Blooming All Over (18 page)

“Then why are you acting like such a bitch? The Susie you used to be would have thought that lobster was fantastic.”

She sighed. “I’m not being a bitch,” she argued. “I can’t imagine ever thinking that lobster would be fantastic, but…” She sighed again, adjusted her sunglasses and attempted a lackluster smile. “My life is a mess right now, okay? I’m sorry. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Is Grandma Ida—”

“It has nothing to do with her, either.”

“Is Julia giving you shit?”

“Let’s not play Twenty Questions, okay?”

“So tell me and I’ll stop guessing.”

“I broke up with Casey,” she said.

Oh. That was a biggie. “Why?”

“He wanted to marry me.”

Rick chewed that over. The bridge of his nose developed a cramp from his frown. Didn’t women
want
the men they loved to marry them? Didn’t women usually break up with men because the men
refused
to marry them? Had he been given the wrong information on all this?

“You didn’t want to marry him?”

“Ricky, if I married him, would I be driving around Maine with you and that lobster back there?”

“I don’t know.”

“No. I wouldn’t be,” she told him. “I’d be in Queens, doing wife stuff. Waiting for Casey to get home from work and having a hot meal on the table for him.”

Rick snorted. “If that was what Casey wanted, why would he want to marry you? You can’t cook.”

“How do you know I can’t?” she asked defensively.

“You’re a Bloom. None of us can cook. My mother’s probably the best cook in the family, and she cooks things that have lentils and tofu in them. Your mother’s idea of cooking is to thaw some frozen supermarket bagels and open a tub of cream cheese. I’ve had enough brunches at her house to know.”

“Our mothers aren’t Blooms,” Susie reminded him. “They married in.”

“Anyway, doesn’t Casey cook? Maybe if you married him, he’d be the one waiting in Queens with a hot meal for you.”

She sent him a skeptical look. “Cooking isn’t the issue. I’m not ready for marriage.”

“Is Casey that much older than you?”

“A year and a half. An eternity,” she added grimly.

“So—you mean, if I asked Anna to marry me, she’d never want to see me again?”

Susie grinned. “If you asked her to marry you, she’d probably laugh so hard she’d dislocate her tonsils. Don’t even think about it.”

He pondered Susie’s situation for a minute and found himself unable to make any sense of it at all. “Well, okay,” he said sympathetically. “Whatever’s going on, I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” She reached across the console and gave his hand a squeeze. “And I’m sorry for acting like a bitch.”

He gave them a moment of silence so their apologies could sink in, then pointed to a convenience store up ahead. “Let’s stop there and ask where the nearest blueberry field is,” he suggested.

“Okay.” She slapped lightly at her cheek, and he realized a tear had leaked down from behind her sunglasses.

He was kind enough not to comment on it. “I think we ought to name the lobster,” he said as she slowed the van.

“Name it what? Louie the Lobster?”

“Big Red,” he said.

She wrinkled her nose. “It’s got to start with an L. Libby. Lucy. Larry. Lenny. Linus—that’s it! Linus.”

“Linus?” He glanced behind him as she steered into the dirt lot in front of the store. A wiry red plastic lobster antenna stared back. “Yeah,” he agreed. “He looks like a Linus.” Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But if letting Susie name the lobster Linus boosted her spirits, who was he to argue?

“Y
our aunt Martha is here,” Lyndon said.

Wonderful. Just what Julia needed. She’d phoned Grandma Ida from her office downstairs and asked to come up, and Grandma Ida had said of course, come, and so she’d come. If Aunt Martha had been on the schedule, Grandma Ida would have said so, but since Aunt Martha lived just downstairs from Grandma Ida, she must have dropped by uninvited.

When Uncle Jay and Aunt Martha had divorced, they’d engaged in a fierce custody battle over their apartment, a rambling residence on the twenty-fourth floor of the Bloom Building, down the hall from the apartment where Julia had grown up and her mother still lived. Uncle Jay had finally ceded the apartment to Aunt Martha, since the divorce was his idea and his bimboesque new wife, Wendy, was more of an East Side type, anyway. They’d found an elegant apartment on East Sixty-third, and Aunt Martha had remained in the Bloom Building.

Julia wouldn’t have wanted to evict Aunt Martha from the family—she was Julia’s cousins’ mother, after all, and a part of Julia’s life. But Aunt Martha was a little hard to take. She had all the optimism of Eeyore, and none of his charm. She took classes at the New School on gynocentric evolutionary theory and literary
deconstruction as an economic fallacy, and she attended lectures on repression in Tibet and depression in menopause. She was the most earnest woman Julia had ever met. Like a cloud, she darkened every room she entered.

So now she was darkening Grandma Ida’s apartment. Julia could spare only a half hour to make her plea, which she didn’t want to make in front of Aunt Martha, because Aunt Martha was full of opinions and had no qualms about sharing them. She was certain to have plenty of opinions about Julia’s wedding.

“Will she be leaving soon?” Julia asked Lyndon as she stepped into the foyer.

Lyndon shrugged and grinned. “Who knows? It’s Martha,” he said, then kissed Julia’s cheek and nudged her down the hall to the arched living-room doorway.

Not a single aspect of Grandma Ida’s apartment had changed throughout Julia’s entire lifetime, other than the fact that Grandpa Isaac no longer lived there. Even when he was alive, he didn’t leave much of a mark on the place. His cheery personality had warmed the rooms, but he hadn’t been like, for instance, Ron, scattering masculine detritus throughout the residence. Entering Ron’s apartment, no one would doubt for a moment that a man resided within it. Countless water stains the exact circumference of the base of a beer bottle marked the coffee table. Subscription renewal cards from
Sports Illustrated
served as bookmarks in trade paperbacks about Wall Street scandals and novels about spies who could bring down megalomaniacs, hack into top-secret computers and give women multiple orgasms without breaking a sweat. The power button on the TV set had not a single fingerprint on it because it had never been used, but a pile of spare AAA
batteries sat in an old ashtray, ready to power any of the several remote controls scattered across the coffee table amid the beer-bottle stains. Throw pillows on the sofa and chairs were askew because they were actually used as pillows and not just decoration. The kitchen trash can contained a suspicious number of disposable plastic containers from take-out restaurants.

Of course, the same could be said of Julia’s kitchen trash can. Thanks to Ron, she’d become a devotee of Bloom’s Heat’n’Eat entrées.

Her grandmother’s living room, which was utterly devoid of guy clutter, looked like a stage set from a World War II drama about the home front. The furniture was old and massive, dark mahogany and burgundy velvet. The Persian rugs covering the hardwood floors featured patterns Julia had memorized as a child; she could still find the vaguely teddy bear-shaped blobs in the edging, and the swirls that used to remind her of the Grinch’s cheeks, and the patch near the window where Susie had splashed watercolors while painting. The stain had come out easily enough, but Julia still remembered the day the accident had happened, the tension in Grandma Ida’s voice as she’d scolded Susie, Susie’s lower lip protruding as she’d stubbornly refused to cry, and Grandpa Isaac sneaking both girls into the kitchen and slipping them pieces of toffee once Grandma Ida had run out of steam and stomped off down the hall.

Grandma Ida’s apartment was a place where Julia could never escape from her memories. The mirror above the mantel—she recalled with pride the day she was finally tall enough to see the top of her head in it. The wide windows overlooking Broadway, where she and Susie would press their noses to the glass and count
how many yellow taxis zoomed below them. The pink depression-glass candy dish that Susie used to perch upside down on her head and say, “Look! A yarmulke!” The meandering route that Adam used to steer his Tonka dump trucks around the legs of chairs and tables until Grandma Ida would snap, “
Nu
, does this look like a highway to you? Go play in the hall.”

No Tonka dump trucks littered the floor today; no young children played here. Julia hesitated in the doorway as an image flashed before her of her own baby, hers and Ron’s, crawling across the rug, seeing teddy bears and Grinches in its fading patterns. The vision brought tears to her eyes—whether of joy or panic she couldn’t say—and she hastily blinked it away and marched into the room, beaming a smile at her grandmother and her aunt. Grandma Ida was ensconced in her favorite armchair, dressed in her usual dowdy but comfortable apparel—A-line skirt, cotton blouse, leather oxfords and gold bangle bracelets circling her wrists. Her hair was a cloud even darker than Aunt Martha, so black it sucked light out of the room.

Aunt Martha looked like a superannuated Girl Scout in browns and khakis, white socks and Birkenstock sandals, a braided cord of leather around her neck and her long, lumpy salt-and-pepper hair held back in a clip. She returned Julia’s smile, although her smile was clearly ambivalent. It always was. She didn’t do happy very well.

“Hello, Julia,” she said in her glum, gravelly voice. “How are things at the store?”

“Fine,” Julia answered, latching onto an idea. “Actually, Aunt Martha, I came upstairs to discuss the store with Grandma. I’ve got only a few minutes, and we need to talk shop.”

Aunt Martha was gloomy but she wasn’t dense. “Oh, of course. I wouldn’t dream of interfering. I came by just to drop off this book I think your grandmother will enjoy.” She gestured toward a hardcover tome lying on the coffee table. Julia lifted it and read the title:
Broads of the Bible: A Feminist Trades Jabs with God
. “A friend of mine from the Women’s Center recommended it. I found the book absorbing.”

“I don’t know why you think I’d like it,” Grandma Ida barked, refusing to join the smile-fest Julia and Aunt Martha were caught up in. “I don’t like that word
broads
. It’s like what truck drivers say.”

“The book is supposed to be humorous,” Aunt Martha explained dolefully. Her idea of humorous was probably anything that didn’t make a person want to drink Drano.

“It’s full of jokes? A book that big, I’m supposed to laugh? I can hardly pick it up. My arthritis.” Grandma Ida lifted her hands and her bangles clinked.

“Just have a look at it, Ida,” Aunt Martha urged her as she rose from the sofa. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

“I’m too old to be surprised,” Grandma Ida muttered.

Aunt Martha didn’t seem to hear her. She started toward the door, pausing to give Julia a hug en route. “How’s your mother?”

Julia was not about to discuss her mother’s current insanity with anyone. “She’s fine,” she lied. “I’ll give her your regards.”

“Please do. I’ve got to have her over for tea. I’ve discovered these wonderful cakes made out of red bean curd. They’re Chinese. I bet she’ll love them.”

“I’m sure she will,” Julia agreed, realizing she’d have to steer her mother clear of Aunt Martha at least
until she stopped acting like an infatuated schoolgirl and babbling about the magnificent time she’d spent having coffee with Norman Joffe. Actually, it had been magnificent in only some of the tellings. In others it had been glorious, delightful and so much fun. Norman was such a gentleman. He was so soft-spoken. He was so generous—he’d insisted that she order the double latte, and he’d practically forced a raspberry scone upon her, which implied that he didn’t think she was too fat—and he was very smart, he knew so much about tax preparation, and he hadn’t said a single negative thing about his ex-wife, which Julia’s mother considered fabulously discreet. She could see where Ron had come from, such a wonderful young man. He’d obviously inherited a lot of genes from his father.

If Julia remembered her high-school biology better, she could determine exactly how many genes Ron had inherited from his father. The number wasn’t important now, though. What was important was to keep her mother from doing something seriously inconvenient, like falling in love with Ron’s father.

In the meantime, until she was positive her mother was immune to anything as stupid as love, Julia had to keep her from running into anyone she might babble to. Norman Joffe might be the epitome of discretion, but Sondra Bloom was not.

Aunt Martha lumbered out of the living room. Julia waved at her back, then settled onto the couch, deliberately sitting one cushion over from where Aunt Martha had sat. She heard Aunt Martha and Lyndon chatting in the entry, and then the front door swinging open and shut.

“That woman is an idiot,” Grandma Ida announced.

“She’s not so bad,” Julia argued, lifting the book. The weight strained her wrist. Were there really so many jabs to be traded between a feminist and God? Julia wasn’t overly religious, but she suspected that God could win such a bout in well under a hundred pages. Under fifty, if he put his all into it.

“So? What did you want to see me about?” Grandma Ida asked, clasping her gnarled fingers together and staring at Julia with piercingly clear eyes.

Julia inhaled. A year ago she would have been intimidated by her grandmother’s relentless gaze and crotchety attitude, but she’d spent a year running Bloom’s and discovering that she was a woman with great intelligence, competence and resources. Grandma Ida had named her, rather than her mother or Uncle Jay or any of the cousins, the president of Bloom’s because Grandma Ida trusted her and had faith in her. Having Grandma Ida’s trust and faith had done wonders for Julia’s self-confidence.

Even so, what she was about to ask wasn’t simple, nor was Grandma Ida’s reaction predictable. “Here’s what I was thinking,” she said. “I want my wedding catered by Bloom’s. I want it to have a homey feel to it, a Bloom’s feel. And I’m having a hell of a time finding a venue that will let me bring in my own caterer. I guess they all make their biggest profits on the catering.”

“What’s a venue?” Grandma Ida asked. “I don’t know that word,
a venue
.”

“A location,” Julia defined the term. “A place to have something.”

“It sounds like a street. Park a-Venue. Fifth a-Venue.”

“Well.” Julia paused, then launched back into her
pitch. “I kept thinking, if only I had a home big enough, I’d host the wedding there. I don’t, though.”

“That apartment you have, it’s the size of a toilet,” Grandma Ida remarked.

“It is not! It’s much bigger than a toilet,” Julia protested.

“It’s a little place. You put two people in it, one has to breathe out while the other one’s breathing in or you’ll run out of air.”

If Grandma Ida thought Julia’s apartment was small, she ought to have a look at the dive Susie was sharing with two other women. Cousin Rick’s apartment was even tinier. But Grandma Ida never visited their places. Anything south of Thirty-fourth Street didn’t exist for her. “On Thirty-fourth Street you’ve got Macy’s and Penn Station,” Grandma Ida pointed out on occasion. “What’s south of there? Wall Street?
Feh
. City Hall? Who needs it? Greenwich Village? Beatniks.
Feh
.”

But in her contempt for Julia’s apartment, Grandma Ida was providing ammunition for Julia’s argument. “You’ve got a big enough apartment, Grandma,” she said, trying not to sound too eager. “We could fit eighty people in here.”

“Eighty people? In my apartment?
Oy!
”

“We could do it, Grandma. Or maybe we could cut the guest list down to seventy-five. We could have a buffet of Bloom’s food in the dining room, set up some tables in the living room, cocktails in the library and musicians in the foyer. We could do it.”

“Where would people dance?”

Julia stifled a laugh. That her eighty-nine-year-old grandmother cared about dancing amused her. Of course, Grandma Ida herself wouldn’t dance. She’d just sit—in the very chair she was sitting in now, no
doubt—and make snide comments about the guests who did want to dance.

“In the living room,” Julia answered. “The tables we’d set up would be little end tables, places for people to put down their plates. We could roll up the rug, or lay a temporary parquet over it.”

“What are you talking, a temporary floor?”

“Just a smooth surface over the rug to make dancing easier. I could work with a rental company on that. We’d rent dishes, silverware, stemware—everything. No one would touch your plates.”

“And you want Lyndon to do all that work?”

“Of course not. I’ll hire servers. They’ll do all the setup and cleanup. Lyndon will be a guest at the wedding.”

“He’ll want to bring that friend of his, Howard,” Grandma Ida warned in a whisper. “They’re
faygelas
, the two of them.”

“They’re a lovely couple,” Julia said.

“Howard, at least he’s Jewish. A Jew and a black man, I don’t know…”

“Don’t worry about Lyndon,” Julia said, guiding her grandmother back to the subject at hand. “What do you think about having the wedding here? We’d have professional cleaners come in before and after. They’d do all the work. The day after the wedding, you’d never know it had been here.”

“I wouldn’t know? You think I’d forget my first grandchild’s wedding?”

“What I mean is, everything would be left the way it is right now. All the furniture would be in place, the kitchen scrubbed down, everything back to normal.”