Love in Bloom's (2 page)

“You’d be one of those
meshugena
ladies in the fancy suits and the sneakers.”

“They aren’t
meshuge,
Grandma.”

“You don’t wear sneakers with a fancy suit.”

“They only wear the sneakers going to and from work. When they get to their offices, they change into real shoes.”

“It’s crazy. Sneakers with a suit like that. And all of them picking up ‘heat-n-eat’ dinners on their way home. They should be home making a proper meal for their families, not crowding Bloom’s looking for food.”

“The store makes lots of money with those prepared meals,” Julia reminded her.

“Thank God for that.
Meshugena,”
Grandma Ida clucked, shaking her head. “So you eat what?”

“Nothing as good as this,” Julia swore, then shoveled more eggs into her mouth.

Her grandmother ate, as well. Not as enthusiastically, not as voraciously, but she held her own. Even at her advanced age, she had most of her original teeth, and chewy bagels couldn’t defeat her.

“This is wonderful,” Julia finally said, leaning back in her chair and feeling a contented ache in her belly. “Thank you.” She knew the little chat was imminent, but she figured a show of gratitude might make it go more smoothly.

Her grandmother drained the last of her coffee and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. Then she settled herself in her chair and glared at Julia, her eyes dark and focused as if she were seeing not Julia but her own soon-to-be-revealed purpose.

“It’s been a year,” she began.

“I know.” A year since Julia’s father had died. She no longer felt that squeeze of emotion in her guts, in her lungs, no longer felt the pinch in the bridge of her nose, releasing tears. Her father had been what he was, but she’d loved him, they all had, and he shouldn’t have had to die of food poisoning while on a trip to St. Petersburg to meet with his sturgeon supplier. For months Julia had been haunted by images of him suffering in some foreign hotel room, and Russian doctors at the hospital babbling in their guttural, Slavic language above his wracked
body, inserting tubes into him, attempting to jump-start his heart…And all because he’d tasted some tainted sturgeon.

“So, we mourn for a year and then it’s over,” Grandma Ida said.

“It’s never really over, Grandma.”

“In terms of God, it’s over. A year passes, you unveil the stone—and then you go on.”

“All right. Fine.” Julia wasn’t going to argue.

“So here I am, an old lady, and the son who ran Bloom’s is gone a year. Your father was president of the store, Julia. This I don’t have to tell you.”

Julia warily took a sip of her coffee. It had cooled down, but she sensed now would not be the best time to head into the kitchen for a hot refill.

“Bloom’s needs a president. For a year, now, it’s been without. But we must go on.”

Julia nodded her agreement. Grandma Ida was going to tell her she was putting Uncle Jay in charge. Julia expected it. Even her mother expected it, although the thought enraged her. Julia’s mother had worked hand in hand with her father all these years. She knew the business as well as Uncle Jay did, and she was more disciplined and diligent than he was. She deserved to be named president. But Grandma Ida was going to favor her surviving son over her widowed daughter-in-law, and she was going to ask Julia to break the news to her mother. That was the reason for the brunch.

She relaxed slightly. Her mother had already suspected Grandma Ida would do something like this. She’d thrown several anticipatory fits about it. Once the decision was handed down, she’d likely throw several more fits—and then she’d get back to work overseeing the store’s inventory, because she had nothing better to do.

“I want you to take over,” Grandma Ida said.

Julia choked on a mouthful of tepid coffee. “Take over what?”

“Bloom’s. I’m naming you president.”

“What?” The word came out a squeak.

“You are going to be president,” Grandma Ida said, as if the question was already resolved.

“Grandma.” She stretched her spine back into balance-a-book posture and met her grandmother’s rigid gaze. “I can’t be president. I’ve already got a job.”

“Some job.” Her grandmother sniffed dismissively.

“I’m a lawyer, Grandma.”

“Well, hoo-ha. I’m supposed to be impressed?”

“As a matter of fact, yes! I spent three long years in law school, remember? And passed the bar exam on my first try.”

“And now you work in a big hoo-ha firm with that blond boy, and what do you do? Do you send murderers to prison? Do you defend the innocent? Do you go to Washington and tell Congress to write new laws to protect
faygalas
like our Lyndon?”

Unfortunately, Julia’s legal training didn’t lend itself to fiery litigation, noble Constitutional defenses or battles to protect
faygalas.
She worked in a firm that could only be called “hoo-ha,” a huge legal factory where she and the other associates toiled long hours researching cases for their bosses, the partners. The work was tedious, it was frustrating and at times it was distasteful. But it wasn’t retail merchandising in a world-class deli, and it wasn’t under Grandma Ida’s control. It wasn’t Bloom’s. It was a place where Julia could just be Julia, far from the universe in which she’d grown up.

“I like my job,” she said.

“Your job has no meaning. It’s not family.”

“That’s one thing I like about it,” she muttered.

Grandma Ida’s hearing was operational today. “So, you don’t want to work with family. So, fine. You’re president—you could fire them all.”

“Fire Mom and Uncle Jay? They’re the only ones who know how to run the place.”

“We’ve got staff. We’ve got Myron, the accountant. And your father’s secretary, the Irish one, Deirdre. They know how to keep things running.”

“This is what I went to law school for? To run a glorified delicatessen?”

“You’re the smartest one in the family,” her grandmother explained. “All that schooling, that law—it makes you smart, am I right?”

“My mother’s smart.”

“Your mother doesn’t even have the nose God gave her.”

This was true. Julia’s mother had celebrated her sweet-sixteenth birthday by subjecting her nose to surgical improvement. But Julia had never known her mother with any other nose. The nose she had was all right—somewhat impersonal, perhaps, but adequate. And it had no bearing on her ability to run Bloom’s, which she’d been doing rather efficiently for the past year.

“What about Uncle Jay? He’s got his own nose,” Julia pointed out.

“He’s my son, God knows, but he spends all his time doing that computer stuff. And he married that Wendy. Not a smart man, my son Jay.”

Julia had to agree with Grandma Ida. Wendy, dubbed The Bimbette by Julia’s family because she was too cute to be a mere bimbo, offered proof that Uncle Jay was lacking a certain degree of maturity. Or sensibility. Or gravitas. His first wife, Aunt Martha, had enough gravitas to send most men diving headfirst into the nearest perky bosom. Perhaps Jay’s greatest flaw was that he was so predictable—or that his current wife’s bosom was so amazingly perky.

But some of the computer stuff he did for the store was useful. “Grandma, Uncle Jay has worked for Bloom’s all his life. So has my mother—”

“Not
all
her life,” Grandma Ida quibbled. “She was a wife, a mother. She did other things. Fund-raising, volunteer work.”

Julia refrained from pointing out that most of the work she did for Bloom’s was volunteer, too, since she didn’t get paid. She’d fought Julia’s father about it, but he’d explained that it wouldn’t be fair for her to be paid a salary separate from his,
because then his branch of the family would be taking more of the store’s profits than his brother’s branch. Julia’s mother had replied that they deserved more because they were both working for the store, while Aunt Martha—Uncle Jay’s wife back then—was contributing nothing to the store but her personality, “and she’s got the personality of a dried mushroom,” her mother had concluded with a flourish.

Julia’s father had given himself raises to cover his wife’s contributions to the store. This had resulted in a very nice household income, but it hadn’t addressed Sondra Bloom’s real concern, which was that she was working and not getting paid. Once he died, the store finally put her on the payroll. She got
his
salary. Never her own, though.

If Julia became president, that would change.

Not that she was going to become president.

“My point is,” she explained to Grandma Ida, “they’ve both worked for Bloom’s. I never have—other than a few summer jobs running a cash register. I have no idea how to manage a retail store. I don’t know the products we sell. I couldn’t begin to tell you the difference between Turkish olives and Greek olives.”

“Turkish cost more,” her grandmother informed her, as if it were that simple.

“I mean, why
me?
Why not Susie?”

“Your sister?” Grandma Ida’s lips imploded, as if she’d just sucked hard on a lemon. “She’s got that thing on her leg, that tattoo.”

Julia would admit Susie’s tattoo had been a foolish move, but that didn’t make her any less suited to run Bloom’s. Nobody could be less suited to run it than Julia. “How about Adam?”

“He’s still in college. You think he should drop out and run the store?”

No, of course not. But Julia didn’t think
she
should run the store, either. “Or Jay’s kids. Neil and Rick. They’re both out of school. Neil already runs his own business—”

Grandma Ida made a contemptuous flapping gesture with
her hand. The thick gold bangle around her wrist glinted in the sunlight. A while back, Lyndon had mentioned to her that some people believed copper bracelets eased the symptoms of arthritis, so she’d taken to wearing bangles. Fourteen-karat gold ones, though. “If copper is good, gold must be better,” she’d reasoned.

“Neil is a bum,” she proclaimed. “He lives like a
shaygetz
.”

“What’s not Jewish about chartering sailboats in the Florida Keys?”

“Everything,” she snapped. “And Ricky? He’s always asking me for money. I’m going to trust him with the store?” She shook her head and laughed sadly, an eerie cackling sound. “I’ve thought about it, Julia, and you’re the one. You’ll become the president. You’re smart, you’re responsible and you remind me of me.”

Julia knew her grandmother intended this as a sincere compliment, but she couldn’t help being insulted. She might be smart and responsible, but she wasn’t bossy. She wasn’t manipulative. She never acted illogically, and she would never let Bella near her hair.

And until a minute ago, she hadn’t known that the only difference between the Turkish olives and the Greek olives sold at Bloom’s was the price.

“Grandma…” She sighed and prayed that her expression looked sympathetic. “It’s not that I don’t love Bloom’s. I do. That’s why I wouldn’t want you to entrust it to me. I respect the place enough to know that you need someone with more expertise in the president’s office, overseeing everything. You need someone who understands the business—”

“What are we talking about, ‘business’? It’s a delicatessen. You think I understood the business when I married Isaac, may he rest, and we turned this place into what it is today? You learn. You get some flour on your face, some cheese in your hair, a little kugel under your nails—and you’re an expert.”

“I don’t want kugel under my nails.”

“So you’ll sit in your father’s office and push papers around,
like he did. He made Bloom’s a very successful outfit. A brand-name, he used to say. Chartered buses from Jersey, regulars from Brooklyn, tourists from Europe—they all come to Bloom’s. We ship mail orders around the world. And you’ll do even better.” She folded her hands in front of her, as if sealing her pronouncement with a prayer. “I’ll be talking to the lawyers, a bunch of
gonifs
, but it has to be done. You’ll make me proud, Julia.”

Julia didn’t know what to say. If she spoke her mind, Grandma Ida would be hurt. Or angry. Better to keep silent, to say goodbye, to leave the apartment and go somewhere where she could digest everything she’d just taken in.

One thing she knew: it was going to be much easier to digest the lox and eggs than her grandmother’s decision.

E
ddie was a Snickers.

Susie and her roommates knew a little about sex, but they knew a lot about chocolate. So they’d taken to rating men in terms they understood. Encounters that didn’t go far were “Hershey’s Kisses.” Young guys were “Junior Mints.” Under-endowed guys were “Baby Ruths.” Rich guys were “Paydays,” even though Anna insisted that Paydays contained no chocolate. Guys who specialized in foreplay were “Butterfingers.” Guys who specialized in oral sex were “Charleston Chews.” Guys who came too quickly were “Milky Ways.” Guys who indiscriminately screwed around with airheads were “Tootsie Rolls.” Caitlin recently mentioned “Three Musketeers” in reference to a long, hot night that had begun at a party for a visiting hockey team from Canada, but Susie had chosen not to ask her for details.

“Snickers” seemed to peg Eddie pretty accurately. He was robust and cheerful, satisfying in a comfortable if not particu
larly breathtaking way. Susie genuinely liked him, but she had no fear that love might sneak into the situation and throw everything out of whack. She and Eddie were compatible, they laughed a lot when they were together, and although his husky build sometimes squashed her when he was on top, it made him wonderfully cozy to cuddle up with afterward. His chest was nicely upholstered, his body always warm. Sleeping with him was a pleasant way to pass the dark hours.

A cell phone was chirping. “Is that mine?” Eddie asked sleepily.

“No.” She eased out of the curve of his arm and sat up. “It sounds like mine.”

“Sounds like mine, too. They all sound alike.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s mine.” She shoved back the wool blanket and the musty top sheet and reached for her camisole and panties, which lay on the floor right beside the bed. She yanked the burgundy cotton knit over her head and wriggled it into place, then slid the matching panties on and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress. The cell phone chirped again as she strode across Eddie’s small, cluttered bedroom for her bag.

By the time she’d reached the black leather hobo-style bag, she knew it was her phone. It twittered up from the depths of the bag like a trapped bird. She loosened the drawstring, dug out the phone and flipped it open. “Hello?”

“Susie? It’s Julia. We’ve got a disaster.”

“Huh?”

“Susie. It’s one o’clock. Why do you sound like you just woke up?”

Susie ran a hand through her hair and gazed across the shadowed room at Eddie, who had closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep. Her watch lay with her earrings on the splintery orange crate that served as his nightstand, and the only other clock in the room was on his VCR, which she couldn’t see from where she was standing. To glimpse its digits, she’d have to return to the bed, but she didn’t want to disturb Eddie while he dozed.

She’d accept Julia’s claim that it was indeed one o’clock. Big deal. Why shouldn’t she sleep late? She’d worked past midnight last night, and then she and Eddie had gone out to an all-night movie house to see
Outside Providence
, and then they’d gone to a café for lattes and returned to his place and done the Snickers thing until the caffeine from the lattes finally wore off.

So, yeah, one o’clock seemed about the right time to be waking up. It was Sunday, after all. People were allowed to sleep late on Sunday.

“What do you mean,
we
have a disaster?” she asked. Julia never had disasters. She was too organized, too in control. She was a lawyer, for God’s sake, well dressed, well groomed, the sort of role model chronically held up to her younger sister as an example of the right way to manage one’s life.

The word
disaster
must have reached Eddie’s ears. He blinked awake and stared at her, not an easy thing to do without lifting his head off the pillow. His neck was crooked at such an odd angle it almost seemed dislocated, and his thinning red hair splayed across the pillowcase like cobwebs.

“I can’t talk about it on the phone,” Julia said. “Can you come to the store?”

A store disaster? What? Had the refrigerator cases lost power and now the place was reeking of rotting cheese? Had one of the ovens exploded and sent pulverized knishes flying through the Upper West Side sky? “What kind of disaster?” she pressed Julia. “Are there injuries?”

“Not yet. I might have to strangle Grandma Ida.”

“Oh, that sounds like fun.” Her worry abating, she sent Eddie a reassuring smile. He nodded, rolled over and sank back to sleep. “Why do I have to come all the way uptown so you can talk to me?” she asked.

“Because you’re my sister and you love me, and you don’t want me to go to jail for murdering our grandmother. So you’d better get up here and restrain me.”

“Can you restrain yourself for an hour? I’m not dressed yet.”

“It’s one o’clock, Susie!”

“Thanks for reminding me. I’ll see you in an hour. Where will you be?”

“In the olive section. Did you know the only difference between Greek olives and Turkish olives is that Turkish olives cost more?”

If Julia was babbling about the price of imported olives, she must be really upset. “I’ll try to get there in less than an hour,” Susie promised, then turned off her phone and stuffed it back into her bag. “Eddie, I’ve got to go.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, his voice muffled by the blanket. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” She searched the room until she located the long black skirt and the loose-knit black sweater she’d worn last night. She liked wearing black, but she especially liked wearing it over colorful underwear. It was her little secret, her deception, her taunt.
Aha!
her apparel said.
I am wearing all black like a typical downtown girl and you
think
you know who and what I am. But you can’t pin me down so easily. Underneath this black attire lurks flamboyant lingerie.
Not that burgundy was the most flamboyant color, but Susie also had orange, turquoise, pea-green and siren-red panties, polka-dot, striped and jungle-print bras, and a complete wardrobe of camisoles and chemises because she was flat chested and they fit her better than the bras.

Once dressed, she made her way into Eddie’s bathroom, which had a suspicious smell, part citrus and part mildew. Lacking her own toothbrush, she had to borrow his, which was icky but better than not brushing her teeth at all. The mirror above the sink was missing large patches of silver, but enough remained to reflect her groggy face back at her. Her cheeks were mottled, her eyes glazed. Her hair didn’t look too bad, at least. She’d gotten a really good cut last week, chin length, the ends ruler straight. A few fluffs with her fingertips and she looked salon fresh from the eyebrows up.

She left the bathroom, gathered her jewelry from the crate and crossed back to her purse. Wedging her feet into her clogs,
she called to Eddie, “Gotta go.” She spotted her black denim jacket draped over the back of a chair and put it on.

“Yeah, I’ll see you,” he mumbled without opening his eyes. If she were in love with him, she would be insulted.

Someday, she thought as she clomped down the stairs to the front door of his building and exited onto the sun-washed pavement of Avenue B, she’d like to find someone a little better than a Snickers bar. A Swiss truffle, perhaps. A hand-dipped strawberry. A slab of homemade cream-cheese fudge riddled with pecans. Not that she was ready to settle down, not that she would
ever
be ready to settle down—but a little gourmet chocolate, something a touch less sweet, a touch deeper and more complex…Chocolate liqueur, perhaps. Chocolate-covered halvah. Perugina. A girl could dream.

The train was fairly crowded for a weekend afternoon in March. In another month, a day this sunny would inspire hordes of New Yorkers to travel uptown to hang out in Central Park. But today wasn’t quite a hanging-out-in-Central-Park day. The air still held a chilly bite. Winter stood at the open door, on its way out but loitering on the porch as if it had one final bit of gossip to share before it departed for good.

At Grand Central Station, Susie took the cross-town shuttle, then hopped onto another uptown train. She could understand why Julia lived on the Upper West Side, even if it was their old neighborhood and way too close to Mom and Grandma Ida. Julia was living an uptown life—nylons, manicures, DKNY ensembles and Body Shop facial cleansers. In a way Susie felt sorry for her sister. Julia was trying so hard not to live their mother’s life—yet there she was, slowly, inevitably evolving into their mother.

Whenever the tracks curved, the train’s metal wheels shrieked in protest. Even though there were plenty of empty seats, Susie chose to stand, balanced against one of the vertical poles. Her muscles were a little stiff, especially in her shoulders and her thighs. Eddie had just a bit too much heft. He was always coming into Nico’s and ordering a slice of pizza—so he
could see Susie, he claimed, but honestly, he didn’t have to order a jumbo slice of Sicilian with everything if all he wanted was to see her. Ten pounds, fifteen at most—lay off the pizza, add a little exercise, and he could lose the weight without suffering inordinately. If she ever believed she had a relationship with Eddie, something real, something that implied a future, she’d get him organized into a proper regimen.

He’d appreciate it, too, wouldn’t he, she thought with a sarcastic snort. “Gee, Susie, I’m so glad you love me enough to turn into a shrew, nagging me not to eat that extra-big slice with the works.”

The train whined as it rolled into the Seventy-Second Street station. Susie was the first one out the door. Eddie faded from her mind as she focused on her more immediate situation. What disaster could have arisen that would make Julia want to murder Grandma Ida?

Actually, Susie could think of lots of possibilities. Grandma Ida bugged the hell out of her. She didn’t favor murder as a way to resolve problems, but if Grandma Ida were removed from her life, Susie wouldn’t have to spend so much time and energy dreading her.

All right. She didn’t exactly
dread
Grandma Ida. She just…resented her. Grandma Ida had never left any doubt that she considered Julia a vastly superior specimen of granddaughterhood. She’d always criticized Susie. As a child, when Susie sat at Grandma Ida’s imposing dining room table for a Passover seder and Grandpa Isaac would drone on and on in what sounded more like gibberish than Hebrew, she’d get bored and swing her feet under her chair, and Grandma Ida would humiliate her by interrupting the gibberish to announce, “Susie, stop kicking.”

Julia never kicked.

But being scolded for kicking wasn’t the worst of it. When Susie had gotten B-pluses in school, Grandma Ida had called her an underachiever. When Susie had set the table, Grandma Ida had chided her for not folding the napkins symmetrically.
When Susie had run up and down the hall, Grandma Ida had yelled at her for making too much noise and failing to act ladylike. When Susie had drawn pictures to hang on the refrigerator, Grandma Ida had pointed out all the flaws: “This bush has blue leaves on it. Why did you put blue there? Leaves are green.”

Susie had always believed leaves could be blue. She’d believed buttons could be soldiers and a sewing box could be used to stage an imaginary war. She’d believed that a cookie before supper did not necessarily spoil a person’s appetite. She still believed that writing poetry was a higher calling than marketing bagels and lox to yuppies.

“Poetry?” Grandma Ida would sniff. “You can’t eat poetry, can you?”

So if there was going to be a homicide involving Grandma Ida today, Susie definitely wanted to be there to witness it.

A few blocks north of the subway station, she spotted the Bloom Building. Above the broad ground-floor display windows chaotically crammed with what appeared to be at least one of every single product in the store’s inventory, a banner sign circled the building with Bloom’s-Bloom’s-Bloom’s painted in white letters against a dark-brown background. The repeated names sloped upward, each
B
at the bottom of the sign and each
s
banging against the top edge. For some reason, the effect made Susie think of the Rockettes, a line of dancers all leaning back and kicking high.

She knew the store. It had changed over the course of her life, but so had she. She wasn’t the three-year-old she used to be, chasing her big sister along the aisles, her flailing hands swiping at boxes of crackers and delicately balanced pyramids of sardine tins. Bloom’s had grown up, too. Sometime in the eighties, the linoleum floors had been replaced by hardwood floors that looked simultaneously more rustic and more elegant. Varnished oak shelves had appeared where once uninspired metal shelving had stood. The second floor had been reborn as a kitchenware center, walls hung with copper-bottom pots and
cast-iron skillets, displays jammed with potato peelers, apple corers, egg slicers and rice steamers, counters crammed with bread makers, yogurt makers, pasta makers, melon-ball makers, ice-cream makers and any other kind of maker a person might want in her kitchen.

So much stuff. It boggled Susie’s mind that her family had been able to accumulate a significant fortune by selling people four different kinds of specialized cheese slicers when any old knife would get the job done.

Or corkscrews. These had been articles of great fascination to her as a teenager, when sneaking the occasional bottle of wine with her friends had been considered the ultimate triumph. Bloom’s sold about a dozen different kinds of wine bottle openers, from the basic portable corkscrew model to hundred-dollar gadgets. Susie used to fantasize about owning a wine bottle opener—any style would do—but of course she couldn’t ask her father to bring one home from the store for her. Nor could she purchase one herself. In those days, all the clerks had known the boss’s daughters, which meant they’d also known Susie was years below the drinking age and had no legitimate use for a corkscrew.

She could legally drink wine now, and she owned a simple corkscrew with “Nico’s” etched into it, from the pizza place. As for all the other kitchen gizmos sold at Bloom’s, well, she and her roommates didn’t do that much cooking. Their kitchen wasn’t much bigger than the average shower stall; they couldn’t all fit into it at the same time. They went through a lot of coffee and tea, and the refrigerator was usually full of bottled water, clementines, leftover sushi and Caitlin’s nail polish, which she claimed lasted longer if it was kept cold. Susie got free dinners at Nico’s, and other than that, she lived on cereal, yogurt and fresh fruit. Most of the meals she knew how to cook weren’t worth eating, at least not the way she cooked them.