Love in Bloom's (5 page)

In the kitchen, Sondra set out Ziploc bags of cut fresh vegetables and a tub of dill-and-sour-cream dip. “Is this from downstairs?” Susie asked, examining the tub.

Sondra shook her head. “Their dips are too expensive.”

“You don’t have to pay for them,” Julia reminded her.

“If I take one, it comes out of the profits.”

“The store makes a nice profit, Mom,” Susie argued. “If anyone ought to know that, it’s you.”

“And do you know why the store makes a nice profit?” Sondra swirled a stalk of celery through the dip. “Because the Blooms don’t go filching inventory, that’s why. Because the merchandise is there for retail purposes. We sell it. That’s how we make a nice profit.”

Julia glanced at Susie and found her glancing back. “You’d better tell her,” Susie said.

Julia would have kicked Susie if they’d been seated at the table where her mother wouldn’t have been able to see the foot movement. But they were standing, leaning side by side against the polished granite counter, while their mother pulled a chunk of cheddar cheese—no doubt some cheap store-brand from the supermarket down the street, not from the international collection at Bloom’s—out of the refrigerator and placed it on her marble cutting board.

“Tell me what?” she asked, her dark-eyed gaze traveling from one daughter to the other.

“That cheese looks great,” Susie said brightly, lifting the silver knife and slicing into it.

Sondra zeroed in on Julia. “Tell me what?”

“I had brunch at Grandma Ida’s this morning,” Julia said.

“Which is why Susie’s eating and you’re not. What did Lyndon make?”

“Lox and scrambled eggs. I asked him to marry me.”

“He’s not your type, sweetie.”

“He’s a great cook.”

“If cooking was necessary for the success of a marriage, your father and I wouldn’t have stayed married for thirty years.”

This was true. Neither of them had excelled in the culinary arts. On and off over the years, her mother had hired a cook. She’d also often resorted to prepared dinners for the family—from the supermarket down the street, not from Bloom’s.

Then again, cooking or no, Julia sometimes wondered how her parents had managed to stay married for thirty years. Julia had loved her father, but Ben Bloom hadn’t been an easy man. The store had consumed him. He’d had moods, often acting as if the fate of every last roll of liverwurst and Jordan Almond rested on his weary but all-important shoulders. He’d missed dinner more nights than not—maybe because he couldn’t stand Sondra’s cooking—and frequently worked on weekends. He’d never seemed as “at home” in this apartment as he had downstairs in his corner office on the third floor, directly above the kitchenware department.

But Julia had always known he loved her. He loved Susie, too, and Adam—although he hadn’t been around enough for Adam. He hadn’t made himself available to do all that father-son stuff, like taking him to Central Park and teaching him how to throw a baseball. Adam had learned baseball from Uncle Jay and the cousins, and Julia sensed that he still resented their father for failing to teach him the techniques necessary to throw a curve and a sinker. It didn’t matter how often Julia reassured him that he was better off learning such things from Uncle Jay, who unlike their father was a natural athlete and who was always eager to abandon his office for a few hours of catch in the park with the boys.

Sondra pulled three tumblers from an overhead cabinet and placed them on the counter. “So,” she said as she swung open the refrigerator door again and reached for a lidded plastic pitcher of iced tea, “what did Grandma Ida invite you to brunch for?”

“She said she intends to name me president of Bloom’s.”

Sondra straightened, set the iced tea on the counter and
smiled hesitantly, as if certain she’d misheard. “She intends to do what?”

“Name me president of Bloom’s,” Julia enunciated.

Sondra issued a dramatic gasp. Her dark eyes narrowed. So did her lips, compressing into a pinched pink circle. She reached into another cabinet and pulled out a bottle of scotch. After pouring a generous slosh of it into one of the glasses, she crossed to the dinette table, sank onto one of the leather-and-chrome chairs and took a long slurp. “This is a joke, right?”

“No joke,” Julia said.

“This is serious? Grandma Ida told you she’s naming you president?”

“Yes.”

“Of Bloom’s?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“She doesn’t want me to be president,” Susie said cheerfully, pouring an inch of scotch into each of the other glasses and handing one to Julia. “Apparently, I was disqualified because of my tattoo.”

“It’s an embarrassment, that tattoo,” Sondra remarked. She sprang out of her chair, yanked a box of Cheese Nips from a shelf, settled back into her chair and scooped a fistful of the crackers out of the box. “Don’t forget, your Grandfather Isaac came over to this country in, what, ’thirty-eight? Just steps ahead of the storm troopers. A Jew with a tattoo makes some people think of concentration camp survivors.”

“I don’t believe the Jews in the concentration camps got butterflies tattooed onto their ankles,” Susie argued.

“That’s not the point. The point is, you wanted a tattoo and you got one. Don’t expect your grandma to approve. But you…” She turned her gaze to Julia. Her lips had taken on a slightly orange coloration from the Cheese Nips. “You’re a lawyer! You’ve got a wonderful career! What the hell is Ida up to? What is wrong with that woman?”

Julia thought “wonderful career” might be a bit of an overstatement, but other than that, she agreed with her mother’s sen
timents. She didn’t agree with her choice of beverage, however. She didn’t drink hard liquor; it tasted too much like liquor. But to dump her scotch into the sink would look like a condemnation of her mother’s and sister’s choice, so she gingerly took a sip of the stuff and tried not to grimace.

“I have worked my fingers to the bone for that store!” Sondra ranted. “I learned the business from your father. Who was I? Just his wife. But I learned. First I helped him with typing. Then with the books. Then with decisions. I was the one who said we should be selling gourmet flours. I was the force behind our coffee corner—and look at what a profit center that’s turned into. Years before Starbuck’s took over the world, I was telling your father that Bloom’s needed to get out front with gourmet coffees. Was I right?”

She stared at Julia and Susie long enough for them to realize this wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Yes,” Susie said, while Julia murmured, “Absolutely.”

“And that crazy woman thinks my daughter should be the next president? I run the damn place! I know the job better than
she
does, the great Mrs. Ida Bloom, the Grand Pooh-bah herself! Does she hate me that much?”

“She said you weren’t a Bloom by blood,” Julia explained in a gentle voice. It was a terrible reason, but that was what Grandma Ida had said. “Also, she doesn’t like your nose.”

“I don’t like her nose, either!” Her mother pounded her fist on the table, causing her glass to tremble. “What is her problem?” She placed the Cheese Nips box on the table, stood, paced, frowned. “You know what? Maybe she’s senile. She’s eighty-eight. Maybe her brain is beginning to go. More than beginning. Maybe she’s deep into Alzheimer’s territory, and we just never noticed.”

“She doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, Mom,” Julia argued. If Grandma Ida was demented, her dementia had nothing to do with her age. She’d been ornery and unreasonable for as long as Julia could remember.

“So…she hates me that much,” her mother muttered. “She
hates me so much she’d refuse to let me run the store I’m already running. Girls, never get married. I don’t mean that,” she hastily corrected. “Of course get married, have babies, make me a grandma. But just remember—you get married and you wind up with a mother-in-law. Maybe you should both marry orphans.”

“I’ll do my best,” Susie offered, downing another robust sip of scotch.

“And Jay? Why didn’t she pick him? She doesn’t like his nose, either?”

“She said he spends too much time on the computer.”

“The computer business is the only worthwhile thing he’s ever done for the store,” Sondra retorted. “The woman is senile. Completely
meshuge.
So, okay. Jay spends too much time on the computer and I’ve got a nose. And Susie’s got a tattoo. Did she have equally good reasons for disqualifying everybody else?”

Julia sighed. She felt uncomfortable rehashing her post-brunch conversation with Grandma Ida. Enduring the discussion once had been unpleasant enough. “Adam’s too young. Neil lives in Florida. Rick’s always broke. It would be crazy putting
any
of us in charge. None of us knows thing one about how to run a place like Bloom’s.”

“
I
know thing one,” her mother asserted. “Also things two, three, four and a hundred. I should have been named president. Ida knows it. She just hates me.”

“I don’t think she hates you, Mom—”

“She hates me,” Sondra said decisively. She stopped pacing, flopped back into her chair and took a swallow of scotch. “So, what are you going to do?”

What Julia
wasn’t
going to do was take over the presidency. She’d endured nearly her entire life surrounded by Bloom’s. Her parents had worked at the store, she’d spent her after-school hours at the store, and on those occasions when they’d all come upstairs together for a late supper, her parents had spent the entire meal talking about the store. Over reheated macaroni-and-cheese or pan-fried burgers, they’d debated the markup on
multigrain bread, the menus of heat-n-eat meals, the efficiency of the catering service, the decision to expand into housewares. Julia still remembered a virulent fight that had lasted several days over whether to pipe background music into the store. Sondra had put in time at the library reading studies claiming that shoppers spent more money in stores with piped-in music, but Julia’s father hadn’t cared. “We’ve never had music in Bloom’s,” he’d said. “Bloom’s isn’t a goddamn elevator, okay? It isn’t a dentist’s office.”

Julia had lived Bloom’s from the moment of her birth until the day she’d left for Wellesley nine-and-a-half years ago. She had no intention of living Bloom’s as an adult.

She wanted her mother to be the president. Sondra deserved it. She’d earned it. The size of her nose was irrelevant; for the sake of the store itself, for the solvency of its future, for the legacy of yet-to-be-born generations of Blooms, Sondra ought to be the one at the helm.

“You need a plan,” Susie commented. She swirled a vivid green slice of bell pepper through the dip and popped it into her mouth.

“What are you talking about?” Julia asked.

“A plan so Mom can get to be president.”

“You have any ideas?”

Susie gave her a grin broad enough that Julia would have blamed its excessiveness on the scotch if Susie had consumed more. “Here’s what I think,” she said. “Julia, you tell Grandma Ida you’ll be the president. Then you act as kind of a dummy president. Mom does the actual job and you keep your job at Griffin, McDougal.”

“That’s a stupid idea,” Julia said, although for some reason it didn’t seem quite stupid enough.

“How long would we have to play this game?” Sondra asked. “How long would we have to pretend Julia’s the president?”

“How long do you think Grandma Ida’s going to live?” Susie asked. With a remorseful cringe, she added, “I’m not saying we should start hoping for her to die or anything. I’m just
saying, how much attention is she really going to give to all this? She hardly ever goes to the third floor. She doesn’t visit the offices much. How often, Mom? Maybe once or twice a month? On those days, Julia will have just stepped out of the office. Or she’s got an appointment with the vinegar dealer. Or she’s at a sour cream tasting.”

“I’m not going to a sour cream tasting,” Julia protested.

Susie gave her an impatient look. “Of course you’re not. You’re over at Griffin, McDougal, running up billable hours. Grandma Ida doesn’t have to know that.”

“Uncle Jay’ll figure it out. He’ll tell her.”

“Uncle Jay doesn’t pay enough attention to figure anything out. And if he does…well, maybe sometimes you’ll have to stop in at the store and act like you’re in charge. You could bring your files with you and work in Dad’s old office, couldn’t you?”

“What if Uncle Jay asks me a question about something and I don’t know the answer?”

“Tell him you haven’t mastered the job yet. Tell him to check with Mom in the meantime. Eventually, Grandma Ida is going to…well, do whatever she’s going to do eventually. And then, as president, you can name Mom your successor.”

“What a brilliant idea,” Sondra said.

Julia took a quick, biting sip of scotch and tried not to wince. The idea was miles from brilliant, but it still didn’t sound stupid enough. She needed it to sound stupid. She needed it to sound so stupid she could laugh about it, and then tell Sondra and Susie that it was the stupidest idea she’d ever heard.

She eyed the bottle of Dewar’s sitting innocently next to the bags of raw vegetables. It was two-thirds full. There wasn’t enough scotch in it to make this idea sound as stupid as Julia needed it to sound.

She didn’t want to be the president of Bloom’s. Not even the dummy president. Not even a fake, fool-Grandma-Ida, grease-the-skids-for-Mom president.

“It’s a brilliant idea,” Sondra gushed, gliding across the room
and gathering Susie into a smothering hug. She relaxed her hold on Susie only enough to reach out and snag Julia, who was drawn tight against the two women she was closest to in the whole world. Three bosoms smashed together at the center of the circle of Sondra Bloom’s arms. “It’s an absolutely brilliant idea. Let’s do it.
Mazel tov
to Julia, the new president of Bloom’s.”

Shit,
Julia thought, as her mother hugged her tighter. Like Sondra’s hug, the idea wrapped around her and squeezed. And she couldn’t see a way to escape.

R
on Joffe leaned back in his chair. The spring in the hinge had gone a bit flabby, so he had to do this carefully or he’d wind up flopping over backward and banging his head on the industrial-strength carpet that blanketed the floors of
Gotham Magazine’s
headquarters, a block from Union Square. The right corner of his desk was occupied by his computer, which filled his office with a white-noise purr. The monitor displayed the text of next week’s column. He ought to skim it one final time, but he didn’t want to. He’d gone over it often enough to recognize the configurations of the letters and the patterns of the paragraph breaks.

The column was fine. It was great. It was done, finished, history.

He enjoyed being
Gotham
’s financial columnist. It beat having to wear a necktie to work. Journalism had been his first love, anyway—the business degree had come later. Having a weekly gig at New York City’s top-circulation magazine suited him the
way a career in finance never would. Journalism and business—the perfect marriage.

Shifting his attention from the computer screen, he stared at the framed print of a lion hanging on the wall across from his desk and felt a keen identity with the animal, its muscles taut and bristling with energy beneath its tawny skin. The lion was one of eight large photographs of animals that decorated his office. Some days he was partial to the photo of two pandas. They looked so sweet and cuddly and childlike. Other days he was partial to the photo of the lion, which looked the exact opposite of sweet and cuddly and childlike.

Today was a lion day. Energy burned under his skin, making him want to prowl.

He groaned. What was wrong with him? Why did he feel so restless? Why were his thoughts skewing toward romance, images of first loves and perfect marriages? He knew that old saw about how in the spring a man’s fancy turned to thoughts of love, but in the spring his fancy usually turned to thoughts of the Yankees—if he even had a fancy, which he sincerely hoped he didn’t.

He was not suffering from spring fever. Lions never suffered from spring fever, did they?

Actually, he wasn’t sure about that. It was possible they mated in the spring. Or maybe spring was when they gave birth to their cubs. He knew squat about wild animals, with the possible exception of urban cockroaches, a species he’d had some experience with over the years.

Cockroaches. Ha. A man with a fancy didn’t think about cockroaches. This must prove he didn’t have a fancy.

The thought failed to soothe him.

He hit the combination of buttons on his keyboard that would send his column to his boss, and shoved out of his chair. He tried prowling for a minute but it didn’t satisfy him. Maybe if he had four legs, if he could prowl on clawed and padded paws instead of scuffed and battered sneakers, if he could prowl
through an African savannah or an Asian jungle, or wherever it was that real lions prowled, the exercise might have a more therapeutic effect. At least he had a great head of hair, he thought, sending the lion poster a defiant glare. Mr. Pussycat there might have more of an eighties Bon Jovi coif, but Ron’s hair wasn’t chopped liver.

Why was he thinking about chopped liver?

Maybe he was hungry.

He left his office, resolved to go downstairs and buy himself something edible. Preferably something that included meat, given his leonine mood. He’d go find a hot dog vendor and pounce with a roar.

He slowed his gait as he neared Kim Pinsky’s office at the far end of the hall. Not that he felt he had to sneak past her, but if she saw him leave, she’d want to know where he was going and why. She was like a mother, only worse—too young, too smart and too hard to bullshit.

His slowing was a bad move, though. It allowed his shadow to slide through her doorway. “Joffe?” Her voice wafted out to him, a deceptively gentle soprano.

Sighing, he followed his shadow into her office. She sat at her desk, blond and mercilessly gorgeous, the antithesis of a hard-boiled editor in appearance if not attitude. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“Out for lunch.”

“It’s ten-fifteen.”

“A very early lunch.”

Her smile didn’t reassure him. “Where’s your column?”

He was relieved to be able to say “Probably sitting in your e-mail In-box right this very minute.”

“And?”

“And I’m hungry,” he said.

She flicked a long, golden lock of hair behind her ear with her hand. Her hair was better than his. So were her claws, perfectly filed and painted a metallic copper.

“You’re hungry for a challenge,” she told him.

“Actually, I was thinking along the lines of a couple of hot dogs.”

Her teeth were also better than his, too even and white to be natural. He was pretty sure she regularly subjected them to professional bleaching. He was also pretty sure she’d had cheek implants at some point. She was a Californian by birth, after all.

“I have an idea for a bigger article,” she said. “Maybe a cover story, if you think you can handle it.”

He straightened, even though he knew she was manipulating him. She was blond and he was a man. Of course she could manipulate him. “I can handle it.”

“It’s about food,” she said. “A very New York piece. A new challenge, Ron. Something to get your juices flowing.”

If she were single and he had a fancy, his juices might start flowing just from the velvet texture of her voice. But she was married—to a high-priced lawyer, in fact—and bitchy. And Californian. And his boss. All in all, not his type.

So he focused on the big article she was pitching him. “What’s it about?”

“You’re familiar with Bloom’s?”

What New Yorker wasn’t? He shopped at Bloom’s regularly. It was a terrific store. It sold more bagels than Broadway sold tickets to shows—and Bloom’s bagels probably got better reviews, too. He’d bought his own significant share of those bagels over the years.

But still…
Bloom’s?
What the hell would he write about a deli? “Just because I’m hungry doesn’t mean I’m a food expert,” he argued.

“Obviously. If you were a food expert, you’d stay away from hot dogs. Do you have any idea what goes into them?”

“Not knowing is part of the fun,” he said.

“Bloom’s isn’t just a deli. It’s a huge business. One year ago, Ben Bloom, the president of the company died. I want you to get past the food and write about the business. One year after Ben Bloom’s death, how is Bloom’s doing? Are their finances
shaky now that Ben Bloom is gone? There’s your story, Joffe. A business story about food. You’re just the one to write it.”

He disagreed, but disagreeing with Kim was something a
Gotham
staffer—even an esteemed weekly columnist—didn’t do out loud. “Okay,” he said, realizing he wasn’t that hungry after all. Or else perhaps this assignment had taken his appetite away.

With a forced smile, he backed out of Kim’s office. One of his colleagues had once dubbed her the
Gotham
Goddess, and someone else had said it was bad luck to turn one’s back on a goddess, so they all remained facing her when they left her office. Ron wasn’t particularly superstitious, but he knew better than to tempt fate.

Oddly enough, though, as he retraced his steps to his office, contemplating his new assignment, he couldn’t shake the eerie notion that Kim had just given his fate a karmic realignment.
Bloom’s.
A fabulous deli, the death of the head honcho, family intrigue. Food, money, heirs, power. Tradition. Schmaltz.

His nonexistent fancy was definitely turning.

Susie sat cross-legged on a chair near the front window of Nico’s, the whiteboard on the table in front of her and a marker clenched in her hand. The last poem she’d written had been up for nearly two months. It was time for her to compose a new one.

She stared at the streaky white surface for a moment, doodled a couple of round red tomatoes in the bottom-right corner of the board and tried not to think about the poetry-writing techniques she’d learned at Bennington. College professors knew how to coach students to write the sort of poetry that got good grades. Nico wanted the sort of poetry that would entice people into the restaurant to buy pizza and pasta and pitchers of beer.

The window poetry had been her idea. She didn’t mind waiting on tables—she wasn’t crazy about it, but it paid her third of the rent for the crowded little walk-up on East First Street that she shared with Anna and Caitlin. However, she had artis
tic inclinations. After working at Nico’s for a few weeks, she’d asked Nico to let her redesign the pizzeria’s window. He’d put her off for a while, but finally he’d given her permission. She’d arranged some of her old stuffed animals around a toy table in the window and put a big fake pizza on the table. She’d tied a bib around the neck of Mr. Beanie, her stuffed elephant, taped a plastic fork to the paw of Aussie the koala and a wedged piece of a bread stick into the bill of Inga the stuffed duck, and she’d set before them glasses filled with water darkened with red food coloring to look like Chianti.

Then she’d written a poem that would have earned her at best a C-minus in Sadie Rathbun’s advanced poetry writing seminar at Bennington:

Not only had many people come in and ordered pizza, but they’d all commented on the charming window display and the poem. Nico had decided that Susie must be some sort of genius, and he’d asked her to change the window display every few months.

Her new display entailed a poster that showed a pizza broken up like a pie chart, with different-size wedges. A two-thirds-of-the-pie wedge was labeled “Percentage of New Yorkers who can’t resist Nico’s pizza.” A ninety-degree wedge was labeled “Percentage of people who prefer sex to Nico’s pizza.” A very narrow wedge was labeled “Percentage of people who, if stranded on a desert island, would rather have a good book than a slice of Nico’s pizza.”

Nico loved the pie chart, but he wanted a poem, too. “The customers expect it,” he explained to her—even though this grand tradition was little more than a year old. “They want the poem. Gotta give ’em what they want.”

She studied the blank surface of the board, wishing words would magically materialize on it. Magic failed, and the board remained blank.

“Okay,” she whispered, then forced herself to write:

Not her best. At the moment, pizzas didn’t seem like aphrodisiacs to her. Bagels, on the other hand…

No, she wasn’t going to think about the guy selling bagels at Bloom’s. Not for the next ten minutes. She’d already been thinking about him too much, and for no good reason. Who was he, anyway? Some clerk who’d given her an egg bagel—and reminded her to pay for it, as if she were a potential shoplifter. And he’d called her “nubile,” which, when she considered it, had a kind of iffy feel to it.

She reread her poem, decided it would do and set the whiteboard on its easel in the window. Through the glass, she saw a familiar-looking man pausing to read it. She waved at him, and he smiled and nodded, then steered his attention back to the poem.

She closed her marker and carried it across the small dining room to the counter. The tables were empty. Her shift ran from three to eleven today, and the place wouldn’t start filling up until closer to five, when hungry customers began drifting in after work. She could visit a little with her cousin Rick if he came in.

He did, moving in his shambling way across the checkerboard floor tiles to the counter. “Hey, Cous’,” he greeted her,
tossing his unkempt black hair back from his face with a jerk of his head.

“Hey, Rick.”

“New poem?”

She nodded. “What do you think of it?”

“I think any poem that has the word
aphrodisiac
in it is okay.” He leaned on the counter and gave her an ingratiating smile. “Would your boss kill you if I had a cola on the house?”

“No, he wouldn’t kill me. He’d just ask me to pay the buck-fifty,” she said, her smile growing a little stiff. Rick was always trying to mooch food off her.

She didn’t know why he never had any money. Well, yes, she did: because he never worked. He usually had a supposed deal in the offing, some project about to happen, but until the deal or project reached fruition—which was about as likely to occur as the earth colliding with the moon—he subsisted on handouts. Uncle Jay usually came through for him. So did Aunt Martha. One advantage of having divorced parents was that you could hit them both up for money and neither had to know you’d already hit the other one up.

Still, Susie liked Rick. They were the same age, second-born kids, arty types, downtowners. He lived in a flat in TriBeCa that he couldn’t possibly afford without assistance from Uncle Jay, and he sporadically took classes at NYU’s film school. He saw himself as the next darling of the independent film world. At least he would be, if he ever managed to make a movie.

“If I staggered in here dying of thirst, so parched my skin was turning to dust like Oklahoma in the thirties, you’d still make me pay for a cola,” he said. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

She had to laugh. That was the thing with Rick: he made her laugh, and that made her give in. “I’ll treat you, but first you’ve got to tell me what you
really
thought of my poem.”

“If you’re treating me, I
really
thought your poem was a work of brilliance. It resonated, Suze. It rocked.”

She was laughing harder. Her cousin was going to get his
cola. And Nico probably wouldn’t make her pay for it, anyway. He was back in the kitchen, prepping for the dinner surge. He’d never even have to know about the cola. She’d tell him she’d taken it for herself.

And he wasn’t paying her extra for the front windows. The least he owed her was a cold drink.