I would have ignored the doorbell. Not my wife. The knife salesman was already in the den before I could express my displeasure. His seersucker suit hung flaccidly in the Texas chill. Who the hell came up with that name for clothes? Seersucker?
I looked it up. It appears to be derived from Persian or Hindi. Poor people wore seersucker until it worked its way up the apparel food chain into the wardrobe of college students in the 19th century. At some point after that, it became the summer uniform of Southern aristocracy. From the look of his stained seersucker suit, the knife salesman didn’t get the memo. It was January.
He sat on the couch and opened his Naugahyde case and paused as if to pray. Perhaps he was just trying to remember his pitch. We sat across from him and waited. After returning from the spiritual world of knife salesmen, he arranged his cutlery on our coffee table and began his spiel. He was clearly aiming the conversation at my wife. His strategy: women make these kinds of purchases. He had been trained to tolerate the husband; keep him busy fondling the cutlery; sell to the wife. The blood came next.
“Here, sir, test this balance,” he said handing me the long chef’s knife handle. Before I could grab it, he flipped it around to show me how balanced the blade was.
“Feel that?” he asked, confidently.
The blade whirled and carved an impressive cut into my thumb.
“Yeah,” I said. “I felt that.”
He was shocked and blurted apologies and pulled out a stained handkerchief and thrust it toward me. My hand pooled a crimson puddle on the table. I was not sure which was worse, the cut or the thought of bandaging it in his snotty rag. I tersely declined his handkerchief.
He didn’t mean to do it. They didn’t teach that in knife-selling class. I suppose he meant to spin the blade to demonstrate a point. I got the point. Remember Dan Aykroyd playing Julia Child from the old Saturday Night Live skit? It was like that.
He knew the sale was botched. He looked worried that I would call the company and report a customer slicing. He was thinking lawsuit and banishment to a bad Funk & Wagnell’s territory.
I sat emotionless, staring at my blood then back at him. My reaction was not so much pain as disgust. I squeezed my other hand into a tourniquet around my blood-slimed thumb and silently walked into the kitchen. My wife took care of his departure. I ran cold water over my hand and boiled with anger. Stabbed by a knife salesman wearing seersucker in January. How pathetic.