The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (7 page)

Things went wrong for Barbara Jean’s mother when the man she
had arranged to see that evening sprung a surprise on her. She’d told him five months earlier that he was going to be a father, and he had seemed to be pleased about it. Or rather, he was pleased Loretta was not going to tell his wife. She was content merely to accept a small monthly payment in exchange for her discretion. This same arrangement also suited each of the three other men Loretta had informed that they were the father of her unborn child.

Loretta had set up a meeting with Daddy no. 4 (going by the order in which she had told them about her pregnancy) at a quiet roadside diner in Leaning Tree after the baby shower. At the diner, she was going to remind him of just how fair she was being and then, when she had him feeling appropriately grateful to her for being such a good sport, she would casually mention just how much easier a new Chevrolet would make life for her and his child. If she worked it right, by sunset she would have a new car and he would travel back to his wife and family in Louisville thanking God that he had knocked up such a reasonable woman.

She seated herself at a booth and drank coffee to come down from her whiskey sour buzz and waited for Daddy no. 4 to join her. When he stepped through the door with Daddy no. 2 right behind him, she knew that the jig was up.

As the men approached, Loretta, always quick on her feet when cornered, made one last desperate move to hold her plan together by playing one daddy against the other. She said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’ve tried so many times to tell him that I love you and it’s all over with him, but I was just too scared. He’s so mean; I didn’t know what he might do to me and our baby.” She said it to both of them, hoping each would assume she was talking to him alone and that she could slip out of the diner while they fought over her. Later, she could separately thank both the conquering hero and the valiant loser for defending her honor, assuring each that she loved only him. With luck, after the dust settled, her plans could go forward unchanged.

Loretta was a stunning beauty, and she knew it. She thought it was only logical that men should fight over her, and they often did. When she got sick with the cirrhosis that killed her at thirty-five, the hardest
thing for her—harder than dying, Barbara Jean thought—was saying goodbye to her beauty. Loretta died hard and she died ugly. Liver disease whittled away her cute, round face and bountiful figure to nothing—a mean turn of fate for a woman who, as one of her men described her, “looked like she was made out of basketballs and chocolate pudding.”

Daddies no. 2 and no. 4 presented a united front in the diner, with Daddy no. 4 doing most of the talking. He told her she’d never get another dime from either of them, and he carried on as if he were some sort of genius detective for single-handedly figuring out her plot. The truth, blurted out by Daddy no. 2, was that Loretta had been the victim of her customary bad luck. The fathers had ended up seated next to each other at Forrest Payne’s joint, and after they had sucked down enough of Forrest’s watered-down liquor to loosen their tongues, they started bragging about their women. It didn’t take them long to realize that they were each bragging about the same one.

Forrest Payne had pretensions of running a gentlemen’s club instead of a country strip joint and whorehouse, so he greeted every customer at the door dressed up in his signature canary-yellow tuxedo. Then he escorted them to their seats with all the flourish of a French maitre d’. Since he didn’t trust anyone else to handle the door and the cover charge money, Loretta knew it had to have been Forrest himself who had seated the daddies next to each other. This, in spite of the fact that she had left explicit instructions that none of her baby’s fathers should be placed within ten feet of each other. For the rest of her short life, Loretta blamed Forrest Payne for ruining her.

Daddy no. 4 leaned across the table and wagged his finger at Loretta’s nose. He said, “I was too smart for you, li’l girl. You been outplayed at your own game.”

Loretta stared at Daddy no. 4, who had once been her favorite, and wondered what it was she had ever seen in him, with his wide, lopsided mouth and his strange, Egyptian-looking eyes. Then she thought about the ring he had bought for her, a decent-sized ruby with tiny azure sapphires arranged around it in a daisy pattern, and
she recalled why she had put up with him. She slid her hands from the table so he wouldn’t see the ring and get it in his head to demand its return. When she tried to pawn it a year later, she would find out the stones were glass.

Daddy no. 2 surprised Loretta by bursting into tears. He buried his face in his hands and wailed as if he’d been stuck with a sharp stick, blubbering on about his lost son. Daddy no. 4 put his arm around his new friend and then put both of their feelings about Loretta into words. He leaned toward her and launched into some very loud and creative name-calling. The other customers in the diner looked their way, wondering what the commotion was about.

Loretta was a firm believer that, if a woman was smart, she acted like a lady by the light of day no matter what she did after sunset. This situation, one daddy crying his eyes out and the other loudly exploring the limits of his vocabulary, was just the kind of thing that got you ostracized by decent folks—the kind of people she planned to be spending her time with as soon as she’d had her baby in University Hospital and elevated her status. Loretta hurried away from the booth and, for the benefit of anyone who might have been listening, said, “I can see that you two do not intend to behave like gentlemen. I shall not stay and risk losing my poise due to your crass behavior.” What she said to herself was “Fuck this. I still got Daddy no. 1 and Daddy no. 3.”

She headed back toward Forrest Payne’s place to cuss him out, and was halfway there when her water broke. She made her way to the best-kept house on the block, thinking that its owners would be likely to have a telephone—not everyone did in 1950. Mrs. Carmel Handy, a schoolteacher Loretta would have known if she hadn’t left school in the sixth grade, owned the well-landscaped brick bungalow she chose to stop at. Miss Carmel answered the insistent knocking at her door and found herself confronted with a very attractive, massively pregnant young woman supporting herself against the doorjamb.

Between groans of discomfort, the girl said, “Hi, I’m Mrs. Loretta Perdue, and I was admiring your front yard and thinking that whoever lived here must be a person of class and would surely have a telephone.
I myself have a telephone, but I’m a ways from home and I’m not feeling well. So, if you don’t mind, I need you to call my friend, Mr. Forrest Payne, at his place of business and tell him to come get me and drive me to University Hospital where I plan to have my baby like folks of substance. It’s the least Forrest could do since my situation is entirely his fault.”

Because she had been in the middle of pressing her hair and she didn’t want to stand there with her door open for any passersby to see her with her head half done, Carmel Handy permitted Loretta to enter her home. Careful not to burn Loretta with the still-smoking straightening comb, she helped her into the house. In her foyer, Miss Carmel listened politely as Loretta recited Forrest Payne’s telephone number, all the while thinking how funny it was that this girl was trying so hard to make Forrest sound like anything but the pimp everyone in Plainview knew he was.

Miss Carmel led Loretta to her living room sofa to rest while she made the phone call. But instead of calling Forrest Payne—she wasn’t about to have her neighbors see that man coming and going from her house, thank you very much—she called a nurse who lived down the block.

The nurse brought Barbara Jean into the world right there on the sofa while Carmel Handy made the first of a dozen phone calls she would make that day to tell her friends what had happened in her home and to extol the benefits of plasticizing your furniture. That first call began “Some girl just popped out another of Forrest Payne’s bastards right in my front room,” starting a rumor that would follow Barbara Jean for the rest of her life.

The baby was named Barbara Jean—Barbara for Daddy no. 1’s mother and Jean for Daddy no. 3’s.

When Loretta’s child was first handed to her, she took note of the infant’s lopsided, half-smiling mouth and the almond-shaped eyes, already fully open, that were tilted up at the corners like an Egyptian’s. Loretta recognized that face instantly and said to herself, “Ain’t this some shit. It was No. 4 all along.” Then she turned to Mrs. Handy and said, “Got any whiskey?”

On a September morning fourteen years later, Miss Carmel read Barbara Jean’s name aloud from the roster in her ninth grade English class. After placing her clipboard down on her desk, Miss Carmel walked over to Barbara Jean and, for the first time, uttered the words that would begin most of their encounters for the next four decades. “Girl, did you know you were born on my davenport?”

Once Barbara Jean had married Lester and his business had taken off, most of the town lined up to kiss her ass in order to get on Lester’s good side. But Carmel Handy continued to greet her that same way. Barbara Jean supposed it spoke well of Miss Carmel’s character that the wealth she came into didn’t change her old teacher’s behavior toward her one bit. But she still hated her for it. It shamed her to admit it, but Barbara Jean felt relieved when, in her eighties, Miss Carmel developed the habit of telling each black woman around Barbara Jean’s age who crossed her path that she was born on her sofa. Eventually, the tale of the baby born in her front room became so bound up with Miss Carmel’s short-circuiting brain that nearly everyone forgot that the story was rooted in fact or had anything to do with Barbara Jean.

Carmel Handy’s block was one of the first to be demolished when housing developers and the university bought up most of Leaning Tree in the 1980s and ’90s. On the day they bulldozed that little brick bungalow, Barbara Jean drove over to Miss Carmel’s street and drank a champagne toast in the front seat of her new Mercedes.

As she stood in the All-You-Can-Eat at the center of an expanding circle of grief over Big Earl’s passing, Barbara Jean listened to Carmel Handy reminding her, yet again, of her low origins. Barbara Jean thought then of the taste of the champagne she sipped that day in her car as she watched the workmen scratch Miss Carmel’s home out of existence. That delicious memory helped her not to scream.

The night before Big Earl’s funeral, Barbara Jean dreamed that she and Lester were walking along a rutted dirt road on a cool fall day. They exhaled clouds of white mist while rust, yellow, and brown leaves floated around them in a circle, as if they were at the center of a cyclone. Because of the storm of leaves, Barbara Jean was just barely able to make out the path ahead of them. She held Lester’s arm tight to keep from twisting her ankle in the tire tracks embedded in the road. Even in her dreams, she always wore heels.

After a time, the leaf storm around them thinned enough to reveal a river ahead. On the opposite shore, a small boy waved. Then, just as they lifted their hands to wave back, a woman in a silvery, iridescent gown appeared, hovering in the air above their heads. The woman said, “Lester, the water is frozen. Just walk on over and get him. He’s waiting.” But it was November or December in the dream and the river was clearly only half frozen. Barbara Jean could see the bubbling and churning current just beneath the brittle surface of the ice. She dug her fingers into the rough cloth of her husband’s winter coat to keep him from going out onto the river. As Lester’s sleeve escaped her grasp, Barbara Jean woke up with her pulse racing and both of her arms reaching out for Lester.

She’d had that dream, or one nearly identical to it, for years. Sometimes it was spring or summer in the dream and, instead of a dangerously thin layer of ice, it was a decrepit rope bridge with rotted wooden slats that spanned the water. But she always dreamed of the same road, the dirt trail that had once formed the western border of Leaning Tree. It had been paved ages ago, or so Barbara Jean had been told. She hadn’t gone near it in years. She always dreamed of the
same waving boy, her lost Adam. The woman in the air also never varied. It was always her mother.

Barbara Jean awakened from her dream with a sore back from being curled up for hours on one of the two Chippendale wingback chairs that sat by the fireplace in the library of her home. The chairs had been reupholstered, at frightful expense, with burgundy crushed-velvet fabric adorned with a fleur-de-lis pattern that matched the design of the library’s hand-painted wallpaper. Every spring at the Plainview Home and Garden Walk, people made a big fuss over those chairs, and Barbara Jean loved them. But they were hell on her lower back if she sat in them for too long a time.

Barbara Jean and Lester’s house stood at the intersection of Plainview Avenue and Main Street. A three-story Queen Anne giant with a turret at its northeast corner and six separate porches, it had once been called Ballard House, and still was by most of the inhabitants of Plainview over the age of fifty. It was built in 1870 by a local thief named Alfred Ballard who looted some of the best homes in the vanquished South during the Civil War and returned to Plainview a rich man. Mr. Ballard’s descendants lacked his business sense and his ruthlessness. They failed to add to their fortune, wasted the money Ballard had left them, and eventually lost the house to the tax man. In 1969, after he expanded his lawn care business to Kentucky and got a contract to tend all of the state-owned properties in the northern half of the state, Lester bought Ballard House for his young wife and their son, Adam. It was a gutted, falling-down mess at the time, and although she loved the house, Barbara Jean had no clue what needed to be done to put it back together. Clarice, though, had been raised by her mother with the assumption that she would one day oversee a grand home. So Barbara Jean turned every decision in the renovation process over to her friend. Barbara Jean stood back and watched as Clarice transformed her massive shell of a house into the kind of showplace Clarice would have lived in if fate, in the form of a three-hundred-pound, corn-fed Wisconsin linebacker with blood in his eye, hadn’t stepped in and transformed Richmond from a potential NFL legend into a recruiter at a university whose football
glory days were long past. Out of respect for her friend, Clarice never accepted a bit of credit for her hard work. Instead, she patiently tutored Barbara Jean, teaching her everything she knew about art, antiques, and architecture. Between the practical experience Barbara Jean gained from tending to the needs of her extravagant old home and from Clarice’s guidance, she eventually surpassed her instructor’s level of expertise.