The Star Side of Bird Hill (9 page)

D
IONNE BOUNDED INTO
her grandmother's house with a netball cradled in her forearm and a red singlet plastered against her chest. Hyacinth could see beneath her shirt the imprint of not one but two bras that melded Dionne's breasts into an undifferentiated mass. Hyacinth wanted to say something about it, but she knew that criticizing Dionne would invite her prickliness. Just the week before, Hyacinth had asked Dionne to go see Jean and have him make new clothes for her. There was a standoff in which Dionne insisted that her clothes still fit. What Dionne had said exactly, below her breath, was that she didn't see why she had to let some buller man ruin her clothes like he'd ruined her hair on her birthday. Hyacinth, who believed that calling someone outside of their name was a grave offense, pounded her foot on the ground so
that the few pieces of good china and crystal in the hutch shook. “What did you say?”

“Nothing, Granny.”

“I know you couldn't be talking that kind of nonsense in my house. I beg you to leave whatever slackness you pick up in those streets when you wipe your feet on these steps. Jean isn't a buller man. And I won't have you going about here saying so. You hearing me?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Dionne said to the floorboards.

The compromise was that Jean would mend the places where her thighs had rubbed holes into her pants and let out her tops and skirts and dresses. Never mind that Dionne's clothes were in need of replacing well before she'd come to Barbados, a fact that Hyacinth lamented when she and Phaedra unpacked their suitcases, asking if “wunna mother think that it's a department store she sending you to,” ranting about the sad state of their wardrobes until Phaedra's face flushed and she tried to snatch back a t-shirt pocked with pills and holes that her grandmother held up with one finger. Hyacinth did not tolerate rudeness from children. When Phaedra tried to wrest the t-shirt from her that evening, she pulled the little girl close and said, “I know Avril ain't teach you to grab things from grown people. If that's what you did in New York, you won't do it in my house. That can't fly in here at all.”

Hyacinth could tell from looking at the girls when they arrived that shame was not something new to them. Each of them wore it differently, Dionne with a bravado that belied what she knew about herself and her family, which was that
neither she nor they ever had enough of what they needed. Phaedra had taken the teasing from the girls at school in Brooklyn and turned it against herself; she sometimes wondered if she wasn't the dirty, worthless girl her classmates called her. One particularly rough week, Phaedra had to wear the same two tops to school because there was no money to go to the Laundromat. Never mind that Dionne made Phaedra take off her clothes as soon as she got home, then washed them in the bathroom sink and hung them to dry on the shower curtain rod each evening. Phaedra knew that the safest response to these kinds of assaults was silence, because although she wanted to say that at least she didn't smell like Mercy, whom the other girls called an African booty scratcher, she knew that wouldn't get her anywhere. As time passed that summer, Phaedra could feel herself standing taller, as if she could tap into the better parts of herself more readily in Bird Hill than she could in Brooklyn. Dionne, though, felt her armor clink into place more securely in Barbados, felt each passing day as evidence of their mother's betrayal.

Hyacinth learned to pick her battles with Dionne, and it was for that reason and because it was the end of the day and she was tired from Ms. Husbands's delivery the night before, that she didn't remark that it looked like it was time for Dionne to get some new brassieres.

“Good evening,” was all Hyacinth said, looking up from her newspaper.

“Evening,” Dionne huffed. She went to put the netball on the coffee table, inside the crystal bowl that never had fruit in
it. But then she felt Hyacinth's eyes on her, and placed the ball on the floor.

“So, what you find yourself in the street doing this time of night?”

“I was exercising.”

“Well, I can see that.”

Hyacinth watched as Dionne walked to the kitchen and then leaned over the refrigerator. The door stayed open for several minutes, the fridge light illuminating Dionne's red, sweaty face, the sound of its motor harmonizing with the rhythm of her panting.

“There's a plate on the stove for you,” Hyacinth said.

“Thanks, Gran.”

Dionne went to unwrap the plastic from the plate and was putting the food in a saucepan to heat it up when she heard Hyacinth.

“You're not going to bathe your skin? I bet that food would taste even better once you're clean.”

Dionne knew this question to be a command, and so she dragged her feet to her bedroom where she pulled her clothes off and threw them on the floor. When she was bathed and dressed, she sat down at the table with a heaping plate of cook-up rice. Dionne slammed the food into her mouth and was sucking the marrow from a chicken bone when she felt her grandmother's eyes on her again. She put the bone down and wiped her teeth clean of the marrow, not sure whether Hyacinth would be proud of or horrified by her imitation of her mother's lusty way of devouring meat.

“Come sit with me, darling,” Hyacinth said. Dionne's head grazed the wooden archway that separated the dining area from the front room; Hyacinth sighed at the sight of her firstborn grandchild who was growing faster than she could keep up with.

When Dionne was close to her on the couch, Hyacinth said, “You know, sometimes I look on you and I can only see your mother.”

Dionne smiled, because even though the woman Avril was now wasn't who she had been, Dionne still thought her mother was the most beautiful woman she knew.

“Did any letter come from Mommy?”

“One came last week.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

Hyacinth raised one eyebrow, and Dionne knew not to ask this question again. Dionne, more than her sister, found it hard to abide by the hill's stringent rules of respect, which meant never questioning adults. It would take more than a few months for her to adjust from being in Brooklyn, where she thought for herself and for Phaedra and for her mother, to being on the hill, where she was expected to act as if she were an innocent and incapable of making decisions for herself.

Hyacinth pushed her reading glasses further up her nose and set her newspaper aside. She motioned for Dionne to bring her purse from where it hung on the front door's knob. She rifled through it until she produced a plastic bag tied tight around a stack of papers.

“You know, your mother used to play sports. That must be where you get it from.”

“Well, it's not like I'm any good. I think the girls only asked me because I'm tall.”

“That's a start,” Hyacinth said, wresting the bag's tight knot free. “When your mother was in school, she played everything—football, netball, track and field. You name it, she did it. When she was about your age, she went to England on some exhibition tour for the best netballers from the Commonwealth. She begged and cried to go, and when she came back she wasn't the same. Everything was ‘in England, they eat baked beans with breakfast,' and ‘I quite liked Tower Bridge.' It was like she left Barbados one person and came back completely different. From then, she had a hot foot.”

“I never knew Mommy played sports.”

“There's a lot you don't know, dear heart,” Hyacinth said, pulling a few sheets of paper from a white airmail envelope. “Will you read it for me? Tonight I'm feeling my age.”

Dionne didn't believe her grandmother, whom she'd never known to be any less than fully alert or mobile, but she took the letter from her and started reading anyway.

Dear Mummy,

I know I've been remiss in writing, but things here have been quite hectic of late. Looking for work keeps me busy and between that and the heat and trying to find a place to live for me and the girls, most days I come home and I'm bone-tired. I just want to eat and then fall into the bed in the same clothes I
had on all day. So, all that is to say, I was writing this letter to you in my mind well before I sat down to put pen to paper. I'm glad to hear the girls are doing well and that they ask for me. It's so strange being up here without them. Sometimes I feel like this apartment is too big and quiet for just me alone. Well, give the girls my love. If you check the bank on Monday, you should see something there for you. And of course I'll let you know as soon as I can when I'm coming.

Love, Avril

Dionne turned over the last sheet as if expecting something more, a postscript at least. When she saw there wasn't anything, she read the letter again silently to herself, and then handed it back to Hyacinth.

“Sounds like she's doing well,” Dionne said with forced cheerfulness.

Hyacinth said nothing to confirm or deny Dionne's pronouncement, just piled the newest letter atop the others and fussed with the plastic bag and rubber bands that held the letters together. “Well, then,” she said.

“Don't you think she sounds happy?”

“You don't really want to know what I think.”

“Yes, I do,” Dionne said, her voice softening.

This was what bothered Hyacinth most about teenagers, the way they swung so quickly from sharpness to tenderness, sometimes in the same breath. Hyacinth knew the best way to deal with them was to hold your center firm until they came
around again. Hyacinth's work helping hill women in their darkest moments had taught her how to find and stay on steady emotional ground.

“I just can't understand how it's almost two months since wunna reach here, and she still hasn't picked up the phone once to say well, hello, dog, or how you doing, cat. And I don't know why she keeps saying she doesn't know when she's coming down here to collect you. School's starting back soon.”

Just the day before, they'd watched the news coverage of back-to-school sales that had already started in the States. Phaedra asked Hyacinth when they were going home; her friend Donna had already been fitted for new school uniforms. Hyacinth hated having to say, “Soon,” instead of the truth, which was that she had no idea. Now she turned to Dionne and said, “A child is not a toy you pick up one day, play with, and then when you get tired of it, you put it down, and go on about your business.”

Dionne felt her grandmother getting worked up and watched as she tried unsuccessfully to heave herself from the low sofa.

“I found some of Mommy's clothes in her closet.”

“I don't know what kind of condition those things must be in. What the moths haven't eaten, you probably can't fit.”

“That's not true, Gran. This is hers,” Dionne said, pulling at the sleeve of the blue Queens College Netball Invitational t-shirt she was wearing.

“Well, I guess the things she used to exercise in would fit you. She always said that sports were the one place where she
didn't have to worry about what she looked like. No matter what the coaches said about how neat the girls should look, she always had her things made one size too big.”

Dionne leaned back into the sofa's shallow cushions and smiled. All summer, she'd felt her mother's life in Barbados taking shape with Hyacinth's stories and the ones the hill women told her after they said she looked like her mother had spit her out. There was something comforting about wearing Avril's clothes, sleeping in her bed, walking where she once walked, hearing stories about her.

“All those girls would be itching to roll up their shorts and tie their shirts around their waists, and your mother would prefer to look like those clothes were wearing her. You think your mother's easy? She was never easy,” Hyacinth said.

Dionne stretched her legs before her, readying herself for a story, the only thing sure to ease the tension she saw pulsing her grandmother's neck.

“One day, when your mother was about your age, she flew in here with her friend Jean like the devil himself was chasing her. And from that day forward, for about two months, all these children could talk about was the end-of-year dance. For weeks and weeks, all your mother would do was eat, sleep, go to school, and work on her dress. Your mother almost broke my bank with all the things she wanted. And the things I couldn't afford, she paid for from her own kitty. She was funny that way, always liked to have her own things. Back then she was apprenticing to Jean's grandmother, and so she had all of the fabric she wanted and a little pocket change Jean's granny
would throw at her when she finished piecework. So, the week before the dance, she bought these shoes at Bata, ones she had been saving up her money for. I remember now that they were red, the same color as her dress, open toe and open back with a four-inch heel. Nice shoes, you know. And her father, who was not into the idea of this dance from the beginning—”

“Father? I never heard Mommy talk about her father,” Dionne said.

“What, you think I just made your mother myself? Well, after you hear this story, you will understand why she never talked about him. Her father, my husband, said that no daughter of his was going to be parading herself about like a harlot in Jezebel shoes. Not while he was alive.”

“Jezebel shoes?” Dionne asked.

“Wait, wait,” Hyacinth said, patting Dionne's hand to hold back the tide of questions she felt welling up in her grandchild. “So, the whole month before the dance, I had been leading the campaign for her to go, not because I cared one way or the other. I personally thought that it was a whole bunch of foolishness, that it cost too much money, and that the excitement would be over before it even really got going. But I could see it was something Avril wanted, something she was probably going to do anyway, whether we said yes or not. And I couldn't in good faith know that she was making her dress already, and then tell her she couldn't go. Truth be told, I actually liked the dress. It was a pretty pretty pretty shade of red, not red like Ms. Zelma's roses, or red like a poinsettia, but red like those birds that does fly in from Trinidad. It was a beautiful color,
and the whole thing was made in organza. The material was expensive, and when she was done, there was not one sliver of material she hadn't used. The skirt was full with layers and the top fit her just so and the sleeves puffed out from her shoulders like clouds. She pinned a ring of red sequins around the neckline and at the hem. I'm telling you. You couldn't look at your mother in this dress and say she was anything less than gorgeous.”