The Star Side of Bird Hill (13 page)

PHAEDRA TURNED HER BACK
to Jean and felt his fingers and measuring tape indent her skin. Jean was the darkest shade of chestnut; he had close-cropped hair, a lanky frame with arms that stretched almost to his knees, and thick, plum-colored lips. In another place, outside the hill, he might have been called beautiful, but here he was Buller Man Jean, and the son of his mother, Trixie, and neither allowed space for anything beyond a kind of grudging tolerance. To be the son of a whore, born into sin, was one thing. To be a homosexual, to choose a life of sin, was something else entirely, a way of sloughing off the obligations of common decency and flaunting the shame that was his birthright. The hill, like every place, had its deviants, and like other small places, what it demanded of them was sublimation. Phaedra could feel Jean's sadness behind his tough exterior, and experienced it as a kind
of gravitational pull. Phaedra didn't complain about the rough, quick way that Jean calculated the length and width of her. She knew that, like her mother, beneath Jean's sandpaper exterior lay a tender, bruised heart.

Before they left New York, Avril told Dionne and Phaedra to give her love to Jean. Once they were safely out of their mother's earshot, Dionne said that she wasn't giving any love to her mother's faggot friend. But the cost of making fast friends with Jean's cousin Saranne was that Dionne had to see Jean every day when she sought escape from the heat and Hyacinth's rule in Trixie's air-conditioned shop. Over time, Dionne's initial iciness toward Jean, who she thought was eccentric in a way that reminded her of Avril, thawed. Dionne still believed that Jean's problem, and Avril's too, was that they held too tightly to their status as outsiders, which Dionne couldn't understand, given how much she wanted a normal family, a normal life, and how little their being different had profited them.

Dionne and Saranne were usually the only people in the shop where Trixie sold detergent and other sundries; the hill women only patronized her when either rain or desperation forced them to produce something for her besides scorn, and even then they would make only the barest of greetings and point to the things they wanted with their mouths. Phaedra, on the other hand, visited Jean often, finding pleasure in his easy way, a respite from the demand for good behavior and idle chatter that she found everywhere else on the hill. While Jean
took her measurements, Phaedra admired the bolts of fabric that lined the walls of Jean's sewing studio, which was really just his bedroom, off to the side of his mother's shop. Since Avril had died, Hyacinth's house pulsed with reminders of her—her school pictures, the clothes Dionne unearthed from her closet and hung all over her room in a kind of tribute, the rocking chair where Phaedra liked to read and into which Avril had carved her initials, in every new crease and crag in her grandmother's face. It was a relief to be somewhere with bright things, things that were not Avril's. She pointed to the fabric that she liked, yellow cotton with red hibiscus stamped on it.

“That's what I want,” Phaedra said.

“That kind of thing don't wear to funeral,” Jean replied.

“Why not?”

“People wear black or white or purple. You have to respect the dead.”

“But Mommy's favorite flower is hibiscus.”

“That's true. That makes me think. Have you ever seen pictures of your mother from when she was younger?”

“Only a few.”

Jean took the needle that was parked in the corner of his mouth and stuck it on a pincushion. He reached under his neatly made bed, which became a seating area for clients during their fittings, and then opened a red faux-leather photo album over his knees.

“You went to New York?” Phaedra asked. As the summer
wore on, Phaedra had started to divide people into categories according to who had seen her city and so could understand her, and people who had not. She was surprised that Jean made it onto her short list of the highly favored. She looked at the picture of her mother with Jean's arm wrapped around her waist. To the right, almost outside the frame, a man stood by the railing, closer to the Statue of Liberty than to Jean and Avril.

“Of course I've been to New York. And not just once either,” Jean said.

“Who's that?” Phaedra asked, pressing her stubby pointer finger against the Polaroid.

“You don't know your own father, P.?”

Phaedra squinted her eyes and pulled the photo carefully from its plastic cover, toward her face. “That doesn't look like my father.”

“The very same.”

“No, Daddy has a belly.”

“That's right. I forget how wunna does go to America and get fat. I see you slim down since you come.” Phaedra felt her cheeks go hot. She remembered the way that her mother would ask her when she was eating which man wanted a fat wife even as, sometimes in the next breath, she would tell Dionne that only a dog wants a bone. All summer, she'd been grateful for the fact that on the hill, body talk was matter of fact, merely descriptive and not some indication of her future, or a symptom of failure. Still, talk of her body and its doings made her blush.

Jean motioned for Phaedra to turn toward him, and began measuring the length from her hip to her knee. She giggled as the cold tape touched her bare skin.

“So did you make a lot of friends this summer?” Jean asked.

“Is two a lot?” Phaedra said.

Jean smiled. “Your mother was the same way. It's funny, because people always wanted to be her friend, but Avril said she didn't need any crowd of people following behind her.”

“But you were one of her friends, right?” Phaedra said. She wanted to change the image forming in her mind of her mother as a lonely girl. All summer, she'd wondered who her mother talked to in Brooklyn since she and Dionne and her father were gone, and she didn't have many friends to begin with. Phaedra wondered who would keep her mother company now that she was dead. Death seemed like another friendless place, even more lonesome than the life Avril left behind.

“Oh yes. And I've never met a better friend before or since.”

“What made her a good friend?”

“Well, some people will tell you having a good friend is about having someone to go to parties with, or someone to go shopping with, a liming partner basically. But a real friend only has to do two things. The first is to listen to you. And the second is to claim you.”

“Claim you?”

“Did your mother ever tell you about sleepaway camp?” Jean asked. He pushed aside the pincushion and measuring tape, and then he patted the bed next to him for Phaedra to sit down. She hesitated, because Hyacinth always told her that
she shouldn't sit on people's beds, especially not a man's. But Jean was different. He invited her again and she eased onto the edge of the comforter.

“So did she tell you about how they used to call her a buller man's wife?”

“Yeah,” Phaedra said, recalling her mother's famous stories about sleepaway camp. She didn't want to let on that she didn't understand exactly what being a buller man's wife meant.

“Well, I don't know if your mother told you that she took on those girls who used to taunt her, all six of them at once.”

“She said she fought them, but she never said how.”

“Well, your mother was on mess hall duty one morning. On her way to the canteen, she gathered all these red ants into an old t-shirt. And when the cook's back was turned, she poured them into the mean girls' cereal bowls.”

“Didn't she get in trouble?”

“Your mother hated that camp so much, the best thing she could imagine happening was being sent home early, except she didn't want to leave me there by myself.”

“Wow, I wish I was as brave as she was,” Phaedra said.

“Sure as you stand here before me, I know that if Avril spit you out, you have more than enough courage to go around. I'm more afraid for whoever finally makes you use it.”

“I want you to make me look like my mother does in this picture,” Phaedra said, bringing them back to the photo Jean had shown her of Avril.

Jean looked down at the photograph in Phaedra's hand, at the goldenrod jersey dress that Avril loved, and that he'd made
for her himself. Then, he went over to the bolts of fabric and picked out one of the black cotton ones.

“So, little miss. Here's what we're going to do. I'll sew some hibiscus on this fabric for you.”

“Can you make the flowers red?”

“I can make them purple or white.”

“Purple.”

“Deal,” Jean said. He checked his notebook to be sure that he had everything he needed, and then he bade Phaedra goodbye. And although her original destination was her grandmother's house, on her walk home, something made her turn in at the Lovings' gate to find Chris.

Mrs. Loving sat on her gallery with a cassette player on a shaky card table beside her, wailers songs streaming out beneath the huge cross that dwarfed the Lovings' front door. Mrs. Loving gestured for Phaedra to come, and she did. Phaedra was grateful for the fact that Mrs. Loving looked at her with the same far-off stare she'd had before her mother's death. Phaedra found her persistent melancholy comforting, in contrast to the newfound pity that poured out of the other hill women's mouths and onto her head like hot coals. Just that morning Phaedra had looked in the mirror and wondered if people could tell just by looking at her that her mother was dead. There was mercy in Mrs. Loving's cloud of private pain that never lifted enough for her to see the people around her clearly.

“I know just the person you're looking for, but the boys are gone to see their grandmother in St. Philip,” Mrs. Loving said.
She reached to turn the cassette player's volume down. Phaedra nodded, disappointed. “Why don't you sit for a bit? I wouldn't mind the company and your face is so long it looks like you could use some too.”

Phaedra relaxed into one of the chair's soft cushions. The way that her bottom sank into the seat reminded her that the chairs on her grandmother's gallery were castoffs from when the church had upgraded its hall. She sat up straight again.

“When I was your age, my mother died too. Everybody was walking around talking about what happened for weeks, about the way she waded into one of the rough beaches on the east coast, and never turned back. Me and my brother were on the beach, and I was pushing the last fist of sand below his chin when it happened, burying him. I turned around and there was just the top of her hair floating above the water, that same pretty hair she brushed every night and sometimes let me brush for her. After her head disappeared under the water, I stayed stuck like that, not talking until my brother saw me frozen and got up to see what happened. Afterwards, everybody said it was my fault for not saying something, that somebody might have fished her out if I acted quicker, but the truth was that she wanted to die, and she would have, if not that day, then another. I didn't talk for a whole year after that happened. And when I did, the big voice I used to sing with on the junior choir was gone.”

These were the most words that anyone had spoken to Phaedra since her mother died, not cooing or talking over her head to her grandmother or to Dionne, but addressed directly
to her. News of Phaedra's singing to herself had gotten around the hill, starting with Hyacinth's whispers to Ms. Zelma that what worried her more than anything was that Phaedra had taken to dragging hymns through her throat until they were extended dirges, woeful things that cast another layer of pallor over the house. In the hill women's mouths, the tip of Phaedra's hand toward madness was another indictment of Avril. “Look how the child walking about here like she one step away from the mental. Just mind she don't come in like her mother,” they clucked. Phaedra was lucky enough to be spared these pronouncements because when the hill women saw her, all they would say was “cuhdear” and ask after her granny and offer their best. But sometimes, in the thick of the songs that settled around her, even Phaedra wondered if what was wrong with her mother was not also wrong with her.

In the beginning, when Avril first took to her bed, Phaedra was always within a few feet of her mother, sensing that her presence, even if unacknowledged, was a kind of balm. Phaedra would sleep curled up at the foot of her mother's sofa bed, stand behind her, oiling and brushing her scalp, keep her cups of tea fresh, milky, and lukewarm. But over time, as the thing that got ahold of Avril dug deeper and deeper into her, Phaedra retreated into her books and solitude, angling her body away in the rare moments when Avril remembered her children and gave them awkward, short-lived bouts of attention. It didn't help when the girls from her school, who never liked her, found new ammunition for their taunts, saying that Phaedra's mother was crazy, and that crazy was catching, and if
everybody knew what was best for them, they would stay as far away as possible from Phaedra. Phaedra thought about lashing out; in her mind, she dragged the ringleader by her pigtails down the glass-strewn concrete steps in the school yard. But she knew that would only make their lies seem true, and so she'd stewed by herself, counting down until the last day of school. Now, with the full extent of her mother's madness proven by her suicide, it was hard for Phaedra not to wonder whether she'd inherited Avril's madness. Maybe, if she was lucky, Phaedra thought, Avril had passed down a portion of her bravery too.

Phaedra relaxed as Mrs. Loving's reggae music took over the dreadful hymn that had been her company that day, “Rock of Ages.” She let Mrs. Loving's story wash over her. And then she spoke, her tongue molasses thick, but moving.

“You knew her?”

“Knew who, sweetheart?”

“My mother.”

“Of course I knew your mother. Impossible to live here and not know her. When I came here with my husband, she was the first friend I made. And when she moved to New York, I was inconsolable. I still remember when Dionne and Trevor were born, we used to walk them all over the place. You sister could cry from the time she woke up in the morning until she went to bed at nighttime, and the only thing to help was to keep her moving.”