The Common Senses
an excerpt

Cindy woke up deaf on Thursday, November 1. Since it happened overnight, it was possible that it actually happened on October 31 before midnight, but she was vaguely superstitious and did not want to believe that Halloween had anything to do with it. For that matter, she wasn’t too happy that it happened on All Saints Day, but that was a trivia question that only the Catholics and religious scholars would take note of, so she was probably safe from the general population making the connection.

She didn’t know she was going to become deaf. As far as she knew, she was just going to bed with a bad cold that had probably turned into a sinus infection. She loaded herself up with leftover drugs in the medicine cabinet - acetaminophen with codeine, prescription decongestant, a mild sleeping pill – and went to bed early on Wednesday. She was a littlle concerned about combining all the old prescription medications, but she was a large woman and figured her body mass could process everything okay if she just did it once. Plus, she thought, some of this stuff is a couple of years old and probably doesn’t even work anymore.

She’d had a miserable day on Wednesday. At work, everyone had seemed the sort of annoyingly cheerful on purpose that people get when there is a person with a dark cloud in their midst. Her computer wanted to operate at a snail’s pace and kept locking up. Cindy had gotten almost no sleep on Tuesday night because of the coughing and hacking and sneezing – one of the reasons she’d raided the home pharmacy on Wednesday night – and found herself falling asleep in front of the computer waiting for programs to process and download. She couldn’t leave work early because she had to wait for the payroll information to come in from New Jersey so she could update the numbers in the accounting program, which was one of the programs moving so slowly that she thought she’d accidentally turned it off.
Plus, it was Halloween and she’d forgotten to get dressed up, so concerned was she about the stupid head and chest cold she was working on.

The best she could do was pull her cowboy hat out of the trunk of her car, where it had been hibernating since her last chance to get out in public at a dress up event, in this case the summer Renaissance Festival, and stick it on her head. And she objected to doing it in principle. She didn’t consider it dressing up. She considered it her own personal idiom to wear her hat to public outdoor events where she could make a small spectacle of herself without offending anyone except her now ex-husband and his mother.

When she’d originally bought the hat at a gas station in Alabama, she was just thinking she would wear it for the weekend while visiting her friend Samantha, who had moved to Anniston, Alabama from Atlanta for love. Cindy hadn’t really given too much thought to the future of the cowboy hat. She assumed it would get put in the top of the closet with the huge-brimmed straw hat from Toronto, the fuzzy rave hat from Las Vegas and the Viking horns from Framingham. Her cousin in Massachusetts claimed that the horns had been brought all the way from Norway, but Cindy’s rule was that a hat’s provenance was the city she received it in. Otherwise, the cowboy hat was from Mexico, the straw and rave hats were from somewhere in China and the horns were probably from East European country where they make cheesy plastic tourist paraphernalia for American tourists.

If she had considered the hat's likely future when she bough it, Cindy would have lumped the cowboy hat in with the other quirky nostalgia headgear that came into her life and ended up in the closet archive. However, when the cowboy hat got home, it somehow got to move to a place of common use and prominence.

Maybe it was seeing the wedding hat displayed on the wall that spurred Cindy to move the cowboy hat up in the chapeau pecking order. Instead of a wedding veil, Cindy had worn a hat with beads and tulle for her wedding headgear. Fifteen years later, she’d gotten rid of the wedding dress, the pen with the fake feather and the last few dried flowers from the bouquet, but she’d kept the hat as the main memento. When Cindy got back from Alabama, she’d seen the hat hung on the bedroom wall and remembered that part of the reason for her trip was to talk to Samantha about the idea that Cindy and Richard’s marriage was beginning to be over. She couldn’t take the wedding hat down – that would have been too obvious and she wasn’t ready to confront Richard yet about the end of their relationship – but she could prominently display her new treasure and dwell on it instead.

That was how the cowboy hat came to be the “out in public” hat for a while. For the first few months, Cindy kept it nearby to pop on her head when she walked down to the school to get the kids in the afternoon. She wore it to little league baseball games to keep the sun off her face. She wore it when it was raining to keep the rain off and not have to bother with an umbrella. She wore it every time she could conceive of an excuse to wear a hat. It was harder than she’d thought to come up with reasons to wear hats. Americans didn’t seem to have a lot of reasons to wear hats anymore. Baseball hats got a fair amount of wear in the general populace, but that was generally boys and men and, unless they were at an official baseball function, they often looked like construction workers or slackers. A lot of companies with uniforms wore hats – pizza delivery guys, the yard pest control guy, the phone guy – but those were not the fashion situations that Cindy wanted. Women did not usually wear hats to work except in the dead of winter, and Atlanta never had more than the inkling of that. They didn’t usually wear hats to weddings and funerals – the lack of which made her friend Katherine from Great Britain just incredulous. “No one here dresses up properly, do they?” she’d asked. “It’s because you haven’t got a Queen.”

Cindy was trying to buck the trend and bring back hat-wearing, hence the frequent display of the black cowboy hat with the silver band, product of Mexico, purchase of Alabama. Naturally, the hat pissed Richard off. “It looks stupid,” was one of the clever things he repeatedly said. “You look like a red-neck,” was a favorite. “I think it might make your face look fat,” was a memorable one. The fact that he said it “might” make her face look fat was evidence that he was not yet ready to break up, that he thought there was still a chance that she would get her act together and lose weight, they would restore their sex life and reconcile and all would be well.

She couldn’t explain to him at the time that the hat was a kind of lever to pry them apart, that she had bought it because it amused her and pleased her and she suspected that he would hate it. It was a test, unintentionally but true, to see if he would remember how to accept her as she was, quirky and funny and chubby. He failed.