Love in Bloom's (12 page)

There were enough places set at the long dining room table that Sondra had to assume Susie had told Ida she was bringing this lug with her. Was Sondra the last to know her daughter was seeing a bagel clerk from Bloom’s? Susie was always seeing someone—even as a girl she’d been boy-crazy, and now, Sondra supposed, she was man-crazy. But honestly—a counter clerk from the store? It was humiliating! What kind of mother would raise a daughter to bring a counter clerk to a family seder?

This was going to tip the scales against Sondra, she was sure.
Ida probably had a list somewhere, the Sondra-Is-A-Bad-Mother list, and this would be added to it. She tried to console herself that two out of three had come out all right. Julia was a Wellesley graduate, N.Y.U. law school—and wasn’t she the president of Bloom’s these days? And Adam was a true scholar; he wanted to go on for a graduate degree in mathematics. He was going to be a doctor, a PhD doctor—the first doctor in the Bloom family. Jay hadn’t raised any doctors.

She glanced down the table as the family obeyed Ida’s commands about where to sit. There were her two nephews.
Schlemiel
and
Schliemazel.
She sniffed. Neil resembled a gigolo, all that deep-fried skin and that hotsy-totsy jacket. When he wasn’t sailing rich tourists from key to key in Florida, he was probably searching for rich divorcées to
shtup.
How else could he afford a jacket like that? It looked like silk.

And Rick. His hair appeared not to have been near a comb in days—she hoped to hell he at least washed it and didn’t have a colony of lice building a subdivision beneath all those messy curls. He was—you should pardon the expression—a filmmaker. An
auteur
. The next Federico Fellini, if only he ever got around to shooting a reel of film.

So Ida had better not be thinking Jay was a better parent than Sondra was. Two out of three she’d raised perfectly, and Susie, even with her tattoo and her questionable taste in men, was vastly superior to either of Jay’s sons. Sondra bet Adam could read the damn
Haggadah
better than Jay, too. Ben used to read it, but now the honor had fallen to Jay. Last year, the first Passover after Ben’s death, Jay had stumbled over the Hebrew, stammered, faked it every which way. They were all Reformed Jews, so it wasn’t the end of the world if Jay skipped a page here and there, but Ben had done it much better. Adam would do it better. Probably this Casey fellow from the bagel counter would do it better.

On the other hand, skipping pages would move things along.

Her gaze shifted to the tower of matzos at the center of the table. It was draped with a square of white linen, with Hebrew
letters stitched onto it in pale blue, like the colors of the Israeli flag. According to family lore, Ida had sewn it. At one time, the story went, she’d been domestic, handy with a needle, skilled in the kitchen. Isaac used to say he’d married an angel when he married her. Somewhere along the line, though, the angel must have lost her wings and halo and tumbled to earth. Her flair for homemaking had vanished, replaced by ambition and stubbornness. No time for stitching Hebrew blessings onto linen when there was a business to run, to expand, to push along.

Once Ida was satisfied with the seating arrangement, she peered at Jay, whom she’d seated to her left at the head of the table. She looked less than pleased. Of course, she always looked less than pleased. She had a
farbisseneh
attitude, a well of chronic resentment that spilled over into all her dealings. Nothing was good enough for her. Not even Bloom’s, which thanks to Ben’s hard work—and Sondra’s—was a huge success.

Sondra would continue to make it a huge success, whether or not Ida ever gave her the credit she deserved. She would do it, with Julia as her helper, her front, her puppet—her partner. They’d make Bloom’s even better than Ida could have imagined in her sour little dreams. And they’d do it thanks to Susie. She might be wild, she might be lacking in dignity, she might be a poet who served pizza to people who didn’t deserve the time of day from her—but she was the genius who’d come up with the scheme to keep Bloom’s in Sondra’s control.

Sondra was proud of her, proud of all her children. She was a good mother. If Ida had a scrap of honesty in her, she’d have to admit that. Sondra was the best mother in this room.

That Casey had agreed to attend Grandma Ida’s seder amazed Susie.

She’d extended the invitation only as a joke, but he’d told her he had never been to a seder before and thought it would be interesting.

“You sell bagels for a living, and you’ve never been to a seder?” she’d asked.

“Not only do I sell bagels, but I design them.”

“Design them? How can someone design a bagel? They’re all the same shape. Some variation regarding the size of the hole, I guess—”

He’d smiled, a smile that was one part whimsy and three parts dimpled seduction. “I develop new flavors. Cinnamon-walnut bagels, tomato-pepper…Bagels are an art form. They embody an aesthetic.”

Susie had been baffled. “They’re food,” she’d argued.

“They’re a national food. Pizza isn’t Italian anymore. Tacos aren’t Mexican anymore. Pizza and tacos are American. So are bagels. Everything sold in this store is American—except the imported items, of course.” He’d gestured toward the heat-n-eat counter. “Couscous. It’s American now. Kasha—American. We’ve reached a moment where the melting pot really is a pot, and it’s full of cross-cultural cuisine.”

“Bagels are part of the melting pot?”

“If someone like me can care so much about them, yeah.” He’d begun unloading the trays into bins as he spoke. “This seder thing…maybe I’ll discover that those foods are part of the melting pot, too.”

“I doubt it.”

“So, when is the Passover party?”

“The first night of Passover.”

“Sounds cool. I’m up for it.”

She’d considered withdrawing the invitation but decided not to. The laws of etiquette forbade such rudeness, and besides, he hadn’t seemed particularly eager to have a cup of coffee with her. The seder was the bait; once he’d spent a little time with her there, he might be more inclined to spend time with her elsewhere. Like over a cup of coffee, or in bed.

They’d exchanged phone numbers and she’d left the store. For twenty-four hours she’d kept her cell phone turned on and
never more than an arm’s length away, and then he’d phoned—in the evening, while she was working at Nico’s.

“This is Casey Gordon,” he’d said, which was how she’d found out his last name.

How he found out her last name was a little more complicated. She’d delayed mentioning it to him until they’d made arrangements to meet at the residents’ entrance to the Bloom Building at five on the night of the first seder. “No kidding—your grandmother lives in the same building as Bloom’s?”

“My grandmother
is
Bloom’s,” she’d confessed, cringing and praying he wouldn’t disconnect the call. “I’m Susie Bloom. My grandparents founded the store.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Wow.”

He’d been silent for such a long time, she’d started thinking about the rate-per-minute her cell-phone carrier charged.

“So you’re Ida Bloom’s granddaughter?”

“Yeah, and she’s a real character. My dad was the store president until he died last year. My mom and uncle are sort of running the place. Oh, and my sister.”

“What about your sister?”

“She’s sort of running the place, too. I don’t work there. I don’t live there. I don’t shop there—except for an occasional bagel. I hope you’re not upset or anything.”

“Upset? No. I’m just…” Another expensive-per-minute delay. “I’m just sort of blown away, a little. I mean…
Ida Bloom
. I’m actually going to meet her.”

“Well, you know it’s going to be a great seder. I mean, we’re talking about the Blooms of Bloom’s. So the food’s going to be fantastic, right?” That the food would be fantastic was a tribute to Lyndon’s talent. Blooms did not excel in the culinary arts, and Grandma Ida, like Sondra, rarely served food from the family store.

“All right,” Casey had conceded. “I’ll meet you there at five. What am I supposed to wear to this thing?”

“Clean clothes,” she’d told him. You’ll need a
yarmulke
, too, but I’ll bring that.” She had a few lying around, black velvet with “Travis Feldman Bar Mitzvah, June 12, 2000” inscribed on the white satin lining. Travis, a cousin on her mother’s side, was a twerp whose soul seemed trapped inside a whine that affected everything he did and said. His bar mitzvah had been held at the Plaza Hotel, and the entertainment had included a chamber ensemble and a low-rent metal band that played excruciating covers of Metallica. Before the cake cutting, his parents announced that in honor of Travis’s bar mitzvah they’d donated twenty-five thousand dollars to Brandeis University. Travis had seemed more interested in the cake.

Susie had asked to keep Adam’s souvenir
yarmulke
, as well as her father’s. They both owned personal skullcaps, and Susie decided she ought to have a few on hand, just in case. She hadn’t known that “just in case” would wind up being a guy like Casey Gordon accompanying her to her grandmother’s seder.

He’d arrived late. She hadn’t been sure whether he’d belatedly decided it was too weird to experience his first seder at the home of the family for whom he worked, or whether he just wasn’t interested in Susie enough to sit through an hour of prayers and chants and songs in order to eat a meal, or whether he didn’t have any clean clothes. When he finally arrived, a little past five-fifteen, she’d been so relieved she hadn’t asked for an explanation. He’d provided one, anyway: “The F train stalled under the East River. We just sat there in the dark for a half hour. Definitely the pits.”

The F train under the East River meant he lived in Queens. Definitely the pits was right. Queens wasn’t just another borough; it was another country, another planet. Queens was where people’s parents lived. It was where residents bragged that they lived on Long Island, not in New York. It was where the Mets played, for God’s sake. She didn’t know if she wanted to get involved with someone from Queens.

Then again, she didn’t really want to get involved with Casey. She just wanted to have some fun, some friendship, some high-
quality sex—and she suspected he might be able to provide at least a few of those essentials.

They’d arrived at Grandma Ida’s just as everyone was gathering around the dining room table. The air was thick with the salty fragrance of chicken soup, punctuated by the zing of freshly grated horseradish. As soon as Julia saw Casey, her eyes widened. Susie’s mother’s eyes narrowed. Of all her female relatives, only Grandma Ida looked unfazed.

“All right, well, you’d better have him sit next to you,” Grandma Ida said as soon as Susie had presented him to her family. “We’re about to start, and he probably has no idea what’s going on. Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked Casey.

“None at all,” he said good-naturedly.

“Then, sit next to Susie. You can be bored together. She usually gets bored when we do this. Jay, you sit at the head. Wendy, you sit here. Martha you sit over there.” Grandma Ida wisely placed the length of the table between Jay’s two wives.

The seder began. Uncle Jay did not read Hebrew fluently, and when he asked Rick or Neil for assistance they stared back at him blankly. Rick, seated on Susie’s other side, had once confided to her that the day after his bar mitzvah, he’d forgotten every word of Hebrew he’d ever learned. She doubted Neil had much opportunity to polish his language skills while cruising around the Florida Keys in his rent-a-sloop.

Not squirming took enormous willpower. If she were younger, she could have kicked her legs back and forth and driven Grandma Ida crazy, but Grandma Ida had been nice enough about including Casey in the family gathering, so Susie forced herself to keep her legs still. She flipped pages in her
Haggadah
and studied the trite illustrations: An infant Moses floating down the river in a basket and resembling a bundle of laundry with a baby’s head poking out one end. An adult Moses looking oddly like a young Bob Dylan, facing off with a pharaoh who had apparently eaten something that didn’t agree with him, if his facial expression was anything to go by. A crowd
of Egyptian women in some sort of marketplace, their faces frozen in agony as torrents of frogs descended from the wide African sky. The Red Sea parting as if someone had unzipped it, and Bob Dylan leading a parade of Jews through the gap. She counted the number of pages Uncle Jay would have to fumble through before she could sip some wine. She counted the number of pages before everyone could set the books aside and dig into dinner, the tantalizing aromas of which made her stomach rumble.

Every now and then she glanced up from her book. Her mother was glowering at her. Adam was fidgeting with the gold ring he’d gotten when he graduated from high school. The Bimbette kept sending her charming dinner-party-guest smile in Casey’s direction. Julia slid her finger along the page, trying to follow Uncle Jay’s halting recitation. Aunt Martha appeared to be dozing, but Susie knew she was only meditating on the meaning of Passover. She always closed her eyes during the seder; she claimed this enabled the story to reach her on a deeper level.

But Casey seemed to be into the whole thing. He would read the English translation on the right-hand side of the page, then study Uncle Jay, then eye the flickering candles, the tower of matzos, the Passover platter laden with all the symbolic foods…and, every once in a while, watch Susie. When she caught him gazing at her, he smiled. Not a bored smile, not an “I’ll survive this ordeal and we’ll go off and live our own lives and never think about this evening again” smile, but a “hey, this is kind of cool” smile.

If she were foolish enough to consider the possibility of falling in love, she’d make sure to fall in love with a man who gave her a “hey, this is kind of cool” smile.

At last, they could eat. He’d floundered three-quarters of the way through the
Haggadah.
The last part of the book had to wait until after dinner, but by then everyone would have consumed enough wine that they wouldn’t all be focusing on how awkwardly he read it, compared with Ben.