Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“The morality police calls,” Dionne said, trying to throw hair she didn’t have over her shoulder.

“Make sure you call me when you reach home. And take care of my princess for me, seen?” the man called after her.

Phaedra noticed the guy talking in a forced Jamaican accent, which sounded neither better nor worse than the Jamaicans in Brooklyn whose efforts to speak American slang made words like “yo” elongate and turn into something else altogether in their mouths.

“I will,” Dionne shouted over her shoulder as she exaggerated the swing of her hips. And then to Phaedra, “Why are you so opposed to me enjoying myself in this lifetime?”

“Dionne.” Now it was Phaedra who was losing her patience. “I was just doing what Granny told me.”

“Well, bless your heart,” Dionne said, imitating the signature phrase of Phaedra’s VBS teacher, Ms. Taylor.

They went back to following their grandmother around on a seemingly endless circuit from stall to stall. At the butcher, where Hyacinth called out for modest cuts of pork and beef, the flies’ conference around the upside-down hanging slabs of meat made Phaedra’s breakfast curdle in her throat. By the time the shopping was done, they were all so tired it was all they could do to drag themselves back to the bus station. Phaedra wanted to squat on her haunches like she saw the boys do, but she knew without asking that it was better not to. She watched the orderly way people lined up around the metal dividers, and realized she’d never seen anyone queue for a bus in Brooklyn. The quiet of exhaustion wrapped itself around Hyacinth and her girls, a cocoon in which they traveled all the way home to Bird Hill.

At home that evening, Phaedra and Dionne and Hyacinth sat at the dining room table eating beef rotis that Hyacinth bought in town. Because Hyacinth was not the type to eat on the street or even in a restaurant, by the time they sat down, they were beyond hungry. Phaedra sat with her legs crossed on the plastic seat covers to avoid the mosquitoes that congregated beneath the table hoping to make meals of her ankles. They had put away the groceries, washed their hands, and heated the food in the oven. The girls’ excitement had mostly dissipated, and the meal felt like fuel rather than the treat it was intended to be.

“Watch yourself, Dionne,” Hyacinth said once everyone had polished off their food, and only stray streaks of curry and channa and roti skins stuck to their plates.

“Sorry?” Dionne said. She pushed her chair back from the table and piled Phaedra’s and Hyacinth’s plates on top of hers.

“Just as sure as I’m looking at you, I know you’re hearing me,” Hyacinth said. “I don’t see why you need to find yourself in public grinding up yourself on grown men and shaking your behind like a thoroughfare.”

“A thoroughfare?”

“The kind of woman who everybody passes through.”

“Oh,” Dionne said. “I was just trying to have a good time.”

“You know what kind of good time that guy was looking with you? If you do know, you’re more stupid than you look,” Hyacinth replied.

“Mommy always said that if we misbehaved she’d send us home. So here I am. The worst thing that could have happened to me already has.”

“Don’t tempt the devil, darling. He’ll give you the worse bits you asked for, plus what you couldn’t even imagine.”

“I’ll talk loud enough for him to hear, then, loud enough for anyone to hear,” Dionne said, her voice rising as she snatched her plate and stormed into the kitchen. Her protest of heavy feet and slamming dishes was one that still acknowledged it was her responsibility to clean up the kitchen after dinner.

“I’m sure you will scream loud enough to make the devil hear, darling. I’m sure you will,” Hyacinth said, certain that Dionne could still hear her, even above the clamor she was making.

ALWAYS, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, Hyacinth thought that Avril would come home. When Avril said that she was sending the girls home for the summer, Hyacinth was glad to have Phaedra and Dionne in the fullest versions of themselves, as seeing the girls day in and day out was so much better than the phone calls and pictures she’d been living off of for years. What Avril had said exactly was that she needed a break so that she could sort herself out and lay a better foundation for the girls. She kept using that word, “foundation,” pressing on it for emphasis the way you pound a table or a Bible, and in her mind, Hyacinth saw concrete being poured into the foundation of a house. Hyacinth thought it was no coincidence that from Ms. Zelma’s kitchen, when she stood talking on the phone to Avril, she could see a house whose foundation had been poured, its walls erected, but never finished. Hyacinth had lived long enough to know that laying down roots was an illusion that made people more comfortable, secure, a pillar they could hold on to until they got shaken to the core again.

For years, Hyacinth had told Avril that any time she was ready to come home and get help with the children, she was more than welcome. She stopped short at saying that she would come up to the States and look after them, because for one, her old bones couldn’t take the cold and for two, there was no way she was leaving the good-good house her husband and she had made with their own hands to go live in an apartment in New York. Hyacinth had always been astonished at the way people lived on top of each other up there. It seemed strange that people could live in such proximity, and yet still be strangers.

On Bird Hill, there was enough space so you could stretch out your arms or raise your voice and touch only yourself and your family. But still Hyacinth knew the public and private affairs of people all over the hill. She knew whose milk wouldn’t come in no matter how many cups of the special teas she brewed for her, which women to expect in her yard like clockwork at the beginning of every month when their husbands drank and then brawled, painting their wives’ faces with their fists. That she knew so much was occasionally overwhelming to Hyacinth. Even when she didn’t want to, Hyacinth could still feel the tug of other women’s worries, which she knew as well as the birthmarks on her knees, the ones that Hyacinth’s mother said made her look like she’d come down from heaven after a lifetime of prayer. Still, Hyacinth preferred this small place and its difficulties to the strangeness of living some place where nobody knew you beyond what you saw fit to tell them.

After Phaedra was born, it became clear that the thin thread that held together Avril’s marriage to her husband, Errol, was frayed. Hyacinth hoped that once Errol finally left, Avril would bring the girls home and they could be a family again. In her mind’s eye, she saw busy mornings sending Avril and the girls off to school, having supper ready for them when they came home, watching and talking at the television together at night while she packed their lunches and pressed uniform shirts and skirts. Despite the disembodied voice that her daughter had become over the years, Hyacinth still remembered the girl that Avril had once been, the light of her life, fiercely protective of her friends and of her mother. Hyacinth had a glimpse of this life in the year that Avril spent at home after she finished college, teaching first form at her old high school. But when classes let out that year for Christmas holidays, Avril met Errol, and the next six months proceeded only in service of them leaving Barbados together.

Hyacinth blamed herself because she didn’t know enough of Avril’s life in New York, of the pressures that moved against her, or the way that the children stretched the precious little that she had to its breaking point. Hyacinth didn’t know that Errol’s imprint was still on Avril’s body — not only the bruises that were slow to heal, but also the other, more insidious ways Errol had lodged himself in Avril’s psyche, the damage that Avril couldn’t admit even to herself. There were only pictures and letters and cards and phone calls to go by, and Avril constructed the lie of her competence so perfectly that it was hard for Hyacinth to know what was really going on. And so she could claim only her memories of Avril before she left Barbados, and then the bits and pieces she came to know that summer in her conversations with her granddaughters. Avril, according to Phaedra, was a mother who missed parent-teacher conferences, who hadn’t held down a job in more than a year, who let Dionne assume responsibility for making sure that she and her sister were bathed, fed, and on time for school. This was an Avril she didn’t know. But she would come to understand that this Avril was as real as the daughter she remembered.