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

by Edward Kelsey Moore

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

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

Rsmsey adams introduced ....friend of richmond's

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

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 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, bu...

must bring Erma Mae so...

Erma Mae yelled, “Belinda!” and her daughter rushed in from the kitchen. Erma Mae pointed toward Clarice and Richmond, and Belinda picked up a pitcher of iced tea and headed to their table. Clarice was fond of Belinda. She was a darling girl, and smart, too.

had won enough scholarship money to pay for a full ride at the university. Unfortunately, she was also the mirror image of her big-headed mother at that age. If you squinted as she walked toward you, you’d swear a brown

party balloon was floatin...

Watching Richmond kneel in his best summer suit at the feet of that awkward, plain girl just to make her feel good caused Clarice’s bad memories of the previous night and morning to recede a little. That was Richmond. About the time she built up a good head of steam thinking of the many ways he had disappointed her, he’d go and remind her of what she loved

She watched him swirl that rag over the rutted oak floor and couldn’t help but think of how those same wonderful hands had comforted their children and changed as many, if not more, of their diapers as hers had. Those hands had also spoon-fed her father—three times a day, every day—for the last weeks of her father’s life, when he was too frail to lift a spoon and too proud to allow Clarice or her mother to feed him. That Richmond, the kind and selfless one, was the only Richmond she had seen for two years. But the other Richmond, the one who lied and cheated, had reappeared, and no number of kind words or gallant

Richmond returned to his chair and gulped from his glass. Clarice tasted her tea and discovered that it was so sweet she couldn’t stand more than a sip. Richmond, who was diabetic, had no business drinking any of it. But when she looked his way, she saw that Richmond was not only guzzling the sweet tea, he was using it to wash down a piece of pecan pie that someone, probably that damn Ramsey Abrams, had slipped to him. This was part of the dance

Richmond is diabetic but eats a lot of sugar

The game always ended with Richmond batting those long lashes of his at her until she permitted him a spoonful of whatever he was sneaking. Then she would return to her chair, theatrically rolling her eyes about what an ill-disciplined boy her Richmond was. But Clarice was in no mood to play along with him this time. She watched him chew the pie and wash it down with sweet tea, and she kept her mouth

Clarice had learned her husband was a diabetic two years earlier when she received a phone call from the hospital saying that he had been found in his university office in a coma and might not make it. He was in intensive care for weeks, and for months afterward he was nearly helpless—no feeling in his feet, no strength in his beautiful hands. When she finally got him home, she prayed, bullied, sweet-talked, and seduced, anything to get Richmond well again.

She succeeded magnificently. He was up and about far sooner than his doctors had anticipated. And when he recovered, he expressed his gratitude for the care she had given him to anyone who would listen. He would actually stop strangers on the street and say, “This woman saved my life; made me a new man.” And Richmond was a new man. For the first time in their marriage he was actually the husband Clarice had always pretended

lasted two years. Two fine years. A petite woman in a knee-length tan

Clarice saw that it was Carmel Handy. She was good-looking, nicely shaped, well-groomed, and at least ninety years old. The schoolboy smile Clarice had seen on her husband’s face had been just that. They’d both had Miss Carmel as their ninth grade English teacher.

The tale people told was that William Handy once took off on a weeklong whoring excursion. When he got home, Miss Carmel confronted him and told him the only excuse he could possibly have for disappearing like that was that he must have forgotten where he lived. So she recited their address, 10 Pine Street, aloud. And, to make it memorable, she punctuated the telling with three blows to Mr. Handy’s head

with a cast-iron skillet. She didn’t kill him, but she changed him from Big Bad Bill to Sweet William overnight. That had happened before Clarice

As

she had so many times in the past, Odette came riding to Clarice’s rescue. Through the window, Clarice saw James and Odette’s car squeezing into a small space directly across the street, in front of the two-story white clapboard house Big Earl had moved his young family into not long after he

Odette had packed on at least ten more pounds that year; and that was on top of the extra fifty she’d been carrying since the Nixon years. The sight of them extricating themselves from that tiny car—Odette, as round as a berry and dressed in one of those shapeless muumuus she favored, and James, skeletal and over six feet tall—was such a spectacle that Clarice couldn’t help but imagine she was taking in a circus act.

Clarice asked herself how on earth she had ended up being the one Supreme who turned into her mother. Odette might look like Dora Jackson, but she was as different as she could be from her mother, who had always scared Clarice a bit with her talk of ghosts and her countrified brusqueness. And with all of her wealth, civic-mindedness, and charitable deeds, Barbara Jean was about as far as she could get from living the sad, desperate life her mother had lived. Clarice had been the one to follow her mother’s example. She had become a pillar of her church, striving for biblical

When her children came, first Ricky, then Abe, and, finally, the twins, Carolyn and Carl, Clarice had made sure that they were the cleanest, best-dressed, and most polite children in town. She had acted the part of a lady, even when every last particle of her being yearned to spit, curse, and kill. And she had grown up and married her father.

Clarice Jordan Baker was the first black child born at University Hospital. It was reported in black newspapers as far away as Los Angeles. Clarice’s mother, Beatrice Jordan, encased the news clippings of the glad tidings in ornate gold frames and placed them strategically around her house. No

“The New Negro Family.” The article about Clarice’s birth heralded the arrival of the “new Negro family of the desegregated 1950s.” Her father, attorney Abraham Jordan, was missing from the picture.

Beatrice worked as a nursing assistant at University Hospital. She got it into her head one day that her child would be born there, instead of at

the colored hospital an hour away in Evansville where everyone in Leaning Tree had their babies. F...

idea coincided with the arrival of Dr. Samuel Snow, who had come to Indiana State University at Plainview from New York City that year to preside over the ob-gyn department. Dr. Snow let it be known when he came to the hospital that, under his leadership, access to the department would no longer be restricted by race. The university agreed to his demand, believing he would get over that bit of New ...

But Dr. Snow did not change his mind, and Beatrice, on the job well into her pregnancy, arranged to repeatedly waddle across his path and allow him to believe he had handpicked her—instead of the other way aroun...

In

Beatrice’s retelling, the minor complications of Clarice’s birth were elevated to terrifying hours during which she and her baby balanced on a knife’s edge between survival and doom. When Beatrice sensed in her daughter some resistance to acknowledging her mo...

Clarice heard the story so often in her childhood that it became as familiar to her as “Cinderella” or “The Pied Piper.” When relating the long version of the ordeal she suffered giving Clarice life, Beatrice often employed overripe fruit as stage props. For the short version, she simply pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and whispered, “It was a horror show.” Freshly snatched from death’s door or not, an hour after Clarice...

ready for the photographers who had gathered to snap pictures of the inspirational middle-class colored family. But Mr. Jordan couldn’t be found. By the time he was located, sharing an intimate moment with one of the hospital cleaning ladies in a supply closet, the photographers had taken their snapshots and gone. That cleaning lady may or may not have been the woman who gave him the syphilis he passed on to his wife, sterilizing her and ensuring that Clarice would ...

Abraham Jordan cheated and lied. Beatrice prayed, consulted with her pastor, prayed again, and then accepted each deception with a smile. Clarice watched and learned. Unlike her mother, who had been taken by surprise, Clarice had received fair warning about Richmond. Just before Clarice’s marriage, Odette had a frank talk with her friend that forced Clarice to open her eyes and see just how much Richmond ha...

When Lester arrived, the conversation would get heated. Each week he loudly declared that Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, could have taken on Ali and Tyson together, and single-handedly whupped an entire football team. If Richmond or James disagreed with him, Lester would grow frustrated and begin to bang his walking stick against the nearest table leg, insisting that his age and wisdom made him the better judge.

Clarice has a long, handsome face with lovely, round eyes and a wide, nicely shaped mouth. But that day her lower jaw was pushed forward, her eyes were squinted, and her lips were pressed together like she was trying hard to keep something in. I hadn’t seen that face in a while, but I knew it well. And I had a good idea what its return meant. I had to fight to keep myself from going down to the other end of the table and slapping the shit out of Richmond. But it was none of my business. And I knew from experience that my interference would not be appreciated.

Before she married Richmond, I went to Clarice and told her some things that I thought she should know about her fiancé. No rumors, no guesses. I sat with my oldest friend on the couch in her parents’ living room and described seeing Richmond late the night before kissing a woman who lived around the block from me and seeing his car still parked in front of her house that morning. It hurt me to say it, loving Clarice like I do. But Clarice used to claim that, when it came to matters of men, she wanted her friends to give her the cold and honest truth, even if it was painful. I was young then, just twenty-one, and I didn’t understand

yet that nearly all of the women who make that claim are lying. Clarice being Clarice, she took my news about Richmond with such sweet grace and calm that I didn’t realize I’d been relieved of my matron of honor duties and thrown out of her house until I was standing on her front porch with the door bumping against my ass. But the next day she was at my house holding an armful of bride magazines, acting like our conversation had never happened. I was her matron of honor after al...

the center of the table sat a stack of tarot cards and a crystal ball the size of a large cantaloupe. A forty-year-old framed eight-by-ten photograph showing Minnie McIntyre decked out in sequins and feathers acting as a magician’s assistant to her first husband, Charlemagne the Magnificent, was propped up behind the tarot cards and crystal ball. From that table in the back of the All-You-Can-Eat, Minnie operated her fortune-telling business. It was her claim that, since his death, Charlemagne had reversed their roles and was now working as her assistant and guide to the spirit world.

The thing with Minnie was that her predictions almost always had a nasty edge to them that made it seem like she was more interested in delivering insults disguised as prophecies and manipulating her naïve customers than she was in communing with the other side.

Minnie had been in business for years and still had a steady stream of customers, many of whom were the sort of people you’d think would know better. Clarice doesn’t like to admit it, but she

was once one of those customers. In a fit of bridal jit...

to Minnie for a tarot reading the week before she married Richmond. Big Earl’s first wife, Thelma, was still alive then, and Minnie hadn’t yet sunk her teeth into Big Earl. So Clarice dragged Barbara Jean and me to the run-down house out near the highway bypass where Minnie used to tell fortunes. She s...

away from consorting with Satan to the folks at Clarice’s church. Inside that nasty shack, we inhaled jasmine incense and listened while Minnie told Clarice that her marriage to Richmond would be joyful, but, having drawn an upright Hermit and a reverse Three of Cups, ...

Clarice worried herself sick throughout her first pregnancy. And for years she couldn’t bring herself to look at what turned out to be lovely wedding photos. Four healthy children and three decades later, ...

When Clarice was in the kind of mood she was in that day, she enjoyed identifying flaws, moral and otherwise, in everyone except the idiot in the blue shirt at the other end of the table. My friend had a multitude of gifts. She played the piano like