The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (14 page)

Clarice exhaled slowly, smiled, and said, “You’re a doll to think of me, Veronica. But I’m sure you and Sharon will be able to plan a beautiful wedding without my help.”

Odette, who had been unusually quiet all afternoon, spoke up. She said, “Yes, Veronica, none of us will forget that Easter pageant you organized over at First Baptist. It was spectacular.” Barbara Jean put her head down and covered her laughter by pretending she was coughing. And Clarice made a mental note to buy Odette an extra nice Christmas gift for bringing up Veronica’s Easter pageant just then.

A couple of years earlier, Veronica had played on the fears of the board at First Baptist that their Easter pageant would be outshined by the white folks at Plainview Lutheran. The Lutherans had recently started adding some real sparkle to their Easter show—live lambs and a candlelight processional. She promised them that, if they handed the event over to her, she would produce an extravaganza that would leave the demoralized Lutherans hanging their heads in shame.

From the moment Veronica’s daughters started the show with an interpretive dance, the whole thing was a disaster. Veronica’s older girls were no more coordinated than they were pretty. And poor
Sharon, who had been known to become out of breath just lifting a two-liter Pepsi bottle to her lips, got heart palpitations and had to sit down and rest in the middle of the routine.

The highlight of Veronica’s show, a dramatization of Christ’s ascension into heaven, was ruined when the winch used to carry Reverend Biggs up into the rafters got stuck and left him dangling in a harness thirty feet in the air. It took hours for the fire department to get him down. And the worst part was that no one had any doubt the Lutherans would hear all about the whole debacle.

Veronica slid her glass of iced tea, untouched since Erma Mae brought it to her, a few inches further away from her so she could rest her elbow on the table as she presented her back to Odette. To Clarice, she said, “I was thinking you could come with me tomorrow to look at invitations and some swatches for the girls’ dresses.”

Clarice didn’t want to spend an extra minute with Veronica. The holidays weren’t that far off and she would be stuck with her at family gatherings soon enough. But she also had an awful feeling that this was a little taste of justice coming her way. She had sought Odette’s counsel when helping to put together Carolyn’s wedding, and she had initially been sincere in asking for it. Denise’s ceremony, which Odette had helped to plan, had been lovely. But once Clarice got going, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from taking note of each detail of Denise’s wedding and then doing her best to ostentatiously outdo them all. Now Veronica was asking for advice, and Clarice knew without a doubt that her cousin would one-up everything Clarice had done for her Carolyn’s nuptials.

Clarice was reminded then of what she found most insufferable about Veronica. Her cousin had an awful way of making her look at her own worst traits just when she didn’t want to see them. Whenever Clarice was around Veronica, she had to acknowledge that in Veronica she saw herself. It frightened her a little to think that the primary difference between them was the moderating influence of Odette and Barbara Jean.

Thanks to Odette stepping in again, Clarice didn’t have to commit to helping her cousin that afternoon. “Veronica,” Odette said,
“I think maybe Sharon’s ready to get back to her run.” They looked outside and saw that Sharon had left the car behind and was moving down the block with renewed determination in her stride.

Veronica said, “You can’t keep that girl away from her jogging. I had some trouble persuading her to get with the program at first, but now she’s devoted.”

Not a second later, Sharon veered off the street and straight into the front door of Donut Heaven bakery.

Veronica grumbled, “That girl,” and ran out of the restaurant. She hopped into her new car and drove a third of a block up the street to the donut shop. She dashed inside and came out seconds later, dragging Sharon with her. As her mother wrestled her into the car, Sharon cradled one of Donut Heaven’s bright pink boxes against her chest as if it were a newborn baby.

Odette cleaned the last bit of gravy from her plate with a dinner roll and said, “That woman ruins my appetite.” Then she gnawed the gristle from the end of a pork chop bone.

They left the All-You-Can-Eat earlier than usual that day, all of them pleading fatigue. For the rest of the evening Clarice thought about Minnie’s vision. She wasn’t becoming a convert or anything like that. She knew that it took no psychic ability to envision Richmond with another woman. Hell, it didn’t even take a good pair of eyes. What she thought about was how peculiar it was that having that nasty woman rub Richmond’s behavior in her face in public had hardly had any effect on her. If such an incident had occurred a few months earlier, she’d have taken to her bed for days. But, even as it happened, the only sensation Clarice had been aware of was a fierce desire to be alone with her piano.

After Lester’s business was sold and all of the money issues had been seen to, Barbara Jean decided that she needed some sort of regular activity to give shape to her days. So she found a job. Then she found another. And another. All three were volunteer positions; still, it was the first time she’d had to report to work since she’d polished nails and administered shampoos at a hair salon when she was a teenager. On Mondays and Wednesdays, she delivered flowers to patients at University Hospital. Out of respect for her recent loss, the volunteer coordinator assigned her to the maternity ward, where she mostly encountered happy new parents and avoided the terminally ill. It wouldn’t have mattered, though. They could have thrown death in her face all day and Barbara Jean wouldn’t have blinked. With the help of an occasional sip from the thermos of spiked tea she always kept with her—it wasn’t practical to bring her demitasse cups from home—she had turned off the part of her that grieved. And she wasn’t about to turn it back on.

Every Friday morning, Barbara Jean went to First Baptist and did office work. She answered the phone, filed and made copies, all the things she had once done for Lester when his business first took off. After the office closed, she went downstairs to the church school and led Bible study class for new members. Even her pastor, Reverend Biggs, was impressed with Barbara Jean’s biblical knowledge. Finally, she thought, all of those drunken nights in her library with Clarice’s gift Bible were of some use to her.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, she worked at the Plainview Historical Society Museum. The museum, which consisted of a greeting area and three small rooms, each dedicated to a period of
Plainview history—Indian Territory, Civil War, and Modern—was a twenty-minute walk up Plainview Avenue from her house. Her primary responsibilities were to sit at a desk in the greeting area, hand out brochures, and say, “Please wait beneath the Indiana state flag generously donated to the museum by the descendants of famed Hoosier president Benjamin Harrison. A tour guide will be with you momentarily.”

Sometimes she was called upon to don a frontier wife costume and pretend to churn butter or stir imaginary food in a plastic pot over a papier-mâché fire, if the usual frontier wife volunteer couldn’t make it. When no guests were at the museum, which was most of the time, she sat, sipped from her thermos, and read fashion magazines.

There were many days when her two sentences guiding the museum guests to their waiting place beneath the flag were the only words to cross her lips from sunrise to sunset. Those days were her favorites. She saw the other Supremes two or three times a week, and that was all the conversation she felt she could handle.

Walking back to her house from the museum, she followed Plainview Avenue as it rose toward the center of town and the intersection of Plainview and Main, where her house stood. If she turned her head to the left and peered downhill, she had a perfect view of the remnants of Ballard’s Wall and the entrance to Leaning Tree Estates, as the housing development that now occupied her old neighborhood was called.

One early November day as she left the museum for home, she looked down at Leaning Tree. The tall, contorted trees of her old stomping grounds lent even more drama to the landscape now that they’d shed their leaves. She stared at their hunched-over skeletons. They were more impressive to her now than ever. Those trees had all adapted and thrived in the face of the grave insult that had been done to them. If she’d been inclined to ask God for anything, it would have been to make her more like the leaning trees.

She had done her best to adapt. In the three months since Lester’s death, she had organized her time so that she was on the move nearly all day, every day. And wasn’t that what everyone said widows should do?

But now, studying those crooked, old trees, Barbara Jean had to admit to herself that she had failed to thrive. No matter how activity-filled her days were, it was her nights that owned her. That night, she entered her fine home and heard the voice of her mother whispering bad advice and viperous recriminations in her ear. And after managing to fall asleep in her bed, she was wide awake within an hour, believing that she had felt Lester shift positions in the bed and then heard his congested cough coming from the bathroom.
Was it pneumonia again?

She got out of bed and wandered the three floors of her house, hoping that she might find it calming. But it didn’t work; it never did. Adam filled the space every bit as much now as he had when he was alive. She heard his footsteps running from room to room on the third floor, where Lester’s home office had been before the stairs became too much for him. Adam played up there that night just as he had thirty years earlier. The dark, cluttered storage rooms and mazes of filing cabinets held no menace for an adventurous boy who was never frightened, even when he should have been. The sound of Adam humming to himself in the TV room off of the kitchen as he polished that collection of shoes he was so fond of echoed through the first floor. She caught sight of him at the piano in the sitting room, waiting for his aunt Clarice to come by to give him his lesson. The museum that his bedroom had become seemed to have taken over the second floor. All of the other bedrooms were merely anterooms ushering her into the one room on the floor that mattered.

Only the library, with its waiting bottle and book, was a sanctuary from the spirits that haunted her. And that room offered no refuge after she collapsed into a drunken, exhausted sleep in her Chippendale chair. As soon as she nodded off, they returned. Loretta, Lester, Adam, and now Chick.

By the start of her senior year of high school, Barbara Jean was spending most of her time with Clarice and Odette. She hung out at one of their houses every day after school, doing homework, listening to records, and gossiping until at least eight. That way, when she got
home she could tiptoe past Vondell, who was pretty much guaranteed to be passed out on the couch by then. On weekends, when it was harder to avoid Vondell, she worked at a hair salon that one of her mother’s old friends owned, and slept at Odette’s.

Barbara Jean never stayed over at Clarice’s house. Mrs. Jordan always went out of her way to be polite and kind to Barbara Jean, but she couldn’t go so far as to allow the daughter of Loretta Perdue to spend an entire night in her home. Barbara Jean was initially surprised that Clarice’s mother even allowed her to enter her front door, as Mrs. Jordan was widely thought to be equal parts sanctimonious and stuck up. But she welcomed Barbara Jean’s visits. When Barbara Jean better understood the workings of Mr. and Mrs. Jordan’s marriage, she felt comfortable in assuming that Mrs. Jordan’s friendliness was the result of her relief at seeing that at least one of the town’s bastards looked nothing like her husband.

It was a Saturday night. The three girls were at Clarice’s house listening to records when the phone rang. Mrs. Jordan called up the stairs for Clarice, saying that her cousin Veronica was on the line. Odette and Barbara Jean followed Clarice down to the kitchen where the phone was and watched as she listened. She hardly spoke at all, just shook her head and gasped, “No,” and “You’re kidding.” When she hung up the phone, she turned to Odette and Barbara Jean and said, “Veronica says there’s a white boy working at the All-You-Can-Eat.”

Back then, no white people ever wandered into the All-You-Can-Eat. And it was unheard of for a white person, even a teenager, to work for a black man. So this was major news indeed. Five minutes after Clarice hung up the phone, the Supremes were on their way to Earl’s.

When they arrived at the restaurant, they found the largest Saturday night crowd they had ever seen. Every table was full, except for the window table that, on weekends, was now permanently reserved for them. They had to squeeze through the crowd to get to their station. What with Clarice’s music prizes, Richmond being the local football hero, and Barbara Jean looking the way she did, the window table was normally the center of attention at Earl’s. But that night nobody glanced their way. Everyone was there to see the white boy.

When he stepped out of the kitchen with Big Earl, the crowd grew quiet. All that could be heard was an occasional whisper and the voice of Diana Ross cooing “Reflections” on the jukebox.

The white boy did not disappoint. He was tall and thin with wide shoulders and narrow hips. His skin was so pale that he looked as if he hadn’t been in the sun in years. His hair was Shinola black and somewhere between wavy and curly. His pronounced cheekbones and high-bridged nose reminded Barbara Jean of the faces of statues she had seen in school art books. His round eyes were an icy blue. Later, Barbara Jean would remember looking at those eyes and thinking,
This must be what the sky looks like if you see it through a diamond
. He followed Big Earl from table to table, taking drink orders, clearing dishes, and wiping up spills. All the while, no one in the entire restaurant made a sound. They just watched him.

It was Odette, never embarrassed to say what she thought, who broke the silence. “That,” she said, “is one pretty white boy.” Several people heard her and began to snicker. Then conversations started again and the atmosphere returned to something closer to normal.