My Purple Hat by Allegra Jostad Silberstein (100 best novels of all time TXT) 📕

tell him that I do, too. It makes people smile at me. He’s in textiles. I’m a teacher. He’s from West Virginia. I’m from Wisconsin. He has a son and daughter. I think that all this getting to know you stuff is really trying to see below the words the person beneath the stranger.
I have three daughters. He wants to know how old they are—a way, I suppose of knowing how old I am but that doesn’t work well for me because I had my oldest child
when I was thirty-four and still have a dancer body with a classic sort of face that could be any age depending on the lighting, how close you are to me, how keen your eye sight is and whether I’m bending down of looking up. We both love books. He talks about some I haven’t read but I don’t admit it. He tells how the earth reaches up and around him, how the trees and flowers speak to him eloquently in the language of living green, how he wants to be able to write about the magic of his life, how he really is a frustrated writer and…”Yes,” I say. “You must write; you are a poet.”
Too soon he needs to get back to his meeting. He asks if he may give me his card, if he may have my address. He may. He takes my hand, lifts it almost to kiss it, a caress that holds for more than a handshake. I watch him leave. The dishes have all been cleared away. “Would madam care for anything else?”
“No, thank you, no.” He brings the bill. I’ve enough cash for the 20% tip and use plastic to pay for my meal. I tell the proprietor by way of conversation—a mid-western habit I ought to leave behind when I’m in the City but today I can’t—that I came today of a flyer a lovely lady had given to me. I wanted to know if she worked here.
“Oh, yes,” he says, “she is my wife. He smiles. There’s a twinkle in his eyes, “Have a good day”.
“I will,” I say, grateful that he has not responded with properly polite distance.
I decide not to wait on line for a ticket to Crazy for You but go to the box office and get a standing room ticket for fifteen dollars. That meant I had time to walk up to the Frick museum. On the way I stopped to watch some artists at work just where Central Park begins. Most people look and walk on and mostly I do, too, but a young woman with beautiful Filipino features urges me to let her do my portrait…only fifteen dollars, for you, ten... Something in me, maybe it is my hat makes me say, “yes”. I sit. We talk of our children, our dreams. It seems I have sitting a long time—my daughter and I had planned to meet at quarter to four. I want to tell her to hurry but can’t do that to an artist. At last she is done. The woman she has drawn is interesting but I don’t think she is me.

The hat looks great. I give her the fifteen she had originally asked for and wish it could have been more.
As fast as I can, I walk down Fifth Avenue but know I will miss my daughter. She had to catch a 5 o’clock train to get back to Princeton in time for rehearsal. At the museum I question the man who takes the tickets and he says, “Yes, a young woman in a flowered dress was asking for you but she left about ten minutes ago,” just what I didn’t want to hear. I hope she’ll forgive me…it was a tentative agreement…she wasn’t sure
she could make it (this was before we had cell phones).
I go to see Rembrandt’s self portrait and his Polish Rider who always seems to ride for me. Further on in the room near the pool, I gaze on Whistler’s portraits, two in dark shades on one wall and on the opposite wall, two in tones of white. In the library Holbein’s Cromwell and his Sir Thomas More still face each other on either side of the fireplace while El Greco’s St. Jerome looks out on the world kindly from his place above the mantle. I wait here awhile even though closing time is near. In my last room, the one furthest to the east, Millet’s young women at work bring me back to the farm in Wisconsin. So much art at the Frick speaks to me, work done in an era when the artists reflecting life reached out to realities of the rich and the poor in everyday acts of life and posed them with a vision wondrous and whole, not broken, ripped apart like so much of modern art. A single red spot is a red cap worn by a worker, not just a dot on the canvas. Appearance is everything. It’s closing time at the Frick but I’ve an hour to see again the impressionists at the Metropolitan before hurrying down to the theatre, time for Millet’s haystacks and Seurat’s “Invitation to the Sideshow”.
Even taking a bus and giving myself an extra ten minutes, I made it to the Shubert with just a few minutes to spare before the houselights dimmed and fantasy became a glow ever brighter on the stage. The impossible romance, the song and dance, the Zeigfield Follies extravaganza while not plausible were strangely pleasurable for all that my mind more suited to tragedies quibbled a bit over this improbable stuff. During the second act I even got to sit. Just as the lights lowered and the aisle curtain was closing, I thought I spotted and empty seat right under the standing room…I asked the young people on line and they said, “Go for it”. I wasn’t even wearing my hat, just holding it.
Tomorrow I’ll be back home, pulling weeds in my garden, getting ready for school to begin, writing poems, watching for a letter that may never come—but not to worry—I’ll be wearing my purple hat, the one I left behind. It’s perched on the hall tree by the front
door, ready to take off, waiting to take me beyond the closed door.

By Allegra Jostad Silberstein


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Publication Date: 11-28-2009

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