The Star Side of Bird Hill (2 page)

DIONNE HATED MOST THINGS
about Barbados, especially the weather. She disliked the cool damp of the mornings, followed by the unforgiving heat and insistent afternoon rains that drowned any hopes of going outside. During the long, wet days when she was forced to keep watch over her sister, Dionne felt like one of the sick and shut-in from the church bulletin. Maybe this is what growing old was like, she thought. Maybe the world gets smaller and smaller until there's nothing but the walls around you to show you where you end and the rest of the world begins.

The weather was just one thing on a long list of gripes that Dionne kept in her head, and occasionally wrote in the margins of the fashion magazines she'd brought with her from Brooklyn. Chief among her complaints was that there was nothing to do to entertain herself. The days just seemed to
drag on and on. She sometimes looked up at the clock thinking an hour must have passed, when in fact it had only been a few minutes. And while she always resented the long list of things she had to do back in Brooklyn—prodding her mother, Avril, to get up and bathe each day, making sure Phaedra was dressed and her hair decently combed, cooking dinner and packing lunches for herself and her sister—in Barbados she felt like she had been demoted back to childhood, asked to put on a pair of too-small shoes by being responsible only for herself.

Hyacinth believed that idle hands were the devil's playground, and so she gave the girls chores to do and signed them up for not one but two sessions of Vacation Bible School. Still, Dionne felt a restlessness welling up in her. Dionne thought Bird Hill was provincial, far too small a stage for a girl like her. There was a flash of excitement when a talent scout for the Miss Teen Barbados pageant came to Bird Hill. For a brief moment, something like joy washed across Dionne's face when the other girls pushed her forward, saying that she would surely win. But when the scout heard her accent, the woman—whom Dionne later pronounced both too fat and too ugly to be scouting for a beauty pageant—asked whether she was of both Barbadian heritage and Barbadian citizenship, and she'd had to admit that she was in fact an American citizen. Just like that, Dionne's dreams of emancipation from the lot of the fatally dull girls in Bird Hill were dashed.

How she longed for her best friend, Taneisha, who could make a walk to the corner store exciting, stopping every few steps to say hello to the boys who were hypnotized by
Taneisha's green eyes and something else, not aloofness, exactly, but a way of broadcasting magnetism without need. Whenever Dionne tried to emulate Taneisha's cool, she ended up seeming standoffish or mean. After years of being on the periphery of the popular girls at her school, she had finally broken through because of Taneisha, whose tongue never got thick in her mouth when she was nervous the way Dionne's sometimes did. It helped that Dionne had scored Darren as her boyfriend, and that soon after they started dating, flesh and muscle started to fill out her lanky arms and bust and behind. The spring when Dionne and Darren started going together, there was a temporary pouring in of sunshine through the cloud that generally hovered over Avril, and she asked which boy was touching Dionne's bubbies under moonlight. Dionne was taken aback by her mother's directness, but then she answered that she didn't know any boys who would be touching her like that. Some part of Dionne was annoyed by how quickly Avril dropped the issue, ready as she was for a fight, and desperate as she was to feel the unfamiliar prick of an adult's concern.

Dionne didn't feel bad about lying to her mother. She knew intimately the precarious nature of their life, the way that it depended on a series of carefully constructed lies, the ones she told to get meat on credit at the butcher at the end of the month when her mother's money ran out; the ones she told to fend off her and Phaedra's teachers' suspicions; the ones she told to keep her friends from coming over to her house, and seeing her mother. Avril didn't move around much, so Dionne
knew she could probably get away with shepherding any visitors into the back bedroom she shared with Phaedra. But there was still the problem of the smell—the scent of eucalyptus from the humidifier Avril kept going all day and all night, the stench from the stinking bush teas Avril bought from some woman on Church Avenue and that she was convinced might heal her, although months and then a year had passed and Avril still showed no signs of getting better. Dionne and Phaedra held their noses every time they came home, lest they choke on their mother's sadness. The more lies Dionne told to protect her mother and herself and her sister, the easier it was to lie to her mother, to anyone, really. And by the time Dionne arrived in Barbados, lying was less a moral dilemma than a means of getting by.

Despite the difficulties of life back in Brooklyn, Dionne preferred the predictable chaos of life there to the monotony of life in Bird Hill. To say that she was disappointed to be spending the summer in Barbados would be an understatement. She was furious. On this particular afternoon, Dionne was contemplating the relative virtues of a quick death—a plane crash, a car accident—over a long drawn-out one, exacerbated by a church's prayers that held you precariously in the land of the living. Today, the radio was looping a story about the death of Barbados's oldest living man, at 113 years old. While everyone on the radio marveled at his fortitude, Dionne couldn't help thinking that 113 years was just too many years to live, especially here. She sighed to herself, and went back to the book she was reading to Phaedra.

Phaedra was lying in the bed she shared with her grandmother, draped in her favorite bluebird bedsheets while Dionne read to her from the well-worn pages of her favorite book,
Annie John.

In my small room. I lay on my pitch-pine bed, which, since I was sick, was made up with my Sunday sheets. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. I could hear the rain as it came down on the galvanized roof. The sound the rain made as it landed on the roof pressed me down in my bed, bolted me down, and I couldn't so much as lift my head if my life depended on it.

Phaedra fancied herself like Annie John, sick for days upon days, coming in and out of dreams while her body repaired itself. She sighed and nestled herself further into the sheets. Overhead, the ceiling fan whirred slowly, swirling air thick with the smell of rain.

Dionne marked her page, and then stretched the paperback across her knees.

“So how long are you going to work this sick thing?”

“What do you mean? I am sick,” Phaedra whined.

“I had some patience and even some sympathy for you before. But it's been a week now. And you look fine to me.”

“You're just mad because you can't use me as a cover anymore for your rendezvous with Trevor,” Phaedra said. She sat up in the bed.

Dionne closed the bedroom door and moved until she was
within an inch of Phaedra's face. She knew she would only have a few minutes before her grandmother asked which grown people lived in her house and were bold enough to lock her doors. The people on the hill held privacy as a luxury not to be extended to children.

“Phaedra Ann Braithwaite, what business is it of yours what I do with boys?” Dionne said. Her hot breath formed a bridge between her face and her sister's.

“I know what I see. And you know Mommy said that if you don't keep your pocketbook shut tight, you're going to find yourself in the family way soon.”

“I swear to God, Phaedra, I will cut your bony ass in two.”

“I'll tell Granny about how you curse at me and sneak out of the house at night.”

Phaedra paused to let the force of her threat land.

“What do you want from me?”

“Bring me Chris,” Phaedra said.

Dionne flung the book at Phaedra, catching the very center of her right breast, which was budding in a way that their grandmother called force ripe. On the hill, becoming a woman was like that—shared with all the women who witnessed you coming into yourself, becoming one of them. Phaedra pressed her hand to the tender place where she'd been hit, but did not grant Dionne the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

 • • • 

“C
OME
,
NUH
,”
DIONNE
SAID
,
nudging her sister awake. Dionne was dressed in her only pair of Lee jeans and an
orange-and-white-striped tube top she found in the back of her mother's closet, a treasure trove of risqué clothes Avril hid from her mother when she was living there. Dionne smiled when she found it, struck by how similar it was to the stash of clothes and makeup stashed beneath her bed at home. When the girls landed at the airport that June, Hyacinth took one look at Dionne in her miniskirt, leggings, and tank top and said, “Lord, Jesus, please have mercy on my soul. I don't know how me and this child going to make out.” Dionne pretended to be annoyed when her grandmother said that Dionne seemed intent on giving her the same series of heart attacks Avril had given Hyacinth when she was a teenager. But secretly  she liked the steadiness of Hyacinth's concern for her, which was comforting after so many years of Avril's absentmindedness. She enjoyed hearing stories about the troublemaker her  mother was and how much Hyacinth loved her despite her antics.

Dionne complained at first about sleeping alone in the back room that was once her mother's bedroom. No matter how many times Phaedra wet the bed or thrashed during her nightmares, Dionne took comfort in having her sister's body beside hers in the room they shared in Brooklyn. Right around the time that Avril began her downward spiral, Dionne started double-checking all the doors before she went to bed at night; she couldn't sleep if the closet door in her bedroom was open even an inch. Avril had been gone to them for some time by then, a ghost who sometimes left a jar of peanut butter open on the kitchen counter or feces floating in the toilet or who
abandoned a knitting project she'd gotten excited about in the middle of the night that was an unsalvageable mess by morning. As Avril retreated more and more into herself, Dionne took comfort in the familiar annoyance of Phaedra's moaning, tossing, and turning, her body dampening the bedsheets. Between her sister's nocturnal theatrics, the bass that pumped from the club across the street, and the garbage trucks that rumbled up Flatbush Avenue as dawn peeked through their apartment's windows, in Brooklyn Dionne had noise to lull her to sleep and, more important, to distract her from the insistent worry that she'd wake one morning and find her mother gone, and not just for a trip in her mind.

Eventually, Dionne came to be soothed by her grandmother's heavy snores, which rose above the walls that stopped just short of the ceiling to let the breeze pass through. It was a comforting layer of sound alongside the frogs that chirped and croaked and occasionally made the nights in Bird Hill seem louder than the nights in Brooklyn. Soon, Dionne enjoyed having her own room, which was impossible in Brooklyn, where everything that was hers was also Phaedra's.

Now, Dionne nudged her sister again, pressing her bony knee into Phaedra's rib cage, which was puffed up with sleep.

“What?” Phaedra moaned. She felt for her grandmother in the bed bedside her, but her spot on the bed was cool. Phaedra was startled at first, and then she remembered that she'd sometimes stir in the middle of the night and find Hyacinth gone, or wake in the morning to find her grandmother deep in sleep well past sunrise.

“Get up. Don't you want to see Chris?”

“What time is it?”

“Don't worry about the time. Just come.”

Phaedra took in the time on the digital alarm clock, 3:05, and looked up again at Dionne, whose figure she could make out better as her eyes adjusted to the dark. She pulled on her favorite pair of black jeans, an indigo t-shirt, and a sweater she'd brought for chilly nights, but hadn't yet worn.

They walked to the back of the house. Dionne undid the locks on the door that led to the backyard. Once they were outside, the chickens started to rustle their feathers, but stopped when Dionne sprinkled feed for them. The girls skirted the edge of their grandmother's garden, wetting their ankles with hydrangea dew. And then they found the road.

The night was brighter than Phaedra expected, brilliantly lit by the full moon and stars that seemed close enough to pluck from the sky. Phaedra stuck close to her sister as they rounded the first ring of the hill road. She wanted to reach for Dionne's hand, but she knew she was too big for that now.

The girls passed a pink chattel house that Phaedra knew was the halfway point between her grandmother's house and the church. The hairs on Phaedra's arms stood up. Suddenly, she felt a hand grab her right elbow. She yelped and her sister stopped a few strides ahead.

“What kind of time you looking tonight?” the voice rasped in Phaedra's ear.

Phaedra could feel the man and his breath and then his grasp as he ground his hips against her.

“Let me go,” Phaedra said in a voice that was half whisper, half scream.

Dionne stepped between her sister and the stranger and said, “What exactly do you think you're doing?”

“I just want a dance,” the stranger said. Dionne could see the man's glassy eyes and smell the liquor on his breath.

“Does she look like she wants to dance with you?” Dionne asked.

“All right, all right, all right. No need to get upset. I was just trying to have a good time.”

Mr. Jeremiah let Phaedra go and stumbled down the hill, in the opposite direction of his house. He sang, his voice rising above the cricket chorus, “Long time we no have no nice time. Do you, do you, do yah think about that?” He punched the air for emphasis on “that” and Phaedra and Dionne stood watching his retreat until he was too far gone for their eyes to follow or their ears to hear.

“Next time walk closer to me,” Dionne said.

Phaedra nodded. She was too focused on the damp rings of sweat Mr. Jeremiah's hands had left on her wrists to speak.