Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Love you back,” Phaedra said. Ever since Avril died, they had started saying, “I love you.” This time, though, it felt like a bribe.

AFTER AVRIL DIED, Hyacinth ran out of reasons why Phaedra couldn’t pierce her ears. Phaedra insisted that she needed it done because she had the VBS play coming up and she wanted to wear earrings. Since she was playing a woman, Martha, in the play, it followed that her look should be a little bit more grown up. Really, what Phaedra wanted was to perm her hair so that she could start school with her hair flouncing down her back. At her old school in Brooklyn, the other girls’ mothers had said they could straighten their hair for fifth-grade graduation. But Hyacinth shut Phaedra down early on in the summer, saying that if her hair was to be straightened, that was something her mother should decide. Because Dionne’s hair had been relaxed before she came to Barbados, she and Hyacinth sat once a month while Jean creamed their hair, having observed a whole week of not scratching their scalps and carefully combing their hair, a ritual and talk Phaedra wanted to be part of. Phaedra came home buzzing after the second of these visits, when she’d sat in Jean’s front room watching television and saw the advertisement for Brother D’s, a jewelry store in town: “Barbados Women Should Be in Chains. Brother D’s Chains.” Before the ad went off, Phaedra noticed that they also did ear piercing. She gathered up courage to talk to Hyacinth during her best time, the late mornings when she had just finished working in her garden, and a sheen coated her face. This was the closest time she ever came to seeing her grandmother happy.

“Granny?”

“Yes, Phaedra.”

“When do you think I could pierce my ears?”

“Oh, I don’t know, child. Why you in such a rush to bore holes in your ears?”

“It’s just that the play is coming up and all the girls are going to be wearing gold earrings.”

“If all the girls went down to the careenage and jumped in the water, you would do that too?”

Phaedra shuddered at the thought of the green-gray, murky water against her skin. “No, ma’am. I just thought it would look nice, and be good for my role.”

“The Lord ain’t studying what you wearing.” Hyacinth sat down to take off her gardening boots but was beat there by Phaedra, who squatted in the grass, pulled them off, and started massaging her grandmother’s feet in a circular motion that made Hyacinth throw back her head and say, “You know what to do, girl.”

“That feels nice, Gran?”

“Better than Christmas.”

Hyacinth let her shoulders drop back against the bench her husband made for her when they were still young and in love. Back then the house and her garden were as new to Hyacinth as she and her husband were to each other. He would come home in the afternoons for lunch and they’d make love for so long that he’d have to rush back to his work at the mechanic shop with his belly rumbling and his full lunch tin banging against his shin. He’d made the bench for Hyacinth because he said that she deserved a place where she could relax and admire God’s work. She looked at the frangipani tree, whose fragrant flowers blanketed the ground. They were beautiful, but cleaning them up was a job that strained her back now. Hyacinth smiled to herself, knowing that her husband had made this house, this garden, this bench by hand so that she’d have something of him to hold on to when he was gone.

Hyacinth relaxed into Phaedra’s touch and let her mind wander. Would Phaedra keep up the house when she was gone? Or would she and Dionne leave, like Avril, the first chance they got? She knew Dionne had a hot foot, but with Phaedra there was hope she’d stay. A couple days before Avril’s funeral, Hyacinth showed the girls the safe where she kept her money, her most important papers, and the simple white dress she wanted to wear to her funeral. She’d had to tell Dionne, who stood in the doorway with her fists at her waist and her lips pursed like she was sucking lemons, that if she thought death was something she could catch like a cold, she was more foolish than she’d already shown herself to be. It was Phaedra who sat down next to Hyacinth while she explained that the plot she wanted to be buried in was already paid for and then listed out the hymns she wanted to be sung at the memorial service. Hyacinth pinned her hope on the chance that Phaedra’s steadiness might balance out her sister’s hotheadedness, that the two of them would take care of each other after she was gone.

Hyacinth looked down at Phaedra kneading her feet. “OK, you little wretch. Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing. Give me time to go about my business today and then when evening comes, we’ll see about you and your ears.”

“But Gran, don’t the buses stop running into town after dark?”

“What we going in town for?”

“We’re not going to Brother D’s?”

Phaedra had imagined herself seated on a pink leather stool, careful to keep her elbows off the glass cases, smelling perfume on the lady who would take a gun to her ears while she sat valiantly still, no tears. Maybe her grandmother would let her try on one of those thick gold chains. Despite being a mostly sensible girl, Avril said, and it was true, that Phaedra had flashy taste like her father.

“Oh Lord, please deliver me from these Yankee children.”

“What happen, Granny?”

“You got Brother D’s money?”

“No, Gran.”

“Right, then,” Hyacinth said, and pushed on the flip-flops Phaedra placed near her feet.

Evening came and Phaedra finished washing the supper dishes. She listened to the night frogs’ song pulsing at the kitchen window and wondered what her grandmother was planning. She went to the front bedroom and saw Hyacinth sitting on the bed, rummaging through her sewing kit.

“You need help finding something?” Phaedra asked.

“I’m looking for a needle. You know Granny’s eyes not so good anymore.”

“What do you need a needle for? I thought you said you were finished with the whole clothes-mending business.”

“You know, Phaedra, for being such a bright girl, sometimes it seems like you don’t have too much sense knocking about in that head of yours.”

Phaedra was quiet. Over time, she’d come to accept her grandmother’s way of serving insults and love together.

“I’m looking for a needle to pierce your ears.”

“Is that safe?” Phaedra had a flash of her mother, who she thought would be wary of this operation.

“You think I would do you anything?” Hyacinth asked.

“No, Gran,” Phaedra said. But Avril had told her to be careful of Hyacinth, past whom she would put nothing. Phaedra knew that the truth about her grandmother lay somewhere between her mother’s occasionally venomous descriptions and the sweet, hard woman she was getting to know. She picked out the best needle she could find, a short silver one that was unthreaded and, as far as she could tell, unused.

In the kitchen, Phaedra pulled the stool where she usually sat shelling peas or husking garlic, or sometimes just watching her grandmother stir the pots. Hyacinth lit the pilot and put the needle to the fire. She handed Phaedra ice cubes from the freezer and draped dish towels over her shoulders to catch the drip. Phaedra caught a glimpse of herself in the picture window, her hands clutching the ice over her extended earlobes.

“You have ears just like your mother,” Hyacinth said. When the needle was hot to her liking, she pulled it away from the flame. “Maybe you might be more able to hear with them when I’m talking to you than she was.”

Phaedra squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth when she felt the pressure of the needle and then the string pulling through her right ear. But she didn’t cry, because she wanted her grandmother to think she was brave.