Ties

Cindy tells herself there’s no reason to look so miserable in that department store mirror. Repeated smiles but her face keeps going right back to that same scowl. “Do I really look this bad?” She asks aloud. No one hears. “This isn’t a bad day: it’s a good day!” Cindy says. She’s here buying a birthday present for her husband Michael, with whom she shared parts of the morning cooking a cream-filled chocolate cake to take across town to his birthday party at his parents’ house, where his friends are going to meet and drink a lot of wine and beer and scotch to wish him well into his thirty-second year.

Now searching through the men’s department, she encounters the tie area. Mike has asked her for a tie. Really, a man actually asked for a tie. He said he wants a silk one, red with white flecks on it. Sandy loves looking at all of the pretty ties hanging there in saturated colors. “Why don’t women ever wear ties?” She asks herself aloud and spots a dark blue one a lot like the one Mike wore when they went to the high school “Queen of Hearts” dance together in eleventh grade. It’s dark blue, almost black. Late that evening his vomit looked so bright orange splattered all over it, so many orange chunks, because Mike had smuggled in a fifth of cheap whiskey and drank it all, not sharing a drop with his buddies, who, as it turns out, had their brought own clandestine supplies anyway. The smell of his throw-up still offends her nose, even now, fourteen years later. She sees an orange tie, and a maroon one with a duck on it. How pretty they are all hanging there without anyone to take them home and throw up on them. Cindy touches a red silk tie, but it is not close enough to the color of blood for Mike. Blood with white speckles: that’s what Mike needs. Blood like the blood which ran down her face last week when he cut her, but this is not a time to fret about minor injuries. “What about this one?” she asks, fingering one of its stripes, embossed like her upper forehead still is from the slashes from last week. Here’s one with Ionic columns on it. Perhaps he’d like this one, because Mike is an architect. He designs hospital layouts on advanced computer applications. But the tie is green, and Mike hates green: hates St. Patrick’s day; hates mowing the green, grass, hates the envy that plagues him, hates house plants, hates those German environmental parties.

No. No green for Mike’s happy birthday. She digs deeper. One has a rough geometric surface like the time drunk Mike crashed the car, and a bundle of Florida oranges hit his upper arm so hard it impressed those plastic web bag patterns into his skin. His arm looked like an alligator, that’s what she said, but he didn’t laugh. He took a swipe at her instead. The next tie is dark brown. No good, he needs red. There’s a rough red one. But he likes smooth ties.

This is useless, no smooth blood-red ties with white flecks! “Damn!”

A young woman salesclerk hears Cindy’s struggle and comes over. “Can I help you?” asks the thin, oval-faced woman with equal amounts of straight brown hair on either side of her pinkish cheeks. “I really hope so,” Cindy says, “I’m desperate to find a silk red tie with white flecks for my husband Mike.”

“Oh, that shouldn’t so be hard to find,” Darlene says fondling the gold-colored name tag pinned above her perky right breast.

“Well, that may be so, but I’ve found a lot of ties here but none suitable for him,” Cindy says.

“No?”

“No.”

Both dig browse through rows of premium ties on hooks, and then through heaps of discounted ties piled in bins, but to no avail. Darlene picks several up and displays them by dangling them in front of Cindy’s face, but they are never quite what Mike needs.

Mike is particular about his ties. Mike hates wide ones. They look like the used-car salesmen you see on low-budget television commercials with sloppy local accents, he says. Mike wears thin ties, but not too thin. If they’re too thin they look like pimps or cheeseballs, he says.

Cindy frowns as she imagines Mike’s scowl as he opens a gift from her containing an unsatisfactory tie. She sees him thank her for it. But will he ever wear it? No. And later on, he won’t drop the issue. He keeps mentioning how he likes this or that kind of tie, which are ties that have nothing in common with her stupid gift. Finally, after several days Cindy will out and ask him if she should return the unsuitable tie, because it is clear he does not like it. But now Mike likes it, he says, so don’t you dare mention taking it back again. But that dark red tie with no white flecks festers in the closet. One night Cindy mentions taking it back to the store again, but this time Mike has been drinking, and this time he says that all of her gifts are terrible, awful, and she’s terrible as well, and then he just comes up and clobbers her in the forehead with a tie rack from the closet, causing a stinging pre-scar bleeding on her forehead. Then he says he’ll strangle her with the fucking tie if she ever says anything about it again.

He rants about the many things wrong with Cindy and everything Cindy likes, her family, her bright dressy wardrobe, the golden retrievers she had as a kid, and Honda cars, and lemon-scented dish soap, and the molded concrete bird bath she loved until Mike shot it to pieces with his granddaddy’s shotgun. The evening presses on until he passes out and she cries until dawn, because nothing she can do or say or even think will ever please him. He’ll apologize in the morning like he always does.

“Here’s one!” Darlene exclaims, “Here’s a smooth, silk, blood-red tie with white flecks! And it’s ten percent off our regular low price.” They behold it, salvaged from a pile of useless other ties.

Cindy almost smiles. “Thank you,” she says, clenching the strip of silk and removing it from pretty Darlene’s unblemished hands. “I’ll take it.” They do the cash register ritual, and Darlene bags the purchase as Cindy slips her Visa back into its slot in her billfold.

“Thank you,” they both say in unison before Cindy turns away.

With Darlene and her cute little dressy apricot suit now a thing of the past, Cindy exits the store for the sunlit parking lot. Here she finds her smooth, maroon Honda Bequeath with red paint and a white interior, gets in and drives away down the busy suburban boulevard.