The Star Side of Bird Hill (6 page)

THE SECOND SESSION
of vacation Bible School began just as July in Bird Hill was yawning toward a close. Going back for round two was particularly hard for Phaedra because now she didn't have the benefit of ignorance about what VBS entailed to make it seem exciting. Just when Phaedra had conquered the steep ascent from the beach to her grandmother's house, just when her latest rereading of
Harriet the Spy
was getting really good, just when she had learned how to launch boomerangs with Chris in Ms. Zelma's backyard—she was thrust again into the tyranny and tedium of VBS.

Vacation Bible School always followed the same schedule: a prayer when they arrived, morning activities, lunch, afternoon activities, and a prayer before dismissal. Phaedra's favorite things were praise song and Bible Jeopardy because these were the only times when she wasn't being scrutinized, teased
about her accent, asked about what her life in America was like, and, occasionally, interrogated about when her mother was coming to collect her and her sister.

The one area where Phaedra excelled, even though she didn't necessarily enjoy it, was memorizing Bible verses. The prospect of wresting the Bible verse memorization championship crown from her nemesis (and three-time winner) Angelique Ward motivated Phaedra to go to VBS even when she didn't want to. Well, that, and the fact that Hyacinth insisted that she was not going to let the good money Avril had spent on VBS go to waste because the girls would prefer to wear out her furniture with their lazy behinds than to learn about the Lord. During recess, while the boys ripped around and the girls jumped double Dutch or played with each other's hair, Phaedra stood off to one side, repeating scripture she'd committed to memory the night before with her grandmother's help. She was not surprised to learn that she and her mother shared the same favorite verse: “No weapon formed against me shall prosper.”

While Phaedra flailed against the injustice of being forced to go to VBS, Dionne sucked up whatever feelings she had about it. Her mounting disinterest in Trevor meant that she sought him out infrequently, but VBS guaranteed that she saw him every day. Dionne simply dried up her remaining affection for him and threw herself into a role she knew well—taking charge of the little sixes and sevens who came for the morning program. When Trevor asked Dionne why she no longer had time for him, she told him that she had plans with
her friends. Even he could see that she was becoming popular with the older girls on the hill, who had gone from seeing Dionne as an oddity to claiming her as an asset, asking her opinion on boys, their hairstyles, clothes. It wasn't unusual that summer to walk onto the netball court in front of the church and find Dionne holding forth to a group of rapt girls about, for example, how to rock leg warmers in spite of the warm weather.

Before VBS, Phaedra had not had any dealings with white people other than the ones she saw on television. She wasn't sure if she could count as white the Hasidic Jews who lived in her neighborhood in Brooklyn, the ones who rushed past her on Shabbat toward their services. These white people who ran the Vacation Bible School were strange, Phaedra thought, but likeable—big, friendly Texans who roasted themselves in the sun and laughed heartily all the time, as if Christ's glory had a laugh track. Her favorite was her teacher, Tracey Taylor. Phaedra knew from watching television that Ms. Taylor was what some people would call beautiful—blond-haired, blue-eyed, flat-bottomed, and full-breasted. She noticed the way all the men and boys panted after Ms. Taylor, especially her coworker Derrick Boss.

The girls in Phaedra's age group were flexing their last bits of power before they'd be reduced to first-formers when school started back in September. In Phaedra, they found an easy target. It was the first Friday of the second, monthlong session of VBS, right after praise song, when the barrage of questions started.

“A jumbie comb your hair or what?” Angelique Ward drew attention to the halo of frizz that hovered above Phaedra's head, the outcome of Phaedra's tender-headed protest against having her hair cornrowed every week. Dionne was not above chasing Phaedra around the house until she washed her hair and sat down for an hour of oiling her scalp, combing through the knots in her hair, and then braiding it. It was more for Dionne, since she saw Phaedra's appearance as a reflection on her. But Hyacinth cared about different things, and said that she didn't want Dionne acting like anybody's mother, lest she find herself in the family way with some bighead boy's child.

“I thought they had combs in America,” Simone Saveur added.

“I don't know where she think she come from with her funny name and her hair flying every which way. What I want to know is who says that light skin and long hair makes you pretty?” Tanya Tompkins pronounced.

The least troublesome of these girls, Donna, was both too round and too timid to join in the teasing. She wore her body like a mistake she hoped to one day be forgiven for. She gestured to Phaedra to follow her inside. Phaedra smashed her fists into her shorts pockets and slid onto one of the church hall's benches beside Donna.

Donna hunched her shoulders as she devoured four tuna fish sandwiches, washing them down with too-sweet Tang, whose flavor crystals stuck to the corners of her mouth. When she'd taken her last gulp, she let out a burp behind her hand and then she turned to Phaedra. Her eyes darted around
the room as if she wanted to be sure that no one heard her secret.

“You know, I have an aunt in Queens. Jamaica, Queens. Is that near where you live?”

“No, I don't think so,” Phaedra said. She had seen the sign for Jamaica on the taxi ride to JFK earlier that summer. Hearing Donna mention Jamaica, Queens, reminded Phaedra of how confused she'd been when she saw the sign, because the only Jamaica she'd heard of before then was the island Jamaica, and she didn't think you could drive there.

“Maybe one day when you're walking around, you'll see her.”

“Maybe,” Phaedra said. She was hungry. She looked behind her to see that the pyramid of saran-wrapped sandwiches was gone. When Phaedra had first seen the sandwiches, she'd dismissed them, thinking she could wait until she got home to eat the food she knew Hyacinth was cooking. She was starving now.

“I have an idea. We can be friends. We'll hang out this summer. And then when you're gone, I'll write to you.”

Phaedra found it hard to imagine being pleased by running into Donna's aunt or responding to Donna's letters. Still, Donna was kinder than any of the other girls had been to her so far. “That would be nice,” she forced herself to say.

Donna offered her second cup of Tang to Phaedra, and she drank it gratefully. She politely declined the bread ends Donna pushed toward her.

Later that afternoon, as they sat cutting pictures of Bible action figures from cardboard, in the same way that the girls
had scanned Phaedra for weak spots before pouncing, they pressed the issue of their teacher's potential beau. Angelique Ward hissed the
s
in Ms. Taylor's name until her status as a single woman sounded like a curse. Slowly, because Ms. Taylor had trouble following the rapid-fire patois they spoke, the other girls said how nice she and Derrick looked leading morning prayers together, that they had noticed him looking at her in a way that seemed more than friendly, that his last name, Boss, meant that he would know what to do when the time came.

Phaedra was happy to have the attention drawn away from everything that was wrong with her as they sat talking with the double doors open for breeze. She focused on cutting out a picture of Zacchaeus, the “wee little man” she knew well from praise song, while the other girls weighed in on the possibility of Ms. Taylor's courtship.

And then Phaedra spoke. “Yes, Ms. Taylor,” she said. “All now, he could be putting his hands up your skirt.”

While the other girls' expressions shifted from shock to judgment, Angelique Ward walked over to Phaedra with her palms planted firmly on her bony hips. She took a deep breath before spitting her words. “Phaedra Ann Braithwaite, it is only your sister who has made herself known for that kind of slackness.”

Ms. Taylor, for her part, didn't know what to do with Phaedra's comment or Angelique's swift punishment. After an uncomfortable silence during which the word “slackness” hung in the air, she dismissed all the girls except Phaedra. “Phaedra,
is there anything you want to talk about?” Ms. Taylor said. She sat down next to Phaedra on the edge of the church hall's stage, the angle and distance between them perfect for sharing a secret.

“No, ma'am,” Phaedra said. Her face strained with the effort of not crying. There was so much that she wanted to say about her mother and her grandmother and Dionne and Chris. But then she remembered what happened when she told her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Friedman, about how her mother would disappear for days and that when she was home she would sit looking out the window or staring at the television screen. The sound of the police sirens when they came to take her mother away came rushing back to Phaedra, piercing the hill's late-afternoon hush.

“Are you sure?” Ms. Taylor asked.

Phaedra said “No” again with more force. She walked out of the church hall, leaving Ms. Taylor alone amid the paper cutouts and folding
chairs.

H
YACINTH'S MOTHER
liked to say that even though she never learned to read, never went to college to be a nurse or a midwife or a doctor, that didn't stop her from delivering every baby on the hill. She worked roots for everyone, even for those who said that obeah was backward and against their Christian beliefs, but would still find themselves at her doorstep under cover of darkness, seeking help with a man who suddenly had a hot foot or a taste for another woman's pot, a womb that wouldn't bear children, a son or daughter gone to the States or England and never heard from again. Hyacinth went further than her mother in school and knew enough to write and to read the
Nation
and her Bible. And for her, that was enough. She felt the hill as a magnetic force that pulled her close even when she was outside its bounds. The only safe place to travel was in your dreams, she thought. And despite
her daughter spending almost two decades in what Hyacinth referred to alternatively as “foreign,” “up there,” and “that man country,” Hyacinth never stepped foot past Bridgetown. Everything she needed was in her yard.

As soon as Phaedra was old enough to write, she wrote to her grandmother. At first, she just added a few
x
's and
o
's at the end of her mother's letters. But soon, she was writing her own short letters every month, catching her grandmother up on what she was learning in school, which psalms she knew by heart, pretending that she'd made closer friends than she had. It was hard for Phaedra to reconcile the hardness in Avril's voice when she talked about Barbados in general and Bird Hill in particular with the peaceful place Hyacinth described. But the different ways Phaedra and her sister saw the world in general and their parents in particular taught Phaedra that two people could feel different ways about exactly the same things, and that they could both be right.

It was Phaedra's grandmother who told her that she should start keeping track of her dreams. Her mother bought her a dream catcher at a powwow out at Floyd Bennett Field, and she placed it above her bed in Brooklyn, hoping to hang on a bit longer to the Technicolor pulse behind her eyes. Avril always told her that dreams were just another world we lived in, different from but related to the waking world.

In her grandmother's house, there was a carafe filled with water on the night table that Phaedra sipped from each morning to help her remember where her dreams had taken her.
There was another glass of water beneath the bed to catch tricky spirits. The carafe was one way Phaedra knew that beauty was not something reserved for the wealthy, but a common, everyday kind of thing that was available to anyone with eyes open enough to see. Phaedra had taken to writing down her dreams, imitating her grandmother, who kept a notebook by her bedside for precisely this purpose.

For days, Phaedra dreamed of schools of flying fish jumping out of the water, not unlike the ones she'd seen on Sunday afternoons after church when Hyacinth let her and Dionne go to the beach with the Lovings. The third day she dreamed of fish, she woke up later than usual, having slept in to savor the feeling of the sun on her skin and the light reflecting the fishes' silver flesh. When she awoke, she wandered into the kitchen, where her sister and grandmother were mixing salt fish and flour together for fish cakes.

“Good morning, Granny,” Phaedra said, hugging her grandmother from behind. She felt Hyacinth stiffen at her embrace, but she leaned in further to smell the nutmeg on her housedress.

“Well, hello. I see Sleeping Beauty finally decide to wake. What sweet you this morning so?” Finally too uncomfortable, Hyacinth pulled herself free from Phaedra's grip, making an excuse of reaching for the fish draining in a colander.

“I had the best dream. I dreamed we were all at a picnic at Pebbles Beach and the flying fish were jumping so high it looked like they could touch the sun.”

“Hmmm, have you ever thought that maybe you were just dreaming that because we're going to the beach later?” Dionne asked.

“We are?” Phaedra said, the pitch of her voice turning up with excitement.

“Yes, darling. You don't remember the church picnic is today?” Hyacinth looked out at the plants encroaching on the white hydrangeas below her kitchen window. “Looks like a whole army of weeds take over my garden. I don't know how it is that I have two strong girls here with me and I still have to be bending down and cleaning up all the time as if I'm a young person.”

“What do the fish in my dreams mean, Gran?” Phaedra asked.

“It means a baby soon come. Take note, darling, and see if your dreams don't bear fruit.”

Phaedra looked out through the picture window at the bananas, which she still couldn't call figs like everyone else did. The banana trees she'd imagined stretched their branches high to the sky, not fat and squat to the ground, heavy with fruit that turned purple like Jean's skin before they ripened. Maybe the baby would come just like the fruit on that tree, she thought, upside down and not at all how she expected it.

“So fish mean babies?”

“You dream of fish and a baby soon come. Dream of a wedding and it's a funeral around the corner. Dream of a funeral and somebody's getting married soon,” Hyacinth said.

Phaedra jumped when she heard the pop and hiss as Hyacinth lowered the first few tablespoons of batter into hot oil.

“OK, OK, that's all I can remember for right now,” Phaedra said.

Phaedra left the kitchen wondering where this child might come from. Her absent wonder almost made her chores go by
quickly.