Blooming All Over (2 page)

But like so much else, Tash didn’t care about wonders of the world or cholesterol. And she sure didn’t care about kosher salami. She was a vegetarian—almost a vegan, but she couldn’t bring herself to give up cheese omelettes, a fact that caused her some remorse but not enough to switch to granola for breakfast. Adam had described to her the variety of cheeses and meats sold at the deli, the mile-high corned-beef sandwiches, the smoked fish, the stuffed cabbage. “I don’t think I’ll ever set foot in there,” she’d said.

Adam gazed at her now. She was lying on her back, her head resting on his shoulder and her voluptuous breasts flattened against her chest like mounds of dough. Her skin was pale, her fingernails short, her
nose a pudgy button at the center of her face. She wasn’t what you’d call beautiful, but she looked warm and natural, at home with herself.

He really liked her. He adored her passion, her confidence, her laugh and those big breasts, as well as her big hips and her thick thighs and her enthusiasm for sex—and her access to free birth control, thanks to her mother’s job at Planned Parenthood. But he couldn’t picture himself spending the rest of his life with a woman who wouldn’t enter Bloom’s. Not that he himself shopped at Bloom’s, not that he made a habit of eating the gourmet kosher-style delicacies the store sold, but Bloom’s was his legacy.

“My mother won’t bring bagels,” he said. “Even if she did, they’d be frozen bagels from the supermarket down the street. She rarely eats Bloom’s food.”

“Why not? Doesn’t she own the place?”

“My grandmother owns it. I think,” he added. He wasn’t too clear on the Bloom’s corporate hierarchy. “My mother works there. So does my uncle Jay. My sister Julia is the president. My other sister, Susie, does freelance work there.”

“Freelance deli work?”

“I don’t exactly know what she does,” he admitted. One of the blessings of attending college two hundred miles away from home was that he didn’t have to be on top of such things.

“And they buy their food at a supermarket down the street? Why?”

“Because they’re crazy?” He shrugged, jostling Tash’s head. “They do what they do. I don’t know. I don’t live with them.”

“When are they going to get here?”

“They said they were leaving New York City around
nine.” He craned his neck to peer past Tash at the clock radio on the windowsill. A little past noon. Shit. “I’ve got to shower and get dressed,” he said, shoving himself up to sit.

His dorm room looked alien to him. The walls were bare, his posters of Josie and the Pussycats, Zippy the Pinhead and Sequoia National Park—that last one a birthday present from Tash—rolled inside cardboard tubes. His stereo was nestled into molded foam inside the carton it had come in, his printer packed into another carton and his laptop stashed in a canvas computer bag. More cartons held his clothing, his books, his CDs, his videocassette of his freshman-year roommate hurling after an all-night beer-pong tournament, the smiley-face eraser he always tucked into his pocket when he was taking an exam and other essential mementos of the past four years. He hadn’t dealt with his rug yet, and the bed linens wouldn’t get stripped until tomorrow. In his closet hung his rented cap and gown and the Cornell T-shirt and khakis he planned to wear underneath.

The room wasn’t his anymore. Tomorrow he would be evicted, exiled to New York City. He should have lined up a summer job in Indiana—or in Seattle, with Tash. Maybe she could have found him employment sitting in a tree for three months, protecting it from the chain saws of lumber companies. But that probably wouldn’t pay well, and besides, his mother would kill him if he didn’t spend the summer at home. His father had died two years ago, and his mother kept reminding him that he was now the man of the family.

Actually, Adam suspected that his sister Julia was the man of the family, even if she was a woman. She was the oldest, the big success story, the lawyer who’d
taken over Bloom’s and increased its profits. And now she was engaged to a hotshot columnist from
Gotham
magazine. Let her be the top dog; Adam would be just as happy sitting in a tree for the summer, especially if someone paid him to do it.

Then again, he’d survived last summer in New York. He’d devoted six weeks of the summer to bagging groceries at Bloom’s—Julia had pleaded with him, and he’d had nothing better to do. He and Tash had been sort of together before last summer, but not
together
together, so he hadn’t missed her that much.

This summer…Hell, he didn’t want to have to bag groceries again. He was a goddamn Cornell graduate, ready to begin work on his Ph.D. in mathematics. He wanted to do something interesting, something profound. Something like what he’d been doing the past four years in college—studying hard, sleeping, sleeping with women, listening to Phish and getting stoned every now and then.

“My parents won’t arrive until five o’clock,” Tash said, shoving a dense mass of hair back from her face. “Time zones and all. They’re probably going to fall asleep the minute they check into their hotel room.”

“Lucky you.” His family wouldn’t be drowsy when they arrived. They’d be full of energy. They’d demand a campus tour. They’d argue, hug him mercilessly, force him to pose for photos and argue some more. “You may as well get dressed, too,” he suggested. “You can hang around with my family until your parents get here.”

“I’ve still got some packing to do. But I would like to meet your family. I bet your mother will be carrying a bag of bagels.”

“I already told you…” Unwilling to repeat himself,
he let the thought drop. Tash would probably never understand that Blooms didn’t eat food from Bloom’s. He wasn’t sure he himself understood it. His mother always used to insist that the store’s food was for selling to others and that if the family ate it, they’d be consuming their profits.

Maybe things were different with Julia at the helm. Maybe
she’d
be the one who arrived in Ithaca carrying a bag of bagels. Her fiancé loved Bloom’s food. Maybe he’d make her bring bagels. As if she’d ever do anything just because someone made her do it.

Tash socked him in the arm, leaving an aching spot just below his shoulder. “Chill, Adam. It’s graduation. You’re supposed to be happy.”

“Yeah, right.” He faked a smile. “See how happy I am?”

She socked him in the arm again, in exactly the same place. She packed a wallop; he didn’t have to worry about her ever getting mugged. “I can’t wait to meet your family,” she said, swinging out of the bed. “I bet they’re lots of fun.”

Yeah, right.

But they were the only family he had, other than his cousins, Rick and Neil, and Uncle Jay, and all his relations on his mother’s side. The cousins wouldn’t
schlep
all the way to Ithaca for his graduation, not like his sisters, mother and grandmother. In about an hour they would be descending upon him like the plague of frogs upon the Egyptians at Pesach. Unlike the Egyptians, at least, he wouldn’t be subjected to a blood sacrifice.

Doing without sex and weed for the summer was almost as bad.

Julia’s head felt like an egg with hairline cracks running through the shell, thanks to having spent the past four hours trapped in a car with her mother, who refused to talk about anything other than how utterly wonderful a wedding at the Plaza Hotel would be. “Remember your cousin Travis’s bar mitzvah? That’s the kind of wedding I want for my firstborn. Remember those little portobello quiche hors d’oeuvres? To die for. Ron, have you ever been to an affair at the Plaza? Trust me, I know what I’m talking about…” Just one tiny push, one jarring motion, and the shell would shatter, allowing Julia’s runny yolk of a brain to spill out.

So she was not in the right frame of mind to deal with a hassle at the hotel. Not a minor hassle, either. A hassle tricky enough to scramble her brain and serve it on a platter with a side of hash browns.

She’d been looking forward to this trip. She was proud of her baby brother. Adam had survived four years at an Ivy League university, undaunted by the trauma of their father’s death during his sophomore year, and she’d just wanted to come to Ithaca and
kvell
over his achievement. She’d been excited about the prospect of spending a couple of days out of the city with Ron, and had been open to including him in this outing because she already thought of him as family, even if they weren’t married yet. She hadn’t even objected to the car arrangements, although she’d known her mother would spend the entire drive talking about the wedding.

No matter what her mother said, no matter how good the portobello quiche hors d’oeuvres were, she and Ron were not getting married at the Plaza. She was the president of Bloom’s, and her wedding was going to be
catered by Bloom’s—not just to show loyalty to and confidence in the business she ran, but because Bloom’s food was delicious, and even the Plaza’s portobello quiche hors d’oeuvres couldn’t compete with miniblinis and potato “latkettes” from Bloom’s. In the year since she’d taken the helm of Bloom’s, the catering service had expanded significantly, and she had every intention of contributing to that expansion by hiring the service to feed her wedding guests. Since the Plaza Hotel wouldn’t let her bring in her own caterer, the Plaza Hotel was out.

The Plaza Hotel was also miles away. The Ithaca Manor Inn was her current problem. Actually, Grandma Ida was her problem.

Julia had reserved two rooms. She’d made the reservations nearly a year ago—she’d had to reserve rooms far in advance for commencement weekend—and at the time, she’d figured she and Susie would share one room and their mother and Grandma Ida would share the other. Then Ron had suggested joining them, and of course she knew the weekend would be greatly improved if he was a part of it, especially because he was able to borrow brother Ira’s car for the trip. Susie had generously offered to sleep on a rollaway in the room with Sondra and Grandma Ida so Julia and Ron could have a room to themselves. Everything had been worked out. The plan had been sealed by Julia’s VISA card. Two rooms awaited them.

“But you’re not married to him,” Grandma Ida squawked, her voice echoing in the hotel’s atrium lobby, causing several guests emerging from the dining room to turn and stare. No doubt they were trying to decide who the unmarried hussy among the group was.

“We have only two rooms, Grandma Ida,” Julia
said, lowering her voice and glaring at the too-attentive registration clerk. “We worked this all out last winter. You and Mom and Susie will share one room. Ron and I will share the other.”

“What?” Grandma Ida chose this moment to become hard-of-hearing. “What did you say?”

“I said, we’re divvying up the rooms so you can stay with Mom and Susie.”

“You’re not married. Make the reporter get a separate room.”

“We have no more rooms,” the clerk said helpfully. “It’s commencement weekend. We’ve been booked solid since last summer.”

“Then he’ll use one room and the four of us will share the other room,” Grandma Ida resolved, sweeping her hand in a circle to indicate the four Bloom women. Her gold bangle bracelets clanked against one another. That metallic noise was enough to widen the fissures in Julia’s eggshell skull.

“We can’t have four people in one room,” Susie objected. “That’s even more crowded than my apartment in New York.”

Julia looked at her mother, who shrugged. The four-hour drive—and her four-hour oration on the glories of the Plaza Hotel—seemed to have worn her out. Her hair was flat, her lipstick clotted into vertical lines across her lower lip and her sunglasses rode low on her tiny nose. “You’re her favorite,” she muttered, motioning with her head toward Grandma Ida. “You deal with her.”

Julia knew she was her grandmother’s favorite. It wasn’t fair, but somehow she’d been cursed with that designation. She glanced at Ron—whom Grandma Ida was generally quite fond of—but he only sent her a half-baked smile and became engrossed in the framed
street map of Ithaca that hung above the registration counter.

“Grandma,” Julia began, praying her head would remain intact, “Ron and I are getting married next year. We’re engaged. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. We can share a room for one night.”

“What am I, stupid? A man and a woman share a hotel room, they’ve got only one thing on their mind.”

“Adam’s graduation,” Julia said. Ron glanced toward her, his hazel eyes glittering with amusement and disbelief. He nearly always had only one thing on his mind, and it wasn’t Adam’s graduation.

All right, so Ron Joffe was the sexiest man Julia had ever met. If the hotel situation went as planned, she would not be thinking about Adam’s graduation when they retired to their room for the night. Unlike Ron, she occasionally did have other things on her mind even when she was in his presence—not often, but more often than he did. She could sit with him over breakfast and discuss the profit margins on Bloom’s Heat’n’Eat entrées and be thinking about nothing but the fact that the spinach loaf sold better than the kasha varnishkes. When she raised her concerns, he always provided cogent observations. He was the business columnist for
Gotham
magazine and had an MBA, so he knew more about business than she did, although she knew more about spinach loaf and kasha varnishkes. Yet even when he was making his cogent observations, he was usually running his foot up and down her leg, or nudging her knees apart with his toe. He might think the kasha varnishkes would sell better if the gravy was less salty, but he was also obviously thinking about what he and Julia had been doing in bed a half hour earlier, and what they could be doing now instead of discussing
kasha varnishkes, and what they might wind up doing if his foot progressed any farther up her thigh.

“I wasn’t born yesterday,” Grandma Ida bellowed, her rattly voice bouncing off the tile floor. Anyone looking at her would recognize the truth in her statement. Dressed in a navy blue twill skirt, a dowdy cotton blouse and orthopedic sandals, with her gnarled hands and her creased face and her flagrantly black hair, she did not resemble a newborn. “I watch TV. I am aware of what men and women do in bed.”