Pet Peeve

 IT was a mystery addressed to me: A plain brown, double-walled corrugated rectangle emblazoned with silhouetted illustrations of batteries. A flat-packed box had arrived two days after my birthday after numerous anxious inquiries from my husband.

“Any deliveries today?” he asked with a conniver’s grin.

“Not today,” I lied and left the box on the porch.

This gift wasn’t exactly for me.

"Anything liquid, fragile, or potentially hazardous?" I imagined a postal clerk might have asked the sender.

To which my husband - had he been there to witness the standard business shipping exchange - would have joked about the message inside being the most incendiary part of the delivery:

A printed note that said simply: "If you don't tell me what you want for your birthday, you get a vacuum cleaner. I don't make the rules."

Inside was an automatic floor cleaner. A circular robot with sensing whiskers roams the house in search of debris to sweeps into a central chamber.

Its motor whirrs at a decibel that annoys more than it disrupts, though it seems to have a proclivity to find all the cords and draping fabrics the instructions suggested the "We" (in the most royal of senses) remove.

To the casual observer, this might seem an indictment of my housekeeping skills, although my husband might tell you his Interest in buying me floor cleaning devices and gadgets of the utilitarian persuasion it's merely an assuage of his own guilt for lack of helping. His contributions toward the load he rarely lightens.

Moreover, this cursed device startles the cat, which, if my husband's extensive, giggle-filled research of cat-mocking videos of late is any indication, the gift was not merely to delight but to lightly introduce torment as well.

He is positively gleeful as he pours over the instructions I would have recycled unread.

"It's got Bluetooth," he gushes as his fingers tap the glass of his cell phone repeatedly. "It will send me messages!"

I roll my eyes as this gliding ashtray scuttles around in an erratic trajectory, the adult equivalent of a remote control toy. It's clear for whose amusement this gift is intended.

Purse my lips as the cylinder cyclone bumps into the dining room table, recoils, and tries again four inches further, only to be thwarted once again from sweeping under the table by a tight cage of evenly spaced chairs.

I move one of the seats to allow the vacuum access to the dust bunnies underneath and am met by my husband's horror.

"How will it learn to navigate our house if you keep changing the furniture?"

I have to admit I have no snappy answer, just stunned silence as stare at him while I slowly lower the chair.

But my perturbation is as much of a put-on as his theatrical showcase of abominable gift-giving.

We both understand that he is resurrecting a memory; one in which we already danced on our gender roles’ grave.

That time, long ago, when he came home from lunch to find me sitting on the couch watching a movie and eating bite-sized morsels of chocolate like a replicate of a ‘50s era storyline.

“What? I’m vacuuming!” I retorted as a robot vac chugged on by.

But eventually, I will have to explain that the joke has played out. The machine knocking off the faces of radiators and getting stuck under couches will get old.

But not just yet. …

"Oh! Just got a text!!! It's trapped in the corner! Needs assistance!"

He jumps up to rescue his new pet.

Siobhan Connally is a writer and photographer living in the Hudson Valley. Her column about family life appears weekly in print and online.