Middle Rage

Part 10 -- Oma

The house is a tomb. Speckles of dust catch in the morning sun as it pours through the kitchen windows. Slight chill of emptiness in the air. Scott, at work. Boys, school. 11:23 by the microwave clock.

And I am the haunt, a poltergeist, some wild wraith, pin balling about the kitchen, bouncing from the fridge to the sink, thoughts terrifying me so bad I can't be still with them. I should make myself a drink, get day drunk, watch TV. Anything to stop what's happening inside me. The knife block on the countertop, next to the toaster. I grab my favorite, the comfort of metal sliding from wood. With it, I breathe a little slower.

We've had these knives since our wedding, almost twenty years ago. With them, I became a wife, a mother. Cooked five Thanksgiving turkeys. Twice, gave Scott last minute instructions on how to properly carve as our relatives waited at the table: slice upwards, into the bird's armpit. Feel for the joint where wing meets ribcage.  Separate. Cut the leg at the hip to free it from the body. Crunch down at the joint between leg and thigh, creating a perfect drumstick. I clench the smooth, weighted handle. Fucking weeks of planning, hours of cooking, and at the last minute, men swoop in for the glory of carving the bird in front of a live studio audience. I willingly prepped him on how to do it. Son of a bitch.

"Focus," I order the empty kitchen. Look at everything I'm risking: Not merely jail. I'll lose the boys, never attend their weddings, never meet grandbabies. I'll lose Scott. Maybe he and the kids will visit for a year or two. But he'll divorce me when the full weight of what I've done sinks in. My white haired mother will be the only one to come on prison visiting day, the sole person who remembers me with any love. Honestly, that does give me pause. To need her again, to be forced to listen to her well-meaning advice, because without it, I'll be absolutely alone? I am momentarily deterred.

You won't get caught.

Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy? All glorified as brilliant monsters one step ahead of the law, the Hannibal Lecters of our shared history. But as I've been listening to podcast after podcast, the real truth is those dudes got caught plenty of times. Jeffery Dahmer was pulled over with a dismembered body in his back seat at two in the freaking morning. Ted Bundy had been reported to the cops as a suspect by name while law enforcement was actively looking for a suspect named 'Ted' driving exactly the car Ted Bundy drove. They still didn't catch him.

So I'd have to disagree with the common notion those guys are geniuses. They are something else. Like Aimee said: invisible.

Maybe that's not quite right. More like they are able to stand in a cop's blind spot. Too familiar, too apparently harmless, too much like the face a cop sees in the mirror every morning.

Too white. Too male. Too used to getting their way. How many guys have I watched fail up the ladder of success? Ted Bundy just did it as a murderer. 

I breathe hard, wanting to kill someone right that minute. Same as Trump bragging about grabbing pussy and having to listen to every excuse people gave on why the words from his mouth were somehow something other than exactly what he said. Same as my mother, protecting my uncle from me, instead of me from him. Like Aimee said, it makes sense once you realize everything in our society is built to pretend outrage, all while protecting their Assault Privilege Card.

I'm not a man, but I know everything about flying under the radar.  I know about making men feel at ease. If I get caught, they'll make me pay with my life. But I have something not even white guys have. No one in a million years is going to suspect a middle aged suburban mom in a minivan of being a stone cold monster. The very notion leaves the realm of horror and lands in the absurd; a carnival joke, a fairy tale witch. Makes you wonder if the reason there are so few female serial killers is not that they don't exist. Maybe they are impossible to spot. The mind bends around them, just like when Aimee spiked Dan's drink.