Blooming All Over (9 page)

He spotted Susie at another table, near the counter. She was busy doing something; he couldn’t tell what, but whatever it was, it couldn’t be that important. He pushed open the door and she looked toward him and smiled. The geezer with the overpriced espresso didn’t even glance up from his newspaper.

Rick crossed the dining room to Susie’s table. As he got closer he could see she was refilling table dispensers of grated Parmesan cheese. The dispensers stood in a row like large glass onions, their chrome lids unscrewed while Susie spooned the powdered cheese into them from a large plastic vat. The cheese was the same dingy color as Susie’s complexion. Her eyes were outlined in black, her lips tinted a ruby hue, but her cheeks were awfully pale. Give her a striped shirt, white gloves and a top hat, and she could pass as a street mime.

“Hey, cous’,” he greeted her.

She forced a vague smile. “What’s up? You hungry?”

“Always, Susie. Hunger is my middle name.”

“Richard Hunger Bloom. Yeah, I could see your mother saddling you with a name like that.” She screwed the cap onto one of the table shakers and pulled another closer to her for filling. “We might have an old slice of pizza destined for the trash. You want it?”

Jeez. She didn’t have to make it sound as though he was picking food out of a Dumpster. The old slices were perfectly edible leftovers from lunch, a slice here and there that didn’t get bought. “If you’ve got one of those extra slices, I’ll take it,” he said, refusing to let her undermine his pride. “No need to heat it up. I’ll eat it cold.” He said that to spare her from reminding him that she couldn’t stick it in the oven without attracting Nico’s attention. Her boss was in the kitchen, doing setups for the dinner rush. It wasn’t as if he’d fire her for feeding the leftovers to her perpetually starving relative, but why get him involved in the transaction? Life was simpler if Nico remained in blissful ignorance.

Susie stood and walked around the counter. She had on khaki shorts and a black T-shirt under her apron. He had never seen her in khaki before. Maybe that was why she seemed so wan; her face reflected the gray-tan of her shorts.

He watched her slide a limp slice of pizza onto a paper plate and carry it back to the table. Her movements were sluggish. Maybe the lunch hour had been more hectic than usual, or maybe juggling this job and her responsibilities at Bloom’s demanded too much of her. Or maybe that drive all the way up to the hinterlands of Ithaca last weekend had wiped her out.

And here he was, ready to ask her to drive to the hinterlands with him. Different hinterlands, though—and Grandma Ida wouldn’t be part of the deal.

He accepted the pizza from her and tried not to wince at the congealed cheese and glistening oil coating the wedge. As she resumed her seat, he took a bite, chewed and smiled. Not great, but it was edible and hunger was his middle name. “Thanks.”

“I live to serve.”

“So…how’s it going?”

She eyed him sharply. “Why are you asking?”

Because you look like shit
, he almost said, but he didn’t think she’d appreciate his honesty. “I’ve got this gig and I need your help.”

She pursed her lips and screwed a lid onto the jar she’d just filled. “Why is it that I only see you when you want my help? Or food,” she added, cutting him off before he could defend himself.

He tried to muster some indignation, but there was too much truth in what she’d said. “Food is always helpful,” he said, hoping to finagle a smile out of her. She glowered and started in on another empty Parmesan dispenser. He consumed a little more of the cold, rubbery pizza, giving her a chance to forget how often he came to her looking for aid. “So listen,” he said. “The help I need from you is going to be fun. I’ve been hired to make a documentary.”

“Really?” Her face brightened at that. “Who hired you?”

“Bloom’s. And it’s not exactly a documentary,” he continued when her expression changed from excited to skeptical. “It’s kind of an infomercial.”

“An infomercial for Bloom’s?”

“Yeah—but calling it a documentary sounds so much cooler, don’t you think?”

“Well, which is it?” she pressed him. “An infomercial or a documentary?”

He used his thumbnail to pick a twiggy piece of oregano out of a hardened bulge of cheese. After scraping the oregano onto the pleated edge of the plate, he took another bite. “Okay, here’s the deal. My dad con
vinced your sister to cough up twenty-five thousand dollars to make a video promoting Bloom’s. He’s thinking infomercial. That’s the way I pitched it to him. But I’m thinking, why aim low? If we can get some time on local-cable access, why fill that time with some
schlemiel
standing behind a counter and demonstrating how to slice bialys? I’m thinking, why do something boring when I could do something with vision? Something artistic?”

“Maybe because something with vision and artistic isn’t going to promote Bloom’s,” she pointed out.

“But it is!” He was awash in enthusiasm, and aimed the overflow at her. Susie had always been the only Bloom who understood him, who thought like him, who didn’t consider him a complete loser—although maybe she was just good at pretending she didn’t consider him one. Maybe she truly believed he was interested only in getting her to give him help and food.

No, she knew he was interested in other things. Film, for instance. And her poetic window displays. And her roommate Anna.

“I had this idea,” he explained. “I wanted to bounce it off you. Tell me honestly what you think.”
Not too honestly
, he wanted to add.
Just be honest if you absolutely love the idea
.

She lowered the spoon she was using to scoop Parmesan with and stared expectantly at him.

“Bloom’s Soup,”
he said.

“Bloom’s soup? What, like the chicken soup with matzo balls?”

“No. Like ‘Stone Soup.’ Remember that old children’s folk tale?”

She frowned. “Some guy makes a pot of soup with a stone or something?”

“That’s the one.” He waited until she resumed her chore, then continued. “The guy is a soldier. He and his men are starving, and they come to this village hoping to mooch some food from the local citizenry.”

“I can see why you relate to this story,” Susie teased. “Starving men mooching…”

He accepted the ribbing with a grin. “The townspeople don’t want to give him their food. So he tells them he’s got this magic stone, and if they’ll supply him with a cauldron of boiling water, he’ll put his stone in the water and it will create soup for the entire village.”

“This rings a bell,” Susie said with a nod.

“So the stone is boiling in the water in the cauldron, and the soldier says, ‘Man, this smells good. It’s gonna be great soup. But you know, it would be even better if I could add an onion to it.’ So one of the townspeople goes and gets him an onion and he cuts it up and tosses it in. And he says, ‘Wow, this is going to be one outstanding pot of soup! But you know, it would be even better if I could add a few potatoes.’ So someone else goes and gets him some potatoes, and he slices them and sticks them in the pot. And it goes on like that—he says the stone soup is going to be exquisite, but it would be even better with a carrot or two, and a couple of meat bones, and some peas and some leeks or whatever, and the villagers bring him their supplies and he adds them to the pot…and then finally he says, ‘That’s it! The soup is done.’ And of course it’s delicious, and he and his men and all the villagers have some.”

“And then he winds up running for office, because he’s such a con artist,” Susie said, screwing the last lid onto the last jar.

“I don’t believe that’s part of the original story.”

She grinned. “Okay. Now explain to me what that has to do with Bloom’s.”

“It’s just a jumping-off point. My idea is, we’ll make this film about interesting ingredients, and how food relates to family and memory, and how Bloom’s is about all kinds of food coming together in this amazing metaphorical broth.”

“A metaphorical broth,” she echoed, clearly dubious.

“It’ll be great. We’ll mention Bloom’s name over and over. And talk about some of the ingredients Bloom’s cooks use and how they use them, and what they signify.”

She contemplated his vision, then said, “There’s one word in all this that I’m not so sure about.”

“What’s that?”

“
We
. You said
we’ll
mention Bloom’s name over and over. What do you mean,
we?
”

“Come on, Susie! I need your help on this. I’ve got an incredible vision for this thing. Sure, it can be shown on local-access cable, or at a local network affiliate at 2:00 a.m. But I’m thinking big, Suze. I’m thinking Sundance.”

“Film festivals?”

“I’m thinking Cannes. I’m thinking credits. Better credits than being Camera 3 at
Power and Passion
while someone’s on maternity leave. I’m thinking Oscars.”

“I’m thinking you’re nuts.”

He ignored her. “My dad’s wrangled the funding. This is a huge opportunity, Suze. It could launch me. Don’t you know how Spielberg started?”

“By making infomercials for a deli?” Susie guessed.

He gave her his most winsome smile. “You’ve got to help me with this. You’re so creative.”

Susie sighed. Of course she’d help him, he realized. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Be the star.”

“What?”

“I can’t afford to pay a real actor. But that’s beside the point. You’re a Bloom. I want a Bloom at the center of the story of
Bloom’s Soup
.”

“I’m still not clear what the story is. I’m supposed to make soup in this documentary?”

“You’re supposed to take direction.” He could tell she was wavering, and he tried to recall what his brother had taught him about fishing. A lot of Neil’s clients in the Florida Keys liked to fish, so the Jewish kid from New York had learned a thing or two about deep-sea tropical fishing. What Rick recalled Neil telling him was that once you hooked a fish you had to reel it in slowly. He was pretty sure he had Susie hooked; he only had to reel her in. “You’ll be great. You won’t have to act—you’ll just be yourself. And you’ll look great. The camera will love you.”

“I still don’t understand the story. If I’m not making soup—”

“I haven’t written the whole script yet, but don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

Her eyebrows twitched. “That’s what I’m afraid of. If this is going to be like that script you wrote about car chases and ennui—”

“It’s not. It’s about Bloom’s.”

“It’s about soup.”

“Soup as a metaphor.” He gave her what he hoped was an earnest gaze. He really,
really
wanted her to be
a part of this. The only person he’d rather have be a part of it was her roommate Anna, but that was for entirely different reasons. “Here’s the deal. For twenty-five thou, I can’t rent studio space in New York City. So I was figuring we’d take the show on the road, do some filming outdoors to save money and travel around a bit. We could film food stuff on the road, adding local ingredients to the story and talking about Bloom’s, what Grandma Ida and Grandpa Isaac might have put in their soup, stuff like that. Grandpa Isaac was the soup maven, wasn’t he?”

“Was he?” Susie asked, then shook her head. “Grandma Ida recited the family lore all the way to Ithaca, so it should be fresh in my mind. But I tried to tune her out.”

“I know. I tune her out whenever she starts doing the family-lore thing, too. But who cares? We can invent our own family lore.” He popped the last of the soggy crust into his mouth, hoping his casual attitude would equate to reeling her in slowly. “Could you get away from the city for a week or so?”

“To travel around making this infomercial?”

“Yeah. If you could work things out with Nico—”

“I can always work things out with him,” she said, gesturing vaguely toward the kitchen. “Leave the city for a while, huh…”

“Would it be a problem?”

Her face brightened again, genuine pink shading her cheeks. “I’d love to get out of the city.”

“You would?” That surprised him. Susie adored New York. She thrived in the place. The noise, the hustle, the funk, the poetry slams—and of course, Casey, the love of her life. New York was her world, her home.

“Some time away from the city? Absolutely.” She
nodded and her eyes shifted, as if she was viewing something far off, somewhere outside the city. She seemed to like what she saw. “Perfect.” Then her eyes came back into focus on him. “But I’ve also got the newsletter to do, you know, the
Bloom’s Bulletin
…”

“You’ve got a laptop, right? Bring it along. You can work on the newsletter when we aren’t filming.”

“Right. Okay. Fine. I’ll be your star,” she said so abruptly he wondered why he’d been cautious about reeling her in. Hell, if he’d known she was going to leap out of the ocean and fling her scaly body into his boat, he’d have asked for a free Coke to go along with his free slice of pizza.

C
asey’s mother collected statuettes of people with birth defects. Casey didn’t know how else to view the row upon row of porcelain dwarfs and trolls and bandy-legged gremlins that filled the towering mahogany hutch that consumed one wall of the living room. Susie would call his mother’s collection tchochkes. He called them creepy.

But they made his mother happy. She proudly insisted that they were leprechauns, as if being a hunched, bowlegged fellow with a pituitary disorder and a pathetic fashion sense wasn’t really a problem as long as the little guy was Irish.

The hutch dominated one end of the living room and the TV the other. In between stretched a beige and brown desert—brown rug, beige sofa and chairs, brown tables, brown lamps with beige lampshades, beige window shades flanked by brown drapes. Above the brown sideboard hung two sepia-toned prints of unidentifiable landscapes in brown wood frames. If it weren’t for the broadcast on the TV screen and the gaudy attire of the dwarf statuettes, the room would have no color in it at all.

What would Susie think of the place? What would she think of his parents? It no longer mattered. Bringing her around to meet the folks wasn’t on the agenda. If
Casey wanted to obsess about her, he might wonder why he hadn’t bothered to introduce her to his parents in the year they’d been together. Perhaps because he’d known she would burst into hysterical laughter at the sight of his mother’s tacky figurines, all lined up on the hutch’s shelves like soldiers. Or more like army rejects, 4-F’s on parade.

From the kitchen came the smell of food boiling, offering another good reason for him never to have brought Susie to his parents’ house. What if they’d invited her for dinner? She would have discovered the appalling secret of Gordon cuisine: boiling. When he’d decided to apply to the Culinary Institute, his parents had been shocked; hadn’t they raised him to understand that the only way to cook food was in hot water? In the case of poached eggs or corned beef and cabbage, such a preparation worked. In the case of chicken…well, his mother called it stewed chicken, but it was basically chicken she boiled in water, along with onions and carrots and whatever else she had cluttering her refrigerator.

He wasn’t sure what was boiling right now, although the scent of onions clued him in to the likelihood that chicken would be a part of it. He had to get out of the house before his parents strong-armed him into a chair at the kitchen table and forced him to eat. And not just because boiled chicken and onions excited his taste buds about as much as light beer served at room temperature. He was supposed to meet Mose at a neighborhood eatery in twenty minutes. They had business to discuss, and the establishment served
real
food. Baked, roasted, broiled, fried, flavorful food.

“I really can’t stay,” he told his father, who sat in his oversized armchair across the living room.

The chair was angled toward the TV set, but his father twisted to face him where he was perched on the end of the sofa nearest the foyer. “You’ll break your mother’s heart,” his father pointed out.

“I’ll come for dinner another time, Dad. It’s just that I’ve got plans for tonight.”

“With the boss’s daughter?”

Casey sighed. “It’s the boss’s sister, and no. Not with her.”

His father glanced at the TV screen, where a local news anchor breathlessly reported on a scandal involving subway fare cards, a third-grade teacher from Staten Island and a missing ferret. “You’ve got a problem with that girl? She’s causing you problems?”

“He should find a nice Catholic girl,” his mother hollered from the kitchen.

His father waved his hand toward the hall down to the kitchen, as if he could sweep her words out of the living room with his fingers. “Don’t worry about that. So she’s not Catholic. You can always get her to convert.”

Casey wisely kept his mouth shut.

“Thing is…” His father hunched forward, six feet and two inches of beefy middle-aged body mass crowned by a silvering mop of hair. “You’ve got a sweet deal, am I right? You stay with the boss’s daughter, you’re on your way. Your foot is in the door—maybe more than your foot, if you catch my drift.” He winked, and Casey shifted uncomfortably at the thought of a certain part of him getting caught in a door. “Play your cards right and you’ve got yourself a nice little management position, a fancy title, a corner office. They can call the store Bloom’s and Gordon’s.”

“I’m not looking for a corner office,” Casey argued.
“That has nothing to do with the women I date.” As if he and Susie were dating. As if a term as archaic as
dating
had ever described what he and Susie had shared—and what they no longer shared.

“The point is, so what if she’s not Catholic? Catholic, Jewish, it doesn’t matter. All roads lead to God, anyway, am I right?”

“You aren’t talking anti-church, are you?” his mother yelled from the kitchen.

“Margaret, love of my life,” his father yelled back. “I’m simply having a chat with my son. No crime in that, is there?”

“He’s staying for dinner, right? Casey, you’re staying for dinner.”

“I really can’t,” Casey insisted, though not loudly enough for his mother to hear him over the din of boiling pots in the kitchen. He aimed his words at his father: “I stopped by to return your socket wrench. But Mose is expecting me in—” he checked his watch “—fifteen minutes.”

“So, you’re not seeing that girl?”

“No, I’m not.” The stark truth, he thought grimly. Days had passed since he’d last seen Susie—and kissed her. He could still taste her kiss, the kiss that had convinced him they ought to get married, because when two people kissed and it felt that good, that right, that perfect, why mess with fate? If he were religious, he’d say that kisses as spectacular as what he and Susie experienced when they kissed were God’s way of telling them that they belonged together. But he wasn’t religious and God obviously wasn’t talking to Susie, either. Because she’d said no. She had no compunction about messing with fate. Hell, she probably saw messing with fate as an exciting new challenge, like getting a tattoo
or flunking trigonometry, both of which she’d done before she’d met Casey.

Her
no
was finally beginning to sink in. He wasn’t seeing her. Apparently, they were supposed to screw fate and go their separate ways.

Meeting with Mose tonight represented the first step of Casey’s separate way. If only he could figure out a strategy for leaving his parents’ house that wouldn’t launch a dinner crisis. His first big mistake had been to sit. Had he remained standing, he could have handed his father the socket wrench and vanished before his mother started slicing onions into her pot.

“I really have to go,” he said, gripping the arm of the sofa with one hand and the seat cushion with the other, preparing to heave himself out of the too-soft upholstery.

His father’s gaze sharpened, as if he knew what Casey was up to. If the old man had a gun, he would have reached for it. He wouldn’t have drawn, but he’d have let his hand rest menacingly on the butt, a warning that he was prepared to do whatever he had to to keep Casey from bolting without eating dinner first.

Casey relaxed the muscles in his shoulders, as if his only intention all along had been to shift his weight on the sofa. His father kept a wary watch, but he no longer had that ready-to-draw glint in his eyes. “So, there’s a problem with the girl?” he asked.

“No problem,” Casey lied.

“I have nothing against Jews,” his mother bellowed from the kitchen. “All I’m saying, it’s better if you’re the same faith, for the sake of the children.”

“What children?” he asked his father. He felt no need to shout to include his mother in the conversation. She had uncanny hearing, or else she’d wired the house
with eavesdropping bugs. As a child, he’d often suspected the latter. He and his grade-school buddy Brian would be whispering in his bedroom and suddenly his mother would whip the door open and say, “Just for the record, you are not going to start a frog farm in the basement,” and Casey and Brian would stare at each other in astonishment, wondering,
How did she know?

“Your mother wants grandchildren,” his father explained. “God knows why. She drives that school bus five days a week, morning and afternoon, and then she spends the whole evening crabbing about how noisy children are.”

“Maybe she thinks I’d raise my children better,” Casey opined, then cringed inwardly. How did they trap him this way? Not only hadn’t he made his escape, but now they had him talking about the children he was going to raise.

“Kids are noisy. No two ways about it. Your sister was noisy. Then you were born and you were noisier. Girls shriek. Boys shriek and belch. It’s a noisy business. You and that girl want to give me grandchildren? Fine. But they’re going to be noisy, I can guarantee you that. Noisy and gassy. It’s the way children are.”

“You want romaine or iceberg?” his mother shouted.

So far she hadn’t figured out a way to boil salad. But the prospect of fresh, crisp greens wasn’t enough of an incentive for Casey to stick around. “Neither,” he called toward the doorway. “I’m not staying for dinner.” There. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

His father’s fingers twitched, as if searching the air around his hip for that holstered gun. His mother materialized in the doorway, just the way she had the time she’d declared her ban on frog farms in the house. Tall,
thin and armed with a cooking spoon, she gave Casey a fierce stare. “You have to stay for dinner. I made too much for Dad and me.”

“So you’ll have leftovers,” Casey said. “I’ve already got a dinner plan.” Now that he’d stated his intention and the words couldn’t be retracted, he went ahead and stood.

His father sprang to his feet and sidled toward the foyer, apparently planning to block the front door. The socket wrench lay on the coffee table next to the three remote controls needed to operate the TV and a stack of round cardboard coasters with Czerny’s—Home of the Mile-Long Kielbasa printed across them. For a brief, crazy moment Casey contemplated grabbing the wrench and brandishing it like a fencing sword, using it to hold his parents at bay. His mother’s spoon was longer, but the wrench had more heft.

“You having dinner with that girl? The boss’s daughter?” his mother asked.

Correcting her about Susie’s twig of the family tree wasn’t worth the effort. “No.”

“So what am I supposed to do with all these leftovers?”

“I’ll call you tomorrow and give you a recipe for them,” he promised, edging toward the door, his eyes never leaving his father. His movements were like playing one-on-one in slow motion, feinting slightly toward the coat closet to get his father to veer in that direction, then spinning the other way and reaching the door. He could do it—he was younger and much quicker than the old man—but he didn’t want to risk committing a foul. Fouling one’s own father would be disrespectful.

“When are you going to bring her here so we can meet her?” his mother pressed him.

“I don’t know.”
Never, Mom. She turned me down. She said no
. “I’ve got to go.”

“He’s got to go,” his mother grumbled to his father, who had fallen for Casey’s fake and was moving toward the closet door. “Such a busy man, never has time to eat dinner with his parents.”

“I had dinner with you last week,” Casey protested, then winced. Getting snared in an argument over how often he had dinner with his parents would ruin his timing and trip him up. “I’ll see you soon,” he said swiftly. “Thanks for letting me borrow the wrench.”

“You should buy your own tools,” his father chided.

“You’re right. I should. I’ll call you with a recipe, Mom,” he said, gracefully swerving to his right and yanking open the front door. “’Bye,” he said, practically leaping across the threshold and slamming the door behind him.

He drew a breath deep into his lungs. Mild late-spring air, it smelled like grass and his mother’s roses, evening and freedom. Before his parents could charge out the door, waving spoons and wrenches and screaming for him to get his butt back inside and eat some of their overabundance of boiled chicken, he descended the steps and sprinted to the corner, around onto the cross street, away.

He’d been outrunning his parents since he’d matured beyond the crawling stage. He’d always been fast, and now that they were on the far end of their fifties, they didn’t even try to catch him. They probably just tucked themselves back into their color-free house and complained about what an ingrate he’d turned out to be.

He loved his parents, really. He just didn’t fit with them. If he hadn’t looked like them both—he had his father’s thick, wavy hair and hazel eyes, his mother’s
sharp chin and angled cheekbones, his father’s height and his mother’s wiry build—he’d have assumed they’d adopted him. They were both impatient yet docile, intelligent yet uncreative. They seemed incapable of perceiving anything outside the tight little sphere of their own experience. It would never occur to his mother to fry the onions in a little olive oil, rub some herbs onto the chicken and broil the whole thing.

Susie complained about her family all the time, and Casey only shook his head. Her mother could be pushy and whiny, but hell, the woman had lost her husband only two years ago, and lots of women had trouble dealing with growing older, especially growing older alone. Susie’s grandmother was crusty, but a person knew where he stood with her, and beneath her gruffness Casey sensed a softness and a generosity that Susie refused to acknowledge. Susie’s sister, Julia, was great—the best boss he’d ever had, and the only reason he would choose not to work for her was that he’d rather work for himself—and he’d rather remove himself from Susie’s world, now that she’d said no. Casey barely knew Susie’s younger brother, but he seemed okay.

Casey’s sister was a dog groomer. Every conversation he had with her wound up being about the difference between a continental clip and an English saddle clip on a poodle, or about flea baths. Celia was a font of wisdom on the subject of fleas.

So Susie felt like the oddball in her family? She had no idea.