The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (20 page)

The phone rang and Clarice pulled the last strips of bacon from the skillet before going to answer it. After she said hello, she heard a young woman ask, “May I please speak to Richmond?”

Clarice was about to call him to the phone, but she heard the sound of water running in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, so she said, “I’m sorry, Richmond isn’t available right now. Who may I tell him called?”

There was a pause, and then the woman said, “I was just calling to confirm my meeting with him today.” Another pause. “This is Mrs. Jones.”

Mrs. Jones
. Clarice had to roll her eyes at that one.

Clarice said, “I’ll be sure to deliver the message, Mrs. Jones.” She hung up and went back to stirring the already overcooked grits.

Her mother had tired of discussing Clarice’s failed musical career. She began to complain about her Arkansas neighbor, Clarice’s aunt
Glory, another of her favorite topics of conversation. Aunt Glory was petty. Aunt Glory was ill-tempered. Aunt Glory was unwilling to listen to constructive criticism. And, worst of all, Aunt Glory had set such a bad Christian example in her own home that Veronica had fallen under the satanic influence of a fortune-teller.

She said, “Veronica hasn’t been right since she left Calvary and went over to First Baptist. Those First Baptist folks are all show and no substance. Watch and see how fast they drop her after she burns through that money she got from the Leaning Tree place. Mind you, they’re still a step ahead of that primitive Holy Family bunch. I know your friend Odette goes there, but honestly, they might as well be snake handlers.”

The ache behind Clarice’s eyes that had started when Forrest Payne called a day earlier throbbed a little harder with each word that came from her mother’s mouth. What made it worse was the fact that Clarice had expressed similar sentiments about her cousin and about her friends’ churches countless times. Just like Veronica, her mother had a way of reminding Clarice of how alike their thinking was, and seeing the similarities between them made her more and more uncomfortable as time passed.

Richmond burst into the kitchen with a wide, welcoming grin on his handsome face. He was dressed in black slacks and a maroon knit shirt that was tight enough to display the muscles he worked so hard at maintaining. He kissed his mother-in-law on her forehead and sat down next to her.

He winked and said, “Good morning, Bea. How’s the second-prettiest girl in the world doing today?”

Beatrice giggled and said, “You are a darling man, taking the time to sweet-talk an old woman like me.”

“You haven’t aged a day since I met you, and that’s the truth,” he said, gaining another giggle in reply.

To Clarice, Richmond said, “Sweetheart, I have to spend the day in Louisville with Ramsey talking to a football coach and a kid we’re scouting. Depending on how things go, I might not make it back for dinner.”

She nodded and brought Richmond his bowl of grits and a plate with two scrambled eggs and bacon. He said, “Thanks, babe,” and began to eat.

She walked across the kitchen and got the pot of coffee from the machine and brought it back to the table to pour it into his mug. Maybe it was because her mother distracted her from her task by asking about Odette’s health, or perhaps because her mind wandered off to her plans for the day, or because she caught a glimpse of the self-satisfied smirk on Richmond’s face, but the coffee Clarice poured missed Richmond’s mug entirely. Half of the pot spread onto the table and the other half splashed into Richmond’s lap. It wasn’t until he screamed, “Damn it!” and jumped up from his chair that she realized what she had done.

In a voice so high-pitched and breathless from shock that she sounded as if she had been the one doused with steaming hot coffee, Clarice cried out, “I’m so sorry! Are you okay? Let me get something to wipe that off.”

He pulled the steaming fabric of his pants away from his thighs with both thumbs and forefingers. “Don’t bother. I’ve got to get out of these. Jesus Christ, Clarice.” He left the kitchen and hurried up the stairs.

Beatrice didn’t say anything to Clarice as she watched her daughter clean up the mess she had made. She just finished her cup of tea and ate her breakfast—one slice of dry toast and one poached egg, the same breakfast she’d eaten every morning Clarice could recall.

Clarice, having lost her appetite, placed the food she had planned to eat into a plastic tub and tucked it into the refrigerator along with the eggs and milk.

Richmond came down again as Clarice put the last of her breakfast away. He was wearing gray pants and an annoyed expression now. He said, “I’m running late. I’ve got to go.”

“But you’ve hardly had anything to eat,” Clarice said.

He pulled his coat from the rack by the garage door. “That’s okay. I’ll get something later.”

“Richmond, I really am sorry about the coffee.”

He blew a kiss at his wife from across the room and went through the door.

Beatrice retrieved her compact from the pocket of her red-and-green Christmas cardigan and reapplied her lipstick. Then she said, “Clarice, I think you should have a talk with Reverend Peterson. That always helped me when things were bad with your father and our little problem.”

Clarice’s mother called her father’s serial infidelities their “little problem.” It bugged Clarice to no end whenever she described it that way, but she felt that she couldn’t rightfully say anything about it. She knew it was hypocritical of her to be bothered by her mother giving Abraham Jordan’s cheating a comfortable euphemism when Clarice herself had spent decades pretending Richmond’s “little problem” didn’t even exist. But that didn’t stop her from wanting to shout at her mother to shut the hell up.

Beatrice said, “Reverend Peterson has had a lot of experience. Believe me, there isn’t a thing you can say that’ll shock him. He can help you deal with all this anger.”

“I’m not angry.”

“Clarice, what you have to concentrate on is that this is all a part of God’s plan. Sometimes we women have to suffer an unfair amount to gain the Lord’s favor. Just remember that you’re paying the toll for your entrance into the Kingdom. Reverend Peterson explained that to me years ago, and I haven’t had a moment of anger since.”

That just about beat all, Clarice thought. Her father was long dead and her mother still felt sufficiently irate about his behavior to warrant traveling with her holy megaphone. And
she
was passing out anger-management advice?
Watch out, old woman, or I’ll brew an extra hot pot of coffee just for you
.

Clarice said, “Thank you for your advice, Mother, but I’m really not angry. Things are the same with Richmond as they’ve always been. We’re fine.”

“Clarice, dear, you just scalded the man’s crotch and threw away his insulin.”

“Threw away his insulin? What are you talking about?”

Her mother pointed at the trash can. Clarice went to it and pressed the foot pedal that lifted the lid. Sure enough, atop eggshells, coffee grounds, and discarded wrappings of different sorts was the box that contained Richmond’s insulin supply, the box that sometime during the past ten minutes she must have removed from its place in the refrigerator door and tossed into the trash.

She picked up the insulin and stared at it for several seconds. Then she put the box back into the fridge. She took off her apron then and said, “Mother, I think we’ll go shopping a little bit later.”

Clarice left the kitchen and walked through the dining room, past the living room, into the music room, and to her piano. She ripped into Beethoven’s
Appassionata
Sonata and forgot about everything, for a while.

During the week after she saw Chick at the hospital, Barbara Jean couldn’t keep her mind in the present day. She chatted with Erma Mae at the All-You-Can-Eat on Wednesday afternoon and found herself glancing down, fully expecting to see Erma Mae’s son, Earl III, clinging to his mother’s apron with sticky hands. It was only after several seconds of bewilderment that Barbara Jean recalled that Earl III—or Three, as everyone called him—had long since grown up and said goodbye to Plainview, like most of his generation. That Friday evening, a pack of laughing college students passed her on the street as she walked home from the museum, and she ogled them until they noticed that she was watching and returned her stare while chuckling and whispering to each other. In her embarrassment, she nearly chased after them to explain that she had momentarily misplaced a few decades and had been searching through their crowd for the younger faces of her middle-aged friends. The sight of a young interracial couple strolling, hand in hand, down Plainview Avenue on Saturday night spun her into a state of near hysteria, fretting over threats to the couple’s safety that had largely vanished years earlier. Each memory triggered by these encounters pushed her toward a bottle, a flask, or her thermos of spiked tea. The good memories weighed her down just as heavily as the bad, and they all demanded to be drunk away, even though some of those memories really were wonderful.

After Barbara Jean kissed Chick in the back hallway of the All-You-Can-Eat, she fell into a pattern. She would wait until Big Earl, Miss Thelma, and Little Earl were asleep, and then she would look out of
her bedroom window to see if the light in the storeroom across the street at the restaurant was on. If it was, she slipped out of the house and went to see Chick.

They sat on his bed, surrounded by sixty-four-ounce cans of green beans and corn, and they talked until one or both of them couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer. When they weren’t talking, they were kissing—it was just kissing, at first. And every moment was heavenly.

If they couldn’t meet at the All-You-Can-Eat, they would sneak over to the backyard of Odette’s house and press themselves together in the seclusion of the vine-covered gazebo in her mother’s garden. At Barbara Jean’s insistence, they even traveled over shadowed routes to his bully of a brother’s property a few times. They went into the shed where Chick had lived with his chickens and they kissed passionately on his old feather-covered cot. It was like a purification ritual, and the danger of the situation made it all the more irresistible.

Chick was a year out of high school then and he was thinking about college, mostly because Big Earl kept telling him that he was too smart not to. Big Earl said the same thing to Barbara Jean.

Barbara Jean liked the idea of college, but she couldn’t imagine what she would study. She didn’t have a passion like Clarice had with her piano. She got okay grades and she liked school enough. But Loretta had drummed it into her head since she was a child that she was going to marry a rich man. And that required a specific kind of preparation, a kind that you didn’t need college to achieve.

Barbara Jean’s mother taught her to dress in the manner that she associated with glamour—everything shiny and/or revealing. To make sure Barbara Jean talked like a high-class woman, her mother put belt lashes across her back if she dropped
g
s from the ends of her words, the way Loretta did. Barbara Jean and her mother joined First Baptist Church because the richest and lightest-skinned black people in town went there. Her mother weighed her every week to make sure her weight was always within man-catching range—something she and Clarice shared in common, Barbara Jean later discovered.

Barbara Jean thought it was funny that, when she finally did find a
rich man, Loretta’s life lessons had proved useless. All that had mattered was that she pass his family’s skin color test. When she was introduced to Lester’s mother, the old woman held a brown paper bag up to Barbara Jean’s cheek and, judging her just a smidge lighter in comparison, said, “Welcome to the family.”

During the winter of Barbara Jean’s senior year, she wasn’t thinking about her education, or marrying rich, or anything. She was crazy in love with a white boy who was poorer than anybody she knew. Loretta must have been spinning in her grave.

Even as she fell more deeply in love with Chick, Barbara Jean saw more of Lester. She was too naïve and too blinded by her feelings for Chick to even notice that the hours she spent with Lester were also a kind of dating. He often showed up at the All-You-Can-Eat with James and sat for a while at the window table with Barbara Jean and her friends. But Barbara Jean never thought anything of it. Everyone, it seemed, put in time at the window table. Little Earl, that obnoxious Ramsey Abrams, Clarice’s silly cousin Veronica. Even Chick became a regular guest at the table when he wasn’t on duty, since he and James had become good buddies.

Sometimes Lester drove his young friends to Evansville and other nearby towns in his beautiful blue Cadillac, treating them to dinners they could never have afforded on their own. Always, he was a perfect gentleman. Lester never so much as held Barbara Jean’s hand, much less made any sort of advances. She enjoyed his company and was flattered that he wanted to be her friend.

Clarice told Barbara Jean several times that Lester was interested in her, but Barbara Jean didn’t pay much attention to her. Barbara Jean shared Odette’s opinion that Clarice, already having scripted her own happy ending with Richmond, was now eager to write one for everybody else.

On a January night in 1968, Lester took James, Richmond, and the Supremes out for a ride in his Cadillac and then to dinner at a nice place in Louisville to celebrate Richmond having broken a passing record at the university. Barbara Jean enjoyed herself. The food was good and the restaurant was the most glamorous place she had
ever stepped inside of. But she couldn’t wait to get back to Chick. It was Chick’s birthday and she had saved up to buy him a Timex wristwatch with a genuine leather band, which she thought back then was the height of elegance. She kept an eye on James all through dinner, waiting for his yawning to signal that the evening was over. But James didn’t start to fade until 10:00, and it was nearly 10:30 when they began the forty-minute drive back to Plainview.

When Lester dropped Barbara Jean off, she found Odette’s parents in Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s living room. Laughing and bobbing their heads to a scratchy old record playing on the stereo, they waved hello to Barbara Jean through a haze of bluish-gray smoke as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom. The four of them stayed up late that night, the way they always did when they got together. When the Jacksons finally went home at around 2:00, Big Earl and Miss Thelma went straight to bed. They fell into loud snoring not five minutes after their bedroom door closed. For the thousandth time that night, Barbara Jean looked out the window to see if the storeroom light at the All-You-Can-Eat was still on. It was, so she tiptoed down the stairs and went to see Chick.