The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (5 page)

In Beatrice’s retelling, the minor complications of Clarice’s birth were elevated to terrifying hours during which she and her baby balanced on a knife’s edge between survival and doom. When Beatrice sensed in her daughter some resistance to acknowledging her mother’s wisdom, she trotted out the tale of how her solid judgment was the only reason the two of them hadn’t died in a substandard Evansville clinic. Clarice heard the story so often in her childhood that it became as familiar to her as “Cinderella” or “The Pied Piper.” When relating the long version of the ordeal she suffered giving Clarice life, Beatrice often employed overripe fruit as stage props. For the short version, she simply pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and whispered, “It was a horror show.”

Freshly snatched from death’s door or not, an hour after Clarice was born her mother was fully made up, coiffed, dressed in a satin bed coat, and propped up in her hospital bed, ready for the photographers who had gathered to snap pictures of the inspirational middle-class colored family. But Mr. Jordan couldn’t be found. By the time he was located, sharing an intimate moment with one of the hospital cleaning ladies in a supply closet, the photographers had taken their snapshots and gone. That cleaning lady may or may not have been the woman who gave him the syphilis he passed on to his wife, sterilizing her and ensuring that Clarice would be an only child; Abraham was never quite certain.

And so it went, from the time Clarice was old enough to understand what was what until her father was too sick to get into trouble. Abraham Jordan cheated and lied. Beatrice prayed, consulted with her pastor, prayed again, and then accepted each deception with a smile. Clarice watched and learned.

Unlike her mother, who had been taken by surprise, Clarice had received fair warning about Richmond. Just before Clarice’s marriage, Odette had a frank talk with her friend that forced Clarice to open her eyes and see just how much Richmond had in common with Abraham Jordan. Clarice had nearly called off the wedding, but, because she loved Richmond so, she chose to rely upon the counsel of her mother and the same pastor whose guidance would lead Beatrice
into a life consumed by bitterness. Clarice had weighed her options and—like a fool, she later saw—she had decided to make a deal with Richmond that allowed her to clamp her eyes shut again. The deal was, so long as Richmond didn’t embarrass her by being indiscreet the way her father had been, she would accept him as he was and go on as if everything were perfect.

They both stuck by the terms of their agreement, but Clarice’s definition of indiscretion shifted over the years. At first, she told herself she could handle his missteps if he was at home and in bed beside her at a decent hour every night. But that didn’t even make it through their first year. So she decided late nights were okay, as long as no strange women called the house. When she gave up on that, she settled for not being confronted with physical evidence.

As it turned out, Richmond was good about leaving no evidence. Clarice never had to scrub lipstick stains from his shorts or brush face powder from his lapels. She never contracted any diseases. And unlike her father, who had cast his seed around with the abandon of malfunctioning farm equipment, Richmond was careful. Clarice was never greeted at her front door by a younger woman clutching the hand of a child who had Richmond’s pretty mouth.

That Sunday afternoon at the All-You-Can-Eat, between the example of her parents and the years she had spent honoring her part of her deal with Richmond, Clarice told herself that, given time, she could find her way back to that blissful state of mind in which the absence of sexually transmitted diseases and not having bastard children dropped off at her door were sufficient proof of her husband’s love and respect. She was wrong.

I did my best not to dwell on my sunrise conversation with Mama, but it was on my mind all through morning service and during the drive to the All-You-Can-Eat. When we got to the restaurant, I tried not to be obvious about it as I studied Big Earl’s house, searching for signs of unusual activity. But everything was quiet. There were no cars in the driveway except Big Earl’s Buick. No somber-faced men stood smoking on the front porch. No one was visible through the parted living room drapes.

Inside the restaurant, I scanned the room for Big Earl. It was his habit to spend Sundays zigzagging his way between the tables, chatting with the customers. I didn’t see him, so I turned toward the buffet to look for Little Earl or Erma Mae. I caught sight of Erma Mae sliding off of her stool and walking into the kitchen. I decided to take her presence and the calm at the house across the street as good signs about Big Earl’s well-being. Feeling optimistic and a little annoyed with Mama for getting me all riled up with her ghostly insider information, I followed James to our table.

Richmond was waving goodbye to Carmel Handy and Clarice sat staring at the cutlery with a peculiar look on her face when we joined them. James took a seat next to Richmond and the two of them jumped right into a conversation. I didn’t have to listen in to know what they were saying. They had been discussing the same two topics since 1972. They either talked about football or boxing. Specifically, they talked about famous athletes of the past and how they might fare against famous athletes of the present. When Lester arrived, the conversation would get heated. Each week he loudly declared that Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, could have taken on Ali and Tyson together, and single-handedly whupped an entire football team. If
Richmond or James disagreed with him, Lester would grow frustrated and begin to bang his walking stick against the nearest table leg, insisting that his age and wisdom made him the better judge.

Clarice perched on the edge of her chair, showing off her best charm school posture and wearing an expression that was supposed to be a smile. Clarice has a long, handsome face with lovely, round eyes and a wide, nicely shaped mouth. But that day her lower jaw was pushed forward, her eyes were squinted, and her lips were pressed together like she was trying hard to keep something in. I hadn’t seen that face in a while, but I knew it well. And I had a good idea what its return meant. I had to fight to keep myself from going down to the other end of the table and slapping the shit out of Richmond. But it was none of my business. And I knew from experience that my interference would not be appreciated.

Before she married Richmond, I went to Clarice and told her some things that I thought she should know about her fiancé. No rumors, no guesses. I sat with my oldest friend on the couch in her parents’ living room and described seeing Richmond late the night before kissing a woman who lived around the block from me and seeing his car still parked in front of her house that morning. It hurt me to say it, loving Clarice like I do. But Clarice used to claim that, when it came to matters of men, she wanted her friends to give her the cold and honest truth, even if it was painful. I was young then, just twenty-one, and I didn’t understand yet that nearly all of the women who make that claim are lying.

Clarice being Clarice, she took my news about Richmond with such sweet grace and calm that I didn’t realize I’d been relieved of my matron of honor duties and thrown out of her house until I was standing on her front porch with the door bumping against my ass. But the next day she was at my house holding an armful of bride magazines, acting like our conversation had never happened. I was her matron of honor after all, and I never said another word to her about any of Richmond’s shenanigans from then on.

After we got through our kisses and hellos, I asked Clarice, “Seen Big Earl today?”

She said, “No, why do you ask?”

“No reason. He was just on my mind,” I said, which was the truth, if not the whole truth.

Clarice said, “I’m sure he’ll be in pretty soon. That’s a man who truly does not understand the idea of retirement. Besides, I get the feeling he prefers being here on Sundays since
she
doesn’t work on the Sabbath.”

Clarice nodded toward the only vacant table in the room. It sat in a back corner and was covered with a shiny gold tablecloth that was decorated with silver stars and moons and symbols of the zodiac. At the center of the table sat a stack of tarot cards and a crystal ball the size of a large cantaloupe. A forty-year-old framed eight-by-ten photograph showing Minnie McIntyre decked out in sequins and feathers acting as a magician’s assistant to her first husband, Charlemagne the Magnificent, was propped up behind the tarot cards and crystal ball. From that table in the back of the All-You-Can-Eat, Minnie operated her fortune-telling business. It was her claim that, since his death, Charlemagne had reversed their roles and was now working as her assistant and guide to the spirit world.

In spite of my own encounter with a traveler from the afterlife just that morning, I didn’t believe for a second that Minnie had any such connections. It wasn’t just that her predictions were famous for being way off; I knew just how inaccurate the dead could be from years of hearing Mama complain about how her ghosts often fed her a line of crap. The thing with Minnie was that her predictions almost always had a nasty edge to them that made it seem like she was more interested in delivering insults disguised as prophecies and manipulating her naïve customers than she was in communing with the other side.

Inaccurate and ornery as she was, Minnie had been in business for years and still had a steady stream of customers, many of whom were the sort of people you’d think would know better. Clarice doesn’t like to admit it, but she was once one of those customers.

In a fit of bridal jitters, Clarice went to Minnie for a tarot reading the week before she married Richmond. Big Earl’s first wife, Thelma, was still alive then, and Minnie hadn’t yet sunk her teeth into Big Earl. So Clarice dragged Barbara Jean and me to the run-down house
out near the highway bypass where Minnie used to tell fortunes. She swore us both to secrecy, since seeing a fortune-teller was just a hair’s breadth away from consorting with Satan to the folks at Clarice’s church. Inside that nasty shack, we inhaled jasmine incense and listened while Minnie told Clarice that her marriage to Richmond would be joyful, but, having drawn an upright Hermit and a reverse Three of Cups, she would turn out to be barren and would look fat in her wedding gown. Clarice worried herself sick throughout her first pregnancy. And for years she couldn’t bring herself to look at what turned out to be lovely wedding photos. Four healthy children and three decades later, Clarice still wasn’t feeling inclined to forgive Minnie.

Clarice pointed her index finger at Minnie’s table and said, “Stepmother or not, Little Earl shouldn’t have that old fake in this place. There have got to be laws against that kind of thing. It’s fraud, pure and simple.” She took a swig of iced tea and twisted her mouth. “Too sweet,” she said.

I prepared myself for one of Clarice’s lectures on the moral failings of Minnie McIntyre. When Clarice was in the kind of mood she was in that day, she enjoyed identifying flaws, moral and otherwise, in everyone except the idiot in the blue shirt at the other end of the table. My friend had a multitude of gifts. She played the piano like an angel. She could cook, sew, sing, and speak French. And she was as kind and generous a friend as anyone could hope for. What she didn’t have much of a knack for was placing blame where it should truly lie.

Clarice’s church didn’t help her disposition much. Calvary Baptist wasn’t full-blown Pentecostal, but it still managed to be the Bible-thumpingest and angriest church in town. So Sundays were bad for Clarice even without Richmond misbehaving or Minnie’s name coming up in the conversation. Calvary’s pastor, Reverend Peterson, yelled at his congregation every week that God was mad at them for a long list of wrongs they had committed and that He was even madder about whatever they were thinking of doing. If you weren’t in a foul temper by the time you left a Calvary Baptist service, it meant you weren’t listening.

At my church, Holy Family Baptist, the only hard-and-fast rule was that everyone should be kind to everybody. That view was way too casual for the Calvary congregation, and it drove them straight up the wall that we didn’t take a harder line on sin and sinners. The Calvary crowd were equally disgusted with Barbara Jean’s church, First Baptist, where the members proved their devotion to God by doing charity work and by dressing up like they were on a fashion runway every Sunday. The old joke was that Holy Family preached the good news gospel, Calvary Baptist preached the bad news gospel, and First Baptist preached the new clothes gospel.

Clarice didn’t begin a recitation from her catalog of the ways Minnie’s behavior offended her, though. A glance through the window provided her with something new to complain about. Pointing outside, she said, “There’s Barbara Jean and Lester. You know, she really should call when she’s going to be this late. It’s not right to worry everybody like this.”

Clarice was mostly letting off steam, but she had a point. The summer heat tended to aggravate Lester’s various health problems. And there was quite a list of problems. Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys. If it was still in Lester’s body, it was going bad. They often appeared for supper an hour late after having to pull their car over for Barbara Jean to kick-start one of Lester’s vital organs with a remedy from the portable clinic she kept in her pocketbook.

So, when I turned to watch Barbara Jean and Lester Maxberry making their way toward the restaurant, I was surprised to see Lester moving much more energetically than usual. Dressed in a white suit and matching white fedora, Lester’s usually round back was straight, and he hardly leaned on his ivory walking stick at all. He lifted his knees high in that almost military way he did when he was feeling spry. It was Barbara Jean who slowly shuffled along, frowning with each step.

Barbara Jean wore a snug-fitting bright yellow dress and a yellow hat with a brim at least three feet wide. Her calves were encased in white go-go boots that had three-inch heels. Even from half a block away I could see that the boots were paining her. With every step she
took, the corners of Barbara Jean’s mouth turned down a little more, and she occasionally stopped walking altogether to take a deep breath before soldiering on.