Our annual January get-together was a long-running tradition, going back to the first year of our marriage. The truth, even though he denies this, is that the first party was an attempt by James to prove to his friends that I wasn’t as bad a choice of a mate as I seemed. Richmond and Ramsey—and others, most likely—had warned James that a big-mouthed, hot-tempered woman like me could never be properly tamed. But James was determined to show them that I could, on occasion, be as domestic and wifely as any other woman. I suspect that he’s still trying to convince them.
What James has proved is that people will flock to a party hosted by a troublesome woman as long as she lays out a good spread. The party got a little bigger with each passing year, and lately we can count on seventy-five to a hundred folks showing up throughout the course of the day.
I normally cooked for a solid week in anticipation of my guests arriving, but that year James fought me, insisting that I conserve my strength and have the whole thing catered by Little Earl. We battled it out until we finally came to a compromise. Little Earl covered the savory. I did the sweet, with some help from Barbara Jean and Clarice.
My friends worked harder than I did to put the party together. Clarice even brought her mother by to lend a hand with the baking. Mrs. Jordan—who, with her bullhorn nonsense, was giving Mama a run for her money in the race to be considered the nuttiest woman Plainview had ever produced—was a real asset in the kitchen once she got past her revulsion over the cheapness of my serving platters. I appreciated her coming by to help, but her habit of stopping to thank Jesus at every step of the cooking process got old real fast. We thanked Him for every ingredient, the utensils, even the oven timer. Being around her reminded me of something Mama liked to say: “I love Jesus, but some of his representatives sure make my ass tired.”
On New Year’s Day, the guests started showing up around three o’clock. My sons, my daughter, and my grandkids did all of the greeting. Denise was bossy, ordering her older brothers around like she always had. Jimmy argued with his sister over the slightest thing: “The coats go in the middle bedroom.” “No, they don’t. They go in the guest bedroom.” Eric ignored them both and acted just as thrilled to be having company over as he did when he was six years old. I half expected him to grab one of the guests by the hand and demand that they accompany him to his room to see his train set. Seeing my fully grown offspring together, falling back into the roles they had played as children, was a load of fun for me, although I’m sure my son-in-law and daughter-in-law were counting the seconds until they could escape my house and get back the adults they’d married.
James’s police friends arrived first. The younger men who worked under James came at the precise moment the party was scheduled to start, like they were appearing for morning roll call. Mostly fresh-faced, beefy white boys—there were still no women in his unit—they came bearing flowers, in the company of skinny girlfriends who wore extremely low-cut blouses. As always, the first-timers looked stiff and uncomfortable until the good food, plentiful beer, and a few country songs mixed in with the R&B on the stereo loosened them up.
My brother stomped through the living room and threw himself on me like an overly friendly Labrador. Rudy spun me around and inspected me. “You don’t look much worse than usual,” he said. Then he gave me a brotherly punch in the arm and a kiss on each cheek.
Rudy’s wife, Inez, stepped closer, slapped him on the wrist, and chastised him for being too rough with me. Then she hugged me so tight she squeezed the breath out of me. Inez might be a dainty thing—she’s my height and no more than a hundred pounds—but every last bit of what’s there is muscle. Rudy likes to pretend his wife is helpless, and she plays along. But I wouldn’t want to be the one to make Inez mad. The three of us did some fast catching up before I passed them along to James and said hello to the newest guests.
Richmond, Clarice, and her mother, Beatrice, arrived at the same time as Veronica and her mother, Glory. Beatrice, Glory, and Veronica all wore elaborate, floor-length gowns. It was their habit to overdress for every occasion. They came to picnics dressed for a day on a yacht. They showed up at graduation ceremonies done up as if they were attending a coronation. They always wanted their hosts to understand that they were either on their way to or on their way from a much more important gathering.
Beatrice and Glory made a big show of not speaking to each other due to an argument they’d had on the phone that morning. Whenever the two elderly sisters came within five feet of each other, they snorted and sniffed like riled-up horses before stalking off in opposite directions.
Barbara Jean caused a stir when she sashayed in packed into a hot pink dress with a plunging neckline. The young cops looked away from their dates and stared in appreciation at this woman twice the age of their girlfriends. Barbara Jean went straight to the drinks table and hit the vodka with an intensity that worried me.
My doctor, Alex Soo, came in with a hefty woman on his arm. She was as loud as he was quiet, and she had a laugh like a rooster’s crow. She parked herself beside one of the food tables and soon made it clear that her goal for the day was to break the world record for consuming the most deviled eggs in one sitting. I liked her right off.
Ramsey Abrams and his always angry wife, Florence, arrived with their sons, Clifton and Stevie, and their future daughter-in-law. Like her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt, Sharon was dressed in the style of touring royalty. From the moment she stepped in the door, she signaled her intent to spend the evening flouncing around in her party dress while gesturing wildly with her left hand to show off the expensive engagement ring Clifton had given her. The naïve girl was completely oblivious to the way her shady fiancé broke out in a sweat when she brandished that rock anywhere near one of the many cops in attendance.
I sure wished Ramsey and Florence had used common sense and left Stevie at home. He clearly wasn’t over that shoe thing of his, or his airplane glue habit either, judging from his glassy eyes. He stared at the feet of every woman who walked past with an expression on his face that reminded you of a stray dog outside of a butcher shop. It gave people the creeps.
Clarice’s daughter, Carolyn, who is good friends with my Denise, stretched her Christmas visit out a few extra days and came to the party with her husband and her son, who was carried in already sound asleep in his father’s arms. Carolyn had gone way out of her way to find a man who wasn’t the least bit like her father. She married a Latino intellectual who teaches physics at a college in Massachusetts. He’s small, much shorter than Carolyn, and he’s had the doughy body of an idle middle-aged man since he was twenty-two.
When Richmond realized that Carolyn was getting serious about the intellectual, he did everything he could to divert Carolyn’s interest in the direction of someone he thought would be more suitable for her. He scoured the campus until he found two replicas of himself in his virile prime. Then he dragged both men to a big Memorial Day picnic at his house, where he paraded them in front of Carolyn like a couple of prize bulls. In a turn of events that I’m sure Richmond will still be trying to sort out on the day he dies, Carolyn stayed with her egghead while the two Richmond clones began a romance with each other on that Memorial Day that is still going strong more than a decade later.
Mama appeared, along with Mrs. Roosevelt, late in the evening. They both looked like they’d been to several other parties already that day. Mama’s eyes were bloodshot and Mrs. Roosevelt, who was wearing a cone-shaped silver and gold paper hat that was attached to her head with an elastic band, seemed to have forgotten her usual good manners. She waved in my general direction as she staggered in. Then she plopped down onto a footstool and began to snore.
When Mama spotted Rudy, she squealed, “Look at my boy. Ain’t he the handsomest thing?” Rudy’s a dear, but he’s mostly ears, nose, and belly. Pretty, my brother is not. I said nothing.
After Mama finished making a fuss over Rudy, she commenced to making a nuisance of herself by following me around the ho
use as I performed my hostess duties. “Oh, there’s the Abrams boy,” she said when she saw Ramsey. He was standing much too close to the girlfriend of one of the young cops and getting dirty looks from the girl’s date and from his wife, who scowled at him from a few feet away.
Mama said, “You know, it’s sad when you think about it. He’s probably just overcompensatin’ for a very small penis. All of the Abrams men have little dicks. That’s why they’re so short-tempered. His poor father and uncle were the same way, had practically nothin’ down there at all.”
I silently prayed that my mother would spare me the details of just how she’d come across that bit of information about the Abrams men.
I noticed Clarice sitting on the couch next to her mother and aunt. She was frowning like she had a toothache and her attention was focused on some point way off in the distance. The fingers of both her hands were tapping away on her lap like she was playing an invisible piano. If her mother didn’t get out of town soon, Clarice was going to snap.
When I came over to offer to freshen up their drinks, I saw that Clarice’s mother and her aunt Glory had started speaking to each other again. They were having a good time now, arguing about who would be more surprised to be left behind after the Rapture, the Catholics or the Mormons.
Mama sneered at them. “I know you and Clarice are friends, but you can’t tell me you don’t wanna slap the livin’ shit outta that mother of hers. Talk about somebody with her head stuffed way up her own ass. And that sister of hers is just as bad. As far back as I can remember, Beatrice and Glory been usin’ Jesus as an excuse to be bitches.” She wagged her finger at them and, like they could hear her, said, “That’s right, I said it!”
Veronica waved me over to where she was holding court, showing Sharon’s wedding planning book to a group of women who were too polite to walk away. She pointed to a page in the book that held a magazine clipping with a picture of a bride floating on a rug in midair down the center aisle of a church. Veronica said, “I’m thinking Sharon should make a magic carpet entrance. It’s all done with lights and mirrors. Isn’t it something?”
I agreed that it was something, all right, and tried to ignore the fact that my mother was next to me shrieking with laughter at the idea of big Sharon floating to the altar.
Over Mama’s continued cackling, I heard Veronica discussing the trouble she was having finding a suitable affordable home for the newlyweds. Sharon had another year at the university, and her fiancé, Clifton, Veronica claimed, would be going back to school soon. So after the wedding, which Veronica and her psychic had determined should happen on the first Saturday in July, she would settle them into something nice, but reasonably priced, here in town.
James, ever helpful, walked by just then and said, “You know, Veronica, we don’t have a tenant in the house in Leaning Tree.”
If I hadn’t been holding a tray of pigs in blankets, I’d have knocked James upside his head. I had nothing against Sharon. It wasn’t her fault that she’d inherited her father’s intelligence and her mother’s personality. It was the thought of Veronica traipsing in and out of Mama and Daddy’s house that made my pressure rise.
I gave James my back away quickly look. But he’d been immune to my hostile glances for ages, so he wasn’t put off his stride for a second. He just went right on being helpful.
He said, “We just put a new roof on it and painted it. And the last tenant took good care of the garden. It’s not like it was when Miss Dora was living, but it’s not bad.”
It turned out I didn’t have to worry about the prospect of having more Veronica in my life. Veronica wrinkled her nose and said, “Thanks, James, but I didn’t spend all those years working to get out of Leaning Tree just to send my baby daughter back there.”
Mama let out a snort. “Talk about a nerve. I guess she’s too good for my house now. She oughta try to sell that bullshit to some folks who don’t remember where she came from. And what kind of ‘working’ did she do to get outta Leanin’ Tree? All she did was outlive her lowlife daddy. Odette, tell her your mama’s back and that she’s fixin’ to haunt the fuck outta her. Go on, tell ’er.”
I hadn’t seen Minnie McIntyre come in, but I heard the tinkling of a bell and turned to see her standing just behind me. Minnie had taken to wearing her fortune-telling turban with its tiny silver bell all the time. She said that, because she was so near death, Charlemagne the Magnificent had more messages for her than ever. So she wouldn’t miss one of those messages, she made sure to always have her bell at the ready. My first thought was Oh great, now Mama will never shut up.
When Mama was alive, just the sight of Minnie McIntyre was enough to start her cussing and spitting. I prepared myself to hear her let loose with a foul-mouthed tirade. But Mama was watching Denise as she attempted to corral my grandkids. She wasn’t thinking about Minnie. Mama heard Denise call her daughter by her name, Dora, and I thought she was going to fall out on the floor.
Mama was in my business so much that I had forgotten she wasn’t a daily part of my children’s lives, too. She hadn’t seen them in years and didn’t know her great-grandchildren at all. Now she’d discovered that she had a cute little namesake running around and it had knocked the wind out of her sails. She went silent and tottered off behind the kids. After all the shocks she’d handed me, it was kind of nice to see Mama taken by surprise for a change.
Barbara Jean stood talking with Erma Mae on the other side of the living room from me. She nodded her head and pretended to listen to whatever Erma Mae was saying to her. But I could see that she was staring at my grandkids, especially my grandson William, just as hard as Mama was. Barbara Jean did that from time to time, saw boys around eight or nine years old and couldn’t draw her eyes away from them. I knew she was thinking of Adam. How could she not? Sure, Adam and William looked nothing alike. My grandson inherited my roundness and cocoa skin, and Adam was a buttercream-colored string bean. But they shared that same wild energy and heartbreaking sweetness that little boys have in those brief years before your presence bores and annoys them and they can’t abide an embrace. Barbara Jean’s boy would never grow out of that phase.
Barbara Jean watched my grandson as he zipped through the room, tormenting my cats with an overabundance of affection and charming guests with his big smile. When my son-in-law sensed that William was becoming too rambunctious for the crowd and carried his giggling and squirming son out of the room under his arm, Barbara Jean looked like she might cry. I’d have bet good money that she was seeing Lester and Adam just like I was, remembering how Lester couldn’t resist hoisting Adam in the air whenever that boy was within reach. If Lester’d had his way, Adam’s feet would never have touched the ground. Barbara Jean walked away from Erma Mae then, heading in the direction of the vodka.
That year’s party was the biggest ever. It was like everybody we’d ever met came by to say hello. Or, more likely, they came to say goodbye. Nothing like a little touch of cancer to get folks to feel all sentimental about you, whether they cared for you or not. But by midnight most of the guests had left. Mama retired to the family room to coo over her great-grandkids, who had collapsed on the couch alongside Clarice’s grandson by then. I was dead on my feet and longed to stretch out and rest, but I went into the kitchen to do some cleaning up. I opened the kitchen door to find my Denise and Clarice’s Carolyn washing dishes, laughing and talking the same way they had done when they were girls. I stood there for a few seconds watching them—both of them smart, strong, and happy. Well, I thought, looks like Clarice and I did at least one thing right.
A hand touched my shoulder and I turned to see Richmond. He whispered into my ear, “Listen, Odette, Clarice and I are leaving, and we’re taking Barbara Jean. She’s had a little too much to drink.”
I followed him out of the kitchen, through the living room, and into the front hallway, where Clarice was helping Barbara Jean into her coat. The quiet mood Barbara Jean had been in all day had given way to gloominess. H
er watery eyes and the haunted expression on her face seemed even bleaker because of the pink dress that mocked her now with its youthful cheeriness.
I gave her a quick hug and said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Barbara Jean tried to say good night, but her words came out in a jumble. Clarice and Richmond each grabbed one of her arms and guided her out. They were followed by the oh-so-proper Mrs. Jordan, who glared at Barbara Jean and clucked, “Unseemly. Entirely unseemly.”
I stepped out onto the front porch and watched as Clarice and her mother got into the front seat of Richmond’s Chrysler while he helped Barbara Jean into the back. After he got Barbara Jean settled in, he shut the door and trotted over to her car and hopped inside. They drove off, Richmond leading the way in Barbara Jean’s Mercedes.
I stayed on the porch for a few minutes, enjoying the cold air after so many hours inside the warm, crowded house. Mama joined me, and Mrs. Roosevelt came out just after Mama. The former first lady had sobered up and her famous warm, toothy smile was firmly in place as she snuggled up against me.
Mama said, “I hate to see Barbara Jean like that. I think maybe there’s trouble comin’, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer for a moment. I was distracted because, for the first time in all of her visits, Mrs. Roosevelt seemed to have actual physical presence. I felt the weight of her body leaning against mine. And, in the chilly air of the evening, the warmth that emanated from her was almost uncomfortably hot. She and I now truly shared the same world. This can’t be good, I thought.
When I finally answered Mama, I said, “Yeah, I believe trouble’s coming.”
The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat Page 17