The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (17 page)

For a moment, Vondell stood gaping at her, eyes wide, mouth open. Then, to Clarice’s amazement, he started to back up. First one step, then another. He tried to act as if he were in charge, calling her a string of filthy names and threatening to hurt her. But Clarice could see from the way his eyes darted left and right searching out an escape route that this short, chubby teenage girl had him unnerved.

Odette kept moving toward him and he kept backing away. He moved across the living room floor, his feet shuffling across the orange carpet. His hands gripped the backs of the heavy, mismatched furniture he was careful to keep between himself and Odette. When he had backed completely out of the room and into the hallway that led to the kitchen, he yelled out, “I ain’t got time to be dealin’ with this crazy shit. Go on, get out. I don’t care where you go. You ain’t none of my concern.” He moved out of sight then, and a few seconds later they heard the rear door of the house open and slam shut.

Odette maintained her Golden Gloves stance for what seemed like an hour, but was probably less than a minute. When Vondell didn’t return, she brought her fists down, shaking out her shoulders as if she’d just gone ten rounds. Then she walked toward Clarice, who was
still frozen at the front door. Stepping into the circle of golden fabric she had shed onto the floor earlier, Odette said, “Clarice, could you give me a hand getting back into my dress?”

After Clarice packed Odette into her gown, the two girls went to Barbara Jean, who sat in the maroon chair staring at Odette with awe. Clarice picked up the imitation fur stoles and dime-store jewelry from the floor while Odette helped Barbara Jean up from the chair. Odette said, “Come on, Barbara Jean, we’ve got us a party to go to.”

The three girls squeezed into the front seat of Clarice’s car for the drive to Little Earl’s party. They were about a third of the way there when Clarice finally found words. She said, “That was incredible, Odette. I had no idea your father taught you how to box.”

Odette snorted and said, “Box? Daddy’s never weighed more than a hundred ten pounds his entire life. Who the hell was he gonna box? Vondell would’ve broken my neck if he’d decided to fight me.”

During the rest of the ride to the All-You-Can-Eat, Clarice fought to keep her eyes on the road and not stare at her insane friend in disbelief. Barbara Jean gazed out of the car window and periodically gasped, “Holy shit.”

They had fun at the party that night. They flirted and lip-synched Supremes songs. They watched Little Earl, in a costume consisting of his best Sunday suit and a Bible, try to use the “I Have a Dream” speech as a pickup line. They admired Chick Carlson.

Girls approached Chick all night. Freed from convention by their costumes, they forgot for that evening that they were on opposite sides of a racial divide and constantly interrupted his busboy duties by asking him to dance. Clarice, Barbara Jean, and Odette got a kick out of watching him hop across the floor in his cowboy costume—his everyday clothes plus a bandana. And they giggled as, regardless of the song, he treated each girl to a two-step—the only dance that country white boys knew back then.

Late in the evening, Odette went missing for a while. She returned to the window table with Big Earl and Miss Thelma, who promptly shooed away all of the kids, except Barbara Jean, Odette, and Clarice.
Then, after seating themselves on either side of Barbara Jean, they told her that she would be moving into the room that their daughter, Lydia, had vacated when she left Plainview two years earlier. They didn’t ask her opinion or entertain other options. Each of them held one of Barbara Jean’s hands and informed her that Lydia’s room was hers that night and for as long as she wanted.

Barbara Jean protested just long enough to show that she had good manners. Then she agreed. So that evening, courtesy of Big Earl, Miss Thelma, and Odette, Barbara Jean had a family for the first time in her life. And Clarice came to understand that she had a friend who could perform miracles.

Between them, Lester and Barbara Jean owned four vehicles when he died. When she learned that Odette was sick, Barbara Jean donated Lester’s truck and his year-old car to the American Cancer Society. She thought it might buy her friend some good luck. That left her with her Mercedes and an old Cadillac.

Lester had bought the Cadillac new in 1967, the first in a long string of Caddies he bought over the years. He babied it, keeping it looking as if it had just rolled off the dealer’s showroom floor until the day he died. It was the only one of his cars he never sold or gave away when newer models came out. The car hadn’t been touched since the last time Lester drove it. It just sat in the garage taking up space and reminding Barbara Jean of the past.

One day when she arrived at the museum to work a volunteer shift in her butter-churning outfit, Barbara Jean discovered that a sign had been posted near Benjamin Harrison’s flag. The sign asked for volunteers to contribute something to the annual Christmas auction. She offered the Cadillac.

Judging from the shocked reaction she received when she contacted the committee putting together the auction, a mint condition 1967 Fleetwood was a little more than they had in mind. They had been expecting donations more along the lines of handcrafted needlepoint chair cushions, beeswax candles, or gift baskets full of homemade strawberry preserves in quaintly bonneted jars. But once they understood that Barbara Jean really intended to donate the car itself, not a ride in it or some sort of leasing arrangement, they eagerly accepted her gift. In return, she took them up on their offer to have a room of the museum, the one with the Indian artifacts, renamed
the Lester Maxberry Exhibition Hall. They had wanted to name the room after Barbara Jean, but she declined the honor. The Fleetwood had been Lester’s baby. And he had been the one with happy memories of it, not her.

Barbara Jean had been living at Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s house for about a month when she first saw the car. She was walking home from her job at the salon when she saw a crowd gathered across the street outside the All-You-Can-Eat. Clarice stepped out of the knot of people and called her name.

When she got closer, she saw that the dozen or so people in the street were clustered around the nicest Cadillac she had ever seen. In fact, it was the only brand-new Cadillac Barbara Jean had ever seen outside of TV commercials. It was a beauty, so shiny that it was hard to look directly at it in the afternoon sun. It was sky blue, and the brilliant gloss of the car’s paint job reflected the clouds above so perfectly that looking down at the hood almost made you feel dizzy, as if you didn’t know which way was up. The back end of the car was long and so sleek that it seemed likely you would cut your finger if you ran it along the sharp fins. Occasionally one of the people circling the car in admiration would lean in to exhale on the bright finish and watch the oval of their condensed breath appear and then evaporate.

Only one person in the crowd dared make any real physical contact with the car. That was the Cadillac’s owner, Mr. Lester Maxberry.

Barbara Jean knew Lester, of course. He was famous. At one time or another, he had employed half of the boys in her high school in his landscaping business. James Henry worked for him all through high school and his two years of college. James worked for Lester so long that everyone expected him to take over the business one day. They went on expecting it until James surprised them all by becoming a cop.

Lester sometimes came into the All-You-Can-Eat with James and sat with the young people at the window table. He was always nice, courteous, and charming in an avuncular way. He would talk sports with the guys, or dispense advice, or compliment the girls. But he
usually didn’t stick around for long. He would say, “Let me get going, so you young people can enjoy your evening,” and then he’d tip the fedora he always wore and leave while they objected.

Barbara Jean enjoyed Lester’s company, but she never thought of him in a romantic way, even though just about every other woman she knew did. He had a small, compact body and a long face with droopy eyes that most of the girls thought were sexy. He also had a slight hesitation in his stride from an injury he had received while he was in the service, but he layered it over with so much cool and self-confidence that it seemed like a stylish accessory. Lester was light-skinned and had curly, but not kinky, hair at a time when there weren’t many attributes considered more important than fair skin and good hair.

Lester stood at the prow of his automobile with one foot on the front bumper and his hip leaning onto the driver’s-side quarter panel. He wore navy blue pinstriped pants, a dress shirt the same sky blue as his new car, and a black fedora with a blue feather in its band. He must have been cold. It couldn’t have been more than forty-five degrees on that December day. But he looked perfectly comfortable posing there, smiling and showing off his car.

When he saw Barbara Jean, Lester stood and said, “Hey, Barbie, what do you think?”

She said, “It’s slick, real slick.” She immediately regretted that answer. “Slick” sounded so stupid and childish, just the wrong thing to say to a man like Lester Maxberry. She corrected herself. She said, “It’s a gorgeous car, truly gorgeous,” and felt better.

“Wait till you see this. This is the best part.” He walked around to the driver’s side of the car and then leaned into the open window. He pressed the horn, and after it sounded he turned around with a big grin on his face. The horn had been modified so that it honked out the first three notes from the chorus of Smokey Robinson’s “Ooo Baby, Baby.” The crowd gathered around the car went nuts, some of them singing, “Ooo,
Ooo
-ooo.”

Barbara Jean was squeezed off to the edges of the crowd by the boys who pushed forward to ask car questions or just to hear the horn
again, so she went into the All-You-Can-Eat to say hi to Miss Thelma. By this time on a Saturday she could usually be found in the kitchen of the restaurant starting the baking for Sunday’s after-church rush.

Barbara Jean walked through the dining room and headed down the hallway that led to the storeroom and the rear of the kitchen where the baking table and ovens were. Before she got to the kitchen, the door to the storeroom opened and Chick Carlson stepped out. She acknowledged him with a nod and kept walking. But when she came closer to him, she saw that he had a cut on his forehead.

She knew that she shouldn’t ask. She knew that it was none of her business. But she asked anyway.

She pointed to the cut just below his hairline. “What happened?”

He said, “My brother, he gets mad and …” He stopped himself and looked embarrassed, as if he hadn’t intended to say what he had said. He bit his lip and stood there turning redder and redder.

She didn’t recognize it at the time, but something started between them at that moment, an irresistible need to say and do things before common sense could intervene and hold them back. That need would stretch out over far too many years. And she would live to regret it.

Barbara Jean slipped off her jacket and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. She pointed to three small scars on her arm and said, “My mother hit me with a belt buckle.”

He said, “I’m sure she didn’t mean it.”

“Yes, she did. She used to hit me a lot when she was drunk. But you’re half right; she didn’t mean to give me the scars. She was just so drunk that time that she didn’t realize she’d grabbed the wrong end of the belt when she swung it.”

He came closer to her then and reached out and touched her scars with the tip of his finger. “It looks like a face. See?” He ran his finger over the longer arc-shaped scar on the bottom, “That line looks like a mouth and these two smaller ones up here are like eyes.”

With that slight touch, suddenly they couldn’t stop talking. Words that they had kept bottled up while they stared at each other across the dining room of the All-You-Can-Eat came rushing forward. They didn’t flirt or tease each other with coy chitchat the way other
teenagers might have done in the same situation. The things they told each other were the things that only they could share.

She said, “My mother drank herself to death.”

He said, “My father died in jail. When I was a kid they told me it was a heart attack, but I found out later he got knifed in a fight. My mother ran off about the same time. I barely remember her.”

“I never met my father, but there are two guys who think I’m their daughter.”

“You can’t see it because of my hair, but I’ve got a five-inch scar on top of my head from getting stitches after my brother hit me with a brick for taking food from his refrigerator.”

“When I was fourteen, my mother twisted my arm until she dislocated it because I left the house with no makeup on.”

Chick said, “Big Earl lets me stay in the storeroom here because he found out I was living in the shed at my brother’s place and sharing it with the chickens.”

She held up her hand and said, “Okay, you win.” Then they both started laughing.

That was when she did it. She took a step toward him and kissed him on his mouth. She leaned into him until he fell back against the wall. Then she kept pressing against him, wanting to be as close to him as she could be.

She didn’t know why she was kissing him, she just knew that she had to, the same way she had to tell him things she hadn’t yet told Odette or Clarice, stuff about her mother and her various fathers. With him, those truths just came tumbling out.

When she started to think about the foolishness of what she was doing and began to pull away, he wrapped his arm around her waist and squeezed her even tighter to him. They stood there in the back hallway of the All-You-Can-Eat kissing each other until they were both dizzy from not breathing. They only stopped when they heard someone calling Barbara Jean’s name.

Chick released her waist and Barbara Jean stepped away from him until her back met the opposite wall. They were there, grinning at each other across the hallway, when Clarice ran in and shouted, “Barbara
Jean, come on! Lester wants to take us for a ride in his new car. He asked especially about you.”