The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (25 page)

James looked surprised and then embarrassed. He broke eye contact with Odette and watched the tabletop for a few seconds. Then James said, “I love you. And I’ve been thinkin’ that if you ever get married, it should be to me.”

Odette, Richmond, and Clarice all said, “What?”

He said it again, “I love you, Odette, and I’ve been thinkin’ that if you ever get married it should be to me.”

Richmond threw both of his hands in the air in disgust. He said, “I swear to God, Clarice, that is
not
one of the things I told him to say.”

Odette narrowed her eyes at James. Clarice could tell that Odette thought he was making fun of her.

But James just sat there, still watching her. Only now he sported a grin on his face, as if he were proud of himself for finally having his say.

Right then, at their table at the All-You-Can-Eat, Clarice saw Odette rendered speechless for the first and last time of their long friendship. Clarice watched as Odette scrutinized James for a good long while. That was when she saw it for the first time, that softness in Odette’s face. The lines on Odette’s forehead disappeared, her jaw relaxed, and the corners of her mouth tilted up just the tiniest bit. Clarice understood then that she had witnessed more than one unusual sight that evening. She had also seen something Odette was afraid of. All this time, her tough friend had been frightened that this scarred boy might not love her the way she loved him.

Odette had seen enough movies and heard Clarice rhapsodize over Richmond often enough to know that there were things a young woman was supposed to say at a time like this. She tried her hardest to think of one of those things, but nothing came to her. Her mouth dry and her pulse racing, she sensed the onset of what she guessed was panic. But when Odette looked at James’s satisfied smile, she was comforted by the certainty that he wasn’t a man who would ever need long-winded reassurances or grand pronouncements of affection. And that made her want to wrap her arms around him and hold on till he begged her to let him go.

Odette covered James’s hand with hers and nodded her head a couple of times. She said, “Okay then, James, just so’s we understand each other.”

Barbara Jean knew that Clarice leaving Richmond and returning to Leaning Tree didn’t have anything to do with her; it had been a long time coming. Still, it felt like another piece in the conspiracy the whole world was engaged in, a sinister plot to drag her back into the past and lock her up there. Here they were, the Supremes, gathering again in Leaning Tree, in the same house where they had talked, laughed, and sung along to records on Odette’s pink and violet portable record player forty years earlier.

Driving to and from Odette’s old house—Clarice’s house, now—Barbara Jean saw the Leaning Tree of her girlhood all around her, instead of the one that existed in the present day. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted landmarks that hadn’t stood in decades—Abraham Jordan’s law office, the five-and-dime where her mother bought her cosmetics, the carpentry shop Odette’s father had once owned. They were there, more real than the large homes and cute, overpriced boutiques that had replaced them, until she blinked her eyes and made them vanish.

The people of the past continued to visit her as well. And when they came—Lester, Adam, Loretta, Chick, Big Earl, Miss Thelma, the other Supremes and herself as young girls—Barbara Jean gave in completely to the past and let the force of it pull her drunken mind along as if it were caught in the tide under the surface of the frozen river she now dreamed about every night.

Lester asked Barbara Jean to marry him on April Fool’s Day in 1968. At first she thought he was kidding.

Lester had taken the Supremes, Richmond, and James out to dinner. Being a Monday, it had been an early night. James worked mornings. The girls had school.

Barbara Jean was the last to be dropped off at home that night. Lester parked outside Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s house, and she waited for him to jump out of the car and come around to open her door the way he always did. But Lester sat gazing forward as the Cadillac idled. So she said, “Well, good night, Lester,” and she reached for the handle to open the door.

Lester put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Hold on a minute, Barbara Jean. There’s something I want to talk to you about.” He left his hand on her shoulder, the most physical contact they’d ever had, and began to speak.

“Barbara Jean,” he said, “I’ve been trying hard not to make a fool of myself about this, but I’m sure by now you know that I have feelings for you.”

She expected him to grin and shout “April Fool!” But he continued with a straight face, and she realized, with as much fear as interest, that he was serious.

“You probably think of me as an old man—”

“No, I don’t, Lester,” she interrupted.

“It’s okay. You’re young. When I was your age I thought forty-two was ancient. But, here’s the thing. Forty-two isn’t really all that old. And you’ve always seemed like someone more mature than your years. So, I’ve been thinking that maybe you and me could spend more time together.”

When she didn’t respond, he added, “Just so you understand, I’m not talking about just messing around or something. I’m talking about you and me really being together. What I want is a wife, Barbara Jean.”

She didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded and thought,
Boy, were you right about this one, Clarice
.

“You’ll be done with school in a couple months and you’ve probably been thinking about what’s ahead for you.”

Lester was wrong about that. While Barbara Jean had been raised
to always have an eye out for the next opportunity—“You got to be a forward-thinkin’ woman if you wanna get anywhere in this world,” her mother always said—she had done nothing but try
not
to think about the future since the day she first kissed Chick Carlson in the hallway of the All-You-Can-Eat. And it was becoming increasingly difficult to do. Practically every night, Chick whispered his dreams to her as she lay in his bed with her head resting on his chest. Chick had been reading about cities where they could be together. He made it sound so easy, so possible. They would slip off together to one of the mixed-marriage Promised Lands, maybe Chicago or Detroit, and everything would be perfect. Barbara Jean wanted to fantasize along with him, but where Chick imagined minor inconveniences that they could link arms and breeze right past, Barbara Jean saw impassable obstacles of race, ignorance, and rage. So she let Chick talk about an idyllic tomorrow, but she blocked out his words and only listened to the sound of his heartbeat.

Lester continued, “I just want you to know that I’d like to be a part of your thinking. I’ve got a fair amount of money. And if things go the way I believe they will, I’ll have a lot more soon. I could certainly take care of you and give you anything you might want. Not that I’m trying to buy you, or anything like that. I just thought you should know that I can take care of you right. I could even buy you Ballard House and fix it up for you, if you want. I remember how much you said you liked it.”

“I did?” Barbara Jean asked, not recalling having said any such thing.

“Yeah, that first time you rode in my car, when we passed by the house you said, ‘Look at that place. I’d love to live in something like that.’ ”

Barbara Jean had thought that very thing every time she passed the house, but she didn’t realize she had ever said it out loud. But Lester had heard her and remembered all these months later. It touched her heart.

“You don’t have to decide anything right now. I know this probably isn’t what you were expecting to hear from me today,” he said. “I’m going to be away in Indianapolis for the next week and a half to
do some business. You can think about it and give me an answer when I get back.”

The only words Barbara Jean could think to say were “Thank you, Lester.” So she left it at that.

Lester took his hand away from her shoulder. Then he leaned in and planted a kiss on her cheek. He slid away from her and hopped out of the car. Then he walked around to the passenger side and opened it. Again, she said, “Thank you, Lester.”

She hurried up the walkway to Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s house without glancing back and she let herself in. As she climbed the stairs to her room, Barbara Jean thought of her mother. When Loretta was dying, she had spent hours looking back at her life and listing the ways the world had wronged and cheated her. The main thing she had been denied was “a man who could look me in the eye and swear that he’d be my man forever and that he would always do right by me and my baby.” Now, after what Lester had just said to Barbara Jean in his car, she heard the voice of her mother panting in her ear, “This is it, girl, what we been waitin’ for.”

When she got to her room that night and peered out of the window, she saw that the light was on in the storeroom of the All-You-Can-Eat. But she pulled down her window shade and didn’t go to see Chick.

For two days, Barbara Jean kept what Lester had said to her all to herself, hoping that an answer would come if she thought about it long enough. She stayed behind her locked bedroom door and avoided everyone. If asked, she claimed to be sick, which was half true because holding her secret inside made her stomach churn throughout each of those days. And her shade remained drawn, because she knew that if she stared too long at the storeroom light across the street, she would run to Chick and the decision would be made for her.

Finally she had to let it out, so she called a meeting of the Supremes. In the gazebo behind Odette’s house, the very one that she and Chick had sneaked off to so many times, she told Odette and Clarice about Lester’s proposal.

Clarice was overjoyed. She said, “See? See? I told you Lester was interested in you. You told him yes, didn’t you?”

“I told him I’d think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?” Clarice asked. “There’s not a colored woman in town who wouldn’t jump at the chance to have Lester. Veronica’s been trying to get him to notice her since she was thirteen. You’d better lay claim to him while you can, or somebody else’ll beat you to it.”

Odette didn’t say a word while Clarice went on and on about Lester’s proposal as if it were the greatest thing that had ever happened to anyone in the world. Barbara Jean thought that Clarice sounded as excited about this as she did when she talked about herself and Richmond. Clarice stood up from the wooden bench that lined the lattice walls of the gazebo and walked in a tight circle, already planning Barbara Jean’s wedding.

Clarice named ten girls from their high school, in descending order of height, who would make the best bridesmaids. She rattled off a full menu of foreign-sounding foods Barbara Jean had never heard of, freely spending Lester’s money.

Barbara Jean asked her to stop, saying that she had to think about it. Clarice countered, “Lester is a nice guy, and he has all kinds of money. He’s a little on the short side, but he’s handsome. I don’t see what’s holding you back. Do you, Odette?”

That was when Odette said it, just as casual as can be. “Well, Barbara Jean’s in love with Chick.”

Clarice said, “Chick? What are you talking about?”

“They’ve been together for months. Don’t you have eyes, Clarice?”

Barbara Jean stared at Odette, unnerved by what her friend had just said. Being in love with James seemed to have imbued Odette with a hypersensitivity to other people’s feelings that hadn’t been there before. This new, greater power of observation, combined with Odette’s tendency to say what was on her mind, made her kind of spooky in addition to being a pain in the neck.

Clarice turned to Barbara Jean and asked, “Is that true?”

Barbara Jean was going to lie, but she looked at Odette’s face. Odette cast her open, accepting gaze on Barbara Jean and the truth came on out. Barbara Jean described the first time she kissed Chick. She told them about the nights they had shared in the storeroom. She
repeated to them what Chick had said to her about the two of them running away together to Chicago or Detroit, how couples like them weren’t a big deal there and they could get married.

Odette said, “You should go talk to Big Earl, see what he has to say about it.”

“I can’t do that. What am I going to say? ‘Guess what, Big Earl, I’ve been sneaking out of the house you invited me into and going over to fuck the white busboy in your storeroom.’ I can’t have him thinking of me that way. I can’t have him thinking I’m like …”

Barbara Jean stopped there, but Clarice and Odette both knew how that sentence ended.

Clarice always thought of herself as the most practical of the three of them. She said, “Chick’s sweet. And he’s good-looking. But he’s got no money and no prospects that I can see. Plus, there’s his brother to think about.”

They had all seen Desmond Carlson driving slowly past the All-You-Can-Eat in his red truck at least once a week over the past several months. He never came inside the restaurant to cause trouble; Big Earl wouldn’t have tolerated anything like that, and Desmond knew it. But if he caught sight of his brother through the window as he cruised by, he made obscene gestures and called his brother out to fight before eventually giving up and speeding away.

Clarice said, “That crazy redneck brother of Chick’s will track you both down and kill you even if you make it to Chicago or Detroit.”

Barbara Jean didn’t respond to that because the truth of it was clear. And it wasn’t only Desmond Carlson. There were plenty of folks in Plainview, black and white, who’d happily have seen Chick and Barbara Jean dead rather than see them together. That was just how things were.

When the silence stretched out a while longer, Clarice assumed that the debate was over and that Barbara Jean had seen that she was right. She went back to planning a huge spectacle of a wedding for Barbara Jean. Clarice kept it up during the ride from Odette’s house and didn’t stop until Barbara Jean jumped out of her car in front of Big Earl’s.

In her heart, Barbara Jean knew Clarice was right; there was only one choice that made good sense. But the gorgeous picture Clarice painted of a hand-embroidered wedding dress with a ten-foot lace train battled an even more exquisite image in Barbara Jean’s head, the vision of what she truly wanted.