Missing Silverware

Sitting in the room, her knees are against her chest as she sits on the bed. There is silence in the apartment. She is home by herself, for now. Her partner, not yet home from work. Her stomach growls, disrupting the silence. She is hungry. She hasn’t had anything to eat all day. She looks at the clock and it tells her the time is now 5:12pm. Her partner should be home in about a half hour. A half hour. She wonders if that’s enough time.

She puts her legs over the bed, makes herself stand up and walks to the kitchen. When she get there, she opens the fridge. When she looks inside her heart sinks. There isn’t anything there that she can make a meal of. She is so hungry. And, oh, does she know that when her partner gets home he is going to be hungry too. He is going to be hungry and she won’t have anything for him to eat. What will he say? How will he speak to her? Will he get angry? Ha. She feels bitter laughter bubble inside of her. Of course she knows the answer to all these questions. It means she is in trouble. She must prepare herself for a lecture, shouting, the emotional manipulation she has been trained to recognize, and steele herself to keep calm. She will not let him win. He may say what he will say, but she will not let him get what he wants.

After shutting the fridge, she turns around and goes to the silverware drawer. She opens it, and stares for a few moments. An alarm is going off in her head. “Danger, danger,” it rings out. The question of what should she do weighing on her, repeating over and over in her mind. Slowly, an idea forms. There, in front of her is her way out. This is how she will win.

After shutting the silverware drawer, it is a bit lighter. There are less items in the drawer than when she opened it. She makes her way to the bedroom, items in hand. When she walks through the doorway, she looks at the clock. It is now 5:26pm. She must have taken longer looking at the fridge and the silverware drawer than she thought, because she is a bit rattled. She thought she was only in the kitchen for 5 min. She has less time before her partner gets home than she would like, but she will have to make do. She must get the items in her hand put away, where they cannot be found.

She puts them on her bed and grabs a chair. She brings the chair to her closet, where she puts it up against the clothes that are hanging. Once she is on the chair, she reaches up to the shelf the clothes are hanging from, and finds a box. She brings the box down and over to the bed, where she quickly puts the items inside. Then the thought that if it gets bumped they will make noise inside the box and give away what is inside. She needs something to pad the box. Her mind is starting to race. There should be plenty of time, but knowing that her partner will be home soon is making her more anxious in the moment than she might otherwise be.

She finally gets the idea to use some clothing to pad the box, and hopefully stifle any and all noise that the silverware might make inside. So once again, she goes over to her closet where she picks out a shirt she doesn’t wear very often, and two scarves. Thankfully it is spring, almost summer, so it will not seem odd that the scarves aren’t there. That is, if her partner would even notice the absence of her scarves -but on the off chance that he did, putting them away wouldn’t be strange since the weather is warm and not scarf wearing weather anyway.

Once she had her shirt and scarves packed in the box with the silverware, and the few other random items that were already in the box, she shut the lid and put it back up on the shelf, making sure it looked just as it did before. She knew the missing silverware was going to be noticed right away and did not want to give any clues or hints as to where the missing items were. It was for her safety, she reassured herself. She looked at the clock once more: 5:37pm.

Within her chest she felt her heart begin to pound. She really did it. She was taking steps to ensure that she could win. Her partner who had been controlling what she could eat, when she could get out of their apartment, and refusing to help her family wasn’t going to get his way with this.

She was quickly brought back to the moment when she realized the chair was still in the closet in front of the shelf. She had to be sure to move that back to where it was before. So she quickly moved the chair to its proper place. After doing so, she gave a quick survey to the room to make sure it appeared normal and nothing looked out of place. Once she was satisfied she gave one last look at the clock just as it went from 5:39 to 5:40pm.

Her partner would be home any minute now, maybe even any second. She wondered if she should climb in bed and look as though she were just getting up from a nap… or if that would make her partner think she would be rested and therefore have more energy than she did, which should make her more willing to serve him or do things for him. She decided to sit down with her crochet hooks and yarn. She would look productive, busy, and could still admit to being hungry.

Just as she started, she heard the click of the door. Her partner was home. He came in, shut the door and hung up the keys.

She knew she should greet him. Just giving out a simple call of, “Hey hun,” would be sufficient. However, the words were caught in her throat. She knew she had taken a significant step today, and it seemed to paralyze her voice. She was frozen between excitement and anxiety.

“Hey sweetheart, you home?” Her partner yells out.

“Mmhhm. Sewing,” she manages to get out in response.

Her partner appears in the doorway for the bedroom. She looks up. He looks just like he always does. There isn’t anything different about him. Yet, today feels different.

He greets her and then goes to the bathroom. When he is out of the bathroom her partner tells her that he is famished. Then he asks her if she’s hungry. She tells him that she is. So he sets off for the kitchen.

This is it. Not too much longer. He will go to the silverware drawer and no doubt he will notice what’s missing. So she gets her phone out and ready to make a call if she should need to.

It doesn’t take long. She hears the drawer shut. She hears her partner muttering in the kitchen. Then he is shouting. At her. This is what she knew would come. She thought she had prepared for this, but actually in the moment it still seemed surreal. It was still jarring.

He came into their room, shouting, “Where are the knives??” He repeated it three times, “Where are the knives, honey?” “Where did the knives go?” “Did you put the knives somewhere? Why?” her heart rate increasing with each question. She knows she can’t tell him where they are, but if she doesn’t answer his question how much more angry and upset will her partner become?

“You’re scaring me, honey. Why are you so insistent on knowing where all the knives are?” she asks with her voice a bit shaky.

“How am I supposed to cook? Prepare any food if I don’t have a single knife to use??” Her partner asks with indignation.

“I don’t feel safe! You say it’s about cooking, but you are so angry right now… over knives!” She says and then runs out of the room with her phone in hand. She makes the phone call.

* * * * * *

Time has passed and they are no longer together. The police showed up. The woman got out. The partner went to jail. The woman returned to her family. This woman was a victim of a horrible man. This is the narrative she tells.

What she doesn’t say is that she didn’t have a drivers license. So she could tell you that her partner controlled if she could go out of their apartment and believed she was being factual. There was a grocery store 7 blocks away, but if her partner was gone or didn't want to drive, how could she be expected to get there? And she did not cook. The man, her partner, did all the cooking. Thus, telling everyone that he controlled what she ate was, again, in her mind, factual. The narrative is that the man was controlling and dangerous. The question is: was he? Was he the monster she made him out to be? Who was the real controlling one? In the end, she got exactly what she wanted: him out and to make herself look like the victim. Her future secure in being the sweet, scared woman to garner sympathy for her clearly horrible situation.