The Right Hat

There is a photograph on the wall of one of the coffee shops I spend time at that fascinates me. It is a black and white photo from what I believe is the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s of four women in dark, one piece bathing suits and straw hats. They rest on the sand, three of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, their backs to the camera, their faces completely hidden by the large straw hats they are wearing. The fourth is kneeling in front of the other three. She is smiling, her lips parted and her teeth partially showing, though the rest of her face is obscured by the straw fringe of her hat. I imagine her lipstick must have been a rich shade of red since her lips are so dark in this picture.

Because she is kneeling, and the others are seated, the one facing the camera is taller by about a foot, the heads of the other three tipped up to look at her. Each woman is wearing a different bathing suit, and perhaps they were even different colors, though it's impossible to know this now. The hats are different too, and I can't help but think they have put on the wrong ones. Only the woman who is smiling and turned towards the camera seems to have the right hat; the narrow palm fronds that it is woven from corkscrewing from the crown into a brim much like a lampshade hat with the pointed fringe spiraling counter-clockwise, hanging low enough to hide her eyes, but not her smile. I get the feeling that if you ran your hand along the flow of fronds it would feel momentarily stiff and then give way gently as you followed the curve of the weave. Try to stroke the fibers in the opposite direction and learn what a sharp edge soft can actually have when forced into an unnatural direction.

The woman on the left is wearing a modified Chinese peasant hat, the weave not as tight, since only the sun must be avoided in this instance. She wears a one piece bathing suit with a bow tied at the middle of her lower back. The suit hugs her curving frame, a body that seems to have lived 40 or more years, had children, eaten just a few too many slices of dessert from time to time, but not enough to hurt her. This softer, curving shape, the bow at her waist, is incongruent with the hat. I want her to have the hat on the woman in the middle. It is a tightly woven, softly curving, typical straw sunhat with a wide patterned ribbon around the crown and a bow with long tails flowing off the back.

The middle woman, also in a one piece bathing suit, is thin. Her shoulder blades stick out and her vertebra undulated like a small rise of worn down mountains under her skin. Her suit cuts a straight line across her lower back. No frills, no decoration, clean cut. She seems older than the other women, her body feels to me like it has fought life or fought for life and she is harder because of this. She should have the hat of the woman on the right. It has sharp lines and definite points to the fringe that sticks out defiantly from the brim. This hat is certain, unbending, absolute. It does not flex, even in high wind, but resists and endures and maintains its shape at all costs. Even if that means being pulled violently from the head of the one wearing it and being tossed recklessly in a gale. When it lands it will still look much as it does now. It could still be worn, still be useful, still exist out of shear tenacity.

The woman on the right should be wearing the Chinese peasant hat. The stiff, sharpness of the hat she currently wears doesn't quite fit her. Almost, but not quite. She is wearing a bathing suit that wraps, halter-style, around the back of her neck and then leaves the majority of her back bare. The lines and edges of her body are somewhere between those of the other two seated women, softness and angles intermingled. It is hard to tell her age, the flow of skin over bone coy. The slightly open weave of this particular Chinese peasant hat, completely ineffective for keeping off the rain, is intricate enough to allow snatches of sunlight to flash through and sparkle around her face. It is a weave that reminds me of the beautiful caning of an antique chair my mother once restored, open and fine and strong, the beauty of it lying in the pattern and not requiring extra decoration to catch and hold the eye.

I want to change the hats around, want to set things to the way I see them. But I can't. This moment is long past. The women now exist in some other way. And there is also the fact that I have only seen them from behind. What of the faces that were hidden from my view? If I were privileged enough to have witnessed the curve of their cheeks, the line of their noses, the tip of their smiles, would I have chosen a different hat again? Or, would I have left them as they are in the photo? Then I wonder, did each one chose the hat she wears or was it chosen for her, in some way, through some impulse, after some moment of knowing? And then I think, Who am I to say these hats are the wrong ones at all?