She became extremely angry when she looked at the hat. It was a white, cotton sailor hat that went into the washing machine looking like Popeye’s, and came out looking like a digested marshmallow. It sat on the top of a stack of folded laundry that her mother had placed on her bed, which consisted of underwear, t-shirts, cotton shorts and folded white crew socks.

She couldn’t get over her disappointment. The snazzy, new hat had been violated. Before it was crisp and white, like a fluffy popover or a newfound mushroom after a rain. But now its state was a travesty. It was puckered and pinched, asymmetrical, like a wad of something found stuck to one’s shoe. She tried it on her head. Rather than looking quite the sailor, she was the court jester. Her pride folded in like a broken thing. How could she wear the hat again in public? No one would admire her and say, “Are you a sailor?” at which she would smile proudly and say, “Yup.”

She sat down at her desk and with paper and pencil and a modicum of rage she wrote a note to her mother. Her brow was furrowed as she scrawled:

“I had a hat. It had a shape I liked. But now it is runt.”

This note was placed on her mother’s pillow. Later at dinner, her mother showed the note to her father and laughed. “See what she wrote,” her mother said. “Isn’t it cute?”

But the girl was incensed at their insensitivity and the fact that they would make light of her ruined hat. It was an outrage. She decided to run away.

The prospect of running away had a rather romantic atmosphere around it. She had seen the movie, “Toby Tyler”, in which the orphan boy with the freckles, played by Kevin Corcoran, (with whom she was secretly in love), ran away from the orphanage to ride horses in the circus. He wore a flashy blue uniform and learned to be an acrobat. She knew that Disney studios were out west. Cowboys were also out west and she had always wanted to become a cowboy. Since the sailor gig wasn’t working out, she would try the west. The West. The sound of it spoke of adventure, the clop of horse’s hooves, the ricochet of bullets on rocks during shootouts, the crackle of the campfire as they settled down for the night. The west.

In the family photo album there was a black and white photo of her with her mother. She was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots, a shirt with Roy Roger’s rope designs and fringe, and a cowboy hat. She was sitting at the sewing machine having a sewing lesson from her mom, looking every bit the bored and put upon cowgirl longing to be out roping steers and riding bucking broncos. Not into this girly sewing stuff.

That night, she asked to be excused from the dinner table and went to her room to pack. As her parents lingered over dessert at the table she went back to her mother with a stack of clean underwear. “Will this be enough if I run away?”

Her mother looked at her solemnly and said, “I don’t know. I can’t help you if you’re running away. You will have to make your own decisions.”

She felt a gulp rise in her throat because she really didn’t know how much underwear one would need running away, and especially going west, because she wasn’t sure how far “west” was. Also, she was not expecting her mother to relinquish authority so easily, or at the minimum, not to help with decisions that she was not accustomed to making on her own. She stuffed the stack into the knapsack.

She opened the refrigerator and saw a lone, cooked hotdog on a plate. She took it too and wrapped it in a napkin and shoved it on top of the underwear.

The evening light was waning and the sun was beginning to flirt with the western horizon. They lived in a farmhouse in a small town in upstate NY. The first house west of theirs was the farm where the scary dog, Cookie, lived on the other side of the road. The children of the house would pet Cookie and say, “Smile Cookie, smile!” and the mean dog would pull back her lips and show her teeth. It did not look like much of a smile to the girl. In fact, Cookie often mustered a low volume, throaty growl beneath the questionable grin. The girl had tried once to get Cookie to smile when the kids weren’t home. She was passing by the house and Cookie had trotted out and stood in her path and had growled at her. She had tentatively reached out to pet Cookie’s head while doubtfully encouraging her, cooing, “Smile, Cookie, Smile”. However, instead of smiling, Cookie sunk her teeth into the soft part of her hand. She ran home with hot tears jumping from her eyes like splatters from a boiling pot. Cookie was not a nice dog and she hoped that Cookie would be run over by a combine someday.

“How do I pass that house without Cookie getting me?” she thought. And yet, that house was west, and she knew she had to be brave if she was going to reach the cowboys.

There was a Baptist Church next to her house. It was white, with a big lawn in the front and lovely oak and maple trees. She had been to many events at that church even though she was Catholic. Her mother was a Protestant, which was somehow strange to her, because everyone knew that only Catholics were really saved. Her mother was Protestant so it meant that she must be an exception. The whole existence of Protestants seemed to be something akin to vanilla. It was a flavor but a very vapid one. Protestants didn’t have confession or communion. They didn’t have Latin Mass and the church service was peculiarly informal. They didn’t have nuns and priests. How could there be a religion without nuns and priests? She couldn’t see how God could condone multiple approaches.

Her dad took her and her brother to church on Sundays at Saint Patrick’s, while her mother slept. The Baptist Church had a really nice Ice Cream Social in the middle of the summer, and Santa Claus also came there in December. The kids would go out in the snow, door to door, singing Christmas carols. When they came back to the church for hot chocolate and sugar cookies Santa would be there every time. It was an amazing coincidence, no matter what the date, his secretary seemed to have it right. He came in exactly when they finished caroling and were drinking cups of lukewarm hot chocolate. They got gifts like a wooden paddle with a rubber ball attached by a length of elastic or a comb and brush set.

The next house on the other side of the church belonged to the deaf couple. Their TV was so loud you could hear it a mile away. If you knocked on their door for anything they never heard you. She went there once with her older brother who was the paper boy. You had to pound on the door for a million years and they still couldn’t hear you.
When they finally came to the door, the husband talked in a very loud voice and the wife would agree with what he said, nodding along. Mrs. Deaf had little growths on her neck that the girl stared at wondering how they got there and why she didn’t have them taken off. She imagined taking a pair of nail clippers to Mrs. Deaf in her sleep except it would be a sickening undertaking. Anyway, she didn’t want to dwell on that too long or she would have a gag reflex.

The girl put on her fringed cowboy shirt and cowboy hat and hoisted the knapsack onto her thin little shoulders. She looked shyly at her parents who were still sitting at the dinner table drinking coffee. She waved and they waved and she trudged down the driveway toward the road. Maybe she should bring her dog, Smokey. He would protect her. But what if he got in a fight with Cookie? That would be awful. Instead, she kissed Smokey between his big brown eyes and said, “Bye boy.” Smokey smiled his innocuous dog smile and wagged his tail.

She walked past the church, past the deaf couple’s house and past Cookie’s house. Thank God. Cookie must be in the barn. But as the sun became a pale pink smear and the fields stretched out before her in thick darkness, she started to feel afraid and reluctantly turned around and walked home. She felt defeated and embarrassed but the west was too uncertain. She cracked open the backdoor and glanced at her parents who were still drinking their coffee. As she skedaddled to her bedroom in shame, she shouted to no one in particular, “I’m leaving at dawn!”