Love in Bloom's (22 page)

Susie and Julia picked at their food and didn’t say it was delicious. Sondra would be the first to admit the bagels weren’t as chewy as at Bloom’s—they tasted more like doughnut-shaped bread—but some habits were hard to break. For all her adult life, she had shopped down the street because she viewed Bloom’s food as profit generators, not nourishment. Every bagel was worth a certain number of pennies on the bottom line. Every cup of coffee meant X amount of income for the store, and that income had paid her husband’s salary and now paid Julia’s salary, and Susie’s fee for doing the windows.

You didn’t eat profits, period.

The girls weren’t eating profits or anything else. Julia had accepted Sondra’s offer of a screwdriver, but Susie was drinking her orange juice straight, which was odd. Usually Julia was the teetotaler, while Susie indulged. Susie looked kind of pale, too, and Julia had color in her cheeks. It wouldn’t have shocked Sondra to lift up their pant legs and discover that Susie’s butterfly had flown over to Julia’s ankle.

What was going on with them?

“I mean it, this food is really great,” Rick said as he stabbed another slice of red onion and added it to his bagel. “I always loved eating here, Aunt Sondra. Even when we were kids, remember? I’d always come down the hall to eat here.”

“I remember,” Sondra said, feeling her lips purse.
Kina hora
, Jay’s boys used to eat. Neil every now and then, but Rick all the time because he and Susie had been such buddies. Downstairs, upstairs, back and forth in the hall, they’d been two mischief makers, a coed, Jewish Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. But when it was time for a snack they had inevitably wound up in her kitchen.

“You always had, like, cookies, you know? My mother never had cookies in her kitchen. She used to say refined sugar made men violent.”

“That sounds like her.” Martha was full of odd theories like that. Just the other day, Sondra had run into her in the compactor room and gotten stuck agreeing to have a cup of tea with her. They’d sat in Martha’s Zen-temple kitchen, with weird masks of goddesses and totems hanging on the walls, and Martha had rambled for the better part of an hour about the relationship between destiny and penmanship, something to do with handwriting analysis and brain waves. Sondra hadn’t really followed her—and the tea had tasted like dead grass.

“So I met the coolest guy yesterday.” Rick was regaling the girls. “He used to work for CBS. Now he’s an independent producer.”

“Producer of what?” Sondra asked skeptically.

“Game shows,” he told her, giving her such a sweet smile that
she felt guilty for having questioned him. “He was involved with some of their reality programming, too, although I’m not exactly sure what he did there. So anyway, he’s gone independent. He doesn’t want to be stuck in some faceless bureaucracy anymore, you know?”

“In other words, they laid him off,” Sondra guessed.

“No, he really wanted to leave. It was his choice. He’s looking for projects to develop. We had a really good talk. I’m in his Rolodex now.”

“That’s great,” Susie said, sipping daintily from her orange juice.

“What does that mean, you’re in his Rolodex?” Sondra asked. “He’s going to phone you on a regular basis?”

“It’s just an expression, Aunt Sondra,” Rick explained as he reached for his fourth bagel—she was counting. “He doesn’t really have a Rolodex. He’s got a PalmPilot.”

“And you’re in it?”

Rick nodded jubilantly. “Once I get a few more details put together on my film, he said he wants to see what I’ve got.”

“That’s great,” Julia said, prodding the chunks of honeydew on her plate, arranging them in a lopsided circle.

“I was thinking, maybe we could celebrate some evening this week,” Rick suggested. “Have you got an evening you aren’t working, Susie? Maybe we could get together. You could bring Anna or Caitlin.”

Susie laughed. Sondra wondered what Rick wanted with Susie’s roommates. Then she figured out what Rick wanted with them, and her skepticism returned in full force. Well, they were all young and single—and Anna and Caitlin were kind of on the wild side, as far as Sondra knew. Thank God her own daughter wasn’t promiscuous that way.

“Of course you could come, too, Julia. I’m just thinking, being a lawyer and an executive and all, you’re probably pretty busy these days.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Julia said mildly. “I’m booked solid for the rest of the decade.”

“You’re being facetious, aren’t you?” Sondra asked, annoyed by the fact that she wasn’t sure. What would Julia be booked solid with? It wasn’t as if she was still working at that law firm, where, if she was fortunate to have a few spare minutes when her bosses hadn’t dumped more assignments on her, she was futzing around with that colleague of hers who looked like a member of the Protestant Hall of Fame. Heath, that was his name. Julia hadn’t mentioned him since she’d temporarily stepped off the ladder of success at Griffin, McDougal.

It
was
temporary. Sondra understood that Julia had had to take occupancy of the corner office on the third floor for a while, to satisfy Ida and keep Jay from plugging his computer into a socket in Ben’s old office. But once Ida backed off, satisfied that the store had truly survived Ben’s passing, Julia would return to Griffin, McDougal and Sondra would take over Bloom’s. Maybe she wouldn’t relocate to Ben’s office—not immediately, not as long as Ida still kept poking her nose into the business—but in time, in the not-too-distant future, they would all wind up where they were supposed to be. Julia would forget her regimen of meetings and inventory checks. Susie would do whatever god-awful thing she was going to do to the windows and then go back to her arty life downtown, writing poetry and slinging pizza until, God willing, she met a nice boy and settled down.

Sondra loved her daughters. It wasn’t that she wanted to deprive them of the chance to run the family business. But neither of them had ever taken much of an interest in Bloom’s. They had their own dreams, their own goals—for Julia, a partnership with a solid law firm, and for Susie, heaven only knew, but Sondra prayed it would include a healthy, handsome husband who earned enough money that Susie could stay home and write poetry and stop dressing in black all the time, as if every day was a funeral for her.

The person destined to run Bloom’s was not Susie or Julia—or even Adam, although he could handle it if he wished. He didn’t wish. It wasn’t his dream, either.

It was
her
dream, Sondra’s. Just because she was a middle-aged widow, a doting mother carrying a few extra pounds on her hips, didn’t mean she wasn’t entitled to have dreams. Bloom’s was in her blood every bit as much as it was in the blood of people who were born into the name. She could do a better job of running the business than Julia ever could, and unlike Julia, she wouldn’t always be
noodging
everyone about scheduling a meeting, locating a missing bagel or shopping at Bloom’s instead of the bargain place down the block. That grocery store doubled coupons, for Chrissake. Bloom’s didn’t. Why should she shop at Bloom’s when so many extravagant people who didn’t care about double coupons were happy to spend the extra money there?

Her dream would come true soon. Julia would leave and everything would resolve itself, and maybe her daughters would truly bless her by giving her grandchildren. After they got married, of course.

It was only a matter of time before Sondra took over. And she’d do just as good a job as Ben, if not better.

“The trouble with meetings,” her mother said, “is that they force us all to be in the same room. That’s not such a good idea, sweetie. We all work better when we’ve got some distance among us.”

“You’re always shouting back and forth between offices,” Julia argued. “With meetings, we spare everyone’s vocal cords.”

“I don’t know that anyone needs their vocal cords spared. I’ve been shouting across the hall for twenty years and my cords are still vocal.”

True enough. Julia wondered whether the shouting might in fact strengthen everyone’s vocal cords, tempering them through constant exercise. All her relatives seemed quite adept at top-volume bellowing. “It’s not like we have a meeting every day. What have we had, three? And the real reason for them,” she explained, “is that it’s useful to make eye contact with the person you’re talking to—and listening to. It’s important to view
the body language, the facial expressions, and to go face-to-face with a person you might be criticizing.”

“Who criticizes?” Sondra shrugged and sipped her coffee. “I never criticize. None of us does.”

Julia swallowed some coffee to keep from guffawing.

Rick had left for his mother’s apartment and Susie had gone to the bathroom, stranding Julia to talk shop with her mother. More accurately, to listen while her mother talked shop. Sondra clearly felt compelled to criticize her leadership style—well, no, not criticize; no one at Bloom’s criticized. If asked, she’d probably say she was merely offering recommendations.

“Jay doesn’t like the meetings, either. Deirdre—who the hell knows what she likes? Myron probably liked them until he realized he didn’t have to sit through a meeting to get one of those pink bagels. Ida misses most of them, anyway. So what’s the point?”

“The point is, there are problems at Bloom’s, and they’re better addressed when we’re all in a room concentrating on them than if we’re separated and thinking about different things.”

“The only problem at Bloom’s is, you think there’s a problem. So a few items disappear each week. It happens in every store. Shoplifters, carelessness, lazy clerks who forget to ring up a sale—it all gets absorbed.”

“This isn’t just carelessness and lazy clerks, Mom. It’s a hundred brunches walking out of the store every week.”

“Don’t be silly. Brunches can’t walk.”

The phone rang, rescuing Julia from a conversation she didn’t want to have. As soon as her mother went to answer it, Julia rose from the table and headed down the hall. Susie was exiting the bathroom, and Julia grabbed her arm and steered her into the guest room so they could talk without Sondra present.

The guest room had once been Julia’s bedroom, but when she’d left for college her mother had denuded the room more efficiently than Agent Orange. Julia had already taken her stereo system and a significant portion of her wardrobe with her to
Wellesley. That had left little for her mother to purge: Julia’s stuffed animals, her collection of Far Side anthologies, her Sting poster and the lopsided throw pillow she’d sewn in a consumer studies class in seventh grade.

The room looked as characterless today as it had the day Julia had come home for Thanksgiving that first year of college. But she no longer cared. Then, she’d wept and raged and accused her parents of expunging her very existence from their home. Now, this apartment was no longer her home and Sting no longer did much for her, so she couldn’t get upset about the room’s bland, impersonal feel.

She peered out into the hall and heard her mother chattering on the phone—to Aunt Martha, evidently, since Sondra was providing a description of everything Rick had eaten at brunch. Aunt Martha would keep Sondra occupied for a while.

Satisfied, Julia closed the door and turned to Susie, who had flopped down across the brown futon that extended along the wall where Julia’s bed once stood.

“I need your advice,” Julia said.

Susie’s face brightened a bit. She’d been looking rather dreary and hungover. Usually Susie sparkled, but today the shiniest thing about her was her hair. To have her big sister ask for advice seemed to pump her up.

“About the store?”

“God, no. I get all the advice I need on that from Mom.” Julia sank into the canvas director’s chair that faced the futon. It was, she realized, one of the least comfortable pieces of furniture in her mother’s apartment. “It’s about—well, men.”

“Men?” Susie laughed sourly. “Like I’m such an expert.”

“Compared with me, you are.”

“I used to think I was. Now I’m thinking maybe I was just an idiot savant. I could dazzle people, but the truth is, I don’t know nothin’.”

“Which is more than I can say.” Julia leaned forward. She found it easy to talk to Susie about most things, but not about men. Partly it was jealousy, partly sheer awkwardness, partly the
discomfort of being the older sister and having so much less experience and wisdom than someone who’d entered the world three years after her. “I need advice about sex, actually,” she said.

“You’re pregnant?” Susie exclaimed, her eyes widening with what appeared to be a combination of horror and glee.

“No, of course I’m not pregnant. For God’s sake, I know what a condom is.”

“Okay.” Susie grinned wickedly. “I’m glad I don’t have to explain contraception to you. So, who’s the lucky condom wearer? Big blond Heath?”

“No.” Julia’s neck seemed to be burning up. She expected steam to start rising from her skin any second. “It’s not Heath. It’s not anyone I—well,
know
.”

“Wait a minute.” Susie sat upright, her eyes growing impossibly wider. “You had sex with a stranger?”

“Not a complete stranger.” A
perfect stranger
, she thought, recalling the way Joffe had claimed he was perfect but not a stranger. “We’d met a couple of times, and then I just…”

“You just what?” Susie asked breathlessly.

“I went back to his place.”

Susie subsided. What had seemed perilously out of character and high-risk to Julia didn’t excite her jaded sister. “Okay. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Well, we had sex more than once.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Several times.” Julia sighed. “More than several.”

“How many?”

“A lot.”

“When did this happen?”

“Friday night.”

“And what happened Saturday?”

“We had sex again. More than several times.”

Susie let out a hushed cheer. “Way to go, Julia! This guy must be hot. Is he good-looking?”

“Of course he is!” Did Susie think Julia would have gone to bed with someone she didn’t find attractive?

“And he’s good in bed?”

“That’s the thing, Susie. I just…” A thin film of sweat formed under her chin. “I’m not used to having this much sex.”