Blooming All Over (15 page)

“Heat’n’Eat stuffed cabbage,” she told him, trying not to ogle him as he closed in on her by the sink, where she was transferring the mixed-greens salad she’d brought home from Bloom’s onto two salad plates. “Your favorite.”

“Who needs a wife who can cook when you’ve got one who runs Bloom’s?” he teased, wrapping his arms around her from behind when she turned from him.

“Well, lucky you. You’re going to wind up with a wife who runs Bloom’s and can’t cook. Don’t evade my question. Your father is taking my mother out tomorrow. What are we going to do?”

“He’s taking her out for coffee. And we aren’t going to do anything.”

“The whole thing just seems…icky.”

“It’s not icky. They’re two unattached adults. What, do you think we should chaperon them?”

Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. But if Julia said so, Ron would laugh at her. He had a habit of not taking things as seriously as they ought to be taken. Like the catering for their wedding, or this potential romance between their parents.

They couldn’t chaperon tomorrow’s coffee date. Julia had lined up three different wedding venues for them to visit. Finding nice sites that would allow her to provide her own catering had proven a challenge, but she’d scheduled visits at a private mansion in Greenwich Village, a loft in Chelsea and another mansion on the Upper East Side. She also wanted to check out some venues in Central Park, even though liquor was prohibited from wedding receptions there.

If only she’d knuckled under to her mother, she could have reserved a banquet hall at the Plaza and left the catering and liquor to their in-house service. It would have been easier. But damn it, she was the president of Bloom’s. She wished she could fit a hundred fifty people into her apartment or Ron’s; then she could host the party herself.

They could probably fit a hundred fifty people into her mother’s apartment, if they set up some tables in the bedrooms. But her mother would never allow that. Her brother’s son, Travis, had had his bar mitzvah at the Plaza, after all. Sondra Bloom couldn’t be shown up by her own brother.

Grandma Ida, though…Her apartment was just as big as Julia’s mother’s, clean and cheerful in a depression-era sort of way. Julia and Ron could trim their guest list down to a hundred and fit the wedding there. But with Grandma Ida, one never knew what she’d say or do. She might agree to have the wedding at her place
and then change her mind after the invitations had been sent. Or she might insist that the doorman be invited, since she’d known him for decades and made several donations to the Puerto Rico Statehood and Freedom Brigade at his request.

The microwave dinged. She concluded that Ron loved Bloom’s stuffed cabbage more than he loved her, based on his speed in releasing her and racing to the microwave to remove the food. She smiled, admiring his tight butt in his snug-fitting jeans and thinking, not for the first time, how amazing it was that fate had brought them together.

How did love triumph, anyway? She’d dated such a variety of losers—rich losers, struggling losers, handsome losers, selfish losers. With another woman, some of those losers might actually be winners, but with her they were duds. She’d never felt comfortable with them, never felt completely like herself. She’d never looked at their butts and fantasized about skipping dinner and dragging them to the bedroom.

She entertained that little fantasy now, but didn’t act on it. If the dinner menu had been hamburgers, or peanut butter on toasted whole-wheat bread, Ron would have gladly allowed himself to be dragged. But…she just didn’t want to test her hypothesis and hear Ron say,
Not tonight, dear. I’ve got stuffed cabbage
.

Ron pulled a couple of beers from the fridge, popped the caps off the bottles and set them down on the tiny table crammed into a corner of the room. He and Julia had to sit at right angles from each other because there wasn’t enough room to pull the table out of the corner, but the mere presence of that table qualified the room as an eat-in kitchen. Julia’s kitchen was so small she’d had to situate her dining table at one end of her living room. If they had their wedding in her apartment, they
could accommodate Ron’s brother and Susie, and maybe Adam, period.
Sorry
, they’d have to tell their parents, Grandma Ida, and all the aunts and uncles.
We’d love to invite you to our wedding, but there’s no room
. They could exchange vows, serve a brunch of bagels and nova, bialys and creamed herring, mimosas made with fresh-squeezed orange juice and coffee made with fresh-ground beans and not have to worry about her mother flirting with his father, Uncle Jay bragging about how wonderful he and his sons were, his wife, Wendy, being prettier than the bride and Aunt Martha and Esther Joffe forming a first-wives club and trying to stab people with butter knives. No
sturm und drang
at the wedding. Just siblings.

Actually, that sounded like a lovely idea.

“So, did Susie get off all right today?” Ron asked.

Maybe it wasn’t such a lovely idea. Susie was in the middle of some
mishegas
. “Yeah,” Julia said, then took a sip of her beer. “She and Ricky are on their way to fame and glory.” She sighed.

“You don’t want them to find fame and glory?”

“I want them to make an infomercial for the store. Maybe a pilot for a Bloom’s cooking show. Something we can get on to some local-access cable stations that’ll hype the store. Why they have to
schlep
all the way to Maine to do this is beyond me.”

“Maybe studio rentals are cheaper in Maine.”

“Maybe.” Julia didn’t know much about studio rentals, or movie-making in general. She’d lopped fifteen thousand dollars off the cost estimate Uncle Jay had provided for her, partly because Uncle Jay wasn’t always the most reliable person when it came to spending money and partly because his estimate was based on what Rick had told him and Rick was even less reliable. Even so, she’d handed over a nice chunk of change
from the company’s promotions budget, and she wanted something to show for it once the money was spent. Susie had promised to keep an eye on Rick and his expenditures, but how close an eye could she keep on them when she was in the midst of her
mishegas
?

“You know what?” Julia said. “My family is driving me crazy.”

Ron laughed. “There’s a news flash.”

She took a bite of stuffed cabbage and instantly felt better. The sweet tang of the sauce, the crumbly texture of the chopped-beef-and-rice stuffing, the slippery, sour jacket of cooked cabbage leaves—it was tasty enough to soothe her. Doctors ought to prescribe it for their stressed-out patients.

Swallowing, she gazed up at Ron. He was still laughing. Not quite benignly—he didn’t do benign—but more gently than she would have expected. “It’s not your job to fix everything,” he reminded her. “If your mother and my father screw up, that’s their business. If your sister and your cousin screw up, Bloom’s is out some money, so chalk it up to a bad investment and move on.”

“My sister’s not just screwing up,” Julia explained, acknowledging her number-one worry on a long list of worries. “She’s broken up with Casey, and she’s miserable about it.”

“It’s not your problem,” Ron insisted.

“Of course it’s my problem! Casey works for me, and Susie is my sister. I love her and she’s in pain.”

“Who caused that pain?”

“Casey? Or maybe she caused it herself. I don’t know,” Julia reluctantly admitted.

“Then let her deal with it.” He took a hefty chunk of stuffed cabbage into his mouth, chewed, swallowed and sighed contentedly. “You’re the president of Bloom’s,
not the president of the Blooms. Relax. Let them clean up their own messes. Find something more important to worry about.”

“Okay,” she said, returning his smile. “I’ll worry about where we should have our wedding.”

Adam ought to have felt miserable, or at least something other than pleased. For one thing, he faced the dreaded prospect of sitting through a ballet. For another, he was supposed to be in love with Tash. For yet another, thanks to Elyse, he’d wound up with a summer job he didn’t want.

But in spite of it all, he was pleased.

He’d called Elyse that morning to see if she wanted to grab a movie with him. “I’ve got a class,” she’d said.

“What class? It’s summer. Doesn’t Juilliard close in the summer?”

“Dancers don’t get summer vacations, Adam. It’s like a sport. If you don’t work out every day, you lose everything.”

He’d wondered what exactly she would lose if she took a day off. Her flexibility? That delicate way she had of holding her hands, her slender fingers slightly arched and her knuckles arranged at precise angles? If she went a week without a workout, would her head hang, her chin sag, her neck shrink?

He could think of no one else to go to the movies with. Everyone in the world had something to do during the day, except for him.

“I’ve got tickets to a free dress rehearsal at the New York State Theater this evening,” Elyse had told him. “The ballet troupe is from Brazil. They’re really good.”

A really good ballet troupe equated with a really sweet lemon in Adam’s mind—intriguing, if you happened to like sucking on lemons. But he’d agreed to meet her
outside the theater at Lincoln Center at six-thirty so they could catch the dress rehearsal. She could watch the dancers prancing and mincing. He’d watch her.

Which brought him to the second thing that should have made him miserable: Tash. They e-mailed back and forth, but as soon as he turned off his laptop, she vanished along with the icons on his monitor screen. According to her e-mails, she’d participated in three protests since arriving in Seattle; one against the World Trade Organization, one against loggers and one against manufacturers of stuffed animals, which, according to Tash, objectified and anthropomorphized animals, enabling people to forget that animals were in fact feral and not adorable beings who existed solely to amuse and comfort humans. Adam had spent the first six years of his life intensely attached to a certain stuffed koala named Koko, and he’d considered this new cause of Tash’s less than compelling.

He’d expected to be spending the summer pining for his pine-tree lover. Sure, he was horny, but when he thought about sex, he thought about a sylphlike woman with blond hair that he’d never even seen loose—she always wore it twisted into a little knot at her nape—and limbs like willow branches and her toes always pointing due east and due west when she faced north. Maybe he was unfaithful, maybe he was disloyal, maybe he was just a shallow piece of shit, but Tash just wasn’t front and center for him in his fantasies anymore.

He climbed the steps to the plaza at the heart of Lincoln Center, thinking he ought to be pissed as all get-out not only because he would have to sit through this ballet dress rehearsal but because her inability to go to a movie with him, combined with his abject boredom, had convinced him to ride the elevator from his mother’s apartment down to the third floor of the
Bloom Building to talk to his sister Julia that morning. “I really don’t want to work at Bloom’s,” he’d said, not the best way to begin an employment interview.

“So get a job somewhere else, Adam,” Julia had advised him. “I’m sure other places are hiring.”

“What’s the point of working other places? It would be the same kind of work—stocking shelves, running a register, whatever. No one’s going to give me a
real
job knowing I’ll be leaving for Purdue at the end of August.”

“Well, summer jobs are what they are,” Julia had said. “You don’t get to run Citicorp for ten weeks and then skip off to grad school.”

He still couldn’t quite get past seeing his sister sitting at their father’s desk, doing their father’s job. She was Julia. He’d grown up with her. He’d chipped at the dried blobs of toothpaste she left in the sink. He’d heard her ear-shattering shrieks when some boy did or didn’t call her in high school. He’d shared whispered jokes with her during seders, and he’d once caused her to choke on matzo from laughing too hard. She’d tattled on him for getting green ink on the living-room rug and for stealing and eating all the Hanukkah
gelt
—three mesh bags filled with gold foil-wrapped chocolate coins that their parents had given, one apiece, to each child. She’d also covered for him when he was sixteen and had gotten shit-face drunk at a classmate’s Christmas party while she was on her winter break from law school. She’d kept him from waking their parents—he’d been blitzed enough to see nothing wrong with bellowing “Joy to the World” at two in the morning, but Julia had muzzled him, gotten him washed and out of his clothes, cleaned up the kitchen sink when he’d barfed into it, helped him brush his teeth and tucked him into bed, all without their parents ever finding out.

So it had been unsettling to see her, dressed neatly
if not too formally, enthroned in their father’s big leather swivel chair, running Bloom’s. Even more unsettling to ask her for a job after he’d adamantly insisted he would not be working at Bloom’s this summer.

“Do you need money?” she’d asked.

“Money’s nice,” he’d conceded, then shrugged. “I’m bored. I need to do something.”
While Elyse is in her ballet classes
, he’d almost added, but he hadn’t been quite ready to admit to that.

“I can find something for you,” Julia had promised. “You could restock shelves. Work inventory. You’ll get to use the price gun.”

Oh, joy. The price gun. “Sure,” he’d said.

“Okay. You can start Monday. Go see Helen.”

“Who’s Helen?”

“Our Human Resources person.”

“I didn’t know we had a Human Resources person.”

“I’ve made some changes,” Julia had said.

Making some changes wasn’t always a bad thing, he reminded himself. If Julia could hire a Human Resources person for Bloom’s, surely Adam could renege on his pledge not to work there this summer. And surely he could spend an evening watching people in leotards, tripping around a stage on their tiptoes and fluttering their hands. It wasn’t as if there were any movies he was dying to see, anyway.

He spotted Elyse standing near the doors to the State Theater, on the southern edge of the plaza. The horizon still held a few traces of waning light, and the fountain spewed arcs of silver water into the air. If he were a romantic type, he’d consider the setting very romantic—the fountain, the first few evening stars poking through the sky and a graceful babe with outstanding posture and pretty blue eyes watching for him. He quickened his pace; she spotted him and smiled.