The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

by Edward Kelsey Moore

  Clarice, having lost her appetite, placed the food she had planned to eat into a plastic tub and tucked it into the refrigerator along with the eggs and milk.

  Richmond came down again as Clarice put the last of her breakfast away. He was wearing gray pants and an annoyed expression now. He said, “I’m running late. I’ve got to go.”

  “But you’ve hardly had anything to eat,” Clarice said.

  He pulled his coat from the rack by the garage door. “That’s okay. I’ll get something later.”

  “Richmond, I really am sorry about the coffee.”

  He blew a kiss at his wife from across the room and went through the door.

  Beatrice retrieved her compact from the pocket of her red-and-green Christmas cardigan and reapplied her lipstick. Then she said, “Clarice, I think you should have a talk with Reverend Peterson. That always helped me when things were bad with your father and our little problem.”

  Clarice’s mother called her father’s serial infidelities their “little problem.” It bugged Clarice to no end whenever she described it that way, but she felt that she couldn’t rightfully say anything about it. She knew it was hypocritical of her to be bothered by her mother giving Abraham Jordan’s cheating a comfortable euphemism when Clarice herself had spent decades pretending Richmond’s “little problem” didn’t even exist. But that didn’t stop her from wanting to shout at her mother to shut the hell up.

  Beatrice said, “Reverend Peterson has had a lot of experience. Believe me, there isn’t a thing you can say that’ll shock him. He can help you deal with all this anger.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Clarice, what you have to concentrate on is that this is all a part of God’s plan. Sometimes we women have to suffer an unfair amount to gain the Lord’s favor. Just remember that you’re paying the toll for your entrance into the Kingdom. Reverend Peterson explained that to me years ago, and I haven’t had a moment of anger since.”

  That just about beat all, Clarice thought. Her father was long dead and her mother still felt sufficiently irate about his behavior to warrant traveling with her holy megaphone. And she was passing out anger-management advice? Watch out, old woman, or I’ll brew an extra hot pot of coffee just for you.

  Clarice said, “Thank you for your advice, Mother, but I’m really not angry. Things are the same with Richmond as they’ve always been. We’re fine.”

  “Clarice, dear, you just scalded the man’s crotch and threw away his insulin.”

  “Threw away his insulin? What are you talking about?”

  Her mother pointed at the trash can. Clarice went to it and pressed the foot pedal that lifted the lid. Sure enough, atop eggshells, coffee grounds, and discarded wrappings of different sorts was the box that contained Richmond’s insulin supply, the box that sometime during the past ten minutes she must have removed from its place in the refrigerator door and tossed into the trash.

  She picked up the insulin and stared at it for several seconds. Then she put the box back into the fridge. She took off her apron then and said, “Mother, I think we’ll go shopping a little bit later.”

  Clarice left the kitchen and walked through the dining room, past the living room, into the music room, and to her piano. She ripped into Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata and forgot about everything, for a while.

  Chapter 19

  During the week after she saw Chick at the hospital, Barbara Jean couldn’t keep her mind in the present day. She chatted with Erma Mae at the All-You-Can-Eat on Wednesday afternoon and found herself glancing down, fully expecting to see Erma Mae’s son, Earl III, clinging to his mother’s apron with sticky hands. It was only after several seconds of bewilderment that Barbara Jean recalled that Earl III—or Three, as everyone called him—had long since grown up and said goodbye to Plainview, like most of his generation. That Friday evening, a pack of laughing college students passed her on the street as she walked home from the museum, and she ogled them until they noticed that she was watching and returned her stare while chuckling and whispering to each other. In her embarrassment, she nearly chased after them to explain that she had momentarily misplaced a few decades and had been searching through their crowd for the younger faces of her middle-aged friends. The sight of a young interracial couple strolling, hand in hand, down Plainview Avenue on Saturday night spun her into a state of near hysteria, fretting over threats to the couple’s safety that had largely vanished years earlier. Each memory triggered by these encounters pushed her toward a bottle, a flask, or her thermos of spiked tea. The good memories weighed her down just as heavily as the bad, and they all demanded to be drunk away, even though some of those memories really were wonderful.

  After Barbara Jean kissed Chick in the back hallway of the All-You-Can-Eat, she fell into a pattern. She would wait until Big Earl, Miss Thelma, and Little Earl were asleep, and then she would look out of her bedroom window to see if the light in the storeroom across the street at the restaurant was on. If it was, she slipped out of the house and went to see Chick.

  They sat on his bed, surrounded by sixty-four-ounce cans of green beans and corn, and they talked until one or both of them couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer. When they weren’t talking, they were kissing—it was just kissing, at first. And every moment was heavenly.

  If they couldn’t meet at the All-You-Can-Eat, they would sneak over to the backyard of Odette’s house and press themselves together in the seclusion of the vine-covered gazebo in her mother’s garden. At Barbara Jean’s insistence, they even traveled over shadowed routes to his bully of a brother’s property a few times. They went into the shed where Chick had lived with his chickens and they kissed passionately on his old feather-covered cot. It was like a purification ritual, and the danger of the situation made it all the more irresistible.

  Chick was a year out of high school then and he was thinking about college, mostly because Big Earl kept telling him that he was too smart not to. Big Earl said the same thing to Barbara Jean.

  Barbara Jean liked the idea of college, but she couldn’t imagine what she would study. She didn’t have a passion like Clarice had with her piano. She got okay grades and she liked school enough. But Loretta had drummed it into her head since she was a child that she was going to marry a rich man. And that required a specific kind of preparation, a kind that you didn’t need college to achieve.

  Barbara Jean’s mother taught her to dress in the manner that she associated with glamour—everything shiny and/or revealing. To make sure Barbara Jean talked like a high-class woman, her mother put belt lashes across her back if she dropped gs from the ends of her words, the way Loretta did. Barbara Jean and her mother joined First Baptist Church because the richest and lightest-skinned black people in town went there. Her mother weighed her every week to make sure her weight was always within man-catching range—something she and Clarice shared in common, Barbara Jean later discovered.

  Barbara Jean thought it was funny that, when she finally did find a rich man, Loretta’s life lessons had proved useless. All that had mattered was that she pass his family’s skin color test. When she was introduced to Lester’s mother, the old woman held a brown paper bag up to Barbara Jean’s cheek and, judging her just a smidge lighter in comparison, said, “Welcome to the family.”

  During the winter of Barbara Jean’s senior year, she wasn’t thinking about her education, or marrying rich, or anything. She was crazy in love with a white boy who was poorer than anybody she knew. Loretta must have been spinning in her grave.

  Even as she fell more deeply in love with Chick, Barbara Jean saw more of Lester. She was too naïve and too blinded by her feelings for Chick to even notice that the hours she spent with Lester were also a kind of dating. He often showed up at the All-You-Can-Eat with James and sat for a while at the window table with Barbara Jean and her friends. But Barbara Jean never thought anything of it. Everyone, it seemed, put in time at the window table. Little Earl, that obnoxious Ramsey Abrams, Clarice’
s silly cousin Veronica. Even Chick became a regular guest at the table when he wasn’t on duty, since he and James had become good buddies.

  Sometimes Lester drove his young friends to Evansville and other nearby towns in his beautiful blue Cadillac, treating them to dinners they could never have afforded on their own. Always, he was a perfect gentleman. Lester never so much as held Barbara Jean’s hand, much less made any sort of advances. She enjoyed his company and was flattered that he wanted to be her friend.

  Clarice told Barbara Jean several times that Lester was interested in her, but Barbara Jean didn’t pay much attention to her. Barbara Jean shared Odette’s opinion that Clarice, already having scripted her own happy ending with Richmond, was now eager to write one for everybody else.

  On a January night in 1968, Lester took James, Richmond, and the Supremes out for a ride in his Cadillac and then to dinner at a nice place in Louisville to celebrate Richmond having broken a passing record at the university. Barbara Jean enjoyed herself. The food was good and the restaurant was the most glamorous place she had ever stepped inside of. But she couldn’t wait to get back to Chick. It was Chick’s birthday and she had saved up to buy him a Timex wristwatch with a genuine leather band, which she thought back then was the height of elegance. She kept an eye on James all through dinner, waiting for his yawning to signal that the evening was over. But James didn’t start to fade until 10:00, and it was nearly 10:30 when they began the forty-minute drive back to Plainview.

  When Lester dropped Barbara Jean off, she found Odette’s parents in Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s living room. Laughing and bobbing their heads to a scratchy old record playing on the stereo, they waved hello to Barbara Jean through a haze of bluish-gray smoke as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom. The four of them stayed up late that night, the way they always did when they got together. When the Jacksons finally went home at around 2:00, Big Earl and Miss Thelma went straight to bed. They fell into loud snoring not five minutes after their bedroom door closed. For the thousandth time that night, Barbara Jean looked out the window to see if the storeroom light at the All-You-Can-Eat was still on. It was, so she tiptoed down the stairs and went to see Chick.

  He was sitting on his narrow bed looking down when Barbara Jean walked into the room with the gift box in her outstretched hands. She rushed over and sat beside him. She said, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t get over here any sooner.” She was going to explain about the Jacksons visiting until late, but he looked up then and she stopped talking.

  Chick had a red-and-blue bruise on his chin and his lower lip was split. She didn’t need to ask who had done it. She said, “Why’d you go over there?” and then immediately wished she hadn’t said it.

  She reached out and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He tried to pull away at first, but then he relaxed and laid his head against her neck. He talked quietly in her ear.

  “I ran into my brother’s girlfriend, Liz, this morning. She said Desmond had been talking about how he wanted me to come back home. She said he’d been in a good mood for a while, not drinking as much and stuff. Plus, Liz’s got this little girl. She’s not my brother’s kid, but she calls me Uncle Ray. And Liz said her daughter was asking why her Uncle Ray didn’t come see her over Christmas.” Chick shrugged. “She asked me to come by for supper. So, I went.

  “Desmond was already pretty drunk when I got to the house, but he was joking and kidding around like we used to do sometimes. Then he lost it halfway through supper. He’s like that. Changes real quick.”

  From years with Loretta, Barbara Jean knew how a drunken meal could go all crazy with no warning. One sip too much and a switch inside got flipped from off to on, and then things went bad fast.

  “Nothing really started it, but all of a sudden he was yelling at Liz that she was a whore and was cheating on him. He threw his plate at her, so Liz grabbed her kid and took off before he could throw another one. Then he started in on me. He said he heard a rumor that I was working for a—a colored man.”

  Chick said it in a way that made it clear to Barbara Jean that “colored man” hadn’t been the term his brother had used.

  “Desmond said he wasn’t gonna let me shame him in front of his friends. And then he started swinging.”

  “I’m getting better, though,” Chick said. He raised his hands and showed her his scraped and bleeding knuckles. “I got in a few good ones myself this time.” He tried to smile and grimaced because of his busted lip.

  All the air seemed to go out of him then. He pulled away from Barbara Jean and stared down at his hands as they rested in his lap. Shaking his head, he said, “It’s all shit. It’s all just a bunch of shit.”

  She reached out and lightly stroked the bruise on his chin, remembering how the touch of his fingers had forever transformed the belt buckle scars on her arm into a smiling face. She kissed his mouth, avoiding the swollen part of his lip. She kissed him again and again. Then she put her hands on his waist and carefully pulled his T-shirt up over his head. There were more bruises on his chest and on his skinny arms and she leaned over and kissed those, too.

  Chick put his hands on the sides of her face and kissed her now. Then he reached down and began to unbutton her blouse.

  They undressed each other as if they had been doing it for years, no fumbling or rushing. And when they were both naked, they slid beneath the covers of his bed.

  Barbara Jean was more experienced than Chick was. But her knowledge of intimacy had come too early and under bad circumstances, courtesy of evil men. She realized from the moment that she and Chick pulled the blankets over their bodies that this was as different from those other times as it could be. And that difference made it seem like her first time, too.

  They wound themselves together over and over again, in a blur of arms and legs, lips and hands. When, finally, they were so ragged from exhaustion that they could do no more than lie with their mouths inches apart, each inhaling the other’s breath, Barbara Jean forgot all about the passing of time and fell asleep in his arms under the pile of tangled linens.

  When Barbara Jean awakened, he was gone. She sat up in the bed and looked around the tiny room, at the giant cans of corn, lard, and beans that were stacked to the ceiling against slatted wood walls, at the lamp he’d made from a Coca-Cola bottle and other bits scavenged from the trash cans behind the hardware store. She began to panic, thinking that she had made an awful mistake. She heard her mother’s voice in her head saying, “I told you, girl. That’s how men are. They get what they want, and then they run.”

  The panic fled when Chick tiptoed back into the room, still naked, carrying a big dish of ice cream with two spoons sticking out of it.

  Seeing that Barbara Jean was awake, he grinned at her. “It’s my birthday. We’ve got to have ice cream.”

  His smile fell away when he saw Barbara Jean’s face. He said, “Are you okay? You aren’t sorry, are you? You aren’t sorry we did—you know, what we did, are you?”

  “I’m not sorry. I just thought for a second that you’d left, that’s all.”

  Chick sat on the edge of the bed and kissed her. He tasted like vanilla and cream. “Why would I go anywhere? You’re here.”

  She took the ice cream dish from him and placed it on the bedside table he had made by stacking old fruit crates. She kicked off the blankets and pulled him toward her. They both laughed as she sang, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” into his ear while he settled his weight on top of her again.

  Barbara Jean and Chick were sharing melted ice cream when they heard the back door of the restaurant open. Someone rattled around in the kitchen as they listened. Then the radio came on and they heard Miss Thelma humming.

  Barbara Jean knew she should have been frightened of being discovered there with Chick. And she knew that she should have thought she had done something wrong. She had learned at least that much from Sundays at First Baptist Church. But she couldn’t manage to feel the slightest bit bad about the best night o
f her life.

  They stayed there in bed together listening to the clanking of pots and pans and enjoying the sound of Miss Thelma’s out-of-tune vocalizing. They finished the melted ice cream and kissed, silently celebrating their new lives on a planet all their own.

  An old-timey blues song came on the radio and Miss Thelma began to sing along: “My baby love to rock, my baby love to roll. What she do to me just soothe my soul. Ye-ye-yes, my baby love me …”

  Chick threw back the covers and hopped out of the bed. He stood beside the bed and began to dance, slowly moving his narrow hips in a widening circle while turning away from Barbara Jean to wave his tiny ass in her direction. He grinned back at her over his shoulder, mouthing the words of the song as he moved.

  Barbara Jean had to pick up the pillow and press it against her mouth to keep Miss Thelma from hearing her laugh as Ray Carlson, the King of the Pretty White Boys, danced for her. She laughed so hard she cried. All the while her spinning, seventeen-year-old brain replayed the same thoughts: My Ray. Ray of light. Ray of sunshine. Ray of hope.

  Barbara Jean thought of her mother. But now, for the first time ever, thinking of Loretta didn’t make her feel bad. She thought about what Loretta would say if she had been able to tell her about this night. Her mother would have said, “Well, it looks like you are your mama’s daughter after all. Your stuff was so good you done made a white boy jump up naked and dance the blues.”

  Chapter 20

  I didn’t exactly sail through my treatments the way I’d fantasized, but the side effects weren’t as bad as I’d been warned they could be. My stomach was a mess sometimes, but mostly I was able to eat like I always had. My skin dried out, but didn’t crack and bleed. I was tired, but not so weary that I had to quit my job or even miss a Sunday at the All-You-Can-Eat. Though it was brittle and broke off with the slightest tug, I kept a fair amount of my hair. Best of all, I celebrated Christmas week without a single visit from Eleanor Roosevelt. By the time of our New Year’s Day party, I was full of optimism and ready to kick up my heels.