I sell neckties for a living. Three weeks of every month I sit at a desk that’s missing two of its seven drawers and staple together fabric sample batches, six six-inch-square fabric swatches per sample batch, each batch bound by a folded white cardboard one-half-inch wide.

One week out of every month I travel to cities such as Akron, Fort Wayne, and/or Tupelo, and I meet with the buyers of regional department stores and finer regional men’s haberdasheries. I fan out my sample batches on desks missing only one of the seven drawers and I look straight as I can into the wandering eyes of the Mel’s and Gus’s and the occasional Miss Burns’s, and I say with great enthusiasm: “This season, no our Silver Standard line, the silver stripe is wider than the navy/burgundy/green/gold/brown/powder blue stripes. Our Triple Diamond line features an exciting change, too. The centered clocking now boasts overlapping diamonds of different colors. So you have clocking in navy, burgundy and green, say, against a field of gold, brown, or powder blue. And your more adventurous customers will appreciate our Apollo Line, which is the updated version of our Mercury Line, on which the rocket ships now come in a choice of navy/burgundy/green/gold/brown/powder blue against a celestial galaxy of navy/burgundy/green/gold/brown/powder blue.”

I then fix on what I think is their one good eye and I ask the Mel’s, Gus’s, and/or occasional Miss Burns’s how many neckties they would like to order. When they tell me, I write down the order on a form that comes in triplicate—white copy for them, yellow copy for inventory & shipping back at the office, and pink copy for me. In the army, every form was in triplicate, too, whether it was a requisition for toilet paper or a bill lading for torpedoes, so I’m an old hand at forms in triplicate and this fact may very well been the reason I was hired. I then return home and resume stapling sample batches for next month’s trip to places like Spokane, Keokuk, and/or Kankakee. For this I am paid a base salary plus commission, commission being based on the total number of sales on my total number of pink copies, minus expenses, sick leave, and the estimated average of re-order sales that would have come in had I visited my accounts or not. I get two weeks’ vacation per year.

The one week per month that I’m on the road to places like Fresno, Sandusky, and/or Enid, I resist any and all temptations to suddenly pull an about-face and toodle over someplace madcap like Vicksburg, Smyrna and/or Orono. I do what I’m paid to do. I do what my wife asked me to do before the ink on our marriage certificate had time to run, which was apply myself to a civilian job and leave the service for good. But, because businesses wanted young men they could train from the ground up, and because I was much older than most of the returning vets, not just from one war but two, I took one of the few jobs that would have me, and have me it does.
I don’t veer, I don’t detour, I don’t toodle, I don’t fishtail. There is nothing that I do in my job that I do just for the hell of it.

So if, behind the wheel of my ’59 Rambler station wagon, with its little fins over the taillights that are meant to make me feel aerodynamic, if I should suddenly opt for the unexpected middle of spelling “supererogatory” and turn where I’m not supposed to turn, “you were supposed to turn!” and head us in the direction of Quamasmegmalalohogue instead of Squishapogue, “puerile” and “duplicitous” and “misogamistic” as some may see it, I think I’ve earned the right and, agree or not, someone had better just keep her yap snapped.

“This is a fine how do you do.”

So much for yap-snapping.

“I have to wee-wee!”

“OK, there’s a gas station up ahead.”

“What kind is it?”

“It’s an Esso, all right?”

“No!”

“What do you mean, no?”

“It has to be Sinclair! It has to have the dinosaur!”

“Well, it’s an Esso, Adam, so…so…”

“You’ll wee-wee where we tell you to wee-wee.”

Listen to her. All of a sudden she’s Douglas MacArthur.

“I have to pie.”

“You can do that at the Esso.”

“Hurry up, it’s coming.”

“All right, Charlie…”

“We’re supposed to pick up the keys by three.”

“We’ll get there.”

“We’ll get there?”

“You wanna drive?”

“In this traffic?”

“I have to pie, Daddy. Hurryuphurryuphurryup!”

“Shut up. Charlie, I have to wee-wee and I get to go first, don’t I get to go first, Daddy?”

“Hang on, we’re almost there, you’ll get to go.”

“I bet there was a gas station closer if you had turned where you were supposed to turn.”

“Nettie, does Josh need to go?”

“Hmmm?”

“Josh. Does he need to go?”

“Not anymore.”

“Ew!”

“Ew, gross!”

“Ew, gross doubled!”

“Why didn’t you turn?”

“Who wants to get hit?”

Silence.

Sniffle.

Esso.

 

 From When All Is Said and Done. Copyright 2006 by Robert Hill. All rights reserved.