Ironing Board Bier

Ironing Board Bier

by Jeanne Ichnowski

It wasn’t exactly intentional:  one day she just didn’t have time to iron his dress shirts.  She left them in a rumpled pile on the ironing board that was now rather permanently set up next to the machines.  She didn’t have time the next day either.  Or the next.  At the end of the week the pile grew bigger with the addition of shirts from a new wash.

He said nothing.  At first she thought his silence was comical.  Surely he was running out of clean shirts. Yet, he never commented about the pile, never said he needed a clean shirt.  Was he ignoring the pile?  Did he never go into the laundry room?  Perhaps he did see the pile and just never understood what it signified – so, indeed, why would he comment?  Was he that clueless?  Or, maybe he did understand and deliberately avoided a discussion that could have led to a quarrel (and the possibility of him doing his own laundry). 

There was a time when she prided herself on being that “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, never let him forget he’s your man” kind of super woman.  She thought she could do it all, be it all.  That was a lot of crap.  She was exhausted.

To be fair, he probably was, too.  He worked late, and on those weekends when he didn’t work, he slept.  But at least his efforts would result in rewards at work.  All her work, she feared, would just end up with her on an ironing board bier.

When she finally did have some time, she deliberately chose not to iron those shirts.  She even dialed things up a notch and left his dirty shirts in the hamper, unwashed.  What had initially been a chore postponed turned into a protest unspoken, a strike unannounced.  Those piles of un-ironed and unwashed shirts became the only visible signs of an unacknowledged argument.  A bitterness festered in her ready to explode in loud anger.  By then it was probably wise of him not to start a discussion.

Then, one day, all the piles disappeared.

Two days later the shirts showed up on his side of the closet - cleaned, pressed, covered in plastic and hung on paper-covered hangers.  He had taken them to a laundry service.  And, not only that, he had stuffed a bunch of brand new shirts into the closet.  Apparently, he’d thought it through completely and had calculated how many shirts he’d need in between jaunts to the cleaners and stocked up accordingly.

This time she said nothing.  Although she never washed or ironed another of his shirts, and she never dropped them off or picked them up at the service, she didn’t feel satisfied.  Ironically, even though she had decided that she was not going to do that whole super woman thing, she, at first, felt his response was a rebuke; a way of saying that she had failed in her wifely duties.   He, the man, had worked it out.  He had fixed it.  She felt belittled.  Diminished.  Unseen.

But, ultimately, it occurred to her that he had miscalculated.  Now, how could he ever ask her to deliver or pick up his shirts or even complain about having to do it himself?  To do either would be to acknowledge her protest, to admit it had been justified and to recognize that he should not have taken her or the work and the chores she did for granted. 

That was all she really wanted.