Love in Bloom's (11 page)

Susie stared at the open doors for a moment, gnawing on her bagel as she contemplated her options. She might not be a child anymore, but she still wasn’t allowed down there. The people who worked now for Bloom’s probably didn’t realize she was a Bloom. If she went downstairs, they might arrest her for trespassing, and then she’d have to tell them who she was, and then they’d be embarrassed and worried about their jobs.

But
he
was down there. Her deluxe chocolate. Casey.

With a shrug, she descended the stairs and ducked behind one of the towering shelves when she heard a couple of guys approaching, their conversation accompanied by a squeaking wheel on one of the hand trucks. They were discussing the Knicks in tones of great disgust, as if they believed they could have done a far superior job against the Cleveland Cavaliers last night. She waited until they’d climbed the stairs, then slipped out from behind a shelf full of dried gourmet pasta—why gourmet pasta? This was Bloom’s, not Bloomicelli’s—and headed for the door leading to the kitchen.

It was cracked open, and she inched it wider, until she could peek around it. Several middle-aged women wearing yellow
smocks and shower caps mixed salads in huge stainless-steel bowls. Across the way the wall was filled with industrial ovens.

There he was, pulling trays of hot bagels out of one of the ovens and sliding them onto a six-foot-tall rack on wheels. Once the rack was full of trays, he would wheel it to the freight elevator and bring it upstairs so the trays could be emptied into the bins behind the bagel counter.

He didn’t have to wear a shower cap, thank God. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and his apron was a classic style: white bib, straps tied at his waist, hem dropping to his knees. Under the apron he had on a slate-gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up and faded blue jeans.

He had the kind of legs jeans had been designed for. Seventy-dollar jeans or twenty-buck irregulars—it didn’t matter. What mattered was the way the denim traced the shape of his butt.

A slow sigh escaped her.

Casey.

Smiling to herself, she tiptoed past the door and around to the elevator. She waited with barely contained patience until he emerged from the far door of the kitchen, wheeling the towering rack of bagels in front of him. He couldn’t possibly see her around the rack, which was fine.

He pressed the button, and the door slid open at once. She slipped inside. He pushed the rack in, followed it into the dreary but spacious car and pressed the button to make the door close.

“Hi,” she said.

Another man might have jumped. Another man might have seen her and gone ballistic, and harangued her about how many safety regulations she was breaking—to say nothing of her trespassing and, for all he knew, stealing inventory.

Casey wasn’t another man, though. He stared at her for a moment, then frowned, then smiled slightly. “Do I know you?”

“You sold me a bagel two weeks ago,” she said, holding up the half-eaten bagel she’d bought upstairs. “You said I was nubile. My name is Susie.”

“Okay,” he drawled.

“And your name is Casey.”

“That’s right.”

“So I thought, maybe we could get to know each other.” Susie was missing the shyness gene—at least, that was what her mother had always said. She herself wasn’t sure it was genetic; Julia and Adam were both endowed with a share of shyness. Maybe it was a result of birth order. Being the middle child, she had always opted to go after what she wanted. Julia got attention for being the eldest, Adam for being the youngest. Whatever Susie got, she got by helping herself.

Casey contemplated her as the elevator rose. His eyes looked deceptively drowsy; she could see, beneath his half-mast lids, eyes that were sharply focused on her.

“In what way did you want to get to know me?” he asked.

The elevator bumped to a halt. “Like, we could go get a coffee and talk?” she suggested. “Or maybe catch a movie, or a poetry slam. Or,” she added when none of those suggestions ignited any obvious interest in him, “you could come to my grandmother’s seder.”

“Your grandmother’s seder.”

“It’s a mob scene. One more mouth to feed wouldn’t matter.”

He laughed. He had a great-sounding laugh, dark and husky. “I hate matzo,” he told her. “It tastes like drywall.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never tasted drywall.”

He laughed again. She realized he was holding the Door Close button.

“When I release this button,” he instructed her, “you’re going to hurry down the hall to the door and outside. If anyone finds you in that hall, it’s bad news.”

She considered telling him her last name—proof that she would be in no more trouble lurking in the back hall now than she’d been as a child scampering around the store. But his effort to protect her from punishment, rather than report her to store Security, was kind. And promising.

“So, you just want me to leave,” she said, testing him.

“You leave the building, walk around the corner to the front door and come back in. I’ll be in the bagel department.”

“Okay.” He was still smiling, so she smiled back. “And then what?”

He released the button. The door creaked open and he motioned with his chin that she was to exit.

“Then what?” she persisted.

“We’ll discuss your grandmother’s seder,” he promised, heaving the rack into motion and pushing it down the hall in the opposite direction.

She felt her mouth spread in a triumphant grin as she strolled down the hall to the outer door. If Casey had the balls to attend one of Grandma Ida’s seders, he was definitely worthy of her undying love.

At least for a while.

“Y
ou look pale,” Grandma Ida declared. “And what’s that on your lips? You think you’re going to get sunburn in my apartment?”

Julia sighed. She’d come to Grandma Ida’s apartment a half hour early, just as Grandma Ida had requested. One of these days, she would learn to say no.

But Grandma Ida was eighty-eight. How could Julia say no to someone that old?

The air was heavy with the aromas of good things cooking. Lyndon had let Julia peek into the kitchen, where he and a friend—“Howard is Jewish and he’s a chef, so he knows from gefilte fish, as your grandmother would say”—were orchestrating the feast the family would pray over and then devour as soon as the sun set. Although Julia would have loved to linger in the kitchen, Lyndon had sent her on her way. “She’s in the living room, waiting for you,” he’d said.

“How’s her mood?”

“The usual.”

Julia hadn’t considered that a particularly useful warning. Grandma Ida’s usual mood was inscrutable.

Grandma Ida was dressed for the occasion in a long gray skirt, a cotton blouse with a quaintly rounded collar and a wool cardigan that might have begun its life as lilac but had faded to an uneasy gray. Her hair was a shapeless smudge of black—clearly one of Bella’s masterpiece coiffures—and she wore thick-soled leather oxfords. Gold bangles circled both wrists.

“So, why are you so pale?” she asked.

Because I’m working too hard,
Julia wanted to answer. But she couldn’t. Grandma Ida probably thought she wasn’t working hard enough at Bloom’s. Two brief visits a week did not epitomize a workaholic’s schedule.

Julia sank back into the spongy cushions of the sofa, across a dark cherry wood coffee table from her grandmother, who sat with regal posture in a wingback chair. The sofa’s upholstery was soft enough to drown in. And damn it, Julia felt as if she were drowning.

“It’s been a stressful few weeks for me,” she admitted.

“Are you having trouble running Bloom’s? You’re the smartest of the bunch, Julia. If you can’t run it, there’s something wrong with you.”

The only thing wrong with her was that she had a full-time job elsewhere. And the other only thing wrong with her was that she had no training or expertise in retail merchandising, and her heart pounded with dread whenever she neared her father’s office or glimpsed some new package of documents from the lawyers, and she still wasn’t clear on the difference between Greek and Turkish olives, let alone Iranian and Albanian olives, and she couldn’t get the bagel department numbers to add up.

Now that she considered it, there were a lot of “only things” wrong with her.

“It’s just a bit much for me,” she admitted.

“It’s not too much. If you don’t take good care of Bloom’s, who will?”

“My mother,” Julia said, attempting to keep her tone casual.

“Your mother is all right, up to a point. But that point is over there—” she extended her left index finger in one direction “—and Bloom’s is over here.” Her right index finger pointed in the other direction.

Reflexively, Julia tapped her two index fingers together, as if that might bring her mother and Bloom’s into proximity.

“You need to put in more hours at the store,” Grandma Ida lectured her. “Jay tells me you’re invisible there, like a ghost floating in and out.”

She should have known Uncle Jay would tattle on her. Didn’t he realize that if Julia wasn’t the figurehead president, Grandma Ida would have to align her index fingers and give the job to Sondra? Once she did, he would be in a weaker position than he was in now. Julia didn’t resent him the way her mother did. She actually liked some of his ideas, and she had faith that the Internet sales would eventually become more profitable. But he didn’t deserve to be president of the company—and whether or not Julia held that title was irrelevant.

Again, she realized Grandma Ida was waiting for her to speak. “You know, I can’t just walk away from Griffin, McDougal. I’m in the middle of a few cases there—”

“Any civil rights cases? Anything that’s going to put you in front of the Supreme Court?”

“No—and I guess once I leave them for good, I’ll
never
get to argue before the Supreme Court.” As if staying there and hammering out alimony arrangements would ever put Julia on the high-speed Amtrak to Washington.

“So, what are you walking away from? Something no one else in that whole
goyishe
firm can possibly do?”

“I know you think my work there isn’t important—”

“I think it’s not as important as what you should be doing here, for your family.”

That comment was enough to detonate an explosion of guilt within Julia. She sank deeper into the cushions and bit her lip, waiting stoically as shame rained down upon her soul like
radioactive dust. Of course her family was more important than the
goyishe
law firm. Of course her family was more important than anything else in her life. Of course her family was embodied by Bloom’s. How could she even think of charting an independent course for herself? What kind of selfish monster was she?

The doorbell rang. It took all her willpower not to leap from the sofa and race down the hall to answer the door herself, and to drop to her knees in gratitude that someone had come to save her from this wretched one-on-one with Grandma Ida. Her appreciation waned as soon as she heard Aunt Martha’s lusterless voice: “Hello, Lyndon. Do I smell borscht?”

“No, we didn’t make any borscht.”

“I’m sure I smell borscht.”

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

Julia smiled in spite of herself. In a normal family, a son’s ex-wife would not be invited to the seder. But Aunt Martha lived just downstairs, and she was Neil and Rick’s mother, and so she still wound up getting invited to family affairs.

Aunt Martha made her way to the living room. Today she had on a long, fiercely embroidered vest over a white peasant shirt and baggy woolen trousers. Except for her Birkenstock sandals, she could pass as a member of a Slavic dance troupe.

“Julia,” she said, a faint flicker of her brows the only sign that she was happy to be there. “Good
yontif.
Good
yontif,
Ida,” she added, giving a frosty kiss to Grandma Ida.

“We’re not having borscht,” Grandma Ida announced.

“All I said was, it smelled like borscht. That rooty, beety smell. How are you, Julia? When am I going to get you over to the Women’s Center?”

When the pope dances the
hora,
Julia thought. She smiled feebly at Martha. “That’s an amazing vest,” she said.

The doorbell rang again, and again. Sondra arrived with Adam, who had taken the bus down from Cornell for the holiday. Rick arrived shortly after with his brother, Neil, who had flown in from Florida and looked as though he’d slathered a
golden-brown wood stain over his skin. Uncle Jay arrived with The Bimbette, who smiled and greeted Aunt Martha with such effervescent charm that Aunt Martha grew even more sullen than usual, as if The Bimbette had somehow leeched from her what little cheer she possessed. Her mouth arched downward, her eyes narrowed and her shoulders hunched under her vest.

Lyndon glided around the room, taking coats and offering drinks that no one other than Uncle Jay wanted. Julia watched Jay while he sipped his Manhattan. He ignored his ex-wife, addressed Sondra only in short, tense sentences spoken through a sneer, beamed at his bronze-god son Neil, who seemed resistant to Jay’s attention, and every now and then acknowledged The Bimbette by patting her on the head as though she were a child he was congratulating on her good behavior.

Julia didn’t detect any overt antagonism directed at her. He was openly antagonistic toward Sondra, but then, they’d never gotten along, even when Julia’s father was alive. She couldn’t exactly call his behavior toward Martha antagonistic, since he was acting as if Martha wasn’t in the room. Toward his own mother he seemed ambivalent, sometimes solicitous and sometimes aloof. He would ask her if she was warm enough, then turn his back before she could answer.

“Where’s your sister?” Sondra whispered to Julia. “She’s late.”

“It’s not sunset yet,” Julia whispered back, although she was also wondering where Susie might be.

“She should have been here by now. She should have gotten here before Jay’s boys got here. You’re here, and Adam’s here. All my children should have gotten here first.”

“You brought Adam with you,” Julia pointed out. Although he was twenty-one, legally an adult, Adam still looked unformed to Julia. His face had a boyish softness about it, his chin a slightly indecisive curve. He possessed the Bloom metabolism, too, which endowed him with a stringy build rather than a brawny one. When he turned forty and all his contemporaries started having their first heart attacks, he’d be glad he was so
thin. But ever since he’d hit puberty, his narrow shoulders and undefined musculature had irked him. Uncle Jay’s boys had better physiques.

“I swear, Susie is going to age me ten years,” Sondra hissed. “Where the hell could she be that’s more important than getting to the seder on time? You don’t futz around with Grandma Ida. She invites you to a seder, you come. You don’t show up late.”

“She’ll be here.”

“You think she forgot what day it was?”

“She’ll be here,” Julia repeated emphatically, hoping Susie wouldn’t make a liar out of her.

“Did the sun set yet?” Grandma Ida asked. “Someone check out the window.”

“It doesn’t matter if the sun set,” Uncle Jay corrected her. “They say in the newspaper what time the sun sets. You don’t have to look out a window. You just read it in the newspaper.”

“I’ve got a window over there,” Grandma Ida retorted, pointing to the heavily draped windows along one wall of her living room. Unfortunately, it was an east-facing wall, so looking out them wouldn’t prove the sun’s position. “I’ve got a window and I don’t have a newspaper. I guess we could also look up the sunset on your computer,
nu?
Isn’t that what you’d do, Jay?”

“The time of sunset is scientifically determined,” Jay said tightly.

The Bimbette nodded. “You should listen to him, Ida. He’s so smart when it comes to scientific things.”

“Lyndon!” Grandma Ida shouted above the din of voices. “Lyndon, did the sun set yet?”

Lyndon appeared in the arched doorway. “Yes, it’s set,” he said with such certainty that even Uncle Jay wouldn’t dare to contradict him.

Next to Julia, her mother stiffened. “Okay, so the sun set. Where the hell is your sister?”

As if in answer, the doorbell rang. Sondra let out such a long breath she seemed to lose an inch in height.

“Why don’t you all go into the dining room,” Lyndon suggested. “Howard is pouring the wine. I’ll get the door.”

They milled out to the hall and into the dining room. The long table was set with heavy damask, Grandma Ida’s glass seder dishes, a seder plate adorned with bowls of
charoseth, moror
and saltwater, shrubs of parsley, a charred hard-boiled egg and a bone large enough to keep a Great Dane occupied for the better part of the evening. The bone, like everything else on the seder plate, was supposed to be symbolic; it represented the
pesach
, the paschal lamb. If the bone Lyndon and Howard had come up with was from a lamb, it must have been one with a severe pituitary problem.

“We’re here!” Susie proclaimed, sweeping directly into the dining room, pulling behind her a tall man who looked vaguely familiar to Julia. He wore corduroy slacks and a sweater, and his hair fell in dark-blond waves past the ribbing of the sweater’s crew-neck collar. In fact, Julia realized, he was the most sanely dressed person in the room. Susie had on a long, shapeless black jumper, and Sondra was wearing one of her supposedly slimming sweaters and hostess slacks. Neil wore a white T-shirt under a white jacket, the better to show off his Key West tan, and Rick’s clothes hung off him as if he’d picked them out of the Salvation Army donation box marked Extra Large. The Bimbette had on a low-cut cashmere sweater that displayed the contours of her breasts as precisely as a mammogram, and Uncle Jay wore a suit with a banded-collar shirt and beige buck shoes. Adam was decked out in a Cornell sweatshirt. Julia had dressed demurely, she thought, in a matching tunic and skirt of washable blue silk.

But that man with Susie…he looked blessedly normal, like someone she might see walking down a street, or reading a magazine in the waiting area of Griffin, McDougal, or shopping in Bloom’s.

Bloom’s. That was where she’d seen him before.

Oh God. The bagel man.

“Everyone, I’d like you to meet Casey Gordon,” Susie declared.

Well, Julia thought, at least Susie had found out his name.

Sondra simmered. How could Susie have brought a stranger to the family seder?

Not just a stranger. A tall, blond, Aryan stranger. He looked ridiculous in the
yarmulke
Susie planted on his head. That was how Sondra could tell Jews from
shaygetzes
. On a Jew a
yarmulke
looked right; on a
shaygetz
it looked like a beanie, or maybe a misplaced diaphragm. She often could tell if a man was Jewish even when he wasn’t wearing a
yarmulke
. If you looked at him and imagined him wearing a
yarmulke
, and in your imagination the
yarmulke
looked right, chances were he was Jewish.

Okay, so bad enough Susie had brought this tall blond into Ida’s home for Passover. Even worse, he’d responded to The Bimbette’s sugary question—“So what do you
do,
Casey?”—by saying he sold bagels at Bloom’s.

Bloom’s had long ago become an equal opportunity employer. Her husband, Ben, may he rest, had said it was absurd to be serving a multi-ethnic clientele in a city like New York and be worrying about whether everyone on the staff was Jewish, especially because asking people whether they were Jewish before offering them a job was against the law—although Sondra was reasonably sure it wouldn’t be against the law if you were hiring someone to be, for instance, a rabbi.