Читать книгу Better Food for a Better World - Erin McGraw - Страница 7

What was the saddest thing in the world? Listening to Hank Shank—“Take it to the bank”—play “We Shall Overcome” on the banjo. Standing at the back of the superheated room, Vivy Jilet studied a wrinkle on the banjo’s grubby face and wondered whether Hank had made the instrument himself. Its stumpy neck looked like a finger cut off at the joint, and the string ends bristled up aggressively from the tuning pegs.

“We are not afrai-ai-aid,” Hank Shank quavered, plunking dull, bottom-heavy notes that had only a nodding acquaintance with the ones coming out of his mouth. To listen was painful, and Vivy guessed there was plenty more to come. Hank Shank was singing verses she had never heard, and wore the folk singer’s dolefully sincere expression, the one that promised listeners they would be spared none of the travails of the people.

She resettled herself, leaning back against the hot wall. The situation would not improve when he stopped singing. Since taking the stage half an hour ago, Hank Shank had filled the spaces between songs with stern lectures about the evils of consumerism, urging members of the dwindling audience not to let themselves be co-opted. “To resist society’s consumerist pressure is a revolutionary action,” he said.

Suppressing a yawn, Vivy wondered whether Hank Shank had updated his rhetoric since 1968. Then she wondered whether he realized he was on a stage in an ice cream store, and that his act was being punctuated, not by cries of “Stick it to the man!” but by the chirping of a cash register.

If the cash register had been chirping more often, Vivy wouldn’t have cared about Hank. He was performing here at Natural High Ice Cream—Better Food for a Better World, the sign promised—because Nancy Califfe, one of the store’s six owners, had decided it needed a gala to celebrate its third birthday. “Something special,” she had said, “to draw people in. I know the perfect person.”

Vivy should have known right then. If Nancy could be counted on for anything, it was her flawless reliability when it came to issues of marketing: always, always wrong. Vivy and the other partners spent most of their time blocking Nancy’s tone-deaf ideas—the raffle whose first prize was twenty-five cubic feet of mulch, the community pitch-in day to help the partners clean out the storeroom.

“What are you going to give people for helping us?” Vivy had asked.

“What do you mean, ‘give people’?” Nancy said.

The store had begun as a lighthearted kind of business, three couples pooling their money and time to run an ice cream shop. The good-natured enterprise let them pretend they were back in college—they came to work wearing cutoffs and T-shirts, and they laughed their way through planning meetings, where they came up with ice cream names like Shade Grown Coffee Crunch and Che Guevara Guava. When Nancy said the store needed a new slogan, Vivy and Sam, Vivy’s husband, proposed “Natural High Ice Cream: Street Legal.” Nancy actually let that one through, a rare bit of flexibility on her part, now that Vivy looked back.

Nancy had always had a bit of sand to her; store ownership had hardened it to cement. But all of them, Vivy supposed, were becoming more themselves: Nancy’s husband Paul was perpetually angry, David and Cecilia Moore were earnest, and Sam was lazily goofy, drawing cartoons of Nancy with flames coming out of her mouth as she proposed another awful idea at the weekly meetings she insisted on. She drew precise financial charts and Venn diagrams, and Sam made cartoons of them too.

Nancy talked at length about community corporate management. She contacted a printing company and had high-minded slogans printed on Natural High napkins made of recycled paper. “Small is beautiful,” she reminded them. “Harmony is sustainability.” While Nancy talked, Vivy rubbed her neck, trying to ease the sense of a tight collar closing. She’d joined a company, not a religion. Sam called Nancy the Right Reverend Nancypants, a title that gave Vivy lasting pleasure.

“We are not alo-o-one,” moaned Hank Shank, a line Vivy thought debatable. He was singing to Vivy, Sam, and a dwindling clientele, including the lazy bunch of teenagers who were sprawled in the corner and hadn’t bought anything for half an hour. So far the gala had netted Natural High fewer customers than a slower-than-normal Saturday, and if the store didn’t see a good late-afternoon surge, receipts would be way down for the day.

In fairness, the low turnout wasn’t completely Hank Shank’s fault. That morning, when they’d pulled in a good crowd, the store’s air-conditioning had gone on the fritz, and by the time Vivy and Sam got there, the place was pretty much a riot, if any room so thickly hot could house a riot. Sweaty, shrieking, over-revved kids rocketed between tables or jiggled on their mothers’ laps, and mothers dipped napkins in cups of ice water, first to wipe their children’s sticky mouths, then to cool their own foreheads. Piles of damp napkins clumped in wads across the floor while dry ones, folded into rough fans, lay abandoned on tables. The flimsy recycled paper wilted in the sodden air.

People had started to leave the store before Hank Shank ever showed up, and who could blame them? Paul, who imagined himself mechanically minded, was out back with the compressor, beating on it with a wrench, to judge from the noise. Nancy was on the phone with the service company, explaining the company’s responsibilities to its clients. Vivy wanted to walk into one of the big freezers and stay there for a while, but she was in Nancy’s line of sight. If Vivy had been smart, she would have stood next to Sam behind the counter looking busy, just to make sure Nancy had no grounds to unspool her pet lecture about fiscal responsibility and the bottom line. Vivy had made the acquaintance of the bottom line long before Nancy ever dreamed up the charts demonstrating its glowering existence.

Just out of college—actually, for Vivy, a few months shy of her bachelor’s degree in theater, which she never did bother to finish—Vivy and Sam had gotten married and started Stage Left, a theatrical agency for offbeat acts. Like most things those days, the business had started after a marijuana-stoked conversation with friends who shared their interest in, as Sam said on a breathy exhale, guerilla art. A guy they knew from an econ class had put together a whole stand-up comedy routine about insider trading, and wanted to hitch out to New York so he could deliver it from the floor of the stock exchange. There was the woman who had trained her four parrots to perform a ragged cancan, and the tightrope walker who had managed to run a rope between the top floors of two dormitories and was halfway across before the campus police showed up. “He wore a bowler hat,” Sam had pointed out, which Vivy agreed was the genius part. They were also huge fans of the Strikes and Spares, dancers who dressed like tenpins and performed in bowling alleys, leaping between lanes. Talent like that needed exposure, they said, nodding, agreeing with themselves. Talent like that deserved an audience, and lacked only the framework of management to gain one.

The next morning, when Sam and Vivy were sober, the idea still looked good. Sam had taken some management classes to appease his parents on the way to his BA in art; he could put together enough of a business plan for the parrot lady to somberly show it to her birds and ask their opinion. Mr. Insider, the comedian, took the plan, folded it, and tucked it into his underwear. Remembering those moments now, Vivy felt longing for her old friends seize her like a cramp.

For nearly ten years she and Sam had kept Stage Left going. Twice they had gone to Europe, where crowds accustomed to Cirque de Soleil and buskers at every corner had an amiable appreciation for a troupe of unicycle riders armed with Etch A Sketch pads. There had never been a year that could be called financially secure—not one year, as Sam pointed out sadly, that they’d had a profit to declare to the IRS—but they had all pulled together, and Vivy had never been bored. Not once.

When she became pregnant with Laszlo, she and Sam saw no reason to stop the company. It could only be good for a child to see new places and know many kinds of people. Only three months old, he had whooped with joy every time he saw Marteeny tuck her feet up into her armpits, and Louise let him sleep, sometimes, with her waltzing poodles. By the time Laszlo started school, he had already been taught to read by a juggler and how to add by a stockbroker. He had the best tutors in the world.

But when she got pregnant a second time, Sam took things harder. While carrying one child to performances was charming, carrying two, he said, was a chore. The delight of playing with a baby had already been used up. Now, when Vivy appeared backstage with tiny Annie in her arms, the acts kept rehearsing instead of hurrying over to lift the baby away from her. “We can’t do this,” Sam said.

“Do what?” said Vivy, but she knew she had lost. It was all too much: the taller and taller pile of unpaid debts, the performers’ needs, and the performers themselves, who were not so charming after twelve weeks of close companionship in the bus Sam spent half his time repairing. When Vivy answered the phone and heard Nancy’s voice, she knew without hearing the particulars that her life was over.

She hadn’t been so melodramatic at the time. Both she and Sam loved El Campo, a dot on the east edge of the Sacramento Valley. Towns there were still cheerfully grubby, stocked with as many Grateful Dead fans and macramé makers as dot-com hotshots. To move into a little house with a porch and glider was a new adventure, as was getting Laszlo enrolled in school and then teaching him he really did have to stay there all day, with his socks on. Vivy had stayed interested as long as she could.

Sam seemed content. He worked part-time for a halfway house in Auburn. When he first took the job, he and Vivy joked he would wind up seeing all their old acts again, but if any of them had tried to check themselves in, he wasn’t telling her about it. He worked there thirty hours a week and at the store another fifteen, and proclaimed himself happy and solvent. Vivy knew he liked being able to bring the kids with him to either job, now that they were big enough, and he told her he was showing them the world. True, she supposed, but not much of it.

Since they had come to El Campo, she had sold rollerblades and tamales, canvassed for two political campaigns, and worked at the cannery—seasonal work, her favorite. At night, often, she dreamed of Stage Left, and when she woke up she needed several minutes to remember her new life, her real one, and then the disappointment was hot.

The old acts had been ingenious and playful. They had also been skilled, which Hank Shank emphatically was not. By this point—what was it, the seventh chorus?—he wasn’t even trying to hit the high note on “I do believe,” trudging through the song as if it were the Bataan Death March. As he droned along, Vivy kept an eye on the drooping Natural High birthday banner, calculating a quarter inch of sag for every degree the temperature rose. The air bloomed with heat—outrageous weather for northern California in April, ninety-five degrees as they approached two o’clock. Every citizen of El Campo should have wanted ice cream in weather like this—cones and sundaes and cool coffee drinks mortared with whipped cream. Hank Shank was driving people away. Not an inconsiderable achievement, Vivy thought.

Now that she was thinking, her thoughts carried her well past Hank Shank, stooped on his stool on the little oak stage. The Etch A Sketch Drill Team! Teeny Marteeny the contortionist! Unchecked, her angry memory was running through Stage Left’s entire old corps of acts. Any of them would have had the store full to bursting, selling ice cream hand over fist. In the corner, teenagers rolled up their T-shirts, rubbed ice cubes over one another’s bellies and moaned. “Oooh, baby. That’s so good.” Then, bored, they pulled balloons down from the ceiling and mangled them. They ignored Hank Shank, finally on his feet and bowing for the few people applauding—Nancy, basically.

Vivy stooped to pick up a napkin at her feet, noting its slogan: “Know Your Vision. Embrace Your Vision. Make Your Vision.” Without hesitation, she envisioned a stack of hundred-dollar bills, enough to buy a few weeks’ vacation. Then she glanced out the door and envisioned Fredd the Juggler.

She found Fredd ten years before on the boardwalk at Sausalito, where Vivy and Sam had gone because Vivy was hungry for mussels and Sausalito still had some cheap restaurants then. Fredd was enormous, his shoulders like hams and his thighs like bigger hams. He spilled out of his tank top like fruit spilling out of a bag, and his grin was unexpectedly sweet, wide-spaced teeth set into his gums like individual pieces of corn. His size alone would have made Vivy stop, but then he wrenched the concrete top off of a trash can that had Sausalito Clean! stenciled on it. Sam was watching too, and whistled. “Gotta be at least seventy pounds.”

Tossing the rough green top lightly from hand to hand, Fredd grinned. “What do you think?” he called to the growing crowd.

“Awesome!” said a kid.

“Scary,” said a girl who didn’t sound scared.

“Not bad,” Sam said, “but one is easy. Let’s see you do it again.”

Fredd beamed his corn-kernel smile back at Sam as if he’d hoped for just this invitation. The next trash can was about fifty feet away, and by the time Fredd got there, he was balancing the first top on his thick forearm. Wrenching up the second one took even less time. Maybe another strong man had been there earlier and loosened it up for Fredd.

“Now juggle,” Sam said.

Even Vivy murmured, “No,” but Fredd looked delighted. With a soft grunt he heaved the first trash can top into the air, then the second. His catch, as the first one plummeted, was delicate to the point of daintiness, and he relaunched it well before the second one fell into his big, waiting hand. Vivy had seen a lot of juggling. She didn’t much care for it, all that circus shtick. But watching Fredd juggle those heavy, rough concrete wheels, with grace, was watching something impossible happen. After about a minute, Fredd started to giggle, as if he couldn’t contain himself. Naturally, the crowd burst into applause, and so he caught both tops and bowed, but she could see his disappointment. He wanted to juggle more. By the time they left Sausalito that day, Vivy and Sam had a contract with Fredd, written and signed on a series of bar napkins.

No Stage Left act had been as popular as Fredd. Once, at an outdoor festival with the Etch A Sketch Drill Team, she watched him juggle two unicycles, the ungainly machines glittering as Fredd heaved them six feet over his head. She still shivered when she remembered it. Nancy would have had a cow. That thought was all it took for her to fish her phone out of her pocket. She still had Fredd’s number. He answered on the first ring for Vivy, his old friend and biggest fan. No, he wasn’t far. He didn’t often leave the area anymore, what with the kids.

“Kids?”

“Jesus, Vivy. Don’t you ever open your Christmas cards?”

Sometimes she did, though sometimes not until March. He would come on over. It would be fun. “Will I get paid?”

“You will be paid,” she said. He would. Somehow.

“I’m on my way.”

She hung up as another trio of teenagers sauntered to the door, and she put a hand on the girl, a twig of a human being with magenta hair. “You should stay. There’s a juggler coming who’s amazing. You’ve never seen anything like him.”

“And as long as we’re in here, you’ll want us to order more ice cream. No thanks.” The girl pulled her wrist away.

“I don’t care if you sit there and play five-card stud,” Vivy said. “But you should really see this guy.”

“You work here, right?”

“I’m just trying to tell you. It’s not something you’ll want to miss.”

“You know, if you really want to please your audience, can the juggler and bring in somebody to fix your air-conditioning.” The girl flipped her pink hair over her shoulder and sidled past Vivy, the two boys in knee-length cutoffs and eyebrow rings attending her. All of them practically fleshless, nothing but sinews and joints. Fredd would be able to juggle them, if Vivy could keep them here. Over at the counter Nancy and Sam stood rinsing scoops. Nancy’s lush, showgirl body commanded the narrow space; beside her Sam appeared practically elfin, although he was not a small man. Later Vivy would tease him about spending the day at eye level with Nancy’s breasts.

Twenty minutes passed before Fredd pulled up in the rusting, belching VW van he had been driving since 1988. Ignoring Nancy’s pointed look, Vivy hurried out and let Fredd wrap her in his burly arms, his orange and purple shirt smelling like old cheese, his shaggy mustache scrubbing her cheek. “Still a lady-killer,” she said as he beamed at her.

“Still a flirt.”

“Me? I’m a business gal. I’ve sold out.”

“Don’t try to fool me. You’ve still got it.” He looked at the sign in front of the store. “Really?”

“Don’t get all choicey now. I’m about to put you back onstage.”

He glanced at the store, its small platform and low ceiling. “If you want to call it that.” He trotted to the back of the van and unloaded clubs, knives—he held up a torch and looked at Vivy questioningly.

“Are you nuts?”

Shrugging, he pulled out a box of ping-pong balls. If there wasn’t much wind, he could juggle six of them. If there was no wind, he could juggle a dozen.

He paused and considered every bit of paraphernalia until Vivy grabbed his massive arm and pulled him into the store. She was a tugboat with a wayward tanker. Fredd kept trying to shake hands with everybody he could reach, including a stubble-headed teenage girl with two rings connected by a tiny chain in her nose, who looked up from her pocket-sized video game and said, “Jesus. Finally.”

“You won’t be sorry you waited,” Vivy said to the whole store, yanking at Fredd’s elbow. “This is an act worth waiting for. The Man of a Million Moves: Fredd the Juggler!”

She pushed him onto the platform, half afraid to let go even then, but nobody liked a stage better than Fredd. A moment after she freed his wrist he was flipping knives into the air, slinging the bright blades so close to the light fixtures and few remaining balloons that Vivy cringed. Parents pulled their children back while the teenagers started to inch forward. Behind the counter, Nancy looked like thunder, but Sam grinned. Vivy relaxed. This was going to be fine.

“Sorry I was late. I’ll make it up to you by giving an extra good show,” Fredd said, working his toe underneath the knives at his feet and flicking them up; he was juggling five, then six, then seven—big blades, real chef’s knives. Vivy wondered whether she could get him to give her one. She could use a good knife.

In a nice segue, he switched from knives to clubs, tossing and catching the big wooden bats behind his back with an easy grace that she’d always found sexy. Sam chafed her from time to time about the hungry way she watched Fredd, and his lengthy, smelly, muscle-bound hugs.

“Okay, we’re moving into the audience participation part of today’s show,” Fredd said, the clubs circling around his head like a menacing halo. “What do you want to see me juggle? I’ll take anything you give me.” A kid threw a napkin that Fredd used to dab at his neck before he tossed it up. The paper’s slight weight sailed slowly, out of sync with the bright red and blue clubs. Another kid lobbed one of the store’s beige coffee mugs at him, and a woman, looking daring and embarrassed, ducked up to the stage and handed Fredd her wristwatch. Vivy couldn’t imagine how he kept all the oddly weighted objects in rotation, much less how he could do so while he showboated, catching the wristwatch under his leg, strolling around the stage, whistling. Spontaneous bursts of applause bubbled up, and Vivy glanced back at Nancy, who was transfixed like everybody else.

He finished by setting the clubs upright, one at a time, in a circle around his feet, and throwing the other items back out to the audience members who’d given them to him, even the napkin. People were laughing, a few kids over by the window whistled, and Vivy looked at Sam, who mimed wiping sweat from his forehead in relief. Vivy mimed the same gesture back at him, wiping off real sweat. Despite the fans whirring away from every side, the room was a slow-bake convection oven.

“Okay, now let’s try a real challenge,” Fredd was saying. “Hey Vivy—do you think I could have some ice cream cones?”

“Depends.” She grinned. She liked being part of the act. “Depends on what you want. Carob is heavier than vanilla, you know. We weigh.”

“Let me have two of each in the little squat cones. Press the ice cream down hard.” Nancy slowly reached for a scoop. She lacked Vivy’s pleasure in the unexpected, but she was the one who brought the cones up to the stage, the ice cream already starting to glisten. Kids were pounding on the tables.

The pounding turned rhythmic as Fredd carefully got the cones moving in a tall arc, circling with a preposterous dignity. For once, Fredd looked as if he were actually concentrating, which made the image even sillier—this gorilla of a man in his loud shirt and baggy pants frowning, chewing on his lip, gravely keeping four ice cream cones in midair. Kindergartners jumped on their chairs and screamed with joy, and Fredd finished wonderfully by giving each cone to one of the kids in the front row. Their parents led the applause.

Noise ricocheted around the uncarpeted store and pulled folks in from the street; every chair was taken. Parents with children wedged themselves next to the windows. Teenagers jostled and elbowed until the front row was pushed forward, right under Fredd’s feet. Vivy did a quick head count: sixty-eight. Eighteen more than Nancy had projected in the planning meeting.

Fredd waited until the latest wave settled in, then shot a foxy look at Vivy. “My finale is a very special act, a little gesture to my old friends. Could I have some water?” Looking solemn, Sam filled a pitcher and handed it over the counter to be passed up. By now the crowd was too tight for him to make a path. Fredd, meanwhile, turned his back and pulled some items out of his satchel. Vivy heard the light clink of glass. When the pitcher made it to the stage he poured the water into what seemed to be a series of glass tubes, and not until he turned around, the tubes already circling between his hands, did she realize he was juggling bongs, three of them: purple, blue, and green.

The bark of laughter was out of her mouth before she could stop it, but that seemed all right; the kids were cheering. Fredd could have juggled twenty flaming torches and not have delighted them so. Vivy held her thumbs up high so he could see them, and he wiggled his eyebrows back at her and started singing something in his reedy little voice—maybe “Take It Easy,” but the words were hard to make out over the din.

This was the kind of joke Sam loved more than anything, and Vivy glanced back at the counter to catch his expression. Instead she caught Nancy’s, unhappy and determined, as she tried to force her way from behind the counter. But the crowd kept her penned. She managed only to push aside one boy, who looked back at her and said something Vivy wished she could hear. It was enough to get Nancy talking, and from the set of her back Vivy guessed the topic was the importance of community over the individual, a beloved riff. More kids turned around. One of them made an irritated shushing motion. They weren’t creating much of a commotion in all the room’s uproar, but they created enough. Fredd, glancing over to see what was going on, slipped a little, and water splashed on the kids sitting directly in front of him. “Hey!” a girl bellowed. “Hey! This vest is suede, you asshole!”

Fredd bellowed back, “It’s two million degrees in here. You should thank me for cooling you off.”

“I should thank you for third-rate juggling?”

The bongs sailed right to the ceiling. “This is not third rate,” Fredd said.

“You’re right.” The girl looked bitterly at her vest and pointed to the water stain. “It’s tenth rate.”

That did it. Fredd’s arrogant, strong-man smile turned sullen, and his hands turned into blocks. One of the bongs flew a little to the left, and he grabbed for it, then for the other two as they sailed the other way. He managed to recover them, but the bongs tipped, throwing water in every direction, splashing customers within five rows. For a moment, the air sparkled with water, and the teenagers whooped and dived into one another—trying to get into the spraying water? Away from it? Impossible to tell.

Fredd himself jumped back, a dainty, skipping motion, and a tardy one. His pants and shirt were soaked. But then, so were the teenagers around him, who rose to their feet and cheered, lifting their wet arms to catch more breeze. Fredd looked at them sourly and then bowed, holding the dripping bongs. Everyone in the room except Nancy and the girl with the suede vest was standing and applauding, arms pumping despite the heat. Smile, Vivy muttered urgently at Fredd. They loved you. But he wouldn’t look at her, or at the people pressing toward the stage. He frowned at the floor like an immense, sulky child. Smile! she mouthed fruitlessly, stretching her mouth.

In a moment his crowd, which she had worked so hard to maintain, would start to break apart. She watched three couples hurry out onto the sidewalk. Two kids whipped out cell phones. The bright tension that had rippled through the audience gave out between one breath and the next, leaving disappointment, headaches, too many people in a hot, messy room.

Vivy could already hear the lecture gathering in the back of her brain, the one from creditors and her parents that she carried around, pointing out how she and Sam had gone bankrupt on acts like Fredd. The lecture never acknowledged the incandescent reviews their acts had gotten, how the waltzing dogs had appeared on television in St. Louis and Mobile. Instead, and frequently, the hectoring voice reminded Vivy that by the time their old college friend Nancy proposed a partnership in an ice cream company, Sam and Vivy didn’t have the money for stamps to mail out their bills.

Vivy was moving down the track of her old disappointment now, stopping at every station while she automatically bent down to pick up two napkins, then straighten a chair. Just seeing Fredd made her long for the raucous, hell-raising energy of her old friends. She and Sam could have dug themselves out. They could have saved the acts and emerged with the lives they’d meant to have. Nancy had caught them at a weak moment, promising security. But after five years Vivy and Sam still owed the bank close to $80,000 for their partnership, money they borrowed upon convincing the loan officer of Natural High’s excellent long-term prospects. Vivy couldn’t put her hand on a nickel that hadn’t been spoken for first by Natural High. “I guess he’s done,” said a customer at the door.

Vivy snapped her head up and marched onto the stage. She grabbed Fredd by the arm, which felt like grabbing a pillar. “Hey there, handsome,” she said above the customers’ chatter and the scrape of chairs. “How’s about you teach me to juggle?”

“You’ve got some timing,” Fredd said.

“Famous for it,” Vivy announced. For the moment, at least, people had paused to watch. “Come on. I don’t know the first thing about juggling. How do you begin?”

“Most people don’t learn in front of an audience.”

“We’ll start a new trend. Don’t you have a beanbag in that satchel?”

After a moment, his body stiff, Fredd stooped to rummage through his bag, and Vivy faced the roomful of mildly curious faces. They were tidying themselves, pulling up purses and wallets. She leaned out to them. “I’ve always wanted to juggle. Now, I’m not all that good with my hands, so I’m counting on you all to stay and lend me moral support. After I learn, Fredd’ll teach some of you, and whoever juggles the best will win a free cone. In the meantime, though, you should go ahead and order. It isn’t getting any cooler in here.”

How many years had passed since she’d huckstered? She’d been good at it, coaxing people into auditoriums to hear the Peruvian flute player or see King Cool pour molten tin in his mouth and spit out little metal pebbles, amazingly regular. Now she was scrabbling for words, repeating herself just to keep sound coming out. But she had stopped the migration for the door. One couple, already standing, perched on the edge of their table to see what would come next.

Like a wrathful ghost, Fredd materialized before Vivy holding a handful of tangerines. “Do this,” he said, zipping the fruit back and forth, a blur of orange between his hands.

“Well gosh, what’s the big deal? Anybody could do that,” she said, and customers laughed. “Come on, Fredd. Show me at a speed a mere mortal can imitate.”

“I’m not a teacher,” he said.

“No kidding,” she said, and got another laugh. He handed her the tangerines, and she made deliberately bloopy, impossible tosses. When one of the tangerines rolled off the stage a young father nudged his son to fetch it. “Thank you,” Vivy said, and added, “I’ll bet your daddy would buy you an ice cream cone if you asked him.” The man saluted her and headed for the counter. Vivy made her next toss a little sharper, her next catch a little more deft. As a matter of fact, she was a decent juggler. She’d taught herself during long nights backstage, but she didn’t think Fredd remembered that.

Slowly she improved her tosses and catches, and slowly Fredd nosed back out of his sulk, smiling as he tossed more tangerines at her and adding some fancy catches of his own. Vivy glanced at the counter where Sam and Nancy were scooping Strawberry Swirl and Triple Vanilla and Mocha Crunch for a father with two small boys, a pod of middle school kids, and one dreamy teenage girl with acne. “This is easy!” she accused Fredd. “You never told me it was easy.”

He shrugged and wiggled his eyebrows. “Here,” he said, and fired a tangerine at her so hard that she ducked and scattered her fruit all over the stage. One of the tangerines split, its sharp-sweet smell tingling in the air like a shock. The kids yipped with laughter, and Fredd turned to face them. “Who’s next?” he said, and three girls jumped up.

Vivy retired to a corner and rubbed her hands, stinging with tangerine oil, on her shorts. At the counter, Nancy was busy with an uneasy-looking middle-aged couple. They stood a careful twelve inches apart, the space between them snapping with tension. First date, Vivy guessed. Nancy would be dredging up some weightless small talk to help them out, and Vivy’s heart went out to the man and woman. However hard she tried to keep it light, Nancy’s small talk weighed pounds.

“There you go!” Fredd said when the giggling girl with blue eyeliner managed a single pretty catch. Under the weight of his approval, she dropped the next three tosses and stood pointing her finger at her head like a gun. From the floor, people called up encouragements, and the two who had perched on their table slid back into their chairs. The store felt like a big living room. “‘A Community Business Serving Its Community,’” Vivy said, one of the napkin slogans she found particularly obnoxious.

After the girl fled the stage, Fredd picked out a college couple wearing matching running shorts. In five minutes he had them tossing Indian clubs at each other, precise as a metronome. Watching them reminded Vivy that real jugglers didn’t strive for unhesitating ease, which was boring. Real jugglers took pleasure in the unbalanced, the nearly missed, the little accidents that brought life to an act. Only the amateurs wanted perfection.

While the couple perfected their feed, Fredd strolled to the other side of the stage and hoisted a little girl in a pink T-shirt onto the stage. The girl craned and pulled away from him, her eyes wary and her mouth loose, and Vivy, watching, dug her fingernails into her damp palms. But Fredd sat down on the stage, glanced at her parents for their okay before settling her on his lap, and very gently started to juggle ping-pong balls he pulled, one at a time, from his pocket. The balls bobbed an inch in front of the girl’s nose, light as butterflies, and she dimpled as Fredd added a fourth ball, and a fifth, and a sixth. When he started to bounce them off the top of her head she pealed with laughter, and when Fredd handed her back to her beaming mother, the woman promptly bought ice cream for her whole table.

Fredd looked over at Vivy, who nodded. Calculating fast, she guessed the store had done break-even business for the day, and there was still the afternoon walk-in business, the late night rush. Fredd stood to take a final bow, but as he straightened, protests broke out from the tables closest to the stage. “I wanted to be next,” groused a skinny boy whose Led Zeppelin T-shirt draped over him like a curtain. “I wanted to juggle the bongs. When are you coming back?”

Fredd shrugged and looked over at Vivy. “When am I coming back?”

“You’re our favorite juggler. How’s next week?” she said, a rash offer, and just what the audience wanted to hear.

“Good to go. Next week,” he grinned at the boy in the T-shirt. “We’ll do my Jimmy Page special. I’ll juggle seven lead balls while I play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the harmonica.” Vivy grinned while the boy pumped his fist and cried, “Yes!” She felt as proud of Fredd as if he’d been her son, especially as he paused on his way to the back of the store to autograph ping-pong balls for the kids who shouted and tugged at his baggy pant legs.

It took another fifteen minutes to give him his check, to jaw a while, and finally to watch him drive off. By then the kids around the store had quieted; several of them had fallen asleep under the tables where their mothers chuckled and sipped iced tea. A dense stillness spread over the store—thick, succulent as mud. The air wrapping around her like a pelt, Vivy slipped behind the counter and into the back room, where Sam was setting out a fresh tray of nuts from the freezer. “Shh,” she whispered. She wrapped her hands around the icy metal tray, then ran her cool fingers under his shirt, pressing the spots where sweat had soaked the cotton through.

“Nice,” Sam said.

“A little break provided for the management.”

“Nancy’s going to walk in,” he whispered, leaning back against her hands. “Then won’t we be embarrassed.”

“I’ll tell her I was driven wild by desire for you.”

“What’s the real story?”

“I was driven wild by desire for you.” She pressed her hands flat against his hips. “‘Know Your Vision. Embrace Your Vision. Make Your Vision.’“

“With a store full of customers?”

“Call this a promise for later.”

“Vivy?” Nancy called from the counter. “Can you help me here?”

After pressing her cool fingers one last time against the small of Sam’s back, Vivy edged back out front, where a line of kids giggled and cut their eyes at one another. They propped themselves against the counter and ordered stupendous amounts of ice cream—triple dips with mix-ins, four-fruit smoothies. The boy who won a free cone ate that, then returned to the counter to buy a second. From his bloodshot eyes Vivy had a pretty good idea what he’d spent the last hour doing. She gave him an extra half scoop.

While Vivy took an order for Brown Sugar Butterscotch over Vanilla Crunch from a kid with blonde, halfhearted-looking dreadlocks, Nancy said, “Things got bad for a while there with Fredd. Good thing you were able to set everything straight.”

“It was fun. Reminded me of the old days.”

“That girl in the vest will probably send us her dry-cleaning bill.”

“The rest of the audience loved Fredd. They were standing up and cheering. When is the air-conditioning guy supposed to get here?” Vivy said. Even in the freezer case, the Roasted Almond Carob was as loose as pudding. “Anyway, that girl was a pill. And I kept people here. I hustled.”

“You did,” Nancy said. “You also promised Fredd a berth for next week. The company may not be able to afford it.”

Vivy studied Nancy’s thick auburn ponytail, her long, vanilla-white forearms. She wore a beige and brown Natural High T-shirt, as always—Nancy and Paul had one for every day of the week. Presently, Nancy’s was sweat-glued to her high, round breasts. “We’ll be fine,” Vivy said. “Customers will come back to see Fredd again. They want to hear him play that harmonica.”

“If they remember,” Nancy said.

“If you provide first-line talent, people remember.” Vivy took her time, watching Nancy’s flushed profile. “As a matter of fact, I think we should start hiring more acts. Real ones, not flunked-out banjo players.”

“Hank didn’t get any customers wet. And he was good value.”

Vivy picked a walnut from the tray of mix-ins. Then she picked out two more. Lunch. “I know tap dancers. I know comedians. I know a woman who makes blown-glass fruit and then eats it.”

“That’s horrible.”

“I’m just telling you that I could bring in acts other than jugglers. I’ve still got connections. I’m an underused commodity.”

“That’s one way of looking at things.” Nancy turned to look down at her. Sam’s very first name for Nancy was The Seven Foot Tall Humorless Woman. “I don’t want to point out the obvious here, but we’re trying to be an example of effective partnership, not a venue for sideshow acts.”

“Maybe we should expand our vision,” Vivy said, holding out against the anger that licked at her, even though she felt as if Nancy had just attacked her children. She spread her feet for balance and picked her words. “I think it’s time.”

“We have a partnership,” Nancy said. “Better get your hand out of the nuts. The health inspector warned us about that.”

“I haven’t forgotten about the partnership. I’m very big on the partnership,” Vivy said. “All I’m suggesting is that you let me contribute a little more to the common good.”

Nancy turned away, but not before Vivy saw the tight fold to her lips, the hard lines on either side of her mouth. “I’ll meditate on it,” she said. “I’ll spend some time thinking.”

“And you’ll tell the others to think, too? We could bring this up at the next meeting.”

“There’s nothing for them to think about yet,” Nancy said. “If you’re looking for something to do, you could scrub out the far bin. It’s got leftover water in it. The health inspector warned us about that, too.”

Vivy smiled. Taking great care to use only her fingertips, she plucked one more walnut from the tray. Then she turned to the plump boy goggling at the Cherry-Berry Swirl and asked him whether he would like two scoops or three, adding that Cherry-Berry was on sale, a sale she had just made up, all by herself.