The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (3 page)

Nearly everyone, it seemed to me, believed that coming into the world in any manner that could be seen as out of the ordinary was a bad omen. People never said, “Congratulations on managing to deliver a healthy baby while you were stuck in that rowboat in the middle of the lake.” They just shook their heads and whispered to each other that the child would surely drown one day. No one ever said, “Aren’t you a brave little thing, having your baby all alone in a chicken coop.” They just said that the child would turn out to have bird shit for brains and then went on to treat the child that way even if the kid was clearly a tiny genius. Like the doomed child born on the water and the dummy arriving among fowl, I was born in a sycamore tree and would never have the good sense to know when to run scared.

Not knowing any better, I listened to what I was told about myself and grew up convinced I was a little brown warrior. I stomped my
way through life like I was the Queen of the Amazons. I got in fights with grown men who were twice as big as and ten times meaner than me. I did things that got me talked about pretty bad and then went back and did them again. And that morning I first saw my dead mother in my kitchen, I accepted that I had inherited a strange legacy and visited with her over a bowl of grapes instead of screaming and heading for the hills.

I know the truth about myself, though. I have never been fearless. If I ever believed such a thing, motherhood banished that myth but quick. Still, whenever logic told me it was time to run, a little voice whispered in my ear, “You were born in a sycamore tree.” And, for good or ill, the sound of that voice always made me stand my ground.

Clarice and Richmond Baker claimed seats at opposite ends of the window table at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat and waited for their four friends to arrive. The restaurant was an easy walk from Calvary Baptist and they were always first to show up for after-church supper. Odette and James Henry’s little country church, Holy Family Baptist, was farthest from the All-You-Can-Eat, but James was a fast driver and, being a cop, unafraid of getting speeding tickets. So they usually arrived next. Barbara Jean and Lester Maxberry were members of grand First Baptist, the rich people’s church. It looked down on Plainview from its perch on Main Street and was closest to the restaurant, but Lester was twenty-five years older than the rest of the group and he often moved slowly.

Clarice caught her reflection in the window glass and imagined that she and Richmond must resemble a luminous peacock and his drab mate. She was hidden, neck to kneecaps, beneath a modest, well-tailored beige linen dress. Richmond, leaning back in his chair and waving hello to friends seated at other tables around the room, demanded attention in the pale gray summer suit Clarice had set out for him the night before along with his favorite shirt, a cotton button-down that was the vivid ultramarine of aquarium rocks.

He had always worn bold colors. Richmond had such a Ken-doll handsomeness about him that the women in his life, first his mother and then Clarice, couldn’t resist the urge to dress him in bright hues and show him off. On the occasion of Richmond’s first date with Clarice, his mother had adorned her teenage son in a peach jacket with white rope trim ornamenting the lapels. A getup like that would have gotten any other boy in town ridiculed and called a sissy—it was
still the 1960s, after all. But Richmond Baker sauntered up Clarice’s front walk and managed to make that outfit look as masculine as a rack of antlers. Clarice often pictured that loose, powerful way he walked back then before the surgeries stiffened him. It was as if he were constructed entirely of lean muscle strung together with taut rubber bands.

By coincidence, Clarice had chosen a peach skirt for that first date. Her skirt matched Richmond’s prissy jacket so perfectly that everyone who saw them out on the town later assumed they had planned it that way. Clarice and her mother had peeked through the curtains and watched him step onto the front porch. Her mother, who was as excited as Clarice was, had dug her fingers into Clarice’s arm until her daughter pulled away from her. All the while, her mother had gushed that their matching ensembles were a sign Clarice and Richmond were made for each other.

Clarice, though, had already seen all the signs she needed. Young Richmond had a handsome, almost pretty face with a small, well-shaped mouth and long eyelashes. He had a football scholarship waiting for him at the university across town. He was a preacher’s son, his father having been the pastor of their church before moving on to a larger congregation just across the state line in Louisville. And he had those beautiful hands.

She had been in awe of his hands long before they brought him glory for palming a football in high school, college, and a professional career that had lasted only one season.

By the time he was eleven years old, Richmond was using his already large paws to show off for the girls by pulling walnuts from the low-hanging branches of the trees that lined the streets between the schoolyard and their neighborhood. He would make a grunting, grimacing production of crushing the nuts between his palms until he tired of his solo act and joined in with the other boys who ran in his pack, tossing the walnuts at the girls as they ran home squealing and laughing.

The children had named the walnut trees “time bomb trees” because when the nuts were past their prime they turned black and
made a quiet ticking sound on hot days. Years later, she often thought it was fitting that her earliest recollection of the boy who would become her husband was a memory of him lobbing time bombs in her direction.

Lit by the afternoon sun from the window at the All-You-Can-Eat, Richmond Baker still looked like a square-jawed young football hero. But Clarice was doing her best not to look his way at all. Every time she glanced at her husband, she thought back to the hours she had sat up worrying until he finally staggered in at 3:57 that morning. The sight of him brought to mind those horrible, slow-passing minutes of waiting and then the time spent lying in bed beside him after he finally got home, pretending to sleep and wondering whether she possessed sufficient upper-body strength to smother him with his pillow.

At breakfast, he had dragged himself into the kitchen, scratched his private parts, and told her a tale that she knew was a lie. It was the old reliable story of having to work late and finding that every phone within a ten-mile radius was broken. For the new millennium, he had updated his excuse to include cellular phones mysteriously losing their signals. He deserved some credit for keeping up with the times, she thought. After he told his lie, he had sat down at the kitchen table, blown a kiss in his wife’s direction, and tucked himself into the breakfast she had prepared for him, attacking it as if he hadn’t eaten a meal in weeks. Screwing around, Clarice thought, must stimulate the appetite.

Before church that morning, Clarice had mulled over her situation and decided that her problem was that she had gotten out of the habit of ignoring Richmond’s little lapses; he had been on such good behavior for the past couple of years. She figured that if she just avoided looking at Richmond through breakfast, morning service, and maybe during the walk to Earl’s, she could relocate that old wall in her brain she used to hide behind at times like this. Then she’d soon be back to merrily pretending things were just fine, as she had done for decades. She had gazed at the kitchen floor through breakfast. She had stared at the stained-glass windows during church. She
counted the clouds in the sky and the cracks in the sidewalk on the way to the All-You-Can-Eat. But the remedy didn’t work. The throbbing at her temples that bloomed each time she watched Richmond’s pretty, lying mouth spread into a grin told her that she needed more time before she could step back into the old routine, the way her husband apparently had.

Clarice heard a deep male voice whisper, “Hey there, gorgeous.” She looked to her right and saw that Ramsey Abrams had slithered up beside her. He placed one hand on the table and the other on the back of her chair, and then he leaned in until his face was just inches away from hers.

Ramsey had been Richmond’s number one running buddy for years, the two of them continuing to sow their wild oats together long after they were married and the fathers of several children between them. With his nose nearly touching hers, Clarice could see that the whites of Ramsey’s eyes were laced with bright red veins. She detected the odor of stale rum on his breath.

She began to create a picture in her head of how the previous evening had started. Richmond would have been in his office at the university where he and Ramsey both worked as recruiters for the football team. Ramsey shuffled in and said something along the lines of “Come on, Richmond. Just join me for a quick drink. I’ll have you home by ten. You can stay out till ten, can’t you? Your woman ain’t got that tight a hold on your balls, does she?”

She had no real evidence that he had been the instigator of Richmond’s night out, and she knew Richmond was perfectly capable of getting into mischief all on his own. Still, Clarice itched to slap Ramsey’s stupid face and tell him to get back across the room to the table where his son Clifton—the son who had been in and out of jail since he was thirteen, not the other son who sniffed airplane glue and touched himself inappropriately in women’s shoe stores—and Ramsey’s bucktoothed wife, Florence, sat glaring at each other.

She said, “Ramsey, you keep sweet-talking me like that and I’m going to have to try and steal you away from Florence.”

He laughed. “Baby, I sure won’t stop you from trying. Just don’t tell Richmond.”

Clarice said, “Ramsey, you are so naughty,” and she slapped his hand in that way that men like him interpreted as
Please do go on, you sexy bad boy
. Then he leaned in closer and kissed her on the cheek. She let loose a kind of girlish squeal, the sound of which made her want to kick herself. No, not only herself, but her mother, too, for drumming this business of responding to male attention with adolescent giddiness so firmly into her head that it was automatic now.

She delivered another slap to Ramsey’s hand. This time, she accidentally allowed her true feelings about him to creep into her gesture. He let out a very sincere “Ouch!” and snatched his hand away before walking toward Richmond’s end of the table. As she watched Ramsey rubbing his knuckles, her headache eased just a bit.

Ramsey pulled a chair up close to Richmond and the two of them started whispering in each other’s ears, stopping occasionally to bellow with laughter. Clarice imagined the content of the conversation passing between them and her thoughts turned violent again. She picked up her fork from the place setting, twirled it like a cheerleader’s baton with her left thumb and forefinger, and thought about the sense of fulfillment she would gain if she walked to the other end of the table and plunged that fork into Richmond’s forehead. She pictured the look of amazement that would spread over his face as she grabbed hold of his jaw to get better leverage, and then twisted the fork 180 degrees counterclockwise. That fantasy felt so dangerously good that she forced herself to put the fork back down on the table. She told herself, again, to look away.

Her gaze was drawn to the center of the table then, and she noticed the new tablecloth for the first time. The restaurant, apparently, had a new logo. At the center of the tablecloth, and all the others in the room, a painted wreath of fruits and vegetables spelled out “All-You-Can-Eat.” Inside the circle of produce was a pair of shiny red lips with a bright pink tongue protruding from them.

Clarice could see Little Earl’s tacky fingerprints all over this. He had inherited his father’s kind disposition, but not much of his good taste. And she suspected that, even though the place was no longer legally his, Big Earl wasn’t going to be happy with this innovation. Those nasty-looking lips and fruits and vegetables—particularly the
suggestive cherry and cucumbers that spelled “All”—were going to have the more conservative patrons in an uproar. Clarice was thankful that her pastor wasn’t a regular customer; she could easily imagine him calling for a boycott.

She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed the new tablecloths the instant she walked in. They definitely hadn’t been there a day earlier when she had eaten lunch at this same table with Odette and Barbara Jean. She was so familiar with the All-You-Can-Eat, and it had changed so little over the years, that she could usually tell if one chair was out of place. This was how much Richmond had put her off her game.

Clarice and her friends had been meeting at the window table at Earl’s for almost forty years—since right about the time they were nicknamed the Supremes. Little Earl had wild crushes on all three of them back then, and he had tried his best to seduce them with free Cokes and chicken wings. Clarice was sure that, if he had been a little more persistent, it would have eventually worked on Odette. That girl was always hungry. Even when she was a child, Odette ate like a grown man.

Clarice’s first memory of Odette was of watching her stuff fistfuls of candy into her mouth and then wipe her sticky hands on her dress in kindergarten. Odette always wore hideous homemade dresses with crooked seams and mismatched patterns. Clarice still remembered their first conversation. Since Odette’s maiden name was Jackson and Clarice’s was Jordan, alphabetical order demanded that they sit next to each other throughout most of their education. Odette had reached over from her desk and passed Clarice a piece of taffy in class one day. Clarice said to her, “That’s the ugliest dress in the whole world.”

Odette replied, “My grandmama made it for me. She’s real good at sewin’, but she’s blind.” She popped another piece of candy into her mouth and added, “This ain’t the ugliest dress in the world. I’m gonna wear that one tomorrow.”

And she did. And it was. And they’d been friends ever since.

Little Earl’s wife, Erma Mae, walked, ass first, through the swinging doors that led from the kitchen, carrying a tray of food. Erma Mae had the largest head Clarice had ever seen on a woman. When
she was in high school, that huge, round head, coupled with her tall, bony body and flat chest, earned her the nickname Lollipop. Marriage to Little Earl, and access to all that good free food, had thickened her out from her hips on down, so the nickname hadn’t stuck. Putting on all that extra weight was probably not the healthiest thing for her, but it did help to balance out that giant head, which Clarice supposed must bring Erma Mae some solace.