Blooming All Over (16 page)

He smiled back.

Bloom’s Bulletin
Written and edited by
Susie Bloom

A fellow in need of a treat

Came to Bloom’s to pick up something sweet.

He ate like a slob ’cause

He loved those Bloom’s
babkas

And the
rugelach
couldn’t be beat!

Welcome to the June 3 edition of the
Bloom’s Bulletin
. Mother Nature is turning up the heat—and Bloom’s is ready! Browse through our frozen-foods departments. You’ll find delicious, nutritious fruit pops (made of 100% fruit juice, no sugar added), frozen yogurt, and yes—rich, creamy ice cream with a high enough butterfat content to send your cardiologist screaming into the night. Go ahead—eat,
bubbela!
Enjoy! Also make sure to check out our delicious summery salads, prepared fresh every day: fruit salads, mixed-greens salads, potato salads, pasta salads, all guaranteed to bring your cardiologist back home again.

Fill your belly and feed your head!

Thanks to the success of our first “Booking the Cooks” program, Bloom’s will be instituting a variety of lectures and classes. Coming up over the next two months: Glynnis Montebello will speak on “Napkin Origami” and teach attendees how to fold napkins into boats, flowers, swans and crowns, the perfect way to dress up a table for a festive dinner party. Nutritionist Larry Schwartz will present “What Color Is Your Brunch?” He will explain what the colors of foods indicate about their nutritional value. Sami Gorshan will repeat his
fascinating talk on Middle Eastern cuisine and politics, “Couscous and Kiss-Kiss—Breaking Bread as a Path to Peace.” Child psychologist Jana Popowitz will give a talk called “Eat Your Peas—Healthful and Hug-ful Strategies for Feeding Your Child.” Check page four for times and dates.

In the spring, a woman’s fancy
…turns to chocolate. Specials on imported chocolates this week. Perugina, Lindt, Toblerone, all at prices guaranteed to start your cardiologist screaming again. Indulge!

Did you know
…

We often use the word
lox
in reference to smoked salmon. However, lox isn’t smoked salmon at all. It’s salmon that has been cured in salt brine. In the nineteenth century, curing salmon from the Pacific Northwest in salt helped to preserve it for the long cross-country railroad trip to New York. In the early years of the twentieth century, immigrant Jews loved lox because it was inexpensive and kosher whether served with dairy or meat. Smoked salmon offered a less salty alternative to lox. Smoking techniques developed in Europe for Atlantic salmon were imported to New York, also in the early twentieth century, and the milder smoked salmon eventually eclipsed the heavily salty lox in popularity. No one knows who invented the combination of a bagel, cream cheese and lox or smoked salmon—but whoever it was should have won the Nobel Prize!

Employee Profile:

You may never have seen Myron Finkel, but he’s as much a Bloom’s fixture as the cash registers, the cold-
cuts counter and the showcase windows. Myron has served three generations of the Bloom family as the store’s in-house accountant. He started his career here as a fresh-scrubbed graduate of City College when deli founders Ida and Isaac Bloom ran this place and remained when Isaac and Ida handed over the reins to their son Ben. After Ben’s death two years ago, Myron was on hand to help the store transition to new leadership under Ben’s daughter Julia.

Known for his bow ties and his passion for Bloom’s cranberry bagels with strawberry-flavored cream cheese—“All that pink, it’s so
pink!
” he enthuses—Myron is a native New Yorker who currently makes his home with his wife, Muriel, in Co-op City. “It’s a long subway ride,” he says, “but not so long that a Heat’n’Eat dinner goes
kaput
on the ride home.”

Myron was ignorant about the food industry when he first started working at Bloom’s. He considers himself a modest expert now. He’s learned why some cheddar cheeses are more expensive than others—“It has to do with the age of the cheese, mostly. Plus the kind of milk used, and where it was made,” he explains. To be sure, he knows more about cheddar cheese than computers. “I got my start on adding machines and that’s what I like,” he says. “I feel comfortable with them. Computers? They’re
meshugge
. They freeze on you. I never once had an adding machine freeze on me. I did have one that the multiplication key sometimes got sticky, but wiggle the key a little and it always came unstuck.”

Besides eating cranberry bagels, Myron’s greatest joys are playing with his grandchildren, balancing his checkbook and working at Bloom’s. “We’re all family,” he says. “I’ll never retire.”

Wise Words from Bloom’s founder, Ida Bloom:
“Horseradish is God’s way of telling you he’s stronger than you are.”

On sale this week:
cracked-wheat crackers, pimento-stuffed olives, acidophilus milk and more! See inside for details.

E
va had a kind of Halle Berry thing going. Her hair was short, with tufts pointing in all directions like a shag rug after someone ran a vacuum cleaner over it. She had more curves than Halle Berry, which Casey didn’t mind, and round eyes, and her skin was the color of lightly done toast. Mose had told Casey that LaShonna had told Mose that she thought Eva would be perfect for his newly unattached buddy.

She wore a simple dress with a scoop neck. A gold cross dangled on a slender chain just above her bosom. For that alone, Casey’s mother would consider Eva an improvement over Susie. His mother seemed to think that if Casey fell for a Catholic girl, his lust would lead him back to church. Fat chance.

In any case, he doubted he would fall for Eva. Her assets notwithstanding, her voice contained an unpleasant whinnying quality, and she loved telling knock-knock jokes and laughing uproariously over them, and she was drinking one of those weird chic cocktails that bore a distant relationship to a martini but glowed a turquoise that strained his eyes and was served in an odd-shaped glass, and she’d never seen a Jackie Chan movie in her life and couldn’t imagine why she should. Like LaShonna, she seemed to have set her sights on snagging a businessman on his way up. Evidently,
LaShonna had told her Casey was an entrepreneur. Eva hadn’t been able to hide her disappointment when Casey had explained that he was a bagel specialist hoping to open his own gourmet bread shop.

Still, she was being a good sport about this blind date, and Casey supposed he could be a good sport, too, even though a large chunk of his brain had been hijacked by Susie. He had no idea where the hell she’d gone—but wherever it was, she’d taken a significant piece of him with her, leaving him incomplete and off balance.

LaShonna had dragged Mose out to the dance floor, abandoning Casey and Eva at their dark little table against the wall. A retro spinning-mirror ball strafed them with floating dots of light, and the club smelled vaguely of beer and peppermint and assorted perfumes. Casey nursed his Killian’s Red while Eva nursed her turquoise whatever, and he scrambled for something to talk about while she bounced her shoulders in time with the music.

“I’m sorry,” he said, acknowledging what those shoulders were telling him. “I’d ask you to dance, but I’m really a lousy dancer.”

“Nobody’s a lousy dancer,” she argued with a smile. “Some people are good dancers with lousy attitudes, that’s all.”

“My attitude has two left feet.” He smiled apologetically.

She stopped twitching her shoulders, apparently resigned that he wasn’t going to escort her out on the dance floor. “So tell me, Casey—is that some kind of nickname?”

“Is what some kind of nickname?”

“Casey. Is that a nickname or something?”

He took a deep breath and prayed for patience. He’d never had to suffer through small talk with Susie. From the first, their talk had been—well, not necessarily
big
, but interesting. Never this getting-to-know-you crap, this poking and probing on issues that were ultimately irrelevant.

His name, for example. “My name is Keenan Christopher,” he told Eva, then added, “Junior.”

“Wow, that’s a mouthful. Keenan Christopher Junior? Imagine if you were in big trouble at home and your mama had to call you on it. ‘Keenan Christopher Junior, I’ve got a mind to thrash your butt!’ Yeah, that would sure scare a naughty little boy. How’d you get from Keenan Christopher to Casey?”

“The initials,” he said. At her perplexed stare, he broke it down for her. “Keenan starts with
K
. Christopher starts with
C. KC
. Casey.”

“Oh. Okay. Wow. Yeah.”

One of his molars began to ache—purely psychosomatic. Really, there was nothing wrong with Eva. She seemed like a nice person, and she was attractive, and…

God, he missed Susie.

“So how come Mose calls you Woody?”

“From the movie,” Casey explained, willing his fingers not to drum out their tension against the tabletop.

“What movie?”

“White Men Can’t Jump.”

“Never saw it,” Eva said.

Great. She didn’t watch Asian martial arts films and she didn’t watch
White Men Can’t Jump
. “The two main characters are this white guy and a black guy who hustle folks playing basketball. Mose calls me Woody because the white guy is played by Woody Harrelson,
and I call him Wesley because the black guy is played by Wesley Snipes.”

“Wesley Snipes,” Eva purred. “Now, that’s one fine-looking man. Well, I guess I’m relieved. When Mose called you Woody, I thought maybe he was referring to your anatomy or something.”

Casey swallowed, but a laugh escaped him anyway. Were all blind dates this bizarre? Was the bizarreness due to Eva or him, or the two of them together, combining in a particularly strange way?

“Knock, knock,” Eva said.

Casey tried not to cringe. “Who’s there?”

“Woody.”

“Woody who?”

“Woody-who like to bite my ass?” Eva laughed so hard she snorted, sounding like Mr. Ed suffering an asthma attack.

Casey laughed, too, partly out of politeness and partly because Eva’s laughter was so awful. “That was pretty good.”

“I just made it up,” she boasted. “Right on the spot. Okay, so, tell me more about this store you’re opening,” she demanded. “I just can’t believe it’s all gonna be nothing but bread.”

“Well, bread, bagels, rolls—gourmet carbs,” he explained. She stared blankly at him. “I think there’s a market for it.”

“People eat bread, I guess,” she said dubiously. “A classy place, though—you should open it in Manhattan.”

“I know.” At last, something they agreed about. He swallowed a mouthful of beer and leaned forward. The deejay was playing loud hip-hop, and Casey had to narrow the distance between Eva and himself if he had
any hope of her hearing him. “I’d love to open it in Manhattan, but the rents there are way out of my price range.”

“Manhattan is the cool borough. People in Manhattan would spend money on boutique bread. In Queens, people spend money on Catholic-school tuition and Mets tickets.”

True. “But people are more homebodies in Queens,” he argued, trying to convince himself as much as her. “They’re more likely to eat at home, and to eat well-rounded, well-prepared meals.”

“That’s what you want? Homebodies?” Eva sniffed contemptuously. “If I was opening a store, I wouldn’t want homebodies shopping in it. Did Mose tell you I’m working toward a real-estate license?”

Casey felt his eyebrows climb toward his scalp. “No, he didn’t mention that.” He’d told Casey that Eva had attended Queens College with LaShonna and currently worked in a cubicle at an insurance company, and that she did flamboyant things to her fingernails—they were polished a glittery purple hue but otherwise were pretty tame, Casey thought; his sister put teeny dog decals on her nails, so it took a lot to impress Casey, manicure-wise—and that the odds of scoring with her on the first date were about thirty/seventy, maybe thirty-five/sixty-five. Mose valued precision.

Casey had no intention of scoring with Eva on the first date. For one thing, he preferred to know a woman well before he slept with her, and for another, he wasn’t too thrilled about having to go back to donning the old formfitting latex sleeve. Which was actually just another way of admitting that he wasn’t ready to sleep with another woman so soon after Susie had walked out on him.

Scoring, schmoring, as Susie would say. Mose had neglected to tell Casey the most important stuff about Eva: she liked to dance, she hadn’t seen any Jackie Chan movies and she was studying to be a Realtor.

He sipped some beer, then leaned forward again. “Does that mean you have access to rental information for stores?”

“I’ve got an MLS book,” she told him. He must have looked the way she’d looked when he mentioned Jackie Chan, because she elaborated. “A Multiple Listing Service book. It’s this big, thick catalog that lists all the properties in an area for sale or rent. I’ve got software, too.”

He grinned. “I bet you do.”

“Most people run their listings on Internet-accessible sites,” she told him. “You can use the software to access the sites and find out what’s on the market. Now, what you need, not that it’s my business or anything, is a chic place for this bread store, an address that would make people be willing to spend lots of money on bread. If it was my store, I’d want it to be the chicest bread store in the city. I’d want movie stars who just happened to be in town, you know—doing ‘Letterman’ or maybe filming some scenes from their next big movie—to drop by and pick up a few rolls. Of course, movie stars can’t eat rolls. Too many calories.” She shrugged. “I’d want it to be the kind of place where the Knicks would do their carbo-load before a game, or the mayor would grab some biscuits, or some famous fashion designer would want to be seen. I’d want P. Diddy buying his pumpernickel from me.”

“Have you got a store in your software that would guarantee me that kind of business?”

“No guarantees, Casey-Woody Junior. But I bet I
could find you some storefronts to look at in Manhattan. Downtown in a funky neighborhood where you might get a decent rent.”

“How far downtown?” he asked. P. Diddy wouldn’t buy his pumpernickel in City Hall Plaza, would he?

“I’m thinking Lower East Side, Alphabet City, down around there.”

Susie’s neighborhood. Christ. He’d be selling pumpernickel to P. Diddy and Susie Bloom.

Hell, he couldn’t let her determine where he would set up his store. She didn’t want to be in his life, so fine—she could buy her damn pumpernickel somewhere else. She could pick up bread at Bloom’s when she was doing her third-floor stints there. For all he cared, she could suck on stale pizza crusts at Nico’s.

“So, where do you have this software?” he asked.

She smiled seductively. “You want to come on up and see my laptop?”

If he went on up, her laptop was
all
he’d want to see, especially after she snorted another equine laugh. He would have to play the scene carefully to keep her from being insulted over his refusal to see anything else. He would have to convince her he was a gentleman who wanted to become better acquainted with her before he shifted his attention from her laptop to her lap.

He wouldn’t be lying if he said that, either. Who knew what might happen if he and Eva got better acquainted. He might give her some laughter coaching. She might lose the gold cross. They might catch a Jet Li flick and she might like it. Never say never.

And in the meantime…“Yeah,” he said, “I’d love to see your laptop.”

“I’m feeling really stupid,” Susie complained.

Rick adjusted the tripod slightly higher, then checked the videocam’s screen. He wished he could be working with a real camera and film stock. But given the
drecky
budget Julia had provided for his project, that wasn’t going to happen.

To save money, he and Susie were sharing a motel room. The motel they’d found had resembled an Infidelity Inn, each room opening directly onto the parking lot and none of the walkways particularly well lit. A private investigator would have to use a flash to catch any hanky-panky on film.

Their room was walled in pink plastic vinyl textured to resemble paneling. The bathroom was smaller than what he had at home—he could easily piss into the toilet from the shower, but he couldn’t wash his hands afterward, because the sink was located in the bedroom, not the bathroom. The window overlooked a parking lot and the sill resembled a scene from a housefly version of
The Killing Fields
. Susie had screamed when she’d opened the blinds and discovered the carnage, at least a dozen dead flies lying feet up along the ledge. Rick had given them a quick burial in the toilet.

They’d eaten dinner last night at a restaurant across the parking lot from the motel because they’d been given discount coupons for the place when they’d checked in. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting—lobster, maybe; they were in Maine, after all—but the cuisine had seemed more suited to Arkansas. Chicken-fried steak? Hush puppies? In
Maine?
The waitress had called all her customers “Hon” and the background music had included a lot of songs with lyrics about
loyal dogs, dirty low-down cheats and what a great country America was.

Okay, so he didn’t have a gazillion-dollar budget. He wasn’t doing this film the Steven Spielberg way. He couldn’t afford to give his star her own trailer and stylist. He couldn’t dawdle on this shot, because the only lighting he had to work with was what Mother Nature was kind enough to provide, which that morning was a lemon-white watered-down sun that made Susie look as though she was suffering from hepatitis.

But damn it, he was going to make his movie. And she was going to make it with him, because she’d said she would. And everything would be great if she’d only stop whining.

Even though she didn’t have a trailer and a stylist, Susie evidently intended to behave like a prima donna. As her director, he’d have to humor her. “What’s the matter?” he asked gently, when what he really wanted to ask was,
Are you on the rag or what?

“Well, I’m standing in the middle of a potato field,” she said.

He
hoped
it was a potato field. This early in the summer, before the crops began ripening, every field looked like every other field to him. For all he knew, she could be standing in a cornfield or a pumpkin field or a zucchini field. The soil was loose and gray, powder dry and striped with rows of bushy green sprouts that on the camera’s monitor resembled large, dense sprigs of parsley.

He was a New Yorker. What did he know about agriculture?

“That’s a great opening line,” he remarked, hoping to encourage her. She’d scribbled, read to him and crossed out a lengthy list of opening lines last night,
her voice arching from her bed to his. He’d tried to pretend he was interested as he’d channel-surfed in search of a classic movie or a baseball game. All her opening lines had sounded better to him than anything he could have come up with. He was a director, not a scriptwriter. Susie was the writer in the family, so he deferred to her.