Better Food for a Better World. Erin McGraw
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