The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (29 page)

But Lester didn’t walk away. He looked up at her and asked, “What do you want to do?”

“What I want doesn’t matter. Chick’s gone. Now I’ve got to make plans for me and my baby. My mother managed to do it on her own. I figure I can’t do a worse job of it than she did.”

Lester said, “I really meant it when I said I wanted to marry you, Barbara Jean. I’ve loved you since I first laid eyes on you, and that hasn’t changed. We can get married tomorrow, if you want.”

She waited for Lester to think about what he had just said and return to his senses. But he just stood there. She could only think of one thing to say. She asked the question her mother would have
wanted her to ask. “Lester, can you look me in the eye and swear that you’ll forever be my man and that you’ll always do right by me and my baby?”

Lester stepped up onto the porch beside her and placed a warm hand on her stomach. “I swear,” he said.

So Barbara Jean married Lester, the man who had the right answer to her mother’s question.

Each spring, Calvary Baptist Church held a tent revival. It was a tradition that Richmond’s father started during his years as the pastor of the church, and it continued after he moved on. The revival was famous in Baptist circles throughout the Midwest. It attracted a huge crowd of the faithful every year and provided a boost to the church coffers during the long drought between Easter and Christmas. Clarice couldn’t remember a year of her life that she didn’t attend.

The revival always began on a Friday night with the raising of the tent. A makeshift stage was set up for the choir. Hundreds of folding chairs—ancient, splintering, torturously uncomfortable things Clarice believed had been designed to remind the congregation of the suffering of Christ—were brought in. Then there was a prayer service to get everyone worked up for the thirty-six straight hours of preaching, singing, and soul-saving that would follow. The revival culminated in a mile-long procession from the tent site on the edge of town back to Calvary.

Richmond’s status as both a church deacon and the son of the revival’s founder guaranteed that he and Clarice always had good seats. On opening night that year they sat in the front row. Richmond was in a snit that day over Clarice’s continued refusal to come back home, so Clarice sat between Odette and Barbara Jean and gave James the honor of sitting next to Richmond. The arrangement had the effect of further worsening Richmond’s mood. He sat with his lower lip poked out and only looked in Clarice’s direction to scowl at her.

Clarice still saw plenty of Richmond now that she had moved out. He stopped by the house in Leaning Tree a few times a week.
“Where’s my orange tie?” “How does the oven timer work?” “Where do I take the dry cleaning?” He always seemed to need something.

If he was on good behavior—not too whiny or argumentative—Clarice would invite him in. Richmond was good company. And she loved him. She had never loved any man except Richmond. Well, there was also Beethoven, but he didn’t really count. The problem was, just as soon as Clarice started to think about Richmond’s good points—how charming he could be, how he made her laugh—he would switch into seduction mode. His midnight eyes would flicker on and his voice would take on a quality that made her imagine that she smelled brandy and felt the heat of a roaring wood fire.

But whenever Clarice thought about having Richmond stay the night—a pleasurable thought—an image came into her mind that made her push him out of the door. It was that picture in her head of James trying, and failing, to style Odette’s hair. That image just wouldn’t allow her to step back into the life she had lived for so many years.

It was nearly midnight that first night of the revival and Reverend Peterson was wrapping up his sermon. Reverend Peterson always spoke first on opening night before handing off the podium to visiting preachers. His sermon that night was a good one. He told the terrifying story of the Great Flood from the perspective of one of Noah’s nonbelieving neighbors. The speech climaxed with a vivid description of the doomed neighbor, knee-deep in swirling, filthy water, banging on the side of the ark and begging Noah to let him in. Reverend Peterson added color to the story by imitating the squawks, neighs, and moos of the animals. Of course, Noah could do nothing but wave goodbye to the terrified sinner as he sailed away with the righteous and the noisy animals.

The Noah’s Ark sermon was typical of the Calvary Baptist experience. It was not a gray-area kind of church. Every Sunday, church members sat and listened to their pastor as he gave them the latest message from an angry God. They left the sanctuary certain that Calvary Baptist and Reverend Peterson were the only things standing between them and an eternity of suffering in hell. Calvary’s
parishioners fully expected that, like Noah, they would be waving goodbye to everyone in Plainview who didn’t go to Calvary Baptist when Jesus shipped them all off to join Him.

When Reverend Peterson finished, the crowd was in an uproar of shouting, amen-ing, and speaking in tongues. The church nurses, in their starched white uniforms and white gloves, rushed through the tent to tend to women who had collapsed with the Holy Ghost.

In spite of the barn-busting sermon Reverend Peterson delivered that night, Clarice surprised herself by thinking that maybe it was time she left some of this bad news and rage behind. Sitting there listening to the angriest choir in town as they spat out “It’s Gonna Rain,” she thought that maybe she should branch out and give something else a try.

Having ended his sermon, Reverend Peterson made a plea to the unrepentant sinners in the crowd to come forward and receive the Lord’s blessing before it was too late. He walked back and forth in front of the wailing choir and warned, “It won’t be water, but fire, the next time.” As he returned to his lectern to introduce the next speaker, there was a commotion in the back of the tent.

A woman’s voice shouted, “Let me testify! Let me testify!”

Clarice and everyone else in the front row turned around to look, but there were too many people standing and gawking for them to see all the way to the back. The tent grew quieter and a wave of soft murmuring spread slowly from the rear to the front as the woman moved up the center aisle toward Reverend Peterson.

She was young—around twenty-five, Clarice guessed. The woman’s gravity-defying cleavage hovered above a neon-green tube top that was just wide enough that it wasn’t illegal. Below her exposed navel, she wore tight-fitting vermillion shorts that were so revealing Clarice imagined the woman had borrowed them from an emaciated eleven-year-old. The tube top and the shorts she wore were both made of shiny, wet-looking latex. With each step she took, the movement of latex abrading latex caused a high-pitched squeaking noise to pierce the air. Her hair was pulled back from her face into a fall of glossy black ringlets that hung down to the middle of her back.

Clarice leaned close to Barbara Jean and whispered, “Hair weave.”

She replied, “Implants.”

The woman staggered and stumbled up toward the stage and Reverend Peterson. His bushy, silver eyebrows climbed a little closer to his receding hairline with every step she took in his direction. Clarice wasn’t sure if the woman’s staggering was due to her being drunk or due to the fact that she was only wearing one shoe and had a thick layer of mud up to each ankle.

When she reached the lectern, the woman snatched the microphone away from an astonished Reverend Peterson. “I just had a miracle happen and I need to testify.” She yelled her words into the microphone and feedback from the sound system caused everyone to clamp their hands to their ears. “Just a little while ago, after my shift at the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club, I was doin’ a private performance out in the parking lot in the back of a Chevy Suburban when I heard a voice. Clear as a bell the voice said, ‘You are a child of God.’

“Now, at first I just ignored it ’cause I thought it was my customer. He’s one of my regulars and he carries on like that—always God this, Jesus that, Sweet Lord the other.”

Reverend Peterson’s face registered panic and he made a grab for the microphone. But the stripper was faster. She hopped away from him and continued her testimony.

“The voice said, ‘You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing.’

“I still thought it was my customer, so I got up off the floor of the Chevy and said, ‘Fine. I don’t gotta keep doin’ what I’m doin’? Just give me my damn money and I’ll go home.’

“But then, I heard the voice again. This time it said, ‘Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to the Lord and you will be saved.’

“I knew then that it wasn’t my customer at all. It was an angel sent from heaven to tell me to change my life. So I got out of that SUV and I followed a light I saw off in the distance. I crossed Highway 37 and went through a patch of trees, even lost a shoe walkin’ across a muddy field. But I kept goin’ until I found this here tent. Now I’m here and ready to give up my sinful ways like that angel’s voice told me to. If that ain’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.”

The crowd erupted in praise of the stripper’s miracle. People
shouted, “Amen!” and the choir started to sing out twice as loud as they had before.

Encouraged by the response of her audience, the stripper went on with her testimony. “The second I walked into this tent, somethin’ changed inside my heart. All of a sudden, I started to think about all the fine things God had done for me. I started to think maybe He seen me safely through all the dangerous, sinful things I did for a reason.

“And believe me, there’s a lot of scary stuff out there. Hell, you go out for one night’s work and you could end up with the herpes, the AIDS, the syphilis, the Chinese chicken flu, or the Ebola virus.” She poked long, crimson nails into the air as she used her fingers to count off the diseases.

Reverend Peterson made another attempt to snatch the microphone away from the young woman, but again she was quicker. Like the performer she was, she gave her audience more of what they wanted. She said, “And I tell you, the way some of these men are, they don’t care about protectin’ themselves, you, or their wives and families. They only care about their own pleasure. They wanna act like it’s thirty years ago, before shit got so serious. I’m tellin’ you, you gotta be a safety-first kinda gal if you wanna live long. You know what I do when some asshole tries to talk me into doin’ something stupid? I look him dead in the eye and say, ‘Honey, you think we’re gonna fuck ourselves right back to 1978? This is some magical pussy all right, but it ain’t no damn time machine.’ ”

On that note, several people moved in to restrain her, allowing Reverend Peterson, at last, to retrieve his microphone. The stripper was promptly helped off the stage by one of the church nurses and two representatives of the New Members Committee. As she was led past Clarice, Richmond, and their friends, the woman stopped for a second, turned toward Richmond, and said, “Hey, Richmond, you getting’ saved, too, baby?” before stumbling away with her keepers.

Everyone near the front of the tent, except for Richmond, who had buried his face in his hands, turned to stare at Clarice to see how she would react to the newly saved stripper greeting her husband like
an old friend. But Clarice had something else on her mind. She was thinking about the miraculous voice that had summoned the stripper from the back of the Chevy behind the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club with the all-too-familiar words, “You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing.” Clarice wondered how long her mother and her bullhorn had been back in town.

The morning after Richmond’s stripper friend signed up to have her soul saved, Clarice heard a knock at her door. It was just before nine o’clock in the morning, so she assumed that it was her first student of the day arriving early for her lesson. From the piano bench where she was having her tea, Clarice called out, “Come in.” Beatrice Jordan and Richmond marched into the living room.

Beatrice pointed at her daughter’s chopped-off hair and grimaced. For several seconds, she stood in the center of the room regarding Clarice as if she’d just discovered her dancing naked in a crack house. Richmond wore a smug expression on his face as his mother-in-law said, “Clarice, would you care to explain yourself?”

In the past, this was the point at which Clarice would revert to behaving like an obedient little girl. She would make nice and apologize to her mother for whatever she had done, just to get Beatrice off her back. But living alone in her own house, even for such a short amount of time, had changed her. Clarice found that she couldn’t react like her old self. She said, “I’ve already explained things to Richmond. And I believe that’s all the explaining I need to do.”

Her mother spoke softly, as if she believed someone might be listening in. “Everyone at Calvary Baptist is talking about you. How could you do this? You made a vow before God and everybody.”

“So did Richmond. Did you have a talk with him about his vows?” Clarice said, feeling heat rise from her neck onto her face.

“It’s different for men, and you know it. Besides, Richmond is not the one who ran out on his marriage; you are. But listen, it’s not too late to fix this. Richmond is prepared to go see Reverend Peterson with you to work this out.”

“I don’t think so,” Clarice said. “I’ve seen where Reverend Peterson’s advice leads. And no offense, but I don’t intend to spend my golden years shouting at whores through a megaphone.”

She felt guilty for that low blow when her mother’s eyes began to glisten with tears. But Clarice had been mad for a good long time and a lot nastier things than that were waiting to come out. To keep from saying those things, she took a deep breath and then a drink from her cup of tea. The tea was too hot for the big swallow she took and it scalded all the way from her lips to her stomach. It hurt so much that it took her breath away for a few seconds, but the time she spent recovering from burning her tongue stopped her from saying some of the meaner things that were swirling around in her brain.