Dead Mice, Feminism, and Why I as a Feminist am Not Good All the Time

Merry thrusts her arms into the air, like a mad swimmer. She is conducting her invisible orchestra. Peanut butter and jam smear her cheeks. I don't care if I'm not good! she sings to the increasingly vigorous baroque music burbling from the radio. I don't care if you're not good! She plunges a finger into her sandwich, leaving a hole.

This is lunch time, after which I open the doors to retrieve a plastic-wrapped square of dish detergent (the same that Elspeth took a bite from and then vomited into the sink two weeks ago). I slam the doors shut, put a hand to my mouth, admit into the air a high-pitched sound that is generally reserved for passionate and rodent encounters both. AHHH.


--What is it, Mommy?

--Nothing, I say, as I shove the handles of several wooden spoons through the cabinet handles.

--Yes, I saw you put your hand up to your mouth.

I try to banish the glimpse of the mouse, in a pool of coagulating blood, snapped by the trap.

It's not that I didn't want to catch the little rodent.

We've been trying for weeks. At the beginning we felt sorry for the mice but were optimistic about a catch. My husband, Martin and I tried for the last part of an evening hunched over the little traps, bending back the springs and almost losing fingertips. Finally Martin pronounced his triumph and superiority with dohickies by getting the trap to stay sprung. He set it gingerly in our kitchen cabinet, and we arose the next morning with apprehension. Martin's bravado from the night before had sadly diminished in the face of mouse murder--classic morning after--and so I threw open the cabinet doors myself, expecting to see carnage. Instead, the mouse had escaped with the peanut butter, which is no small feat considering its adhesive properties, but left the trap intact. Martin, who is a pacifist to the core, seemed secretly pleased.

As the mice outsmarted us night after night, his pride in them grew.

You're really happy they're getting away, I told him.

No---he said with an odd light in his eyes--But it is really a smart mouse.

I asked him if he had prayed that the mouse would escape. And he said, kind of.

I reminded him of disease, and that we have a child who eats everything, including indistinguishable things, in greedy fistfuls from the ground. I went back for more traps. There was a prominent display of traps at the front of the store, including a huge rat trap that made me shudder. As I paid, I told the men at the hardware store: I used to feel sorry for the mice, but I don't any more.

They laughed.

--Yes, I said, I can hardly wait to see their little necks broken.

They stopped laughing. This cessation of merriment, I know, was prompted by the realization that I was not so much funny as frightening. I had crossed the line from being femininely charming to being a feminist. Or a mad woman. Both of these things--feminist and mad women--I am into. But I do not think the hardware chappies were.

In any case, I talk a bigger game than I play. One glimpse of that gory mouse and understood two things:
1. the source of the odd smell I had detected off and on all morning
2. the fact that I would, in the near future, call Martin and tell him that I would rather
a. clean up human vomit
b. move away
c. scream my guts out
than deal with the dead mouse.

"Of course you would rather clean up vomit," he said, when I told him. "So would I. So would anyone."

Don't get me wrong. I am a feminist, and I am a tough woman. I have endured Elspeth falling down a flight of stairs with an open pair of scissors; roto viruses; boils as a child. But dead animals somehow just put me over the living edge.

We all have our weaknesses, and like Merry, I don't care if I'm not good. I will shovel the snow tonight, and Martin can jolly well take care of the mouse.