The Things Children Notice

There is a version of this story where Algiers is only a place: a neighborhood across the river reached by ferry, where Mama Ruth kept a shotgun house with a fig tree in the side yard and a Sunday table long enough to need two leaves put in, where the whole scattered branch of Baptistes and Baptiste-adjacents gathered on the first weekend of the month whether anybody had a reason to or not. In that version, Odessa loved going. She loved the ferry ride, the particular green smell of the river up close, the fig preserves Mama Ruth put up every August in jars she never labeled because she said a woman who couldn't tell fig from anything else by looking at it didn't deserve the fig. She loved her cousins, the whole loud tumble of them, and she loved, most of all, being somewhere her father's whole other life lived: his mother, his brothers, the church he'd been dragged to, the corner where he'd learned trumpet, a version of Algiers that was, for the first nine years of Odessa's life, one of the best places in her whole world.

This is also, still, entirely true after she turned nine. That is the specific cruelty of what happened to her there: it did not replace the fig preserves or the ferry ride or Mama Ruth's table. It moved in alongside them, in the same house, on the same weekends, and Odessa spent the rest of her childhood unable to fully hate a place that had also genuinely loved her, which turned out to be a much harder thing to carry than simple hatred would have been.

What can be told is only this: that beginning the summer she was nine, on the weekends Yolanda worked doubles and Odessa stayed over at Mama Ruth's rather than being dragged along to a coworker's for the night, something began happening to her in that house that nobody in it ever spoke of, then or for the next fifteen years, and that it was done by a grown man who had every reason to know better and no reason at all beyond his own hunger, and that it stopped, eventually, the way these things sometimes stop without anyone intervening, because Odessa got old enough and sharp enough and physically large enough to make it cost him more than he was willing to pay, not because anyone protected her.

What can be told, more usefully, is what it did to a nine-year-old girl from the outside, because that is the part other people were in a position to see and did not.

She stopped wanting to go to Algiers, and nobody asked why with any real seriousness, because the going had always been a treat and treats you stop wanting are, to a tired adult's eye, simply treats a child has outgrown. Yolanda noticed. Yolanda noticed the way an exhausted woman notices weather, as a fact to work around rather than a question to investigate, and filed it, the same phrase surfacing more than once over the kitchen table in those years, not unkindly, just wrong: growing up funny, the way girls do.

She got quiet in a specific way that was different from her ordinary quiet, which had always had a kind of watchful humor in it, the quiet of a girl deciding what she was going to say next. This new quiet had nothing behind it. It was a closed door, not a girl thinking, and the two are not hard to tell apart if you are looking for the difference, and nobody in that house, in those years, was looking for the difference.

She developed, around this time, a particular relationship with the smell of Barbasol and menthol cigarettes together, a combination common enough, God knew, on that side of the family, worn by half the uncles at every table, that would cause her, for the rest of her life, to go somewhere else behind her own eyes for four or five seconds before she could locate herself again in whatever room she was actually standing in. Nobody remarked on this either, in childhood. There was no reason to; it looked, from outside, like nothing at all, a girl briefly distracted, gone and back again so fast you'd have needed to already know to see it.

She began, that same year, to develop a specific talent for being the funny one in any room: quick, sharp, first with the joke that let everybody else relax, and this talent would serve her, genuinely serve her, for the whole rest of her life, would make her the person people wanted at their table, would become, eventually, the actual engine of a business she'd build feeding people who came to her house for the food and stayed for the conversation. Nobody, watching a funny nine-year-old get funnier, thought to ask what the joke was covering, because a joke that's covering something and a joke that's just a joke look, from the outside, exactly alike.

She started, around ten, refusing to sit at Mama Ruth's Sunday table in the chair nearest the hallway to the back bedrooms, a preference so specific and so quietly, absolutely non-negotiable that the family simply adjusted around it without ever once discussing why, the way a family will reroute around a piece of furniture nobody remembers deciding to leave in the middle of the room. Mama Ruth, who noticed nearly everything that happened under her roof and who would go to her grave twenty years later still not having let herself fully know this one, once said, mildly, passing biscuits, Dess, baby, you can sit anywhere at this table, you know that, and Odessa said, I know, I like this one, and that was the whole conversation, twice a month, for years.

Camille noticed something, too, though she would not have language for what until she was much older and it was much too late to matter to the version of her cousin who'd needed it noticed at the time. She noticed it exactly once, with any real clarity, on a Fourth of July when she was nine and Odessa was not quite ten, standing in the hallway outside the back bedroom at Mama Ruth's house looking for the bathroom, and she saw something in a doorway: a hand, a look on Odessa's face going somewhere very far away, an uncle's voice pitched low in a register Camille had no category for yet, that her whole body understood as wrong a full four years before her mind caught up enough to supply the word.

She did not tell anyone. She was nine. She did not, in any way she could have explained to an adult, know what she'd seen; she knew only that it belonged, somehow, to the category of things you did not mention at Mama Ruth's table, a category her own house had already taught her plenty about, and so she filed it there, alongside her mother's silences and her grandmother's velvet-glove exclusions, in the growing private archive of things a good girl simply does not say out loud.

She would carry that four or five seconds in the hallway for twenty-four years. She would not tell Odessa she had seen anything at all until a July afternoon on the same porch where they'd once raced paper boats, by which time the not-telling had become its own kind of wound, layered on top of the original one, a second betrayal built entirely out of a child's silence and a woman's much longer failure to ever go back and undo it.

But that is a later chapter. For now, in this one, both girls are still young enough that the worst of it is only beginning, and the only thing either of them fully understands, without yet having words for it, is that something in the family's Sunday table has gone wrong in a way nobody at it is willing to name, and that not-naming it, in that house, is simply how you keep a family fed.