producing berries, and ours were in their second year. We were proud of our minuscule harvest--on any given day, a pint or two of tender, many-lobed berries. We didn't mind if passersby helped themselves. We were glad to be generous. But no one had ever picked every last berry, not as this young woman was doing, walking systematically down the rows in our parking strip, popping ripe ones into her mouth, probably unaware that she was visible from the kitchen window where I stood at the sink doing dishes. She wasn't thieving from need. She was well dressed--although in an oddly outmoded style: a plaid skirt that hung below her knees, white anklets, saddle shoes, and a blouse so blazingly white it was hard to see. Her black hair fell forward, hiding her face, but I knew she was Asian. Thinking it best to ignore her, I moved into the living room and was plumping the pillow at my end of the sofa when a shadow seemed to slice across the walls. An Asian man in military uniform with narrow, knee-high boots came striding up the block, his expression grim. Losing sight of him at the street corner, I ran back to the kitchen window. There she was still: this adult "little girl," dressed as if in school uniform, bending deep among the stalks, not kneeling now but lying under the boughs, gazing upward into leaves that arced above her, their undersides weighted down with secret treasure. Organdy moire curtains lent a shimmery white halo to the scene. Common Knowledge 22:2 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-3464998 © 2016 by Duke University Press Published by Duke University Press Common Knowledge Ours is a middle-class neighborhood, shoehorned between two busy thoroughfares. People do not lie down in the parking strips. Besides, it seemed as if she was consuming all of our berries. I strode out into the yard, with a little plastic bucket on my arm, on the pretext of picking some for myself, and hoping that my presence...