The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (4 page)

Erma Mae placed the tray on the buffet table and then plopped down on one of the two wooden stools next to the gleaming stainless-steel steam tables from which she and her husband oversaw their domain every day. She made eye contact with Clarice after she settled onto her stool, and she waved at her.

When Clarice waved back, Erma Mae stood and performed a little pirouette to display her new apron, which, like the tablecloths, had that awful lips logo on it. Clarice mouthed, “I love it,” and thought,
Hope you’re watching, Richmond. This is how you tell a convincing lie
.

Erma Mae yelled, “Belinda!” and her daughter rushed in from the kitchen. Erma Mae pointed toward Clarice and Richmond, and Belinda picked up a pitcher of iced tea and headed to their table. Clarice was fond of Belinda. She was a darling girl, and smart, too. She had won enough scholarship money to pay for a full ride at the university. Unfortunately, she was also the mirror image of her big-headed mother at that age. If you squinted as she walked toward you, you’d swear a brown party balloon was floating your way.

After Belinda poured Richmond’s tea, she accidentally nudged his glass with the pitcher, causing the glass to fall to the floor. She let out a yelp and said she was sorry. Then she started going on about how clumsy she was. Belinda pulled a kitchen rag from her apron pocket and moved to wipe up the spill, but Richmond stopped her. “And risk ruining that fancy new apron? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,” he said as he took the rag from her. He dropped to his knees to clean up the mess. Belinda continued apologizing as he worked, and she poured him another tea using a glass taken from one of the other place settings at the table.

Watching Richmond kneel in his best summer suit at the feet of
that awkward, plain girl just to make her feel good caused Clarice’s bad memories of the previous night and morning to recede a little. That was Richmond. About the time she built up a good head of steam thinking of the many ways he had disappointed her, he’d go and remind her of what she loved about him. She watched him swirl that rag over the rutted oak floor and couldn’t help but think of how those same wonderful hands had comforted their children and changed as many, if not more, of their diapers as hers had. Those hands had also spoon-fed her father—three times a day, every day—for the last weeks of her father’s life, when he was too frail to lift a spoon and too proud to allow Clarice or her mother to feed him.
That
Richmond, the kind and selfless one, was the only Richmond she had seen for two years. But the other Richmond, the one who lied and cheated, had reappeared, and no number of kind words or gallant gestures could erase him from her mind.

Belinda left, carrying the tea-soaked cloth and still looking flustered, but grinning. Richmond returned to his chair and gulped from his glass. Clarice tasted her tea and discovered that it was so sweet she couldn’t stand more than a sip. Richmond, who was diabetic, had no business drinking any of it. But when she looked his way, she saw that Richmond was not only guzzling the sweet tea, he was using it to wash down a piece of pecan pie that someone, probably that damn Ramsey Abrams, had slipped to him.

This was part of the dance they did each Sunday. Richmond sneaked fatty, sugary treats that were off his diet and Clarice played the role of the frustrated mother, running to the other end of the table to pinch his ear and demand that he hand it over to her. The game always ended with Richmond batting those long lashes of his at her until she permitted him a spoonful of whatever he was sneaking. Then she would return to her chair, theatrically rolling her eyes about what an ill-disciplined boy her Richmond was.

But Clarice was in no mood to play along with him this time. She watched him chew the pie and wash it down with sweet tea, and she kept her mouth firmly shut. She told herself that this time she wasn’t going to lift a finger to stop him. He could put himself in the hospital again, if he wanted to. If he didn’t care, why should she?

Old habits evolve into reflexes, though, and Clarice found that she couldn’t stop herself. She raised her tea glass high in the air with her right hand and then tapped it with the nail of her left ring finger to get his attention. She said, “Richmond, too sweet.”

He pushed his lower lip out and unleashed the sad eyes, but he slid his glass of tea and the small plate containing the pie away from his place setting. Then, performing his part of their little ritual to perfection, he grabbed his fork and took one more quick bite of the pie. Then he winked at her.

Clarice had learned her husband was a diabetic two years earlier when she received a phone call from the hospital saying that he had been found in his university office in a coma and might not make it. He was in intensive care for weeks, and for months afterward he was nearly helpless—no feeling in his feet, no strength in his beautiful hands. When she finally got him home, she prayed, bullied, sweet-talked, and seduced, anything to get Richmond well again.

She succeeded magnificently. He was up and about far sooner than his doctors had anticipated. And when he recovered, he expressed his gratitude for the care she had given him to anyone who would listen. He would actually stop strangers on the street and say, “This woman saved my life; made me a new man.”

And Richmond
was
a new man. For the first time in their marriage he was actually the husband Clarice had always pretended he was. All the love she had for him, the affection that had felt so inconvenient for so long, suddenly didn’t seem misplaced. It was a second chance at life, a wonderful rebirth for both of them.

It lasted two years. Two fine years.

A petite woman in a knee-length tan dress and black patent leather pumps walked past Clarice and strode up to Richmond. She leaned over to say something into his ear, giving Clarice and half the dining room a view of her tiny backside.

The vise around Clarice’s forehead tightened again. There she is, Clarice thought, the reason Richmond didn’t make it home until nearly sunrise.

With her eyeglasses stowed away in her purse, Clarice couldn’t identify the woman whispering to her husband. She reached to
retrieve her glasses, but stopped herself. The only people who saw her bespectacled with any regularity were her piano students. That concession to middle age had come only after she had detected a slight decline in the general level of her students’ playing that was caused, she came to realize, by her inability to see subtle technical lapses—an intermittently flattened finger, a wrist that dipped at just the wrong moment, a transient raised shoulder. Few people even knew that Clarice owned glasses, and she certainly wasn’t about to give Richmond’s latest partner in fornication the pleasure of seeing her looking matronly. Not today.

Clarice leaned back, hoping that a little more distance would bring the woman into better focus. She teetered on the rear legs of her chair until she felt that she was on the verge of toppling over backwards. Only the thought of Richmond’s current bit on the side laughing at her as she lay with her back on the floor and her best Sunday pumps pointing at the ceiling forced Clarice to sit up straight again.

Attempting not to squint so blatantly that Richmond and the stranger might notice, Clarice strained to see the other end of the table. Whoever the woman was, Richmond responded to her with a wide smile that displayed even, capped teeth that were the eye-straining white of new aluminum siding and took years off his face.

Right then, Clarice felt something crack inside of her. The look of admiration on Richmond’s face as he flirted, right in front of her, with this skinny tramp in her polyester dress was just too damn much to take. Clarice had gone decades without making scenes, no matter how great the provocation. But now, at their window table at the All-You-Can-Eat, in front of some of their oldest friends, she was primed to leap into uncharted territory.

Before she had time to think about what she was doing, Clarice stood from her chair and shouted, “Richmond!” loud enough that the restaurant grew quieter as the people at the surrounding tables stopped their conversations to look her way. But her chance to let thirty-five years of pent-up outrage come flooding out evaporated when the woman whispering to Richmond turned in her direction and Clarice saw that it was Carmel Handy. She was good-looking, nicely shaped, well-groomed, and at least ninety years old. The schoolboy
smile Clarice had seen on her husband’s face had been just that. They’d both had Miss Carmel as their ninth grade English teacher.

That her prime suspect turned out to be Miss Carmel was, Clarice had to admit, one hell of an ironic twist. Carmel Handy was, at that time, Clarice’s personal hero because of the local legend about her marriage.

The tale people told was that William Handy once took off on a weeklong whoring excursion. When he got home, Miss Carmel confronted him and told him the only excuse he could possibly have for disappearing like that was that he must have forgotten where he lived. So she recited their address, 10 Pine Street, aloud. And, to make it memorable, she punctuated the telling with three blows to Mr. Handy’s head with a cast-iron skillet. She didn’t kill him, but she changed him from Big Bad Bill to Sweet William overnight.

That had happened before Clarice was born, if it happened at all. Rumor had a way of becoming permanently entangled with fact in small towns like Plainview. But, to this day, angry wives in southern Indiana evoke the legend of “the Skillet Lady” whenever they want to get their husbands’ full attention.

Richmond and Miss Carmel both stared at Clarice, waiting for her to explain her outburst. She stared back at them, trying to come up with words. But no words would form. All she could think about was how satisfying it must have been for Miss Carmel to remind her no-count husband where he lived by clobbering him on the head once for each of the three syllables of their address. Since Richmond and Clarice lived at 1722 Prendergast Boulevard, she assumed that her satisfaction would be four times sweeter.

As she had so many times in the past, Odette came riding to Clarice’s rescue. Through the window, Clarice saw James and Odette’s car squeezing into a small space directly across the street, in front of the two-story white clapboard house Big Earl had moved his young family into not long after he opened the All-You-Can-Eat.

Clarice lowered herself into her chair and said, “Hi, Miss Carmel, how are you, dear?” Then, to Richmond, “Honey, Odette and James are here.”

Miss Carmel said hello to Clarice and then went back to chatting
with Richmond, who was still teacher’s pet after forty-three years. The customers seated nearby stopped staring and resumed their conversations when they saw that nothing exciting was going to happen.

For reasons Clarice could never understand, Odette and James insisted upon traveling around town in a microscopic ten-year-old Honda when James had full access to a much roomier and more presentable state police department vehicle. It looked even worse now because Odette had packed on at least ten more pounds that year; and that was on top of the extra fifty she’d been carrying since the Nixon years. The sight of them extricating themselves from that tiny car—Odette, as round as a berry and dressed in one of those shapeless muumuus she favored, and James, skeletal and over six feet tall—was such a spectacle that Clarice couldn’t help but imagine she was taking in a circus act.

As she watched Odette and James walk toward the All-You-Can-Eat, Clarice asked herself how on earth she had ended up being the one Supreme who turned into her mother. Odette might look like Dora Jackson, but she was as different as she could be from her mother, who had always scared Clarice a bit with her talk of ghosts and her countrified brusqueness. And with all of her wealth, civic-mindedness, and charitable deeds, Barbara Jean was about as far as she could get from living the sad, desperate life her mother had lived.

Clarice had been the one to follow her mother’s example. She had become a pillar of her church, striving for biblical perfection at all costs. When her children came, first Ricky, then Abe, and, finally, the twins, Carolyn and Carl, Clarice had made sure that they were the cleanest, best-dressed, and most polite children in town. She had acted the part of a lady, even when every last particle of her being yearned to spit, curse, and kill. And she had grown up and married her father.

Clarice Jordan Baker was the first black child born at University Hospital. It was reported in black newspapers as far away as Los Angeles. Clarice’s mother, Beatrice Jordan, encased the news clippings of the glad tidings in ornate gold frames and placed them strategically around her house. No guest could sit at the Jordans’ dining table or use their toilet without being aware that the family had once made history. The clipping over the mantel in the living room was snipped from the front page of the
Indianapolis Recorder
. The caption beneath the photo read “The New Negro Family.” The article about Clarice’s birth heralded the arrival of the “new Negro family of the desegregated 1950s.” Her father, attorney Abraham Jordan, was missing from the picture.

Beatrice worked as a nursing assistant at University Hospital. She got it into her head one day that her child would be born there, instead of at the colored hospital an hour away in Evansville where everyone in Leaning Tree had their babies. Fortunately for her, this wild idea coincided with the arrival of Dr. Samuel Snow, who had come to Indiana State University at Plainview from New York City that year to preside over the ob-gyn department. Dr. Snow let it be known when he came to the hospital that, under his leadership, access to the department would no longer be restricted by race. The university agreed to his demand, believing he would get over that bit of New York–style eccentricity once he got settled in southern Indiana and gained an appreciation for how things worked there. But Dr. Snow did not change his mind, and Beatrice, on the job well into her pregnancy, arranged to repeatedly waddle across his path and allow him to believe he had handpicked her—instead of the other way around—for the honor of making history at University Hospital.