
THE SOAP THIEF 
  by T.O. Francis 

    "She's done it again!" cried Lottie McMean. Her jowly face 
trembled with anger. She peered into the bright blue box, her 
lashes fluttering with disbelief. 

    "Not the soap powder again?" Josie Raymond whined, 
singsonging her exasperation. Her old, soft, but favorite 
slippers whispered hoarsely against the wash room's tile floor as 
she rushed to the basket where she had stored her supply of new 
and improved soaps, softeners and sundries. 

    Josie's nut brown hands, lined but well kept, snatched the 
brightly rendered box of soap flakes from the basket. She did not 
have to peer into her box. It had been half full when she and 
Lottie left for the Sam's deli, less than half a minute around 
the corner. Now, the box virtually leapt from its birth as if 
gravity had suddenly exempted the "all new, stronger" product 
from its law. 

    "It's empty," Josie sighed. She wrinkled one side of her pert 
nose causing a rise in a cheek splashed with dark brown freckles. 
She tipped the box toward her and aimed a very angry, brown eye 
into the yawning emptiness. "She is such a bitch... we know it's 
her... and she gets away with it every time" 

    Lottie cast a mournful eye at the front door. Sunlight bathed 
the baleful Bronx cement outside and cascaded inside past the 
plain but shiny pine door frame and formed a symmetrical box on 
the aging and chipped black and white checkered floor. 

    The purloined soap powder had ruined Lottie's day: "My 
hair'll wilt in that heat; and I'll have to go back past Sammy's. 
I don't think I can resist the cheese cake a second time." Lottie 
licked large, full, lipstickless lips. "As a matter of fact," she 
added with an air of finality, "I'm sure I won't make it." She 
plopped her plump hands on her equally plump hips around which an 
one-size too small black skirt hugged with an earnestness a boa 
constrictor would envy. "Damn that Ernestine..." she added 
almost as an aside. 

    Josie adjusted the blue and red scarf -- a riot of color tied 
into a neat triangle -- so that the slick fabric again covered 
the edge of her ebony hair. She had just washed and styled her 
hair and the scarf was a vital element in  the drudgery necessary 
to prepare her tresses for another day of torturous repetition of 
"Directory assistance, operator 11, what city, please?" 

    She tugged angrily on the two loose ends just below her chin. 
"This ticks me off," she chanted, with considerably less melody 
in her articulation. "Running back and forth to the store takes 
away from the time I was planning to spend with my Ralphy. That 
bitch!" 

    "And she knows that we know it's her... that's what gets me." 
Lottie whined. She ambled to the door and stared longingly down 
the block in the direction of the deli. She could hear the feral, 
beckoning cry of Sammy's cheese cake. The plaintive cry barely 
drowned the sound of Sammy's donuts. 

    Josie floated across the washroom and out into the sunlight. 
She dabbed daintily at a film of perspiration deposited on her 
lip by the wash room's humidity. "I can't spend another minute in 
there," she fretted, dancing in nervous semicircles, "... it'll 
ruin my hair." She tugged at the seams of her skintight, red 
peddle pushers that clung to her everywhere possible and left 
little to the imagination. Ralphy loved her in tight things. 

    "Well, I suppose the day's ruined already," she announced 
with a sigh tucked between anger and resignation. "The clothes 
are already wet." She shrugged. "Well, are you coming..." 

    Lottie always found Josie's ability to transform herself from 
a meandering, molasses-footed, bowl-shaped plodder into a quick-
stepping, sure-footed athlete with the agility of a ballerina -- 
miraculous. Josie was already two steps ahead, her head bent in 
intent investigation of the monetary contents of the small purse 
tightly secure in her hand. 

    "I hope I have enough for a slice of Neapolitan to go with my 
cheesecake." Her voice lowered to a guilty whisper. "Just seems 
like a sin to eat desert without having eaten a meal, right?" 

    Josie agreed by singsonging a grunt, her mind still on her 
lost afternoon with Ralphy. 

    The laundry room was in a small street-level room next to the 
entrance to the aging but well-kept tenement in which they resided. 
The brown-brick building, with its rows of windows pocked with air
conditioners, rugs hanging for air, tiny glimmers of naked light 
bulbs twinkling from within, stared down upon the two women as they 
passed by the front entrance. 

    Children of all sizes and colors raced from shade to sunlight; 
from raging pump water to dry steamy blacktop, their voices pealing 
their unbounded joy. 

    "Hiya, ladies," a voice chimed in sharp staccato. 

    Josie looked up just as Rae Garcia, freshly divorced, and the 
newest addition to their family of tenement residents, appeared 
at the top of the cement steps. Lottie turned also, but somehow 
managed several more steps -- sideways at that -- before deciding 
to stop and return Rae's greeting. 

    "What's up, Rae?" Josie replied, trying to match the cheery 
bounce in Rae's voice. 

    "Hiya, Rae," Lottie added, turning her head in the direction 
of Sammy's as if to catch a sniff of the sweet aroma of boiling 
pastrami. "We're on our way to Sammy's... I mean to the grocery." 

    "Ernestine made off with our soap powder again." Josie's 
voice was low and regretful. 

    Rae bounded down the cement steps. She was tanned a dark 
brown; the result of spending days at Orchard beach hunting a new 
man to take the place of the "lech bastard" she left behind in 
Spanish Harlem. 

    Rae was much younger than Josie and Lottie, but experienced in 
ways the two older women could only wonder about. 

    "Well, she better not touch my stuff, babeee," Rae said between 
frantic clicks of gum that she seemed never to be without. 

    Rae tightened her hand around the neck of a pillowcase 
stuffed with clothes for the washing machines which she had slung 
mannishly over her shoulder. 

    "I don't know... how you... stop... her." Lottie said 
between anxious glances toward the end of the block. "I've been 
living here for almost ten years and nobody's ever caught her 
red-handed." 

    "She acts like the laundry room's her own very special 
supermarket." Josie insisted. The sun bit at the back of 
Josie's neck and she turned slightly to prevent an unwanted burn. 

    Rae alighted from the stairs with an exaggerated saunter. Her 
shredded hot pants, cut from a pair of old denims, showed her to 
be a woman who could handle herself and took no prisoners in the 
course. 

    "Do something to her friking clothes when she puts them in 
the machine," Rae snorted with a defiant shrug of her shoulder, a 
shrug that set a large breast bobbling beneath a worn man's 
striped shirt. She touched a pinky to the edge of her lip glazed 
a blazing red. "That'll make her dig herself." 

    Lottie's feet bounced her several more steps in the direction 
of the corner. She banged her purse against a thick thigh in 
impatient rhythm. 

    "Well, that's the thing, see," said Josie, "she's got her own 
machine. So she only comes down to steal our wash powder and then 
rushes upstairs with our soap powder." 

    "And bleach... and any thing else she can get her hot little 
hands on." Josie added without looking at either woman. 

    "Oh, yeah..." Rae drawled like a Texas gunfighter meeting a 
challenge. "The day she takes my stuff is the day she stops 
taking stuff." Rae hefted the bag once to show that she meant 
business. "We had ways of dealing with bitches like her downtown. 
She better not touch my stuff." She looked up at the windows as if 
she were able to see Ernestine through the dirty brown bricks. I 
catch you later." She said in an accent tinged with mambo, beer 
and cuchifrito. 

    Josie watched for a moment as Rae's barely covered backside 
disappeared into the laundry room. "Maybe," she said to herself 
since Lottie had wandered out of earshot, "she'll be the one to 
teach Ernestine a lesson." 

    Ernestine Jacobs cradled her key tightly between index finger 
and thumb, the remaining bunch of keys tightly gripped in her 
fist. She eased the key into the lock and turned it softly. Easy 
does it, no noise. 

    The cylinder clicked, echoing softly in the cool, brightly 
lit hall. She slid her massive hips quickly through the door. And 
quickly locked the door behind her. 

    The fingers of one hand, the color and thickness of chocolate bars, 
clutched a large clear cup filled with a white powder. 

    She pressed a face much too thin for her large body against 
the door and peeked through the peek hole. 

    She grinned broadly, her smallish, intent eyes detected no 
one in the hall. She closed the metal door to the peep hole 
softly. The women in the building were so stupid, she thought as 
she lifted the cup and examined its contents. "_It's the new girl's 
soap powder, I... appropriated. What was her name again. Oh, yeah, 
Rae. Thinks she's tough or something just cause she's from downtown. 
Hmmph! Let's see her do something about it._" 

    Ernestine ambled into the kitchen. She raised the lid to her 
washing machine. Shimmering water played a ghostly pall on her 
face. She had run out of soap powder in the middle of the wash. 
The women in the building bought such cheap powder it was hard to 
get the whole wash done with just a cup full. 

    The powder formed a layer of white on the water's surface, 
rippling softly like snow blown across a field. 

    She dropped the cover heavily into place; twisted the cycle 
dial, listening to its comforting ratcheting chatter. The machine 
leaped to life with a guttural bark. 

    Ernestine leaned against the machine. She liked the gentle 
vibrations that shook her great breasts and caused her gigantic 
Bermuda shorts to shimmy sympathetically. She often found the 
machine's vibrations almost as relaxing as a man's massage. 

    But she had other things to do and reluctantly went about 
preparing the evening's meal. Her man, Roland, would be home soon 
with another batch of clothes black with oil and dirt from the 
gas station. 

    She had just plunged her hands into the cool water in the 
sink where she had set a arm's length of frozen fish to thaw when 
there arose a startling clamor from her machine. 

    Ernestine cringed against the icy coolness of the sink. "Lord 
have mercy," she howled, transfixed by a foaming white mass that 
pushed the cover of the machine open and spilled onto the floor. 

    Ernestine danced through the thick, spongy goo on tiptoes. 
She grabbed the red kitchen phone near the door. She peered 
anxiously at the numbers scribbled on the white paint around the 
phone until she found the washing machine repairman's number. 

    "It's shooting out of the machine like there's no tomorrow!" 
she cried into the phone and into the ear of the disbelieving 
repairman. "It's climbing up my sink!" she howled standing at a 
safe distance in the hall, her eyes riveted to the mountain of 
white that continued to grow even as she hung up the phone. 

    Ernestine paced her living room floor. She could think of 
nothing but the motion picture in which a formless mass consumed
the unsuspecting and naive populace of a small town. She knew this 
mass wreaking havoc on the kitchen was no kin to the monster that 
devoured those poor people but maybe this mass in the kitchen did 
worse. 

    Finally, the bell rang. Huffing almost hysterically, Ernestine 
directed the man to the machine with a firm push in the back and 
then repaired to the living room to await the verdict -- provided 
the white glop in the kitchen didn't devour the repairman. 

    Ernestine bit at short, ragged fingernails, listening to the 
clank of tools, whistles and gasps of surprise. Finally, the 
repairman, his blue coveralls stained wet and white appeared in 
the entrance to the living room. 

    He was a smallish man, balding with a face like a rat. He 
stood there with a handful of the white mass in his hand. His 
lips held part of a smile, part of a smirk that was still bent 
with bemused surprise. 

    "Well," she breathed, clutching her hands to her breasts. 

    "Well," he echoed, a twinkle in his eye, "it's mashed 
potatoes." 
========================      # # #     ==============================

Ted Francis worked as a reporter for a couple of small Northeastern 
papers during the sixties and seventies until his legs gave out (they 
say the legs are the first to go - they were right). Then he moved up 
(or down depending on your view) to copyediting. For several brutal 
years of commuting, he copyedited for such papers as the Bridgeport,
(Conn) Telegram and the Morristown (NJ) Record. Now he hustles computer 
application stories for a living (ha, ha... you call that a living).



