A white Chrysler, its sunroof open in spite of the chill, pulled into the parking lot and stopped at the doors just below where they stood. A man got out of the car and greeted the young woman who ran out of the building to meet him. He walked around to the passenger side of the Chrysler and opened the door for the woman. She lost her hat—a replica of the wide-brimmed, floppy style popular in the 1970s—to a gust of wind as she bent to climb into the car. The man caught the hat for her, gracefully snatching it from midair. He glanced left and right, like a criminal checking for witnesses. Then he playfully swatted the woman on her behind with the hat. She took her hat from him and, with a toss of her long black hair, hopped into the Chrysler.
The man was Clarice’s husband.
Barbara Jean kept her face pointed forward and said nothing. But she watched Clarice out of the corner of her eye.
Clarice stared at the car as it left the parking lot. She felt more embarrassed for Richmond than for herself as she watched him roar out of the lot and onto the road that led downhill to the highway, peeling rubber like a rowdy high school boy. The sound of his screeching tires was so loud that they heard it through the thick plate-glass window.
After the car had disappeared from sight, Clarice said, “He claimed he was going to be in Atlanta to scout recruits with Ramsey Abrams for the next two days.”
Barbara Jean, still not looking directly at her, said, “The girl works in the hospital gift shop. The flowers I take to patients on my volunteer days get delivered to the gift shop first. I see her at least two times a week when I go there to sort the flowers. Her name is Cherokee.”
“Cherokee? Like the Indian tribe?”
“No, Cherokee like the Jeep. Her father owns a car repair shop and he takes his work home, apparently. She has brothers named Tercel and Seville.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Cherokee, Tercel, and Seville Robinson.”
Clarice said, “You see? This is why I can’t hate Richmond, no matter what he does. Just when I want to break his neck, the man always finds a way to make me laugh.”
Barbara Jean reached out and grabbed hold of Clarice’s hand, saying, “Let’s go back and see if Odette’s finished.” They left the window and walked back down the hallway toward the infusion room swinging their clutched hands like a pair of five-year-olds.
Just before they got to the door, Clarice said, “Chick Carlson and this Cherokee woman both in one day. I swear, Barbara Jean, sometimes this town is just too damn small.”
“Clarice, honey,” she responded, “you have just said a mouthful.”
Chapter 18
On the evening of December twenty-first, Clarice answered the ringing telephone in her living room and heard a familiar voice. It was a sweet, tenor sound with a subtle lisp, like a choirboy who had been born with the tongue of a snake. It was the voice of Mr. Forrest Payne.
Instead of hello, he said, “She’s here.”
Clarice didn’t need to ask what or whom he was talking about. She answered, “I’m sorry. I’ll be right over.”
From the other end of the line, she heard the snick-snick of a cigarette lighter being struck. Then Mr. Payne, the vile whoremonger with the lovely speaking voice, said, “Merry Christmas, Clarice. God bless you and your family.” He hung up before she was forced to return his kind wishes.
Clarice arrived at the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club fifteen minutes after receiving Forrest Payne’s call. Her mother stood on a small hill just east of the parking lot. Tall and thin, Beatrice Jordan looked elegant in the black, sable-trimmed sheared mink coat that Clarice’s father had given her twenty years earlier after doing something especially humiliating to her, the details of which Clarice was never privy to. In hands covered by her bright red leather Christmas gloves, Beatrice held a megaphone. She bellowed, “You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing. Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to the Lord and you will be saved.”
Clarice had heard her mother’s hilltop sermon dozens of times. It always began the same way, “You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing. Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to the Lord and you will be saved.” After that, a Bible verse. As Clarice approached her on her hill, her mother broadcast Romans 8:13. “For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.” Beatrice was especially fond of the more ominous verses.
Clarice’s mother’s first Pink Slipper bullhorn sermon occurred during a visit home not long after she’d moved away following her husband’s death. Clarice had been at home awaiting her mother’s arrival. Anticipation had just transformed into worry, causing her to station herself at the front window to watch for her mother’s rental car, when the phone rang. Pretty-voiced Forrest Payne had told her that her mother was at his place with a megaphone. She hadn’t believed him until he carried his phone outside so she could hear her mother’s amplified voice crackling out warnings of damnation.
Mr. Payne had said, “Clarice, I’m calling you instead of the police out of respect for the many years your daddy, God rest his soul, served as my attorney.” But she suspected it was really out of respect for the fact that her father had spent so much money at the Pink Slipper that Forrest Payne should have named a room, or at least a memorial stripper pole, in Abraham Jordan’s honor.
After Clarice persuaded her mother to stop sermonizing that first time and got her back to her house, Beatrice informed her daughter that she was finally ready to openly acknowledge her deceased husband’s infidelities. But she also made it clear that she had entered into a new type of denial. She refused to hold Abraham responsible for any of his misbehavior. Instead, she blamed his cheating on the loose women and poorly chosen male friends who she believed had led him down a sinful path. She focused her righteous fury on Forrest Payne and his little den of iniquity out on the edge of town.
So, once or twice a year, Clarice’s mother, the epitome of all things ladylike and proper, stopped by Forrest Payne’s Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club armed with a megaphone and an unquenchable thirst for revenge. It is terrifying, Clarice thought, what marriage can do to a woman.
Making the situation even worse, Beatrice didn’t recognize Clarice at first. When she saw that Clarice was walking toward her instead of going into the club, she took her daughter for a fresh convert. She pointed the megaphone at Clarice and said, “That’s right, sister, turn your back on that house of evil and listen to the Word.” Seeing, finally, that it was Clarice, Beatrice said, unamplified, “Hi, sweetheart, I suppose he called you again.”
Clarice nodded yes.
“Well, I was just about finished here anyway.” But she wasn’t done quite yet. A truck pulled into the parking lot just then and the driver, a heavyset, bearded man in a cowboy hat who moved as if he had already had a few drinks, walked falteringly from his vehicle toward the fuchsia front door of the club. Beatrice lifted her megaphone again and squawked out, “You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing. Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to the Lord and you will be saved.” When the man disappeared inside the Pink Slipper, she tucked the bullhorn under her arm and descended her hill.
She stopped just in front of Clarice and looked her up and down. Clarice was wearing the gray down parka and snow boots she had thrown on to go fetch her mother after receiving Forrest Payne’s phone call. Beatrice frowned as she took in her daughter’s ensemble. She said, “I can’t believe you allow yourself to be seen in public like this. These people may be the lowest of God’s creatures, but that doesn’t mean they won’t talk.”
Clarice quietly mumbled to herself, “I love my mother. I love my mother.” She knew she was going to have to remind herself of that often over the next several days. This Christmas season was going to be rough, with Odette being sick, Barbara Jean walking around half in a coma, and Richmond behaving more like Richmond
than ever. She wasn’t in the mood to have her mother’s special brand of crazy piled on top of it all. Clarice gave serious thought to marching into the Pink Slipper and doing her best to persuade Forrest Payne to have Beatrice locked up for trespassing and disturbing the peace. Let the county jail have her for the holidays. That would serve her right.
Clarice hugged her mother and said, “Merry Christmas.”
The following morning as she cooked breakfast, Clarice discussed the day’s itinerary with her mother. She had scheduled several things: hair appointments for them both, visits to old family friends, shopping excursions for last-minute gifts, and a grocery store trip for the meal they had to prepare for Clarice’s children and their families. There were also all sorts of holiday events going on at Calvary Baptist if more was required to keep Beatrice busy. It was important that Beatrice always have something to do. Left to her own devices, her fingers began to itch for her bullhorn.
Things would become easier when the kids arrived the next day. Ricky would be with his wife’s family this year, but Clarice and Richmond’s other children were coming. Abe was bringing along a new girlfriend for his grandmother to exhaustively interview and disapprove of. Carl would have dozens of pictures to show Beatrice from the latest exotic vacation spot he had taken his wife to as penance for his latest transgression. Carolyn’s four-year-old son, Esai, who had inherited Clarice’s musical genes, could be relied upon to occupy his great-grandmother with hours of singing and dancing. God bless him. The child could go all day, if needed.
Beatrice wore dark red lipstick that left a vivid imprint on the white mug from which she sipped Earl Grey tea. She always came to breakfast in full makeup. Because it involved a rare excursion into the use of coarse language, Clarice never forgot her mother’s opinion about being seen, even in your own home, without your face done. “Honey, it’s the equivalent of dropping your pants and taking a dump in the fountain outside of Town Hall.” As a goodwill gesture toward her mother and to avoid aggravation, Clarice had been sure to apply lipstick herself that morning.
Her mother asked, “What were you playing last night?”
Clarice apologized for waking her. The piano was in a music room that was off the living room. The bedrooms were upstairs at the opposite end of the house—far out of earshot, she thought.
“No, no, you didn’t wake me. I just got up in the night to go to the bathroom and I heard you. I sat on the stairs for a while and listened to you play. It was beautiful. Took me back to when you were a youngster. I used to sit on the stairs at the old house for hours listening to you practice. I have never been as proud of you as I was then, listening to my baby girl overpower that big piano. You really had a gift.”
Her mother seldom passed out compliments, even backhanded ones. Clarice took a moment to enjoy it. Then she said, “It was Beethoven, the Waldstein Sonata. I’ve gotten into a habit lately of practicing Beethoven in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.”
Beatrice took another sip of tea and said, “You know, I’ve always thought it was a terrible shame that you gave up on your music.”
Here we go, Clarice thought. “I hardly gave up on music, Mother. I have two dozen piano students, and I have former students performing all around the world.”
Her mother dabbed at her lips with a napkin and said, “That’s nice, I suppose. But what I meant was that it’s a shame you never did more, after showing such promise. You never made those recordings when that man asked you to. What was his name? Albert-something, right?”
“Albertson. Wendell Albertson.”
“That’s right. You really should have made those records.”
When Clarice was a sophomore at the university, she won a major national competition. Wendell Albertson, who was the head producer at what was at that time the leading classical music label in the country, was one of the judges. He talked to Clarice after the competition and told her that he wanted to record her. His idea was that she should record all of the Beethoven sonatas over the coming year. He had wanted to market her as a female André Watts, a pianist version of Leontyne Price. But Richmond was injured not long after the competition, so the recording was put off until later. Then Richmond and Clarice became engaged and the recording was delayed again. Then there were the children. Her piano teacher, Mrs. Olavsky, had greeted the news of Clarice’s first pregnancy by shaking her head and saying, “All these years, wasted,” before slamming the door to her studio in Clarice’s face.
Clarice hadn’t wanted to believe that it was over for her, but time had proved her teacher right. All those years of work, both hers and Mrs. Olavsky’s, had been wasted. Though she tried not to, Clarice thought of the career she had thrown away whenever she suffered through a sloppy, poorly phrased performance from one of her weaker students. And she mourned that lost life even more keenly each time she watched one of her especially gifted pupils escape Plainview for a fine conservatory, leaving her behind to ruminate over her missed opportunities.
Beatrice said, “You know, I often wonder what would have happened if you’d gone ahead and made those records.”
“I haven’t given it a thought in years,” Clarice said. That was only half a lie because there had been years, mostly when the kids were young, when she hardly ever thought about having passed up her big chance. But now it was on her mind during each one of those nights when she sat up playing the piano. Lately, as she charged through the angriest Beethoven passages, she found herself wondering what would have happened if she had been stronger or braver and walked away from Richmond when she’d had the opportunity. But then there wouldn’t have been the children, and what would her life have been without them? She stirred the grits in the saucepan and tried to think of Christmas shopping.
The phone rang and Clarice pulled the last strips of bacon from the skillet before going to answer it. After she said hello, she heard a young woman ask, “May I please speak to Richmond?”
Clarice was about to call him to the phone, but she heard the sound of water running in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, so she said, “I’m sorry, Richmond isn’t available right now. Who may I tell him called?”
There was a pause, and then the woman said, “I was just calling to confirm my meeting with him today.” Another pause. “This is Mrs. Jones.”
Mrs. Jones. Clarice had to roll her eyes at that one.
Clarice said, “I’ll be sure to deliver the message, Mrs. Jones.” She hung up and went back to stirring the already overcooked grits.
Her mother had tired of discussing Clarice’s failed musical career. She began to complain about her Arkansas neighbor, Clarice’s aunt Glory, another of her favorite topics of conversation. Aunt Glory was petty. Aunt Glory was ill-tempered. Aunt Glory was unwilling to listen to constructive criticism. And, worst of all, Aunt Glory had set such a bad Christian example in her own home that Veronica had fallen under the satanic influence of a fortune-teller.
She said, “Veronica hasn’t been right since she left Calvary and went over to First Baptist. Those First Baptist folks are all show and no substance. Watch and see how fast they drop her after she burns through that money she got from the Leaning Tree place. Mind you, they’re still a step ahead of that primitive Holy Family bunch. I know your friend Odette goes there, but honestly, they might as well be snake handlers.”
The ache behind Clarice’s eyes that had started when Forrest Payne called a day earlier throbbed a little harder with each word that came from her mother’s mouth. What made it worse was the fact that Clarice had expressed similar sentiments about her cousin and about her friends’ churches countless times. Just like Veronica, her mother had a way of reminding Clarice of how alike their thinking was, and seeing the similarities between them made her more and more uncomfortable as time passed.
Richmond burst into the kitchen with a wide, welcoming grin on his handsome face. He was dressed in black slacks and a maroon knit shirt that was tight enough to display the muscles he worked so hard
at maintaining. He kissed his mother-in-law on her forehead and sat down next to her.
He winked and said, “Good morning, Bea. How’s the second-prettiest girl in the world doing today?”
Beatrice giggled and said, “You are a darling man, taking the time to sweet-talk an old woman like me.”
“You haven’t aged a day since I met you, and that’s the truth,” he said, gaining another giggle in reply.
To Clarice, Richmond said, “Sweetheart, I have to spend the day in Louisville with Ramsey talking to a football coach and a kid we’re scouting. Depending on how things go, I might not make it back for dinner.”
She nodded and brought Richmond his bowl of grits and a plate with two scrambled eggs and bacon. He said, “Thanks, babe,” and began to eat.
She walked across the kitchen and got the pot of coffee from the machine and brought it back to the table to pour it into his mug. Maybe it was because her mother distracted her from her task by asking about Odette’s health, or perhaps because her mind wandered off to her plans for the day, or because she caught a glimpse of the self-satisfied smirk on Richmond’s face, but the coffee Clarice poured missed Richmond’s mug entirely. Half of the pot spread onto the table and the other half splashed into Richmond’s lap. It wasn’t until he screamed, “Damn it!” and jumped up from his chair that she realized what she had done.
In a voice so high-pitched and breathless from shock that she sounded as if she had been the one doused with steaming hot coffee, Clarice cried out, “I’m so sorry! Are you okay? Let me get something to wipe that off.”
He pulled the steaming fabric of his pants away from his thighs with both thumbs and forefingers. “Don’t bother. I’ve got to get out of these. Jesus Christ, Clarice.” He left the kitchen and hurried up the stairs.
Beatrice didn’t say anything to Clarice as she watched her daughter clean up the mess she had made. She just finished her cup of tea and ate her breakfast—one slice of dry toast and one poached egg, the same breakfast she’d eaten every morning Clarice could recall.
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