Chapter 24 - The Chair
For a long time, Hattie avoided the chair beside me at formal dinners.
If there was an empty seat nearby:
“Where mine?”
I would point.
She checked place cards twice.
At nine, during a charity dinner, she stood behind a chair beside me.
“Can I?”
The question hurt.
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
She sat.
Nothing happened.
Evelina was not there.
Nobody corrected her.
Nobody explained family hierarchy.
Halfway through dinner, Hattie got bored and moved to the children’s table voluntarily because her cousin had brought a card game.
That mattered.
A child can choose the children’s table.
The harm was not that children sometimes sit separately.
The harm was an adult using the seat to define worth.
Later that evening, my sister Diana sat beside me.
“She lasted thirty-eight minutes.”
“Record.”
“She stole two rolls.”
“I saw.”
Then Diana said:
“Remember what Evelina said about seats?”
“Yes.”
“I used to think she was being dramatic.”
“So did I.”
Diana looked toward the children.
“Hattie doesn’t care about status.”
“No.”
“Adults taught the room to.”
Exactly.
People project hierarchies onto children, then punish children for supposedly embodying them.
Hattie had wanted the chair because it was beside Dad.
Not because it was near the head of the table.
At seven, proximity meant safety.
At nine, she would abandon prestige for a card game and dessert.
That should have embarrassed every adult who had turned her seating into a referendum on blood.
May you like
It embarrassed me.
────────────────────
