Better Food for a Better World. Erin McGraw
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