Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  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.

  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 wi
th 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.”