Blooming All Over (4 page)

Casey grunted. What could he say? Mose was right.

They were playing one-on-one on the asphalt outside the Edward Mandel School in Forest Hills, Queens. At four-thirty, the elementary-school kids were long gone and the people who worked regular hours weren’t home yet, so they had the court to themselves.

Because Casey arrived at Bloom’s around 6:00 a.m. most mornings to fire up the bagel and bread ovens, no one minded when he left at three or three-thirty. Unless, of course, there was a sudden frenzy of customers desperate for bagels. This happened quite often, for reasons he couldn’t fathom. The department would be gliding along for hours, never more than one or two people waiting behind those being served, and then abruptly it would be inundated by scores of crazed customers all screaming at once: “Garlic bagels! I must have garlic bagels!” and “I claim that last poppy seed!” and “I’ll take one pesto and one dill pickle and one cranberry and two blueberry—no, two cranberry and one blueberry—and three dill pickle, and skip the pesto, and slice them all, wouldja?” and “Back off,
chazzer
, I was here first!” When things got crazy, he ignored the clock and stayed behind the bagel counter, counting, slicing and keeping the
chazzers
from trampling one another.

Casey had been working at Bloom’s long enough to know that
chazzer
meant pig. He’d picked up a few Yiddish words from Morty Sugarman, his partner in the bagel department, and a few other words from Susie. She didn’t lapse into Yiddish the way some of her relatives did. She was too many generations removed from steerage, he figured.

Susie. What the hell was he going to do?

One thing he wasn’t going to do, apparently, was make his best shot—a three-pointer from just to the left of the key. Usually the ball swooshed right through, all net, but today he’d bounced it off the rim twice and off the backboard once. Bad enough to keep missing like that. Worse to keep missing in front of a witness.

Especially when that witness was Mose, who knew Casey’s moves on the court better than Casey himself did. They’d met as undergrads at St. John’s, when they’d both had the ludicrous idea of joining the university’s basketball team as walk-ons. They’d spent an afternoon strutting their stuff for an assistant coach, who had bluntly directed them to the intramural program. “No tryouts necessary,” he’d barked. “I think you’ll make a team.”

“He
thinks?
” Mose had whispered to Casey as they toweled off their sweat and headed for the gym door.

Eight years later they were still playing, just because they loved the game. Every Tuesday evening during the months of daylight saving time, they played with a group of friends. And Friday afternoons, if Mose could leave work early, they tried to catch a couple of hours, just the two of them, playing one-on-one or Pony. Basketball was one of those things, like ice-cold ale, or a warm, chewy “everything” bagel with a thick
schmear
—another Yiddish word Casey had picked up from work
ing at Bloom’s—or Jackie Chan movies or good sex, that a person could love without being able to pinpoint specifically what made it so lovable.

Susie had once suggested that basketball was like ballet, and he’d nearly choked on the ice-cold ale he’d been enjoying. Basketball was like ballet the way a shell sirloin was like soy curd. Casey knew a thing or two about food; if pressed, he could incorporate soy curd into a recipe. And if his life depended on it, he could probably sit through a ballet. A short one.

“The jumping,” Susie had tried to explain. “The way you move your arms. The grace. It’s very balletic.”

If that was what she thought, maybe their breaking up wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Mose slipped past him for a layup, not terribly difficult since Casey’s feet were planted on the asphalt and his mind was lost in Susie-land. Not until Mose threw the ball at him, hard, did he drag his attention back to the court. “Wake up, Woody,” Mose snapped.

“Shut up, Wesley,” Casey retorted. The nicknames came from the stars of
White Men Can’t Jump
, since Casey was white like Woody Harrelson and Mose was black like Wesley Snipes. That movie was right up there with ice-cold ale and the best of Jackie Chan, as far as Casey was concerned. Maybe it was even right up there with sex.

“Where’s your focus, man? Where’s your concentration?”

“It’s focusing and concentrating on something other than b-ball,” Casey admitted, dribbling to his favorite spot, just to the left of the key, and lofting the ball toward the basket. It circled the rim, then rolled off.

“You suck,” Mose said amiably.

“No shit.” He crossed to the bench beside the court and dug in his pack for his water bottle.

Mose joined him. A sheen of perspiration coated his skin and he pulled from his bag a bottle of turquoise Gatorade. Hideous color, Casey thought, but Mose undoubtedly needed the electrolytes and minerals. He’d actually been playing hard enough to work up a sweat.

They gulped their beverages, lowered their bottles and snapped the lids shut. Then Mose stared at him. “So, what’s up?”

“I’m thinking of starting my own catering business.”

Mose threw back his head and laughed. When Casey didn’t join him, he stopped laughing and stared harder at him. “What are you, crazy?”

“No. I’ve always wanted to have my own business, and now might be the time.” He paused, then added, “I need your help.”

“
My
help? No way.”

“You’re a business consultant. You’ve got an MBA. You get paid to give advice to people like me.”

“You gonna pay me?”

At that, Casey cracked a smile. “What do you think?”

Mose took another sip of Gatorade, then shook his head. “Okay, Woody, I’ll give you some advice and I won’t charge you a nickel for it. Don’t start your own catering business.”

“Why not? I moonlight for that catering outfit on Queens Boulevard—”

“The one run by that gorilla guy?”

“Vinnie Carasculo. He’s not a gorilla.”

“He’s got hairy arms. I wouldn’t wanna eat his catered food.”

“Okay, so I should open my own catering business. Then you could eat my catered food.”

Mose searched Casey’s face, amusement and disbelief warring in his expression. He had to look up slightly; even sitting, Casey had two inches on Mose. When they played basketball, the height differential never bothered Mose because, as he loved to point out, white men couldn’t jump. But when they sat, Casey’s height seemed to vex him. “You’ve got a sweet deal going at Bloom’s,” he reminded Casey. “They love you there. You’re in tight with the boss’s daughter—”

“The boss’s sister,” Casey corrected him.

“Whatever. You got a good deal there, Casey. They pay you well, you can leave at three in the afternoon and you get to invent weird bagels.”

“What’s weird about them?”

“Oh, come on. What was that new flavor you were telling me about last week? Scallion bagels?”

“Chive.”

“Same thing. What do you wanna leave that place for? They give you a nice fat salary to make chive bagels.”

“I’m bored there,” Casey said. He hated lying to his friend, but he wasn’t ready to tell him his other reason—that if things were as bad between him and Susie as he suspected they were, he couldn’t continue to work for the Bloom family.

Maybe things weren’t that bad. Maybe he’d misunderstood Susie when she’d said no. He’d asked her to move in with him, and she’d said no, but maybe she’d actually meant, “No, but I love you, Casey,” or “No, but ask me again next week and I’ll say yes,” or “I
know
what you mean.”

Sure. There were so many different ways to interpret the word
no
.

“Casey, my friend.” Mose leaned forward and adjusted his voice into a smooth baritone—the voice he no doubt used when he was in his office on Park Avenue South, reassuring a client while explaining to him that declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy was his best course of action. “You do not
do
boredom. Your brain waves move so slowly that boredom would not register on them. You don’t get bored concocting new bagel flavors. I would find that boring. Most people would. Which isn’t a put-down—I’m just saying, you operate on a different plane, and that’s good. It’s enviable. You are spared the albatross of boredom while dreaming up ways of incorporating prunes and peppermint into bagels.”

“Albatross?” Casey interrupted.”

Mose reverted to his familiar jive. “Something like that. Sounded good, didn’t it?”

“It sounded ridiculous. So does the idea of peppermint bagels. Prunes I might consider. Raisin bagels are so popular, why not prunes? Or apricots.”

“See?” Mose beamed a smile at Casey, his point apparently proven. “You love what you do. You love bagels. I give you a boring speech and you decide to make apricot bagels. You don’t want to leave Bloom’s—especially not to start your own catering company.”

“I think I do,” Casey said, wishing he sounded more positive. He slumped forward, resting his arms on his thighs and staring at a tag of graffiti someone had painted onto the asphalt near the bench.
Bingo
, it said. Why would anyone paint Bingo onto a schoolyard basketball court?

“You’re a bagel man. You work with dough. You really want to set up shop making stuffed mushrooms and miniature egg rolls and caviar on toast points? That’s not your thing, Woody.”

“There’s money in it.”

“There’re headaches in it. Catering, you’re working on everyone else’s hours. Kiss your nights goodbye. That’s when people have catered parties, right? At night.”

Casey shrugged, not seeing this as a problem. Without Susie, he would have to fill his nights somehow. Might as well fill them stuffing mushrooms.

“Your specialty is bagels. You want to go into business for yourself, go into the bagel business.”

He eyed Mose, feeling a sudden pop, like a camera flash bursting through muddled darkness. He’d thought of a catering business because he’d been working after-hours for Vinnie Carasculo, who had his own catering business, one that didn’t involve caviar or miniature egg rolls. Vinnie was usually hired for Italian weddings, and the most popular items on his menu were lasagna platters, stuffed manicotti, six-foot-long garlic breads and fried calamari. Casey knew how to cook all those things, so he’d figured he could run a catering business. But someone planning an Italian wedding wasn’t going to hire an Irish guy named Keenan Christopher Gordon Jr. to cook the food.

But bagels. Bread. Rolls and muffins and scones. He could do that. On his own hours, too. He wouldn’t be at the mercy of tantrum-throwing brides and their mothers, or biddy ladies in Jackson Heights who hosted bridge parties and refused to pay unless every last detail, from the paper napkins to the chocolate mints, was
perfect. Vinnie had dealt with customers like that. Casey had witnessed a few scenes.

A bread store. He’d need a little real estate, a few ovens, vats for boiling bagel dough, flour and yeast and his imagination. He could do what he’d been doing all along for Bloom’s—something he truly enjoyed—but without doing it for Susie’s sister. Or her grandmother. Or for Susie herself.

She’d said no. He didn’t need a map; he could find the door himself. A door that led out of Bloom’s and into a bread store…Yeah, he could see it.

“S
he’s fat,” Sondra Bloom observed, her stage whisper echoing through the common room on the first floor of Adam’s dorm.

“No, she’s not,” Susie argued, shooting Julia a look. Julia shot a look back, one of her
There goes Mom, but it’s not worth getting into an argument
looks. They were seated on uncomfortable vinyl-upholstered sofas in the oversized, underdecorated lounge, having just sent Joffe upstairs with Adam and his girlfriend, Natasha, to make sleeping arrangements. Sondra and Grandma Ida sat across a scratched and stained coffee table from Susie and Julia. The couches seemed to have been subjected to torture by some tinhorn dictator or underground spy agency. Scuff marks on the vinyl indicated that they’d been kicked; swatches of duct tape held tears in the fabric together, and Susie could see at least three places on the arms where cigarettes had been extinguished.

Susie wanted food. She’d already searched the dorm’s first floor for a vending machine, but couldn’t find one. Adam had mentioned something about a math department reception—reception meant food, didn’t it?—but first Joffe had to work out his sleeping arrangements in the dorm. So Susie sat next to Julia on one of
the tortured sofas and listened to her mother critique Adam’s girlfriend.

“She looked fat to me,” Sondra insisted.

“She’s sturdy,” Susie argued.

“If anyone knows from fat, it’s me.” Unlike her thin daughters—unlike all the thin Blooms—Sondra Bloom was cursed with the inability to burn as many calories as she wished to consume. Over the past few years, she’d developed a pear shape, her body spreading beyond its natural borders just south of her waist. Susie would call her mother sturdy more than fat, but she didn’t know from fat the way her mother did. Sondra often implied that she considered herself well beyond plump and hurtling toward obese.

“If you’re going to criticize Adam’s girlfriend,” Julia muttered, “you could start with the fact that she doesn’t shave her legs.”

“Tush,”
Grandma Ida said with a sniff. “What kind of a name is
Tush?
”

“Tash, Grandma,” Susie said. “It’s short for Natasha.”

“How is Tush short for Natasha?”

“It’s
Tash
,” Julia corrected Grandma Ida.

“Go through life being called Tush? Like someone’s
toches?
It’s embarrassing!”

“She’s not Jewish,” Sondra hissed, her words once again resonating beyond their decibels. “A Jew wouldn’t name her daughter anything that sounded like
Tush
.”

“Who cares if she’s not Jewish?” Susie snapped, managing to keep her voice lower than her mother’s and grandmother’s.

Her mother’s eyes zeroed in on her. Sondra’s hair was impeccable once again, every brown strand doing
its part to create the perfect pageboy around her face. For a fifty-four-year-old woman with a pear-shaped body, she was attractive, her cheeks smooth, her forehead surprisingly unlined, her lipstick reapplied, her eyebrows gently arched when she wasn’t staring hard, the way she was staring at Susie right now. The only feature that appeared out of whack was her nose, which she’d had fixed when she was sixteen. Susie had never known her mother with any other nose, but this nose looked like flesh-hued Silly Putty protruding from the center of her face, shiny and shaped to some abstract ideal, the tip too round, the nostrils too angled, the bridge too narrow.

Her glare implied that she was thinking Susie, of all people, wouldn’t care if Adam’s girlfriend wasn’t Jewish because Susie herself was involved with the distinctly not-Jewish Casey Gordon. Of course, Sondra believed Susie
was
involved with Casey. Susie had no idea if that was true.

She still hadn’t convinced herself that discussing her dilemma with Julia had been a wise thing; she certainly wasn’t going to bring joy and satisfaction to her mother by mentioning that she and Casey were on shaky ground. Her mother probably liked Casey well enough—he made damn good bagels for the store, after all—but Susie suspected Sondra would have preferred for her to hook up with someone more affluent, more grounded, more traditional and definitely more Jewish. She never exactly came right out and said so, though, probably because she was just so relieved that her daughter was dating someone steadily. Like maybe this meant Susie was on the verge of settling down.

Which was the last thing Susie was on the verge of doing.

Adam and Joffe arrived in the common room, rescuing her from her mother’s scathing frown. “Tash is going to meet up with us later,” Adam announced. “She’s got some stuff to do before her parents arrive. I was thinking we may as well head on over to this reception the math department is hosting.”

And I’ll get to eat
, Susie thought. “Let’s go!” she said brightly.

“So, it’s all worked out for Ron tonight?” Sondra asked, rising from the sofa and then helping Grandma Ida to her feet.

“Yeah, everything’s cool,” Adam said, flashing a grin. “Joffe can have my bed, and I’ll stay in Tash’s room.”

Standing behind Sondra and Grandma Ida, Julia shook her head violently, while Susie grimaced and slid her index finger across her throat.

Unfortunately, Grandma Ida’s hearing suddenly recovered. “You’re staying in that girl’s room?” she asked Adam, her face contracting into a scowl.

“And that girl is staying with a friend,” Julia said swiftly, taking Grandma Ida’s elbow and steering her toward the door.

“What room? What room is Tush staying in?”

“She’s staying with a friend,” Julia assured her grandmother in soothing tones.

Lips pursed, Susie’s mother directed her disapproval to Adam, which left Susie feeling both relieved and sympathetic. Having Adam home for the summer would be fun; he could share black-sheep duties with her. Before college, he’d been quiet, shy and well behaved. God bless Cornell for having unleashed his inner rascal.

His shoulders looked a little wider than Susie re
membered. As they all exited the dorm into the sunny afternoon, she noticed that her baby brother had added a slight swagger to his walk. Arnold Schwarzenegger would never run in fear from him—well, maybe when Arnold was in his dotage Adam would have something on him—but her kid brother looked less like a boy than a man. He was graduating, after all. And he was sleeping with Tash—who was not fat, just sturdy, and would probably weigh a couple of pounds less if she shaved her legs.

Tash didn’t have to be perfect for Adam. She didn’t even have to be right for him. Next fall he’d be heading off to that chicken university with the Indians. Better that he should start graduate school with a little experience. Thanks to Tash, he would.

Sondra accelerated her pace to catch up with Joffe, who had accelerated his pace to catch up with Julia, who was keeping pace with Grandma Ida, who strode across the campus in a surprisingly brisk gait for an old lady. This left Susie and Adam to bring up the rear, which was fine with Susie, except that she didn’t want the others to arrive at the reception ahead of her and pick the platters clean before she had a chance to grab some food. Then again, they didn’t know where the reception was. Eventually, Adam would have to move to the head of their procession, and Susie would move with him.

In the meantime, they could lag and talk. “Don’t discuss that you’re sleeping with Tash in front of Grandma Ida,” she warned.

He tilted his head slightly. He didn’t exactly tower over her—Blooms were too short to tower, and even as the tallest in her family Adam was barely five foot ten—but he loomed. His Cornell T-shirt and khaki
slacks bagged on him. Unlike his sweetheart, he didn’t quite qualify as sturdy. “Why?” he asked. “Did Grandma Ida turn into a Republican or something?”

“I don’t know if she’s even registered in a party,” Susie told him. “And she doesn’t care what anyone does behind her back. But in front of her, you have to be tactful. The reason Joffe’s sleeping in your bed tonight is that Grandma Ida was so scandalized by the thought of him sharing a hotel room with Julia.”

“They’re getting married.”

“And I’m sure they’re porking each other every chance they get. Behind Grandma Ida’s back, though. That’s the thing.”

“She’s such a busybody,” Adam muttered. “How can you stand working for her?”

“I’m working for Julia, not her. She hardly ever comes to the store, and when she does, she’s usually hanging off Lyndon’s arm.”

“Hey, she lives out of wedlock with Lyndon, doesn’t she?”

Susie laughed. Lyndon was Grandma Ida’s caretaker, cook and companion. He was also young, black and gay. They were not porking each other. Grandma Ida didn’t even seem to mind that Lyndon porked other men without benefit of marriage. They weren’t doing it in front of her, after all. And Lyndon wasn’t her grandson.

“Does she hassle Rick and Neil about their love lives?” Adam asked, referring to the sons of their father’s brother, Jay. Neil lived in southern Florida, where he ran a charter yacht business, sailing tourists around the Keys for an exorbitant fee. Rick lived in New York and was one of Susie’s closest friends, which meant she knew more details than she wanted
about his love life, and those details weren’t particularly exciting. Rick was a great guy, but the majority of his love life occurred in his imagination. He’d prefer it to occur in the company of her roommate Anna. He’d probably settle for a love life with her other roommate, Caitlin, but Caitlin was so lusty she apparently scared Rick a little, and Anna was Chinese-American, which Rick found exotic.

“Or you,” Adam pressed her. “Does she give you a hard time about Casey?”

“You’re not listening to me, Adam. She doesn’t care if her grandchildren are attending orgies every night, as long as they don’t do it in front of her. In front of her, she gets upset. You don’t want her to stroke out, do you?”

“Is there a real risk of that?”

She glanced up at Adam and saw that he was smirking, his brown eyes churning with laughter. “When did you get to be so snotty?” she teased.

“I’m not snotty. I’m going to go nuts this summer. She lives right above Mom. I won’t be able to do
anything
.”

Their mother occupied a lavish apartment on the twenty-fourth floor of the Bloom Building, above Bloom’s. Their grandmother occupied the apartment directly above their mother’s. The likelihood was far greater that Sondra would hear activity in Grandma Ida’s apartment than that Grandma Ida would hear activity in Sondra’s. But if Adam chose to host an orgy in their mother’s apartment…The hell with Grandma Ida. Their mother would probably stroke out.

“Didn’t they teach you anything about discretion at this fine institution?” she asked, waving a hand at the
ivy-covered gothic halls surrounding the broad lawn across which they were ambling.

“Nothing at all.” Adam sighed. “How am I going to stand living in New York this summer? I should have found a job in West Lafayette.”

Susie wrinkled her nose. When she thought of Purdue, she didn’t think of chickens or Indians like Grandma Ida; but she pictured wide-open spaces, flat geography, a university surrounded by nothing. Did they have poetry slams in West Lafayette? Did they have really bad plays staged in warehouse lofts, midnight showings of cheesy martial arts flicks, transvestites strolling through busy intersections and not being gawked at? Did they have genuine bagels and bialys and smoked nova, delicacies you could buy at Bloom’s?

How could anyone want to spend a summer there?

“You’ll have fun in New York,” she consoled Adam. Even though he was bigger than her he was still her baby brother, in need of comfort. “If things get wonky at Mom’s, you can probably live in Julia’s apartment. She’s always over at Joffe’s place, anyway. You could even stay at my apartment, if you don’t mind sleeping on the living-room couch.”

Adam’s expression was a mixture of gratitude and repulsion, as if sleeping on the couch of Susie’s overcrowded East Village walk-up was no better than taking up residence in a cardboard box in an alley. True, she shared the place with two roommates. But on the other hand, they were female roommates.

“And Julia will hire you at Bloom’s. She’ll find you something interesting that pays good money.”

“A little nepotism, eh?”

“It doesn’t count as nepotism when it’s a family business.”

“I’m not going into the family business,” Adam said firmly. “I’m going to get a Ph.D. in mathematics and then I’m going to teach. And do research. And not sell knishes.”

“Big talker,” Susie teased. “So how will you spend the summer, then? Hanging out in Mom’s apartment and not doing anything?”

“It looks that way.”

“Working at Bloom’s would be better than that.” Susie hooked her hand through his elbow. “You’d get to be surrounded by good food all day. Speaking of which, if there isn’t any food at this math department reception, I’m going to come back outside and start eating the grass. I’m famished.”

“There’ll be food,” Adam promised, letting her march him more rapidly down the path. “The department has to feed us. We math majors don’t know how to feed ourselves. We’re all nerds.”

“You’re not a nerd!” Maybe he had a few nerdish tendencies, but she wasn’t about to let him put himself down, especially not the day before graduation.

“Don’t worry. The math profs keep an eye out for us. There’s
always
food.”

“I should have majored in math,” Susie said, smiling because she’d be eating soon.

Rick would rather go to his father’s than his mother’s for dinner, any day. For one thing, his mother served weird food—sun-dried mushroom casseroles, turnip fritters, warm sauerkraut with raisins in it. Her cuisine matched her personality, just as his father’s cuisine—expensive and not too healthy, heavy on the red meat and rich sauces—matched his. For another thing, while
they ate, Rick’s mother would always interrogate him on what he was doing to make the world a better place—which, he had to admit—wasn’t much, whereas his father would talk about frivolous things like golf and his beloved BMW Z3. For yet another, Rick’s mother, Martha, was a devout feminist, whereas Rick’s stepmother, Wendy, was a Barbie doll.