Labor Division
Michelle Ross
Miles was out with the boys and, as is often the case, wasn’t returning my texts, and I was impatient to get Christmas put away. It was the sixth day of the new year. The clan of winking ceramic Santas on the console table had overstayed their welcome.
If it were up to me, we wouldn’t decorate for Christmas, but Miles and the boys fucking love Christmas. All December and nearly half of November they torture me with their Christmas music. Then every year, come January 1st, I’m asking Miles when he’s going to put away the decorations, haul away the tree, sweep up all the pine needles, and every year, he’s all what’s-the-rush-it’s-still-the-holiday-season. The holiday season is like my brother Jack: Invite it into your house for a few weeks because it’s between jobs and struggling, and it will stay until the end of time if you don’t kick it out.
This year I decided I wouldn’t get hung up on Christmas not being my mess. So, while Miles and the boys were out, I removed every ornament from the tree; boxed up every precious, saccharine figurine; hauled the tree to the tree-recycling drop-off site.
All that remained was to put the boxes back into the attic. As I carried the ladder into the house from the garage, I could hear Miles’s voice in my head: You’re going to carry heavy boxes up a ladder by yourself, no one to spot you? No one to hand you the boxes? Are you insane?
Normally, placing the boxes in the attic is Miles’s task. He positions himself halfway up the ladder where he can reach into the attic, as well as down toward me. My task is to stand by the ladder and lift each box up to him. It’s a two-person job, according to Miles, because it’s too risky to climb a ladder with a heavy box in your arms. You could throw out your back, break your neck.
Miles has a thing about ladders. One of the chief differences between Miles and me boils down to this: He worries about ladder safety. I worry about everything else.
If Miles forgets to confirm that he’s picking up Cole and Xavier from school or if, like today, he’s out with the boys and I don’t hear from him and can’t get a hold of him, I picture his car mangled or a gunman taking out everyone in the movie theater, which is to say that not a week goes by that I don’t imagine the people I love dead.
In contrast, sometimes I think I could stay out all night without sending word to Miles, and when I finally returned home the next morning, he’d look at me and say, “Oh, you were out?”
Miles doesn’t imagine worst-case scenarios. He doesn’t feel around in the dark, convinced that, though the room looked safe before the power went out, now it might hold innumerable dangers for the people he loves.
The one exception is ladders. That man has an eye for ladders the way that a hawk has an eye for stray bunnies and mice. If there’s a ladder within sight, Miles will zero in on it, and he will proceed to comment on how irresponsibly that ladder is being used. “That idiot has that thing balanced against a treetop! That’s a death sentence!”
But I’m no a stranger to ladders. As apathetic as I am about Christmas, every year, I’m the one to put up and take down the outdoor Christmas lights. As with much of the labor division that happens in a marriage over time, it’s hard to say why the outdoor lights is my task. Maybe because I was the first one to do it?
Also, unlike Miles, I can’t stand unfinished business. I wouldn’t be able to shift my focus onto something new until those boxes were where they belonged.
Anyway, the fact is I managed to get the first three boxes into the attic without a hitch. A 75 percent success rate overall, but at the time, a 100 percent success rate, three for three. So, it’s not like I was foolish to think I could accomplish the task of putting away the last box on my own, even if it was the heaviest of the four. It’s not like I expected things to go poorly but forged ahead anyway.
I pointed all this out to Miles and the boys when they returned home, after I hugged them and told Miles that I’d been worried about them, that I wished he would check his phone occasionally.
Miles and the boys didn’t offer a word of gratitude for my having done the work of cleaning up their mess, nor did they offer a word of relief that I was unharmed. They ran to the hallway.
“Our poor Santas,” they said from the floor, cradling broken limbs.
What I didn’t tell Miles is that in that split second when I felt my balance shift, and I knew that it was me or the Santas, I didn’t hesitate. And I felt no regret. After all, I could have broken my neck.
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