Hollywood
March 9, 2012
Christine runs her fingertips across the hat’s brim. A thin line of discoloration circles the wired fabric, evidence that the last person to wear it had done so under the exacting heat of a bright light.
“Scarlett number thirteen? Are you thinking what I am thinking?” Stella, standing next to her, gapes at the hat in Christine’s hands.
“Sure looks like it.”
“How in the world did this family end up with a hat from Gone With the Wind? Shouldn’t it be in a museum or something?”
Christine turns the hat back over, marveling at her sudden desire to eat macaroons with a glass of milk. “Old movie props get bought up all the time by private collectors.”
“But to have something as valuable as this just sitting in a hatbox, where silverfish and moths could have their way with it. Who would do that?”
“I’ve seen this hat before,” Christine says absently.
“Everyone who has seen Gone With the Wind has seen it before.”
A wave of nostalgia, hazy and undefined, falls across her and Christine brings the hat close to her face to breathe in its musky scent. “I mean, I have held this hat before.”
The memory is stronger now. In her mind’s eye Christine sees the hat sitting on a chenille bedspread, along with umbrellas, stacks of books, holiday decorations, and other attic treasures. A TV is on in another room set to KTLA, and she hears the scattered dialogue between Major Nelson and Dr. Bellows. In the hallway, stairs have been lowered from a hole in the ceiling, and a man in a uniform is ascending them. She was afraid of the man because he was there to kill a nest of rats in the attic.
“I was watching a rerun of I Dream of Jeannie, and there was a man in the attic laying down rat poison,” Christine says.
“What?”
The memory begins to fade but not before she recalls there had been someone with her. The elderly next-door neighbor who had been her babysitter the year she was in first grade.
“Do you want to try it on, Chrissy? You can if you want. Just this once.”
And she sees her small hands reaching for it.