Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  “Tinted lip gloss.” Grandma Ida’s frown deepened.

  “Mom says it protects the lips from getting sunburned.”

  “Sunburned lips. I never heard from such a thing.”

  Several retorts filled Julia’s mouth, but she exercised restraint and only said, “I’m going to get my coffee, Grandma. I’ll be right back.” She shoved away from the table and stalked into the kitchen before her grandmother could order her back to her chair.

  The kitchen was big enough to accommodate a small breakfast table, which meant it was enormous by Manhattan standards. The appliances were full-size and the counters were lined with kitchen gadgets too old to have come from Bloom’s, which hadn’t added a kitchenware department until the early eighties. An antiquated popcorn maker, a hand-held mixer and one of those little scales that dieters were supposed to use to measure their portions cluttered the available space. Why her grandmother needed that scale was beyond Julia. The woman was definitely not fat.

  The kitchen smelled so good Julia didn’t want to leave. Her gaze fell on a wicker basket filled with poppy-seed bagels, and it took all her willpower not to grab one and slather it with scal-lion-flavored cream cheese from the tub beside the basket—or better yet, to grab a few bagels, escape from the apartment, and devour them in the elevator on her way downstairs to freedom.

  But more than granddaughterly respect kept her from fleeing. Lyndon stood at the stove, stirring a pan full of scrambled eggs and lox. Merely looking at that glorious mass of pink-flecked yellow curds made Julia’s knees go soft.

  “Lyndon,” she murmured, then emitted a sigh of longing. “Lox and eggs.”

  “Your grandmother specifically requested them. She knows how much you love them. You ought to treat her nicely.”

  “I do treat her nicely. But lox and eggs…” She leaned over the pan and let the rising scent fill her nostrils. “Nobody makes them as good as you. Marry me, Lyndon.”

  He grinned. “I would, honey, except you’re the wrong color and the wrong sex, and if you were the right sex we’d have to elope to Vermont. Coffee’s in that cranky old percolator. Why don’t you buy your grandma a Mr. Coffee?”

  “My mother did. Grandma Ida made her return it. She said she knew the markup on that item and would rather sell it to a stranger than have it sitting idle in her kitchen. You know her. She likes the cranky old percolator.”

  “She doesn’t have to clean it,” he grumbled. “I do, and I hate it. Buy me a Mr. Coffee.”

  “Only if you marry me,” Julia bargained, grabbing a teaspoon and dipping it into the scrambled eggs.

  Lyndon slapped her hand away before she could pry loose a piece of lox. “Wait till it’s cooked. I got the coffee from downstairs, and the hell with the markup. It’s that Kenyan roast. I like it—good ol’ African coffee. Maybe it’ll put a curl in your grandma’s hair.”

  “Her hair is hopeless,” Julia whispered, finding the mug Lyndon had set out for her and filling it with coffee. “Thanks. Really—I’m serious about that marriage proposal. I’d even let you mess around behind my back if you’d only keep me in lox and eggs.”

  “You’re too easy, Julia. Gotta raise your standards.” He spooned the pan’s contents onto a porcelain platter, and Julia’s spirits lifted. The eggs were done, neither too dry nor too wet. That meant she’d be eating soon. She’d eat until there was no longer a trace of tinted lip gloss on her. She’d eat until she was drunk on the marvelous food, drugged by it. Warm, fresh bagels, lox and eggs and…oh, was that a plate of rugelach, glistening with honey, on the table? Her heart thumped.

  She carried the basket of bagels and her mug back into the dining room. Lyndon followed her, conveying the rest of the food on a tray. Grandma Ida’s expression changed almost imperceptibly, a flicker of approval brightening her eyes as Lyndon set the heavy serving plates down on the table.

  “The bagels are already sliced,” he informed Grandma Ida. “The cream cheese is softened. Let me refill your cup, and then you two can have your little chat.”

  Those two ominous words—little chat—tempered Julia’s ecstasy. Food this good didn’t come free. Grandma Ida was going to make Julia pay.

  She didn’t care. She’d feast, and then she’d settle up.

  She scooped a small mountain of eggs onto her plate, took a bagel and smeared cream cheese on its warm surfaces. The thick china was a dull white, the silver bulky and ugly. Grandma Ida had been using the same table settings for as long as Julia could remember. They’d been her mother’s, she’d told Julia—and someday, if Julia was very, very good, they’d be hers. If ever Julia had had an incentive not to be good, that was it.

  The stout plates and silverware didn’t bother her today. For a brunch this spectacular, she’d eat off paper, out of the pan, on the floor. The eggs were divine, the coffee heavenly. The bagel’s crust resisted her teeth for a moment and then yielded, warm and thick in contrast to the cool, smooth icing of the cream cheese.

  “That’s it,” she said with a swoony sigh. “I’m never eating doughnuts again.”

  “You’re too thin,” Grandma Ida criticized. “What do you eat?”

  “For breakfast? Doughnuts.”

  “And for lunch?”

  “I usually don’t have time for lunch,” she admitted. “I try to make up for it at dinner.”

  “With that boy? That blond boy? The lawyer. What does he make you eat?”

  Julia stifled a chuckle. In her blissful gastronomic state, she couldn’t take offense at her grandmother’s apparent dislike of her current boyfriend. Julia wasn’t sure she liked him, either, so it wasn’t worth arguing about. “He doesn’t make me eat anything. If we go out for dinner, we choose a place together. If not, I go home and eat whatever is in my refrigerator. Or I’ll pick up something on my way. If Bloom’s were on my way, I’d pick up stuff here.”

  “You’d be one of those meshugena ladies in the fancy suits and the sneakers.”

  “They aren’t meshuge, Grandma.”

  “You don’t wear sneakers with a fancy suit.”

  “They only wear the sneakers going to and from work. When they get to their offices, they change into real shoes.”

  “It’s crazy. Sneakers with a suit like that. And all of them picking up ‘heat-n-eat’ dinners on their way home. They should be home making a proper meal for their families, not crowding Bloom’s looking for food.”

  “The store makes lots of money with those prepared meals,” Julia reminded her.

  “Thank God for that. Meshugena,” Grandma Ida clucked, shaking her head. “So you eat what?”

  “Nothing as good as this,” Julia swore, then shoveled more eggs into her mouth.

  Her grandmother ate, as well. Not as enthusiastically, not as voraciously, but she held her own. Even at her advanced age, she had most of her original teeth, and chewy bagels couldn’t defeat her.

  “This is wonderful,” Julia finally said, leaning back in her chair and feeling a contented ache in her belly. “Thank you.” She knew the little chat was imminent, but she figured a show of gratitude might make it go more smoothly.

  Her grandmother drained the last of her coffee and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. Then she settled herself in her chair and glared at Julia, her eyes dark and focused as if she were seeing not Julia but her own soon-to-be-revealed purpose.

  “It’s been a year,” she began.

  “I know.” A year since Julia’s father had died. She no longer felt that squeeze of emotion in her guts, in her lungs, no longer felt the pinch in the bridge of her nose, releasing tears. Her father had been what he was, but she’d loved him, they all had, and he shouldn’t have had to die of food poisoning while on a trip to St. Petersburg to meet with his sturgeon supplier. For months Julia had been haunted by images of him suffering in some foreign hotel room, and Russian doctors at the hospital babbling in their guttural, Slavic language above his wracked body, inserting tubes into him, attempting to jump-start his heart…And all because he’d
tasted some tainted sturgeon.

  “So, we mourn for a year and then it’s over,” Grandma Ida said.

  “It’s never really over, Grandma.”

  “In terms of God, it’s over. A year passes, you unveil the stone—and then you go on.”

  “All right. Fine.” Julia wasn’t going to argue.

  “So here I am, an old lady, and the son who ran Bloom’s is gone a year. Your father was president of the store, Julia. This I don’t have to tell you.”

  Julia warily took a sip of her coffee. It had cooled down, but she sensed now would not be the best time to head into the kitchen for a hot refill.

  “Bloom’s needs a president. For a year, now, it’s been without. But we must go on.”

  Julia nodded her agreement. Grandma Ida was going to tell her she was putting Uncle Jay in charge. Julia expected it. Even her mother expected it, although the thought enraged her. Julia’s mother had worked hand in hand with her father all these years. She knew the business as well as Uncle Jay did, and she was more disciplined and diligent than he was. She deserved to be named president. But Grandma Ida was going to favor her surviving son over her widowed daughter-in-law, and she was going to ask Julia to break the news to her mother. That was the reason for the brunch.

  She relaxed slightly. Her mother had already suspected Grandma Ida would do something like this. She’d thrown several anticipatory fits about it. Once the decision was handed down, she’d likely throw several more fits—and then she’d get back to work overseeing the store’s inventory, because she had nothing better to do.

  “I want you to take over,” Grandma Ida said.

  Julia choked on a mouthful of tepid coffee. “Take over what?”

  “Bloom’s. I’m naming you president.”

  “What?” The word came out a squeak.

  “You are going to be president,” Grandma Ida said, as if the question was already resolved.

  “Grandma.” She stretched her spine back into balance-a-book posture and met her grandmother’s rigid gaze. “I can’t be president. I’ve already got a job.”

  “Some job.” Her grandmother sniffed dismissively.

  “I’m a lawyer, Grandma.”

  “Well, hoo-ha. I’m supposed to be impressed?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes! I spent three long years in law school, remember? And passed the bar exam on my first try.”

  “And now you work in a big hoo-ha firm with that blond boy, and what do you do? Do you send murderers to prison? Do you defend the innocent? Do you go to Washington and tell Congress to write new laws to protect faygalas like our Lyndon?”

  Unfortunately, Julia’s legal training didn’t lend itself to fiery litigation, noble Constitutional defenses or battles to protect faygalas. She worked in a firm that could only be called “hoo-ha,” a huge legal factory where she and the other associates toiled long hours researching cases for their bosses, the partners. The work was tedious, it was frustrating and at times it was distasteful. But it wasn’t retail merchandising in a world-class deli, and it wasn’t under Grandma Ida’s control. It wasn’t Bloom’s. It was a place where Julia could just be Julia, far from the universe in which she’d grown up.

  “I like my job,” she said.

  “Your job has no meaning. It’s not family.”

  “That’s one thing I like about it,” she muttered.

  Grandma Ida’s hearing was operational today. “So, you don’t want to work with family. So, fine. You’re president—you could fire them all.”

  “Fire Mom and Uncle Jay? They’re the only ones who know how to run the place.”

  “We’ve got staff. We’ve got Myron, the accountant. And your father’s secretary, the Irish one, Deirdre. They know how to keep things running.”

  “This is what I went to law school for? To run a glorified delicatessen?”

  “You’re the smartest one in the family,” her grandmother explained. “All that schooling, that law—it makes you smart, am I right?”

  “My mother’s smart.”

  “Your mother doesn’t even have the nose God gave her.”

  This was true. Julia’s mother had celebrated her sweet-sixteenth birthday by subjecting her nose to surgical improvement. But Julia had never known her mother with any other nose. The nose she had was all right—somewhat impersonal, perhaps, but adequate. And it had no bearing on her ability to run Bloom’s, which she’d been doing rather efficiently for the past year.

  “What about Uncle Jay? He’s got his own nose,” Julia pointed out.

  “He’s my son, God knows, but he spends all his time doing that computer stuff. And he married that Wendy. Not a smart man, my son Jay.”

  Julia had to agree with Grandma Ida. Wendy, dubbed The Bimbette by Julia’s family because she was too cute to be a mere bimbo, offered proof that Uncle Jay was lacking a certain degree of maturity. Or sensibility. Or gravitas. His first wife, Aunt Martha, had enough gravitas to send most men diving headfirst into the nearest perky bosom. Perhaps Jay’s greatest flaw was that he was so predictable—or that his current wife’s bosom was so amazingly perky.

  But some of the computer stuff he did for the store was useful. “Grandma, Uncle Jay has worked for Bloom’s all his life. So has my mother—”

  “Not all her life,” Grandma Ida quibbled. “She was a wife, a mother. She did other things. Fund-raising, volunteer work.”

  Julia refrained from pointing out that most of the work she did for Bloom’s was volunteer, too, since she didn’t get paid. She’d fought Julia’s father about it, but he’d explained that it wouldn’t be fair for her to be paid a salary separate from his, because then his branch of the family would be taking more of the store’s profits than his brother’s branch. Julia’s mother had replied that they deserved more because they were both working for the store, while Aunt Martha—Uncle Jay’s wife back then—was contributing nothing to the store but her personality, “and she’s got the personality of a dried mushroom,” her mother had concluded with a flourish.

  Julia’s father had given himself raises to cover his wife’s contributions to the store. This had resulted in a very nice household income, but it hadn’t addressed Sondra Bloom’s real concern, which was that she was working and not getting paid. Once he died, the store finally put her on the payroll. She got his salary. Never her own, though.

  If Julia became president, that would change.

  Not that she was going to become president.

  “My point is,” she explained to Grandma Ida, “they’ve both worked for Bloom’s. I never have—other than a few summer jobs running a cash register. I have no idea how to manage a retail store. I don’t know the products we sell. I couldn’t begin to tell you the difference between Turkish olives and Greek olives.”

  “Turkish cost more,” her grandmother informed her, as if it were that simple.

  “I mean, why me? Why not Susie?”

  “Your sister?” Grandma Ida’s lips imploded, as if she’d just sucked hard on a lemon. “She’s got that thing on her leg, that tattoo.”

  Julia would admit Susie’s tattoo had been a foolish move, but that didn’t make her any less suited to run Bloom’s. Nobody could be less suited to run it than Julia. “How about Adam?”

  “He’s still in college. You think he should drop out and run the store?”

  No, of course not. But Julia didn’t think she should run the store, either. “Or Jay’s kids. Neil and Rick. They’re both out of school. Neil already runs his own business—”

  Grandma Ida made a contemptuous flapping gesture with her hand. The thick gold bangle around her wrist glinted in the sunlight. A while back, Lyndon had mentioned to her that some people believed copper bracelets eased the symptoms of arthritis, so she’d taken to wearing bangles. Fourteen-karat gold ones, though. “If copper is good, gold must be better,” she’d reasoned.

  “Neil is a bum,” she proclaimed. “He lives like a shaygetz.”

  “What’s not Jewish about char
tering sailboats in the Florida Keys?”

  “Everything,” she snapped. “And Ricky? He’s always asking me for money. I’m going to trust him with the store?” She shook her head and laughed sadly, an eerie cackling sound. “I’ve thought about it, Julia, and you’re the one. You’ll become the president. You’re smart, you’re responsible and you remind me of me.”

  Julia knew her grandmother intended this as a sincere compliment, but she couldn’t help being insulted. She might be smart and responsible, but she wasn’t bossy. She wasn’t manipulative. She never acted illogically, and she would never let Bella near her hair.

  And until a minute ago, she hadn’t known that the only difference between the Turkish olives and the Greek olives sold at Bloom’s was the price.

  “Grandma…” She sighed and prayed that her expression looked sympathetic. “It’s not that I don’t love Bloom’s. I do. That’s why I wouldn’t want you to entrust it to me. I respect the place enough to know that you need someone with more expertise in the president’s office, overseeing everything. You need someone who understands the business—”

  “What are we talking about, ‘business’? It’s a delicatessen. You think I understood the business when I married Isaac, may he rest, and we turned this place into what it is today? You learn. You get some flour on your face, some cheese in your hair, a little kugel under your nails—and you’re an expert.”

  “I don’t want kugel under my nails.”

  “So you’ll sit in your father’s office and push papers around, like he did. He made Bloom’s a very successful outfit. A brand-name, he used to say. Chartered buses from Jersey, regulars from Brooklyn, tourists from Europe—they all come to Bloom’s. We ship mail orders around the world. And you’ll do even better.” She folded her hands in front of her, as if sealing her pronouncement with a prayer. “I’ll be talking to the lawyers, a bunch of gonifs, but it has to be done. You’ll make me proud, Julia.”

  Julia didn’t know what to say. If she spoke her mind, Grandma Ida would be hurt. Or angry. Better to keep silent, to say goodbye, to leave the apartment and go somewhere where she could digest everything she’d just taken in.