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.
Two
Cecilia
In the front corner of David and Cecilia’s living room, Sandy McGee, the most diligent of Cecilia’s violin students, sawed at a G major étude. Cecilia tapped out the time on her thigh and shaped her mouth into an encouraging smile. Talent didn’t always show at once; sometimes it needed time to be lured, to reveal itself like a slow miracle. Cecilia often found herself thinking about miracles when she was with Sandy, who shot her bow like a pool cue and whose red, bitten fingers displayed an embedded instinct for the wrong note.
After their first month of classes Cecilia had given the girl sheet music for easy fiddle tunes, “Old Joe Clark” and “Bile Them Cabbage Down,” songs that would make the most of her good ear and sense of rhythm. But when Sandy looked at the illustration of a man sitting on a stump beside a happy pig, tears came to her eyes. “You don’t think I can play real music, do you?”
“This is real. People study for years to play this. It’s more popular than Mozart.” Cecilia had picked up her own violin and played a few bars of “Old Joe Clark.” Usually kids liked the bouncy melody, but Sandy bit her lip. When Cecilia put her violin down, the girl started again with her honking rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
In the two months since then she had barely improved. Her vertiginous notes wobbled around the tiny apartment—every week Cecilia imagined paint peeling, light bulbs rattling. Now she pressed her hands together, trying to catch her last flake of patience before Sandy’s playing scoured it away.
“Lightly,” she said, pointing to the bow the girl clutched as if it were a steak knife. “Easy. Listen to the sound you’re making.”
Sandy drew the bow across the strings, losing control partway through so that the bow rode right up on top of the bridge and produced a yowl. She scrubbed a furious hand across her eyes. “I practice. I know it doesn’t sound like it. Every day. My mom makes me go out to the garage.”
“Think of your bow as a feather on the strings,” Cecilia said.
“I try. It doesn’t help.”
“And relax your shoulder. Move your arm from your elbow.”
Chewing her ragged lower lip, Sandy confronted the sheet music, its single line of fat quarter notes stairstepping up the staff, and resettled her face against the chin pad. When she finally brushed at the strings, the bow landed so lightly she hardly made a noise. “Better,” Cecilia said.
She listened, she nodded, she discreetly rubbed her arm. Very BlueBerry ice cream, on special this week and selling like nobody’s business, always left her arm sore. David theorized the high sugar content in Very BlueBerry made it more difficult to scoop. He’d once actually talked to a chemistry TA at the university about temperatures and bonding properties of sugar molecules. The next day he insisted on coming to work during her shift, taking her place behind the counter and chipping at the rock-hard ice cream while she was left sponging tables that were already perfectly clean. Since then she’d been loading up on Advil, doing her own scooping, and assuring him she felt fine, never better.
“‘Fine?’” he’d said last night after dinner. “I don’t think ‘fine’ is good enough. I want you to feel magnificent.”
“Fine is good, David. Most people wish they felt fine. Fine is—fine.” She nodded at him brightly. His broad face wore an eager expression, right at the brink of enjoyment.
“I want you to feel perfect,” he said.
“I don’t think I could take the pressure.”
He had pulled her onto his lap, and she leaned against his heavy arms, even though the embrace was sticky in the room’s heat. “Well, ‘fine’ still isn’t good enough,” he said, shaking her long hair out of its braid. “We’re going to have to do something about that.”
What he wanted her to feel was pregnant. He had brought up the subject two months before, pointing out that they had been married five years, and he was coming into some money from his father, and they had savings. Why wait? Cecilia couldn’t think of any reason, and she was happy to throw away the condoms and tubes of Conceptrol that slid around in their bedside drawer. But she hadn’t been prepared for David’s enthusiasm. Not only did he initiate sex every night, until Cecilia heard herself sighing as soon as the dinner dishes were done, but he turned nosy, asking when exactly her latest period had started and marking the kitchen calendar with a black dot that she could see from across the room. He talked about cervical mucus. Sharply, and more than once, she warned him that he’d better calm down. He brushed his hands across her breasts and said he hadn’t been so excited since she’d let him court her, a pretty piece of talking that made her blush and relent.
David, she reminded herself, was a good-hearted man, as uncomplicated as water. His round, soft body cushioned her knobby joints, his beard scrubbed genially at her face, and his gentle nature soothed her daily onslaught of worries, her sense that she had never quite done enough. Cecilia knew she had fallen in love with him in large part for his ability to ease her fretful soul. “Everything will be all right. Shh, now,” he said night after night. Although she never believed him, she knew he believed himself, which sometimes was enough to make her relax.
But lately his easy faith only made her nervous. She felt like a high-strung dog, alert to every sound or shift in the wind, while cheerful, oblivious David strode beside her. When he talked about fitting a crib into the bedroom with them or thought up baby names—“Wolfgang,” he suggested, trying to please her, “Wolfgang Ludwig Johann Sebastian”—she answered by not answering, chattering about the store, asking him about his tomato plants, complaining, like everybody, about the heat. He looked at her with a puzzled disappointment that made her heart hurt. Now of all times they should be sharing a dreamy, sweet dialogue. But she couldn’t control her edgy spirit. She wanted a baby well enough; she just didn’t want it as much as he did. She had never wanted anything as much as he, so very suddenly, wanted this baby.
Sandy finished her étude—half whisper, half hee-haw. “Again,” Cecilia said.
“I bet you don’t really want to listen to this.”
“Keep playing the notes. It’s always hard at first to find the music.”
“This”—Sandy held the violin by the neck and wagged it in front of her—“isn’t music. When is it going to get better?”
“Sandy, I don’t know. There’s no timetable. You