The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (21 page)

He was sitting on his narrow bed looking down when Barbara Jean walked into the room with the gift box in her outstretched hands. She rushed over and sat beside him. She said, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t get over here any sooner.” She was going to explain about the Jacksons visiting until late, but he looked up then and she stopped talking.

Chick had a red-and-blue bruise on his chin and his lower lip was split. She didn’t need to ask who had done it. She said, “Why’d you go over there?” and then immediately wished she hadn’t said it.

She reached out and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He tried to pull away at first, but then he relaxed and laid his head against her neck. He talked quietly in her ear.

“I ran into my brother’s girlfriend, Liz, this morning. She said Desmond had been talking about how he wanted me to come back home. She said he’d been in a good mood for a while, not drinking as much and stuff. Plus, Liz’s got this little girl. She’s not my brother’s kid, but she calls me Uncle Ray. And Liz said her daughter was asking
why her Uncle Ray didn’t come see her over Christmas.” Chick shrugged. “She asked me to come by for supper. So, I went.

“Desmond was already pretty drunk when I got to the house, but he was joking and kidding around like we used to do sometimes. Then he lost it halfway through supper. He’s like that. Changes real quick.”

From years with Loretta, Barbara Jean knew how a drunken meal could go all crazy with no warning. One sip too much and a switch inside got flipped from off to on, and then things went bad fast.

“Nothing really started it, but all of a sudden he was yelling at Liz that she was a whore and was cheating on him. He threw his plate at her, so Liz grabbed her kid and took off before he could throw another one. Then he started in on me. He said he heard a rumor that I was working for a—a colored man.”

Chick said it in a way that made it clear to Barbara Jean that “colored man” hadn’t been the term his brother had used.

“Desmond said he wasn’t gonna let me shame him in front of his friends. And then he started swinging.”

“I’m getting better, though,” Chick said. He raised his hands and showed her his scraped and bleeding knuckles. “I got in a few good ones myself this time.” He tried to smile and grimaced because of his busted lip.

All the air seemed to go out of him then. He pulled away from Barbara Jean and stared down at his hands as they rested in his lap. Shaking his head, he said, “It’s all shit. It’s all just a bunch of shit.”

She reached out and lightly stroked the bruise on his chin, remembering how the touch of his fingers had forever transformed the belt buckle scars on her arm into a smiling face. She kissed his mouth, avoiding the swollen part of his lip. She kissed him again and again. Then she put her hands on his waist and carefully pulled his T-shirt up over his head. There were more bruises on his chest and on his skinny arms and she leaned over and kissed those, too.

Chick put his hands on the sides of her face and kissed her now. Then he reached down and began to unbutton her blouse.

They undressed each other as if they had been doing it for years,
no fumbling or rushing. And when they were both naked, they slid beneath the covers of his bed.

Barbara Jean was more experienced than Chick was. But her knowledge of intimacy had come too early and under bad circumstances, courtesy of evil men. She realized from the moment that she and Chick pulled the blankets over their bodies that this was as different from those other times as it could be. And that difference made it seem like her first time, too.

They wound themselves together over and over again, in a blur of arms and legs, lips and hands. When, finally, they were so ragged from exhaustion that they could do no more than lie with their mouths inches apart, each inhaling the other’s breath, Barbara Jean forgot all about the passing of time and fell asleep in his arms under the pile of tangled linens.

When Barbara Jean awakened, he was gone. She sat up in the bed and looked around the tiny room, at the giant cans of corn, lard, and beans that were stacked to the ceiling against slatted wood walls, at the lamp he’d made from a Coca-Cola bottle and other bits scavenged from the trash cans behind the hardware store. She began to panic, thinking that she had made an awful mistake. She heard her mother’s voice in her head saying, “I told you, girl. That’s how men are. They get what they want, and then they run.”

The panic fled when Chick tiptoed back into the room, still naked, carrying a big dish of ice cream with two spoons sticking out of it.

Seeing that Barbara Jean was awake, he grinned at her. “It’s my birthday. We’ve got to have ice cream.”

His smile fell away when he saw Barbara Jean’s face. He said, “Are you okay? You aren’t sorry, are you? You aren’t sorry we did—you know, what we did, are you?”

“I’m not sorry. I just thought for a second that you’d left, that’s all.”

Chick sat on the edge of the bed and kissed her. He tasted like vanilla and cream. “Why would I go anywhere? You’re here.”

She took the ice cream dish from him and placed it on the bedside table he had made by stacking old fruit crates. She kicked off the blankets and pulled him toward her. They both laughed as she sang,
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” into his ear while he settled his weight on top of her again.

Barbara Jean and Chick were sharing melted ice cream when they heard the back door of the restaurant open. Someone rattled around in the kitchen as they listened. Then the radio came on and they heard Miss Thelma humming.

Barbara Jean knew she should have been frightened of being discovered there with Chick. And she knew that she should have thought she had done something wrong. She had learned at least that much from Sundays at First Baptist Church. But she couldn’t manage to feel the slightest bit bad about the best night of her life.

They stayed there in bed together listening to the clanking of pots and pans and enjoying the sound of Miss Thelma’s out-of-tune vocalizing. They finished the melted ice cream and kissed, silently celebrating their new lives on a planet all their own.

An old-timey blues song came on the radio and Miss Thelma began to sing along: “My baby love to rock, my baby love to roll. What she do to me just soothe my soul. Ye-ye-yes, my baby love me …”

Chick threw back the covers and hopped out of the bed. He stood beside the bed and began to dance, slowly moving his narrow hips in a widening circle while turning away from Barbara Jean to wave his tiny ass in her direction. He grinned back at her over his shoulder, mouthing the words of the song as he moved.

Barbara Jean had to pick up the pillow and press it against her mouth to keep Miss Thelma from hearing her laugh as Ray Carlson, the King of the Pretty White Boys, danced for her. She laughed so hard she cried. All the while her spinning, seventeen-year-old brain replayed the same thoughts:
My Ray. Ray of light. Ray of sunshine. Ray of hope
.

Barbara Jean thought of her mother. But now, for the first time ever, thinking of Loretta didn’t make her feel bad. She thought about what Loretta would say if she had been able to tell her about this night. Her mother would have said, “Well, it looks like you are your mama’s daughter after all. Your stuff was so good you done made a white boy jump up naked and dance the blues.”

I didn’t exactly sail through my treatments the way I’d fantasized, but the side effects weren’t as bad as I’d been warned they could be. My stomach was a mess sometimes, but mostly I was able to eat like I always had. My skin dried out, but didn’t crack and bleed. I was tired, but not so weary that I had to quit my job or even miss a Sunday at the All-You-Can-Eat. Though it was brittle and broke off with the slightest tug, I kept a fair amount of my hair. Best of all, I celebrated Christmas week without a single visit from Eleanor Roosevelt. By the time of our New Year’s Day party, I was full of optimism and ready to kick up my heels.

Our annual January get-together was a long-running tradition, going back to the first year of our marriage. The truth, even though he denies this, is that the first party was an attempt by James to prove to his friends that I wasn’t as bad a choice of a mate as I seemed. Richmond and Ramsey—and others, most likely—had warned James that a big-mouthed, hot-tempered woman like me could never be properly tamed. But James was determined to show them that I could, on occasion, be as domestic and wifely as any other woman. I suspect that he’s still trying to convince them.

What James
has
proved is that people will flock to a party hosted by a troublesome woman as long as she lays out a good spread. The party got a little bigger with each passing year, and lately we can count on seventy-five to a hundred folks showing up throughout the course of the day.

I normally cooked for a solid week in anticipation of my guests arriving, but that year James fought me, insisting that I conserve my strength and have the whole thing catered by Little Earl. We battled
it out until we finally came to a compromise. Little Earl covered the savory. I did the sweet, with some help from Barbara Jean and Clarice.

My friends worked harder than I did to put the party together. Clarice even brought her mother by to lend a hand with the baking. Mrs. Jordan—who, with her bullhorn nonsense, was giving Mama a run for her money in the race to be considered the nuttiest woman Plainview had ever produced—was a real asset in the kitchen once she got past her revulsion over the cheapness of my serving platters. I appreciated her coming by to help, but her habit of stopping to thank Jesus at every step of the cooking process got old real fast. We thanked Him for every ingredient, the utensils, even the oven timer. Being around her reminded me of something Mama liked to say: “I love Jesus, but some of his representatives sure make my ass tired.”

On New Year’s Day, the guests started showing up around three o’clock. My sons, my daughter, and my grandkids did all of the greeting. Denise was bossy, ordering her older brothers around like she always had. Jimmy argued with his sister over the slightest thing: “The coats go in the middle bedroom.” “No, they don’t. They go in the guest bedroom.” Eric ignored them both and acted just as thrilled to be having company over as he did when he was six years old. I half expected him to grab one of the guests by the hand and demand that they accompany him to his room to see his train set. Seeing my fully grown offspring together, falling back into the roles they had played as children, was a load of fun for me, although I’m sure my son-in-law and daughter-in-law were counting the seconds until they could escape my house and get back the adults they’d married.

James’s police friends arrived first. The younger men who worked under James came at the precise moment the party was scheduled to start, like they were appearing for morning roll call. Mostly fresh-faced, beefy white boys—there were still no women in his unit—they came bearing flowers, in the company of skinny girlfriends who wore extremely low-cut blouses. As always, the first-timers looked stiff and uncomfortable until the good food, plentiful beer, and a few country songs mixed in with the R&B on the stereo loosened them up.

My brother stomped through the living room and threw himself on me like an overly friendly Labrador. Rudy spun me around and inspected me. “You don’t look much worse than usual,” he said. Then he gave me a brotherly punch in the arm and a kiss on each cheek.

Rudy’s wife, Inez, stepped closer, slapped him on the wrist, and chastised him for being too rough with me. Then she hugged me so tight she squeezed the breath out of me. Inez might be a dainty thing—she’s my height and no more than a hundred pounds—but every last bit of what’s there is muscle. Rudy likes to pretend his wife is helpless, and she plays along. But I wouldn’t want to be the one to make Inez mad. The three of us did some fast catching up before I passed them along to James and said hello to the newest guests.

Richmond, Clarice, and her mother, Beatrice, arrived at the same time as Veronica and her mother, Glory. Beatrice, Glory, and Veronica all wore elaborate, floor-length gowns. It was their habit to overdress for every occasion. They came to picnics dressed for a day on a yacht. They showed up at graduation ceremonies done up as if they were attending a coronation. They always wanted their hosts to understand that they were either on their way to or on their way from a much more important gathering.

Beatrice and Glory made a big show of not speaking to each other due to an argument they’d had on the phone that morning. Whenever the two elderly sisters came within five feet of each other, they snorted and sniffed like riled-up horses before stalking off in opposite directions.

Barbara Jean caused a stir when she sashayed in packed into a hot pink dress with a plunging neckline. The young cops looked away from their dates and stared in appreciation at this woman twice the age of their girlfriends. Barbara Jean went straight to the drinks table and hit the vodka with an intensity that worried me.

My doctor, Alex Soo, came in with a hefty woman on his arm. She was as loud as he was quiet, and she had a laugh like a rooster’s crow. She parked herself beside one of the food tables and soon made it clear that her goal for the day was to break the world record for consuming the most deviled eggs in one sitting. I liked her right off.

Ramsey Abrams and his always angry wife, Florence, arrived with their sons, Clifton and Stevie, and their future daughter-in-law. Like her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt, Sharon was dressed in the style of touring royalty. From the moment she stepped in the door, she signaled her intent to spend the evening flouncing around in her party dress while gesturing wildly with her left hand to show off the expensive engagement ring Clifton had given her. The naïve girl was completely oblivious to the way her shady fiancé broke out in a sweat when she brandished that rock anywhere near one of the many cops in attendance.

I sure wished Ramsey and Florence had used common sense and left Stevie at home. He clearly wasn’t over that shoe thing of his, or his airplane glue habit either, judging from his glassy eyes. He stared at the feet of every woman who walked past with an expression on his face that reminded you of a stray dog outside of a butcher shop. It gave people the creeps.