Two Sides Of The Same Town

The summer they were eleven and twelve, there were two invitations, four months apart, and both girls would remember their own more clearly than the other's, which was, in its small way, the whole problem of their whole childhood in miniature.

The first was Camille's birthday, thrown in the Whitfields' side yard under a rented tent because rain was forecast and Elle did not believe in taking chances with a guest list that included two members of the Louisiana Bar Association and their wives. Odessa came because Desmond insisted, one of the rare times he pushed both worlds against each other on purpose: she's your sister, she should be at your sister's birthday, I don't care whose yard it's in. And Elle, who did not want the argument in front of caterers, agreed, and dressed Odessa's presence up afterward, to her own mother-in-law, as a lovely gesture, very inclusive.

Odessa wore her good dress, the yellow one, ironed sharp the way Yolanda ironed everything, and she stood at the edge of the tent for the first twenty minutes with a cup of lemonade she didn't drink because she couldn't figure out where you were supposed to put the cup down between sips in a yard with no table close enough and too many white tablecloths to risk a ring.

"You're Desmond's, aren't you," said a woman in a wide hat, crouching slightly, the specific crouch adults perform for children they've decided require a lower register of voice. "The other one."

"I'm Odessa."

"Of course you are. Camille's told us all about you." She had not, as it happened, told them anything at all; Camille had mostly avoided the subject of Odessa at school and at these functions both, not from shame exactly, or not only from shame, but from a hard-won instinct that some things you kept in the box where they made sense and didn't drag out into rooms that would ask them to explain themselves. The woman in the hat straightened up, satisfied with her own kindness, and moved on toward the shrimp.

Dixie Whitfield found her by the cake table an hour later. Dixie did not crouch. "You have your father's coloring," she said, which was true, and which she said in a tone that made the fact sound like a diagnosis. "It's a shame you girls didn't grow up in the same house, really, sisters ought to. Still. I suppose it's easier this way, all things considered." She did not say what things, considered, made it easier, and Odessa, at eleven, did not yet have the vocabulary to demand she finish the sentence, only the certainty, sitting cold in her stomach the rest of the party, that she had just been told something true and ugly in a voice designed to sound like Christian charity.

Camille found her by the cake table not long after, having watched the whole exchange from twenty feet away and having done nothing, in the moment, to stop it, a failure she would not fully forgive herself for until she was well into her thirties, because at twelve, in front of a hundred of her mother's most carefully chosen guests, she had not yet developed whatever specific courage it takes to walk toward your own grandmother and correct her in public, and so she had simply waited until Dixie moved on and then come over with two plates of cake, as if cake were an apology, which, in the only language that house had taught her for saying sorry, it more or less was.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine." Odessa took the cake. It was very good cake, she'd give the woman that; the Whitfields did not skimp on a bakery. "Your grandma's something."

"She's old."

"That's not what being old is."

Camille didn't argue the point, because she knew Odessa was right and didn't yet have anywhere to put the knowing except further down, alongside the hallway at Mama Ruth's, in the growing pile of things she'd seen and not addressed.

The second invitation came that October, for Odessa's twelfth birthday, on Tennessee Street, in Yolanda's yard, which had no tent and needed none because nobody there was worried about rain ruining a tablecloth that was, in point of fact, a bedsheet Yolanda had washed and pressed and pinned to the folding table for the occasion. There was a boombox playing Frankie Beverly loud enough that three different neighbors leaned over their own fences to holler a request, and there was a card table where four uncles had been running a spades game since noon with a running commentary so filthy and so funny that Camille, standing near it with a plate of red beans, laughed out loud twice before she caught herself and checked, out of pure old habit, whether anyone had seen.

Nobody had seen, or nobody cared, which was itself an entirely new sensation for her.

"You can laugh loud here," Odessa told her, appearing at her elbow with two more plates because at Yolanda's house you were never allowed to hold an empty one for long. "Ain't nobody grading you on it."

"I wasn't—"

"You was. You do it at your house too. I seen you at your birthday, holding your face all careful like it might get took away from you." Odessa said this without cruelty, the way she said most true things, a fact delivered flat and moved past quickly, and it landed in Camille somewhere she would spend the next two decades trying to find her way back to.

There was a police car that idled at the corner for eleven minutes around six o'clock, for no stated reason, no lights, just idling, and Camille watched three grown men at the card table go quiet and careful in a way she didn't fully understand until Odessa, following her eyes, said, low, it does that sometimes, it don't mean nothing, just keep playing normal, and Camille understood, watching the whole yard perform a kind of ease none of them actually felt until the car finally pulled off, that there was a tax on this joy that her own side of the family never had to pay, and that nobody on Tennessee Street was going to make a speech about it, they were simply going to keep dealing the next hand until it passed.

There were bars on the front windows, painted the same blue as the shutters, cheerful and unmistakably functional at once. There was Mama Ruth's fig preserves, opened for the occasion, spread on the good white bread instead of the everyday, and there was a specific, total, unrationed abundance of attention that had nothing to do with money: every single adult at that party asked Camille at least one real question about her actual life and waited, genuinely, for the answer, in a way that made her realize, with a small shock, how rarely that happened at home.

"You having fun?" Odessa asked her, near the end of the night, both of them sitting on the same step where the paper boats had raced two summers before. "Yeah." Camille meant it more than she usually meant that answer. "I like it here."

"You say that every time."

"I mean it every time."

Odessa looked at her sideways, the specific look she'd later use, at thirty-four, on customers who tried to compliment her cooking without actually eating enough of it to have earned the compliment. "You mean it for the one night. Then you go home to your air-conditioning and your grandma who thinks my coloring is a shame, and you don't think about none of this again till next time." It wasn't said cruelly. It was said the way Odessa said most true things: flat, unhidden, already halfway to being forgiven, but it landed, and Camille did not have an answer for it, because at twelve, she genuinely did not know whether it was true, and would spend a good portion of the next twenty-two years finding out, one visit and one absence at a time, exactly how right her sister had been.