The blonde woman – Lydia? – has Cass in a mock choke hold, a playful demonstration gone slightly awkward.
“But I’m ready to fight back. I have the Direct Hit™ keychain,” Cass announces with forced enthusiasm to the three women arranged on her living room couch.
Cass brandishes the spiral baton, a plastic weapon masquerading as self-defense, and gently presses its tip into Lydia’s elbow. Lydia, a reluctant participant in this charade, winces slightly.
“The Direct Hit™ comes in a dozen colors and patterns,” Cass continues, her voice a practiced sales pitch. “You’ll earn it as a hostess gift when you book a Safety Dance demo.”
With a flourish worthy of a game show hostess, Cass gestures towards the sample case borrowed from her upline, Belinda, the architect of her current predicament. Lydia, released from her performative captivity, retreats back to her seat. Lydia is the outlier here, the only attendee not part of Cass’s church moms group. Cass pins her hopes on Lydia, the potential key to expanding her fledgling Safety Dance sales network by securing a coveted demo booking.
“I know you’ve all been waiting to see our stun guns,” Cass pivots, moving onto the more electrifying part of the Safety Dance presentation. “Compared to the 50,000-volt models you’ll find in ordinary stores, our Zapp Attack™ packs a staggering three million volts of power.”
Cass proudly displays her own Zapp Attack™, a gaudy weapon emblazoned with an orange and red flame design. Carrying it, in moments of delusion, makes her feel like a modern-day Charlie’s Angel, a far cry from minivan mom. She reflects, with a pang of resentment, on the incident outside the Joslyn Museum, the sweaty man, the groping, the helplessness. The memory, shared in a blush-inducing whisper with her Bible study group, had led her here. Belinda, ever the opportunist, had prayed with Cass, then swiftly steered her toward the supposed salvation of a Safety Dance party. It’s a self-defense class and a shopping spree rolled into one, Belinda had purred. Just serve up some appetizers and leave the rest to me. To Cass, it had sounded less like empowerment and more like a slightly desperate attempt at exoneration from a life that felt increasingly small.
“The Zapp Attack™ is perfectly legal here in Nebraska, and all neighboring states. And the newest models? Fun animal prints!” Cass chirps, retrieving a leopard-spotted stun gun from Belinda’s overflowing sample case. The animal print feels incongruous with the supposed seriousness of self-defense, another layer of discomfort in this already awkward performance.
Belinda, in her late forties, a decade Cass’s senior, is a force of nature. Big voice, big chest, and a towering, spiky hairstyle. Cass’s ill-fated attempt to replicate Belinda’s cut had resulted in a poinsettia-esque disaster. At Cass’s own launch party, Belinda, the seasoned Safety Dance consultant, had regaled the guests with her own tale of urban peril, a downtown Omaha encounter where a blast from her Wolf This! Whistle™ sent a would-be aggressor scurrying, muttering Jesus, lady. That’s right, Belinda had declared with theatrical flair. Jesus and Safety Dance have my back. Cass, initially, had been genuinely impressed by Belinda’s unwavering self-assurance, a quality so desperately lacking in her own life. Belinda seemed immune to the anxieties that gnawed at Cass: walking alone in the dark, failing her family, the creeping fear of insignificance. When Belinda, in a well-rehearsed move, offered Cass’s guests the chance to become Safety Dance consultants themselves, Cass, propelled by a cocktail of desperation and misplaced admiration, had blurted out her own eagerness to join Belinda’s team. The promise of purpose, however hollow, had been too tempting to resist.
Cass smooths the floral scarf tied around her neck, a final attempt at projecting an image of put-together professionalism. She adjusts her stance, refocusing on Lydia, the key to her sales quota, and resumes reciting her memorized Safety Dance script.
“You might be feeling overwhelmed flipping through your catalog. You wish you could order everything, right?” She directs a pointed glance at the unopened catalog resting on Lydia’s lap. “You shouldn’t have to pick and choose your safety. If you join my team today, you’ll get everything in the starter kit, plus our brand new Hott Flash™ pepper spray-flashlight.” The ‘Hott Flash’, with its unfortunate name, felt more like a source of embarrassment than empowerment.
Belinda had, admittedly, complimented that “pick and choose” line during their last training meeting. I wasn’t a marketing major for nothing, Cass had quipped, attempting a bravado she didn’t feel. Even as the words left her mouth, she knew it was a fabrication. Her brief stint selling ads for the World-Herald, a lifetime ago it seemed, had ended abruptly with maternity leave, a leave from which she’d never returned. Now, her marketing expertise extended to hawking self-defense trinkets at home parties.
Cass hovers near the couch, a saleswoman on tenterhooks, as the women begin to tentatively fill out their order forms. She watches, with a sinking feeling, as Lydia selects a single item from the very back of the catalog, a book titled Empowering Our Daughters: Self-Defense for Women. A book. Not a stun gun, not pepper spray, not even a Direct Hit™ keychain.
“Remember,” Cass interjects, her voice tight with forced cheerfulness, “you can save up to fifty percent on all purchases if you book a party today!” Lydia hands over her order form, pointedly leaving the “Yes! I’d like to host a Safety Dance demo” box unchecked. Nobody checks the box. Cass collects the meager pile of order forms, quickly scanning the totals. Her sales amount to a paltry sum, barely nudging two hundred dollars, a sliver of which translates into actual earnings. In six weeks as a Safety Dance consultant, she’s barely clawed back half of the nine-hundred-dollar starter kit, a financial hole that felt increasingly symbolic of her failing venture.
Cass presents tonight’s hostess with her thank-you gift, a Direct Hit™ keychain in an offensively saccharine cotton candy pink. She begins packing her product samples back into the plastic totes, the weight of the unsold self-defense paraphernalia feeling heavier than it should. As she lugs them towards her minivan, her phone rings.
“When will you be home?” Grant’s voice, laced with predictable irritation, crackles through the speaker. The tinny sound of canned laughter from some Disney Channel show bleeds from the background.
“I’m on my way. I need to swing by Belinda’s first to return her samples.”
Grant sighs, a sound laden with unspoken disapproval. He’d vehemently opposed her becoming a Safety Dance consultant from the outset. If you need a stun gun, he’d said dismissively, I’ll get you one at Cabela’s. As if a stun gun from a sporting goods store could possibly be the same as the empowering, life-changing products offered by Safety Dance. The irony was lost on him, as was, it seemed, everything else.
“Did you earn back the nine hundred dollars yet?” The question hangs in the air, heavy with expectation and thinly veiled scorn.
Cass, stung, instinctively fishes her Zapp Attack™ from her purse, the flame design suddenly seeming less cartoonish and more menacing. She points it, theatrically, at the phone. I’ll show you a stun gun, she thinks, her inner monologue turning dark. You with your hotshot career and long-suffering eye rolls and refusal to put the girls to bed or the dishes in the dishwasher. Her heart pounds, a frantic drumbeat against her ribs. A chilling realization dawns: what she truly fears, more than any shadowy assailant, is her own simmering, volatile anger.
“I got closer,” she manages, her voice tight. “Maybe after one more demo.” A lie, and they both know it.
She clutches the Zapp Attack™, the cold plastic a strange comfort in her trembling hand, and closes her eyes. A vision of Lydia, cool and detached, regards her with undisguised disapproval. Self-possessed snob, Cass seethes, her resentment finding a new target. She fingers the stun gun, imagining the satisfying jolt of electricity. The imaginary Lydia thrashes to the ground, a silent scream on her face, the contents of her expensive Coach handbag spilling onto the pristine carpet beside her.
“I’ll be home soon. Have the girls brush their teeth.” She ends the call abruptly, cutting off any potential objection from Grant, needing to escape the suffocating weight of his disappointment.
Driving down Harrison Street, the oncoming headlights blur into blinding streaks of white, mirroring the white-hot rage building inside her. She seethes at the Safety Dance company, the architects of this elaborate charade, for enticing her into peddling their blinged-out weapons under the guise of empowerment. Why bother with expensive advertising when underemployed women will willingly pay for the privilege of hawking your wares? she thinks bitterly. She lays on her horn, a sharp, aggressive blast, as a Subaru pulls out in front of her, a minor traffic infraction feeling like a personal affront. Make us feel empowered, and we’ll happily recruit our friends into your pyramid scheme, she fumes.
She turns off Harrison onto 139th, Belinda’s house looming just ahead. We’re a pyramid of dupes, Cass thinks, the term suddenly feeling brutally accurate. This afternoon, Belinda, in a flurry of breathless excitement, had gushed about her recent promotion to Director, a dizzying ascent in the Safety Dance hierarchy. Belinda, with her ever-expanding downline, stood to potentially triple her earnings, reaching a mythical twenty thousand dollars a year. Cass had numbly done the math while Belinda blathered on, the stark reality of her own meager earnings hitting her with full force.
“Who works full time for six thousand dollars?” Cass shouts at the windshield, her voice cracking with frustration, tires squealing as she pulls into Belinda’s cul-de-sac. “Looks like I do now, so Belinda doesn’t have to!” The injustice of it all, the feeling of being used, of being a cog in Belinda’s self-enrichment machine, boils over.
Belinda’s driveway stretches straight ahead, an inviting expanse of concrete. Cass taps her brakes, the action hesitant, almost reluctant. She narrows her eyes, focusing on the three-car garage, the supposed repository of Belinda’s Safety Dance empire. The doors are closed, the driveway eerily empty. Belinda stores her inventory in the third bay, she remembers. A flicker of something dark, something reckless, ignites within her. Cass lifts her foot from the brake and slams down on the gas pedal. The minivan surges forward, careening onto the driveway with terrifying speed. She smashes into the garage door, the sound of splintering wood and mangled metal a strangely cathartic explosion. A stack of brightly colored Safety Dance boxes topples in the wreckage as she slams on the brakes, the airbag, disappointingly, failing to deploy.
She climbs out of the wreckage, a strange calm descending amidst the chaos.
“What on earth?” Belinda, alerted by the cacophony, runs from the house, her ample chest heaving beneath her plaid pajamas. In her hand, she wields a baby blue Hott Flash™ pepper spray-flashlight, a weapon from her own Safety Dance arsenal. “Cass?” Belinda’s voice is a mix of shock and disbelief.
Cass grips her Zapp Attack™, the flame design seeming to pulse with an inner light in the dim evening. She doesn’t consciously remember retrieving it from the car, but there it is, heavy and solid in her hand, a tangible manifestation of her pent-up rage. She extends her arm, pointing the stun gun directly at Belinda, her upline, her tormentor, the symbol of everything that has gone wrong. Belinda’s eyes widen in dawning horror. Cass lunges forward, a primal scream building in her throat, and thrusts the Zapp Attack™ into Belinda’s unsuspecting thigh. Belinda howls, a raw, animalistic sound of pain, and instinctively depresses the Hott Flash™ nozzle, unleashing a stream of pepper spray. The acrid smell of burnt flesh mingles with the pungent odor of pepper spray, a sickeningly potent combination. Choking for air, tears streaming down her face, Cass grasps Belinda’s flannel sleeve, desperate for purchase, as both women, locked in a bizarre dance of violence and desperation, tumble to the ground. Cass buries her face in Belinda’s tremendous bosom, the unexpected softness a jarring contrast to the violence of the moment, and screams and screams and screams, a primal release of all the pent-up frustration, anger, and despair that had been simmering beneath the surface for far too long.
