The Hat

“In the Purple Darkness” by Aaron Lelito

On her twenty-fourth birthday, in a tiny loft on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Rebekah Bedfield stole a hat. She wasn’t the kind of person who stole things, and because of this, for years afterward, she told the story all the time. She told it for laughs at parties. She told it to her children when they couldn’t sleep. She told it to her husband on their fourth date, and even at that early point in their relationship, he accused her of making it up. This pleased her. She believed that the only stories worth telling were stories no one would expect of you.

In most aspects of her life, Rebekah was relatively unextraordinary, but she was a good storyteller. Oftentimes, after she told the story of the hat, the listener would remember her as a strikingly beautiful person. Once, a woman she had met at the library would describe Rebekah as wearing an emerald fur coat and gold, hexagonal earrings. This could not possibly have been true. Rebekah is the kind of woman who remembers to send birthday cards and buys food without preservatives. She wears her hair braided in dark, parallel lines down her back.

Before she told the story of the hat, she always reminded her audience that the thievery happened spontaneously. In a strict sense, this was true; she hadn’t planned to take it. Still, surrounding the memory was a cloudy inevitability that she couldn’t pin down, much like the momentum of a long, silver snake of dominos tipping forward. She told the story so much that she could barely recall the original memory. Whenever she tried, she heard her own voice superimposed over top of it, pushing the narrative toward a set of pre-agreed upon checkpoints and images. This feeling worried and confused her. If she drank some coffee, it usually went away.

***

She always began here: It was raining. It was the rainiest October Manhattan had seen in years. Once, when she was telling the story at a New Year’s Eve party, her best friend interrupted her.

“I remember your twenty-fourth birthday,” she said. “It wasn’t raining.” Her hand clawed around a champagne flute. The bubbles rose thinly to the surface.

“Yes it was,” Rebekah said. The rain wasn’t even important to the story. But it was how she told it.

“No,” the friend said, shaking her head vigorously. “I remember. I wore my suede boots, and I wouldn’t have if it was raining.”

“Would you just let me tell the freaking story?” This was the closest Rebekah ever got to cursing. She kept a tight smile on her face. Across the room, her two-year old looked up warily, hand paused above a wooden block.

***

So begin here: It was raining. It was the rainiest October Manhattan had seen in years. When she walked down the street, the skyscrapers groaned and settled in the wind, as though the whole city was breathing. It was her twenty-fourth birthday, and Rebekah Bedfield (then Sanders) was being dumped. She always glossed over this fact, made it into a joke (especially when her husband was around). She’d say, “Don’t breakups always feel so juvenile? They never change.” Tossed her hair behind her shoulder. Made her wedding ring catch the light. The breakup was not the point of the story.

They were meeting at his apartment for a birthday dinner that never materialized. Later she would wonder if he’d ever intended to make it to the restaurant. She shook her boots at the door. A sparkle of raindrops on the tile. The hat hung where it always did, a large, leather cowboy hat, on a coat rack to her left. She hooked her jacket, dripping steadily, beneath it.

“How was work?” her ex-boyfriend-but-not-yet said. She’d make a joke here — these were the kinds of things they said to each other. Mundane things. Then she’d look lovingly at her husband. This was meant to indicate to her audience that she and her husband asked each other very different questions than “How was work?” In fact, she and her husband dissected everything together. It was almost exhausting, the amount of conversations they had, the stones they turned up in one another’s lives. Rebekah met her husband four years after the stolen hat. He was an investigative journalist for a major newspaper, and because of this, people were always telling him secrets. He is tall and brooding, with a habit of keeping eye contact for too long. The husbands of her friends tend to dislike him.

Usually at this point in the story, someone (unprompted) would ask Rebekah a question about her ex-boyfriend, Isaac. Though Rebekah would not admit it, her hat-stealing was not the reason people liked the story. The story was interesting because Isaac was very, very famous. The year after they’d broken up, he started an app that helped people track what they ate by taking a picture of their food instead of manually logging it. The app sold for an obscene amount of money to a tightly-spandexed (and suspiciously cult-y) group of exercise gurus, and made him a celebrity. By the time she was forty, he hosted a wildly popular morning talk show about health and wellness. Rebekah does not watch the show. She thinks health and wellness is a scam for people who are afraid of getting old. She walks around the block twice a day and uses generic face wash and that is enough for her.

Somewhat testily, she would pause the story to give a short rundown of her and Isaac’s relationship. If her husband was around, she would put a hand in the crook of his arm, or straighten the cuff of his sleeve.

Rebekah and Isaac dated for eleven months. The relationship was not serious or casual, neither long nor short. They had separate groups of friends, but met through a friend of the other’s friend at a poetry reading for a stranger who later (she’d name drop the poet here) also became very famous. The reading had been in the poet’s own loft in Greenwich Village. There were white sheets hung from the ceiling to create a makeshift stage, and multicolored Christmas lights. Rebekah found it all kind of depressing.

“I mean, you could see the woman’s shampoo bottles in the shower from the audience,” she’d say. “Very low budget.”

But Isaac had taken the whole thing very seriously, and had dressed too nicely for the occasion, which she found kind of charming. He’d asked if she wanted to share a cab back to Queens, even though she found out later that he actually lived in Brooklyn, and only took the subway. He just wanted to keep talking to her. They met each other’s parents exactly once, at the same brunch place. They hated the same kind of books.

The backstory of the hat, she couldn’t give. It wasn’t the kind of thing Isaac would normally own. He’d certainly never worn it. The most adventurous shirt in his closet was blue with thin green stripes. Even then, she’d once seen him pull a coat over it in church (in August) because he thought it was too casual.

If her audience was really desperate for gossip, she would add in a second, quick anecdote. For Christmas, Isaac had misheard a request for candelabras and gotten her a pair of stuffed llamas instead, wrapped in crimson paper. This always elicited a good laugh.

“She doesn’t own the llamas anymore,” her husband would say.

“No,” she’d say, “Of course not. That was a long time ago.”

***

No matter how many times she told the story, there were some details she kept to herself. The details: She was freshly graduated from Duke and quietly quitting a short phase of environmentalism. Her junior year, she’d published an op-ed in the student newspaper that started a composting program in the dining hall. She’d once chained herself to a tree to stop it from getting cut down (she could never remember why the tree had been more important than other trees). Manhattan overwhelmed and upset her. She began to jump at small noises. It was easy, quitting environmentalism. She littered casually and bought thick, shapeless pants made of polyester. She worked for a retail chain in a cement skyscraper fielding customer service calls. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel guilty about it. She was tired. She didn’t have a lot of money. One day, she woke up and thought practicality was the highest kind of virtue.

At the time, Isaac worked in an office in the West Village buying advertisements for television networks. From this, he’d picked up the unfortunate mental habit of dividing his time perfectly into thirty-second increments. Packing his lunch took him eight increments, he’d told her. Making coffee took three. He wrote Rebekah a list of thirty things that he loved about her. At the time, her apartment in Queens was so small that she had taped it up in the kitchen, to the inside of a cabinet door. When she reached for the smooth rim of a glass, she sometimes caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye.

17. Your fascination with NYC pigeons

28. The way your nose gets super pink in the cold

The rest of the list was like that, fairly shallow. Nothing you couldn’t have said about your grandmother. Sometimes she kept a rinsed glass and a plate on the drying rack so she didn’t have to dig in the cabinet. She would never have shared this detail. She would never share that Isaac was the only person she’d ever dated who did not like her as much as she liked him. These details made her feel cowardly. A good storyteller was not a coward.

***

She had to fit in a lot of exposition before the actual breaking up, because the story snowballed too quickly afterward, and anyway, her listeners lost interest fast once the story was about her, and not Isaac.

The break up: Before Isaac broke the news, they made small talk for four thirty-second increments (she timed this on the clock above his head). He offered her a cup of strong coffee.

“And all the while,” she always said, “The hat sat there, in the corner.” The story didn’t work if she didn’t draw attention to the hat throughout. It was a delicate business, telling a story.

Speed the story up. Isaac said, “Listen,” and then he said a lot of other things. All these other things meant: I don’t like you as much as you like me. She tried to generalize these parts of the story, to make them sound like every other breakup, and if she did it well enough, someone in the group would interject a story about his/her own breakup that went just like that.

This interjection gave Rebekah time to shut herself inside the story, as though she were sliding the chain across a very tiny door. She never gave specifics. This was how she turned heartbreak into a party anecdote, like an origami bird.

At some point, when the conversation seemed to have gone on entirely too long, her husband would interject and say, “But Beck, you haven’t told them about the hat yet!”

“Oh yes,” she’d say, like she’d forgotten. “The hat. Right. So—”

The aftermath: When he was finished with the speech, there’d been a long silence. She got up and walked around the living room. Bare floors and a movie poster (unframed), something she’d never seen. Now she wouldn’t have to. The thought was both relieving and inevitable, vaguely like the feeling of brushing her teeth after eating something garlicky. He had a couch and the leather was cracking. He had one plant that she had to text him to remember to water. She touched one of its leaves. It would die without her.

She built the tension. By this point, if she had told the story well enough, she would be entirely separate from it.

“I’m really, really sorry,” Isaac said, shifting uncomfortably on the couch. She knew he had never broken up with anyone before. He had never even really dated anyone before, except one girl in college, Samantha, who had taped a letter to his dorm room door that they were done. Her head was full of this kind of information, things that didn’t matter now. The apology made everything worse.

***

At the ending, she drew herself up. It was the ending that took energy.

When she told the story to men, she made a rapid right at Isaac’s apology. She pushed her hair behind her ears (it made her look younger). She reminded them that she had grown up in a small town in North Carolina with unlocked doors and nuclear families down the block like rows of corn. She blinked her eyes. She became the most unobtrusive version of herself.

“I was twenty-four,” she laughed. “So young. What could I think to do?”

She clenched her fists and mimicked an angry face. (She always scrunched up her nose. When she was actually angry, her face became a stone, and she got very pale).

“I just couldn’t walk out of there,” she’d say. “I just couldn’t.”

Men always leaned in, elbows on the table, heads bent together. Her friends’ husbands were men who understood the risk of backing down. It struck something for them, in their fraternities and boardrooms, something that she couldn’t always put a finger on, some undercurrent of power that they all despised and cherished at the same time. They understood how courage could breathe down your neck until it was almost oppressive. They were men to whom a failed bluff was more respectable than a fold.

The last line was where the delivery mattered.

“You know,” she said, “I think this is for the best.” Then she strode to the other end of the room, took the hat off its hook, tipped it at Isaac, who was staring at her with wide eyes, and shut the door firmly behind her.

When she told the story to men, she never wore the hat after she stole it. She walked into the street and didn’t know what to do with the darn thing! She held a hand to her mouth and grinned. When she chose this ending, they roared with laughter, and she did, too. She believed herself.

***

With women, it was different. Here, at the apology, they leaned in, hand around a lipsticked coffee cup. Here she brushed her daughter’s hair on the pillowcase, spread like a spilled glass of water. At the apology, their eyes grew big. “That was when I knew I was going to steal the hat,” she whispered.

This was how it really happened, she explained to the women. He was apologizing and she was trying very hard not to cry, and it suddenly seemed invariably unfair that so much of her life was focused around this fulcrum point, like the end of a screw, of not appearing weak. She bent this screw around and around, by not crying, and being polite while getting dumped, and she was angriest because she didn’t want to be someone who had to be apologized to and placated like a child.

“Then I looked at that hat,” she said, and the women would nod. They understood what it was to realize that you were only a series of reactions being polite to the world around you, sitting, and standing, and not crying wherever was appropriate. They understood what it was to feel like a kettle about to scream. They understood what it was to feel a burning, unexplainable hatred for stupid hats that men hung on their walls to tell other men they were brave.

“You know,” she said thickly. “I think this is for the best.” Then she strode to the other end of the room, took the hat off its hook, tipped it at Isaac, who was staring at her with wide eyes, and shut the door firmly behind her.

When she finished, the women would pound their fists on the table, and they’d cheer, and flash their eyes at her, as though she had solved some giant world problem. They went home and felt self-satisfied and powerful, and still, this wasn’t how the story went either.

***

Here is the truest version of the story. (To this day, she keeps it to herself):

Once, Rebekah Bedfield/Sanders was very young. Younger even than she can imagine being now. Her heart got broken and it was completely juvenile and ordinary and it still hurt. She can’t hurt like that anymore. When she hurts now it is in different, grown up ways. She could not even tell this story now, the way it really happened.

Don’t begin. Memories don’t begin, only stories do. They tip like a long line of dominos. Tip the first piece: She was dating someone whose flaws she did not see. They were not right or wrong for each other. They were just people.

It never rained in Manhattan. She walked into the apartment; a sunbeam cut across the tile. She was not expecting to be dumped. No one did anything wrong. It still made her sad. She unhooked a hat and shoved it on her head. It’s not even a story, just a reaction. She was crying in the ugly way, red-faced and snotty. She was acting like a child. He was embarrassed for her. He tried to apologize. He didn’t really know what to do.

She emerged into the day, a collection of bare bones and sunlight. She wore the hat. She wore it for a while. She wore it on the subway, and to the tiny Mexican restaurant on the corner, and once (she remembers this vividly) to a concert hall where she blocked the view of everyone behind her. It was a good hat, comfortable without being too hot, and people always complimented her on it.

She wore it on the train. She got rid of the other, non-hat things that remind her of Isaac, the llamas and the list. In her memory, she narrates over the story until the ending washes out like a stain.

At some point, she lost the hat. She moved apartments. It was windy that day. A roommate took it. The details are fuzzy. They get narrated over. On good days, when she tells people about the hat, she can keep it frozen at the ending they want to hear. “I think this is for the best”, with her hand on the brim of the hat. On good days, she does not remember ever finishing the process of turning into herself. The ending she wants to tell is sharp, clean. “I think this is for the best.”  And really, why is there ever a need to come away from this moment, a moment when she might have gone anywhere and done anything? Why must she work the ending out of clay for them, create a change, a shift, a moral to it all? Why is it her responsibility to find the ending of herself?

At parties, she tells the story for other people. She does not let herself care about the whole, bloodied, battered world. She cares about her husband. Her two children. She keeps her heart to the size of the square of sidewalk beneath her feet. And who is to say this is wrong? This is how you grow up. You learn to protect yourself.

Some nights, she sleeps like the dead. Other times, she wakes gulping for air in the purple darkness, grasping at the space above her head. It is as though she is still wearing it, living in the costume of herself.

Kayla Rutledge is from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the recipient of the 2019 James Hurst Prize for Fiction from NC State and the 2020 Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her work is published and forthcoming in Manqué Magazine, The Roadrunner Review, and Gone Lawn. She is a graduate student in the MFA program at NC State University.