My worst nightmare is to shop for ticking, a tightly woven and heavy fabric, used for upholstery and initially used for mattresses. And yet recently, I dutifully accompanied my wife to Vineyard Decorators, an upscale store near the Martha’s Vineyard Airport that is a popular decorating source for the Island. My wife and I each have our particular style and sometimes they clash, sometimes they meld together perfectly. We agreed on this trip that ticking would be an excellent choice with which to recover our living room couch.

Traditionally called “ticking stripe,” Google notes that the fabric name is based on the Greek word theka, which means “case” or “covering.” In the days before the mattress was invented, societies throughout history slept on piles of straw and bundles of feathers. Presumably, after a night on a pile of sharp straws, sleepers would awake ticked off at how lousy their night’s sleep was.

Ticking was, thus, a natural evolution.

To improve the fabric, it was woven with a special herringbone pattern and then coated with wax or starch to make it impervious to the sharp, annoying pokes from the straw. The two-tone stripes that help identify ticking evolved as a way to delineate the ribbons of herringbone running through it.

For hundreds of years, ticking stripes remained the standard for mattresses and are still sometimes referred to as “mattress stripe.” This situation would have been fine had the ticking stuck to mattresses. But it didn’t. It migrated. To couches, curtains, chairs, ottomans, upholstery fabric — anything you can cover with a cloth, the ticking moved to claim it.

And now it was trying to claim me.

I had no idea what was waiting for us in the fabric center of the store. There was a ticking section about the size of a pickleball court. And I hate pickleball.

The fabric was piled up in bins that reached the ceiling. Bolts of ticking covered a series of tables. Sample chairs and couches covered in ticking were spread around the room. The variations of ticking were mesmerizing — black stripes, blue stripes, red stripes, dark green stripes, black with blue, blue with green, large herringbone patterns, tight tiny herringbone, stripes on cream colored fabric, stripes on bright white, stripes on beige. It was everything, everywhere, all at once.

It suddenly started to feel hot as I weighed the endless stream of choices. Beads of sweat started to rise on my brow, I felt a bit lightheaded, dizzy. I looked around. There were no other men in this section. The women seemed perfectly fine. My wife seemed happy. She looked up in the direction of her husband whose hands were pressed tightly against the sides of his head. Then he suddenly ran out from the store to the parking lot to stand by the car.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her when she finally caught up to me. “I had to get out of there. How can anyone make a decision? How can you choose? There are so many patterns, it’s impossible. How can anyone decorate anything? There is just too much choice.”

She smiled at me knowingly, and thankfully said nothing. She understood, but the tight smile on her lips suggested that further conversation would be needed later. She quietly got in the car and I breathed a sigh of relief. I got in the driver’s seat, turned on the car and slowly backed out of the parking slot.

In the end we passed on the ticking altogether. It was too traumatic, so we settled on a cream colored couch that caused barely a ripple to my sensibilities. You might say that we were tickled to find an easy solution.

David Lott lives in Vineyard Haven.