Phaedra got her sense of what it might mean to go home one evening in Brooklyn. She was seven when she made the mistake of complaining about having to eat chicken for dinner every night. Avril’s eyes turned from their usual doe brown to the shiny black beads they became under the influence of brandy or the winds of a changing mood. “You think life’s hard here? Try life at home,” she said.
Phaedra knew better than to respond to what she knew was not a question. She went back to pushing withered chicken strips around on her plate. And then she felt her chair give way beneath her. Suddenly, she was on the floor and the full heat of her mother’s rage was on top of her. Avril hovered over Phaedra, seething, trying to decide what to do with her.
“You think people at home eat meat every day?” Avril asked. She dragged Phaedra down their apartment’s long hallway, holding her by the flesh at the top of her right arm, talking the whole way. “You want to go home to live with Granny? Let’s send you home and see if you like it there.”
Avril flipped on the light in the girls’ bedroom and rifled around in their closet for suitcases. Phaedra didn’t dare offer to help by telling her mother that they were stored beneath the bunk beds. Avril found one eventually, a red valise coated in a thick layer of dust.
“Let’s see what you should bring. You’ll only need light clothes there,” Avril said.
She climbed a step stool and pulled down the bin with Phaedra’s and Dionne’s summer clothes, then emptied its contents into the suitcase and zipped it closed.
“You want to go home?”
“No, Mommy,” Phaedra said, hoping her lesson would end there.
“Too late now,” Avril said. She shoved the suitcase toward Phaedra, then unlocked the door to the apartment. Avril pushed Phaedra and the suitcase into the cold hallway, all the while repeating her classic line, “Who don’t hear will feel.”
“Please, Mommy, I’ll be good, just let me come inside,” Phaedra said to the closed door, even after she’d heard her mother turn up the volume on the television to drown out her noise.
Phaedra stood at the doorway for the better part of an hour, shivering. Neighbors—a man with a pregnant wife who looked like she was about to give birth to a fully grown person any day—passed by. The man asked if she was OK and Phaedra just nodded at the wonder of his wife’s belly and turned toward the door to hide the holey shorts and thin tank top her mother had pushed her outside in. Phaedra sat down on the suitcase. Each time she heard the strains of the elevator, she prayed that no one would get off on their floor.
Phaedra’s tears had dried by the time Avril finally came to the door to let her back in. Avril didn’t say anything, not about dinner or what she’d done. From then, it was impossible to separate the idea of going to Barbados from the stark memory of Avril’s anger. Bird Hill was for Phaedra, at first, as much a place to be banished to as a place to call home.
For Avril, the island loomed large whenever a tropical storm bore down on the Caribbean, and she called Hyacinth to make sure one of the young fellas battened down the windows, and she and the girls watched anxiously as the hurricane turned colors on the television news and usually spared the island. It was there when Barbados Independence Day came and with it a feast of Bajan food and overly enthusiastic greetings at their church’s Saturday night dinner dance and Sunday service, celebrations Avril and the girls had missed since Avril took to her bed. It was there in the Nation, the Bajan newspaper Avril bought each weekend from the newsstand on Nostrand Avenue and read with more regularity than the local newspaper, piling issues high before using them to pack away dishes and the few fine things they had left for their imminent move.
As Avril became more lethargic, her commitment to moving out of their apartment, which she more often than not referred to as “this stinking place,” became more strident. Sometimes, when she couldn’t hold sleep long enough to find rest, Avril would go through fits of packing, never mind that she’d done nothing to find a new apartment besides saying that she wanted one, and despite the fact that being packed with nowhere to go was at best delusional, and at worst depressing. For Avril, staying on the move, or assuring herself that she would be leaving soon, was one way of trying to outrun her feelings.
Like many of the other West Indian women she knew in passing—because Avril was not the kind for fast friendships—upon moving to the States, she had gone from being a teacher at home to becoming a nurse there. She’d started working at Kings County, the city hospital just a few blocks away from the apartment she shared with Errol and the girls. Avril ended up at St. Vincent’s after Phaedra started day care. In the time she was there, seven years in total, Avril saw the hospital go from treating people with what they were calling GRID, or gay-related immune deficiency, to calling what consumed them AIDS, and the thing that caused it HIV. Regardless of what its name was, Avril witnessed the way the disease tore down young men in the prime of their lives who checked into the hospital, once, twice, maybe more often for the frequent fliers, and then never checked out again.
As Avril got pulled deeper into her work at St. Vincent’s, Errol—who had always wanted nothing less than his wife’s full attention, who was the kind of man who would have taken pride in having a wife who didn’t need to work, who couldn’t understand why she would want to leave her good-good house to put herself in the company of men he considered less than dogs—had questioned how she could choose her work over her family. What he’d said actually, in the argument that Avril understood as the point of no return, was, “I don’t know how you expect me to trust a woman who would risk bringing that nasty disease home to her husband and her two young kids.” And it was this misunderstanding, and not Errol’s empty dreams or Avril’s foolishness in following him, that undid them in the end. Avril, for all her faults, was nothing if not someone who wanted to be devoted to family, and she knew that she couldn’t love anyone who only saw the ways she fell short, and not her desire to be a good mother and wife. Errol, for his part, not hearing a response to his question, which was really, “How much do you love us?” knew that it really was over, that she would keep choosing her work and the sadness and stress it brought her over him and the girls.
If Avril made any good friends since leaving her best friend, Jean, and Mrs. Loving behind in Bird Hill, at least one of them was death. Some men passed after just a few days of struggling against the disease on the ward where she worked, which was nicknamed the Sevens. Avril felt each of their deaths keenly. But during the late-night and early morning shifts that she worked, she also felt a sense of purpose, a feeling of working against something that she still believed could be defeated. Besides, being surrounded by the remains of other people’s lives in the hospital made it a fitting place to mourn the person she thought she’d become in the States, the family she thought she would have, the husband she thought would love her unconditionally, the children she thought she would raise.
Avril wondered sometimes if she wouldn’t have preferred teaching rude American children in the public schools, or wiping old people’s behinds in a nursing home, but once she’d committed to her work, she couldn’t stop. It was her gumption (and being told that she couldn’t do it by a coworker at Kings County who was a refugee from the death and dying at St. Vincent’s) that drove her right into the open arms of the plague. There were the men, some with their rooms fitted out like the Waldorf, others with little more than the clothes on their back, some with so many piercings and tattoos it was hard to make out the contours of their skin. There were their chosen families of friends—lovers and madmen, Avril liked to call them. There was one couple she remembered, two women who looked more like boys, who would come after late nights of clubbing and climb into bed with their friend, a dancer who was larger than life onstage, they said, but never agile enough to navigate the wires and tubes that engulfed him.
And then there was that man’s lover, a tall man with gorgeous dark skin the color of egg
plant who put her in mind of Jean. Because he reminded her so much of Jean, when he looked confused about how to keep up with the regimen of meds the doctor prescribed when he took his lover home to die, Avril gave him her home phone number. And so she was the first one he told that the symptoms that had cropped up in his lover now had come to wreak havoc on his body too.
The night he called was a night like any other night; the girls were doing their homework at the kitchen table when the phone rang. Avril had made dinner, and it was Phaedra, who was usually the sweeter of her two girls, who asked her why they always had to eat the same thing. Avril had not quite landed at home yet; she was still in the world of the ward, the tubes and the flickering lights that she knew would go out for the one person whom she’d allowed to become a sort of friend, when she heard Phaedra’s question. She was angry, and that was why she came down on her child, talking so hard and fast about what home would be like, because what she really wanted more than anything at that moment was to go home to her own mother, to be held by Hyacinth, to be told that the death that had come to sit down beside her would eventually take its leave and go. What Avril wanted more than anything then was the gift of a gentle lie, someone to tell her that her friend would beat this, unlike so many others who had not. Not finding someone who would do her that small favor, she turned to destroy the closest, smallest thing outside herself, which just happened to be Phaedra.
After that night, the sadness that had been crouching at the corner of Avril’s eyes consumed her face, and then her body. She called in sick to work the next day and never went back. And then she was down. Without the daily dramas of either the hospital or the hill, Avril was floating, anchorless. A kind of freedom she’d always wanted, but didn’t know what to do with when it came.
“Just like my Jean, he was,” Avril would say over and over again.
Dionne knew that a cup of milky black tea could calm her mother. And so she’d brewed countless cups until the box of PG Tips was empty and there was no money to buy more.
“Just like him,” Avril kept saying. And then, “You remember Jean?” she’d ask Dionne. At first, Dionne would shake her head. But Avril insisted that Jean had held her when she was a baby, that he’d come to visit and she’d laughed and played patty-cake with him until Jean’s arms were tired. Eventually Dionne went along, repeating stories Avril had told her about Jean, because it made her mother smile, and Dionne had learned that some things were worth the price of dishonesty.
Once Avril was home for good, anything that was out of its designated place would be lost to Avril’s packing fervor. And it was for this reason that Dionne pared down her clothes to just a few items. She hid them beneath her bed because she knew Avril wouldn’t trouble them there—three pairs of jeans and five tops, a few dresses, two pairs of shorts, two bras, and seven panties. The danger was not in loving something too much, Dionne thought, but in loving anything more than what you could carry in your pocket or on your back. Dionne had learned to make the objects of her affection small—designer jeans, a certain kind of pencil whose eraser released a scent when you used it, a new lipstick.
Loving another person, she knew well from watching and knowing Avril, was the most dangerous thing of all. Loving a country besides the one you lived in was a recipe for heartache.
For Dionne, Barbados was at best an inconvenience. As far as she was concerned, being born in Barbados had never benefited her in any particular way. She did know that Barbados was the one thing that her crazy mother and absent father had in common. Which is to say that for Dionne, Barbados was at the root of what she thought was wrong with her family, and not anywhere she wanted to spend an extended period of time.
Dionne once had another idea entirely about how she would celebrate her sixteenth birthday. She and her best friend in Brooklyn, Taneisha, had their hearts set on a party hall on Church Avenue. Everybody was going to be there: Taneisha’s Trinidadian cousins and uncles and sisters, their friends from school (mostly Taneisha’s), and Darren, the boy who Dionne had been going with since he’d moved up from Jamaica three years before.
Dionne was drawn into the school yard romance with Darren by girls who said “it would be cute if y’all went together” because of the way that Dionne’s chestnut skin played off Darren’s hazelnut eyes, the same eyes that had every girl from Vandeveer to Erasmus fantasizing about Darren looking at them. As Dionne got to know Darren on their bus rides home together, her affection for him had deepened, fulfilling the vain promise that had brought them together. Since she’d arrived in Barbados, Dionne thought of Darren often in spite of herself, though she knew that attachment was the first step on the road to disappointment.
After her father left, Dionne witnessed a parade of men her mother entertained for as long as they would stick around. But while she could attract men, draw them into her web, Avril had trouble keeping them. In the last relationship, the one that ended the year before Dionne started high school, Dionne wanted to believe her mother’s conviction that her boyfriend, Musa, would marry her. But something happened once her mother made her intentions for Musa clear, and every time he came over after that, he was always just about to leave again, as if her mother’s desire for him had propelled him in the opposite direction. By his last visit, Musa wouldn’t even take his coat off, just brought the books he’d promised to Phaedra and the Vogue fall fashion issue he’d promised to Dionne, kissed their mother, and left. Dionne had learned from her mother that if you wanted to keep a man, he should love you at least a little bit more than you loved him.
Avril’s plan to send the girls back home for the summer, announced just one week before they left, had messed up everything—the party, working at V.I.M. to save up money for school clothes, Dionne’s hopes of going into the city on Saturday nights with Darren and Taneisha and her girls. So, here she was in Bird Hill on her birthday, Saturday, July 16. And as her grandmother Hyacinth would say, nothing at all go so. There would be no DJ making special shout-outs to the birthday girl, no adults hovering in the back alley smoking joints, drinking beer, squeezing past each other to heap their plates high with curry chicken and roti skins. No girls dancing front to front on boys, winding their waists as if their whole lives had made them move this way, talking afterward about the boys whose dicks had gone hard, then soft on them.
Back in Brooklyn, the outfit that Dionne put on layaway—white jeans with a question mark in gold thread on the back pockets, a matching white top and jacket—still had $20 to go before it was paid off. Instead of wearing it, Dionne was sporting the new dress her grandmother made for her with “room to grow,” a maritime number with a boat collar, white trim, and heavy navy fabric. Dionne thought that the dress was more fit for a box of powdered milk than a girl like her, with legs that started just below her neck, arms made for hanging on to boys rather than pounding nutmeg, and hands more fit for finger-snapping than housework of any kind.
Buller Man Jean was the one to whom most of the hill women turned to get their clothes sewn and, in a pinch, their hair done. He owed Dionne’s grandmother a favor and so he gave Dionne a relaxer before the party that left her hair not quite straight. A night of sleeping in hard plastic rollers had given Dionne a neck ache and tight curls that didn’t brush her shoulders the way she liked. But it would have to do. A lifetime of watching her mother closely had been nothing if not a tutorial in resignation and making do.
Now Dionne looked around for Jean. She searched first for the elastic hair bands he wore like bracelets around his wrist, and then for his skin that was the color of a ripe plum. She wanted to catch Jean’s eye so that she could register her disdain about her hair with him, but she couldn’t find him in the crowd. She took note of the fact that she had never seen Jean at church or a church function, which in Bird Hill was a way of saying she had never seen him out. The church, more than being just a place to worship the Lord, was the place where the fabric of the community was woven, public dramas pl
ayed out and put to rest, subtle lines of hierarchy drawn and redrawn again. If the hill were a quilt made up of its families, Jean and his mother Trixie’s patch was one the quilter forgot beneath her bed.
The party, if it was fair to call it that, was a joint one with Clotel Gumbs, a girl who wore glasses with lenses as thick as breadfruit skin, crinoline dresses that reached her ankles, and a mouth that seemed to open only to correct grammar or to quote Bible verses. Dionne thought Clotel rather unfortunate. And though in summers past the girls played together and ran as far as the hill women saw fit to let them, now it was clear that they had nothing in common besides a birthday. Where Clotel envisioned a life as a schoolteacher and homemaker, Dionne saw herself working in a fashion house on Fifth Avenue, selecting trends for the next fall collection. In Dionne’s mind, her summer job selling sneakers and clothes at V.I.M. on Flatbush was a humble but legitimate step toward her career in fashion. Being stuck in Barbados, a place she might have described as sartorially challenged, was another step a world away from the life of glamour Dionne wanted for herself, a life full of style and free of the burdens of her mother’s and sister’s needs. These differences, simply matters of style when Dionne and Clotel were younger, were now big enough to constitute a wall neither of them could see over.
The Star Side of Bird Hill Page 4
