“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
