Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  One thing she knew: it was going to be much easier to digest the lox and eggs than her grandmother’s decision.

  2

  Eddie was a Snickers.

  Susie and her roommates knew a little about sex, but they knew a lot about chocolate. So they’d taken to rating men in terms they understood. Encounters that didn’t go far were “Hershey’s Kisses.” Young guys were “Junior Mints.” Under-endowed guys were “Baby Ruths.” Rich guys were “Paydays,” even though Anna insisted that Paydays contained no chocolate. Guys who specialized in foreplay were “Butterfingers.” Guys who specialized in oral sex were “Charleston Chews.” Guys who came too quickly were “Milky Ways.” Guys who indiscriminately screwed around with airheads were “Tootsie Rolls.” Caitlin recently mentioned “Three Musketeers” in reference to a long, hot night that had begun at a party for a visiting hockey team from Canada, but Susie had chosen not to ask her for details.

  “Snickers” seemed to peg Eddie pretty accurately. He was robust and cheerful, satisfying in a comfortable if not particularly breathtaking way. Susie genuinely liked him, but she had no fear that love might sneak into the situation and throw everything out of whack. She and Eddie were compatible, they laughed a lot when they were together, and although his husky build sometimes squashed her when he was on top, it made him wonderfully cozy to cuddle up with afterward. His chest was nicely upholstered, his body always warm. Sleeping with him was a pleasant way to pass the dark hours.

  A cell phone was chirping. “Is that mine?” Eddie asked sleepily.

  “No.” She eased out of the curve of his arm and sat up. “It sounds like mine.”

  “Sounds like mine, too. They all sound alike.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s mine.” She shoved back the wool blanket and the musty top sheet and reached for her camisole and panties, which lay on the floor right beside the bed. She yanked the burgundy cotton knit over her head and wriggled it into place, then slid the matching panties on and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress. The cell phone chirped again as she strode across Eddie’s small, cluttered bedroom for her bag.

  By the time she’d reached the black leather hobo-style bag, she knew it was her phone. It twittered up from the depths of the bag like a trapped bird. She loosened the drawstring, dug out the phone and flipped it open. “Hello?”

  “Susie? It’s Julia. We’ve got a disaster.”

  “Huh?”

  “Susie. It’s one o’clock. Why do you sound like you just woke up?”

  Susie ran a hand through her hair and gazed across the shadowed room at Eddie, who had closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep. Her watch lay with her earrings on the splintery orange crate that served as his nightstand, and the only other clock in the room was on his VCR, which she couldn’t see from where she was standing. To glimpse its digits, she’d have to return to the bed, but she didn’t want to disturb Eddie while he dozed.

  She’d accept Julia’s claim that it was indeed one o’clock. Big deal. Why shouldn’t she sleep late? She’d worked past midnight last night, and then she and Eddie had gone out to an all-night movie house to see Outside Providence, and then they’d gone to a café for lattes and returned to his place and done the Snickers thing until the caffeine from the lattes finally wore off.

  So, yeah, one o’clock seemed about the right time to be waking up. It was Sunday, after all. People were allowed to sleep late on Sunday.

  “What do you mean, we have a disaster?” she asked. Julia never had disasters. She was too organized, too in control. She was a lawyer, for God’s sake, well dressed, well groomed, the sort of role model chronically held up to her younger sister as an example of the right way to manage one’s life.

  The word disaster must have reached Eddie’s ears. He blinked awake and stared at her, not an easy thing to do without lifting his head off the pillow. His neck was crooked at such an odd angle it almost seemed dislocated, and his thinning red hair splayed across the pillowcase like cobwebs.

  “I can’t talk about it on the phone,” Julia said. “Can you come to the store?”

  A store disaster? What? Had the refrigerator cases lost power and now the place was reeking of rotting cheese? Had one of the ovens exploded and sent pulverized knishes flying through the Upper West Side sky? “What kind of disaster?” she pressed Julia. “Are there injuries?”

  “Not yet. I might have to strangle Grandma Ida.”

  “Oh, that sounds like fun.” Her worry abating, she sent Eddie a reassuring smile. He nodded, rolled over and sank back to sleep. “Why do I have to come all the way uptown so you can talk to me?” she asked.

  “Because you’re my sister and you love me, and you don’t want me to go to jail for murdering our grandmother. So you’d better get up here and restrain me.”

  “Can you restrain yourself for an hour? I’m not dressed yet.”

  “It’s one o’clock, Susie!”

  “Thanks for reminding me. I’ll see you in an hour. Where will you be?”

  “In the olive section. Did you know the only difference between Greek olives and Turkish olives is that Turkish olives cost more?”

  If Julia was babbling about the price of imported olives, she must be really upset. “I’ll try to get there in less than an hour,” Susie promised, then turned off her phone and stuffed it back into her bag. “Eddie, I’ve got to go.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said, his voice muffled by the blanket. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.” She searched the room until she located the long black skirt and the loose-knit black sweater she’d worn last night. She liked wearing black, but she especially liked wearing it over colorful underwear. It was her little secret, her deception, her taunt. Aha! her apparel said. I am wearing all black like a typical downtown girl and you think you know who and what I am. But you can’t pin me down so easily. Underneath this black attire lurks flamboyant lingerie. Not that burgundy was the most flamboyant color, but Susie also had orange, turquoise, pea-green and siren-red panties, polka-dot, striped and jungle-print bras, and a complete wardrobe of camisoles and chemises because she was flat chested and they fit her better than the bras.

  Once dressed, she made her way into Eddie’s bathroom, which had a suspicious smell, part citrus and part mildew. Lacking her own toothbrush, she had to borrow his, which was icky but better than not brushing her teeth at all. The mirror above the sink was missing large patches of silver, but enough remained to reflect her groggy face back at her. Her cheeks were mottled, her eyes glazed. Her hair didn’t look too bad, at least. She’d gotten a really good cut last week, chin length, the ends ruler straight. A few fluffs with her fingertips and she looked salon fresh from the eyebrows up.

  She left the bathroom, gathered her jewelry from the crate and crossed back to her purse. Wedging her feet into her clogs, she called to Eddie, “Gotta go.” She spotted her black denim jacket draped over the back of a chair and put it on.

  “Yeah, I’ll see you,” he mumbled without opening his eyes. If she were in love with him, she would be insulted.

  Someday, she thought as she clomped down the stairs to the front door of his building and exited onto the sun-washed pavement of Avenue B, she’d like to find someone a little better than a Snickers bar. A Swiss truffle, perhaps. A hand-dipped strawberry. A slab of homemade cream-cheese fudge riddled with pecans. Not that she was ready to settle down, not that she would ever be ready to settle down—but a little gourmet chocolate, something a touch less sweet, a touch deeper and more complex…Chocolate liqueur, perhaps. Chocolate-covered halvah. Perugina. A girl could dream.

  The train was fairly crowded for a weekend afternoon in March. In another month, a day this sunny would inspire hordes of New Yorkers to travel uptown to hang out in Central Park. But today wasn’t quite a hanging-out-in-Central-Park day. The air still held a chilly bite. Winter stood at the open door, on its way out but loitering on the porch as if it had one final bit of gossip to share before it departed for g
ood.

  At Grand Central Station, Susie took the cross-town shuttle, then hopped onto another uptown train. She could understand why Julia lived on the Upper West Side, even if it was their old neighborhood and way too close to Mom and Grandma Ida. Julia was living an uptown life—nylons, manicures, DKNY ensembles and Body Shop facial cleansers. In a way Susie felt sorry for her sister. Julia was trying so hard not to live their mother’s life—yet there she was, slowly, inevitably evolving into their mother.

  Whenever the tracks curved, the train’s metal wheels shrieked in protest. Even though there were plenty of empty seats, Susie chose to stand, balanced against one of the vertical poles. Her muscles were a little stiff, especially in her shoulders and her thighs. Eddie had just a bit too much heft. He was always coming into Nico’s and ordering a slice of pizza—so he could see Susie, he claimed, but honestly, he didn’t have to order a jumbo slice of Sicilian with everything if all he wanted was to see her. Ten pounds, fifteen at most—lay off the pizza, add a little exercise, and he could lose the weight without suffering inordinately. If she ever believed she had a relationship with Eddie, something real, something that implied a future, she’d get him organized into a proper regimen.

  He’d appreciate it, too, wouldn’t he, she thought with a sarcastic snort. “Gee, Susie, I’m so glad you love me enough to turn into a shrew, nagging me not to eat that extra-big slice with the works.”

  The train whined as it rolled into the Seventy-Second Street station. Susie was the first one out the door. Eddie faded from her mind as she focused on her more immediate situation. What disaster could have arisen that would make Julia want to murder Grandma Ida?

  Actually, Susie could think of lots of possibilities. Grandma Ida bugged the hell out of her. She didn’t favor murder as a way to resolve problems, but if Grandma Ida were removed from her life, Susie wouldn’t have to spend so much time and energy dreading her.

  All right. She didn’t exactly dread Grandma Ida. She just…resented her. Grandma Ida had never left any doubt that she considered Julia a vastly superior specimen of granddaughterhood. She’d always criticized Susie. As a child, when Susie sat at Grandma Ida’s imposing dining room table for a Passover seder and Grandpa Isaac would drone on and on in what sounded more like gibberish than Hebrew, she’d get bored and swing her feet under her chair, and Grandma Ida would humiliate her by interrupting the gibberish to announce, “Susie, stop kicking.”

  Julia never kicked.

  But being scolded for kicking wasn’t the worst of it. When Susie had gotten B-pluses in school, Grandma Ida had called her an underachiever. When Susie had set the table, Grandma Ida had chided her for not folding the napkins symmetrically. When Susie had run up and down the hall, Grandma Ida had yelled at her for making too much noise and failing to act ladylike. When Susie had drawn pictures to hang on the refrigerator, Grandma Ida had pointed out all the flaws: “This bush has blue leaves on it. Why did you put blue there? Leaves are green.”

  Susie had always believed leaves could be blue. She’d believed buttons could be soldiers and a sewing box could be used to stage an imaginary war. She’d believed that a cookie before supper did not necessarily spoil a person’s appetite. She still believed that writing poetry was a higher calling than marketing bagels and lox to yuppies.

  “Poetry?” Grandma Ida would sniff. “You can’t eat poetry, can you?”

  So if there was going to be a homicide involving Grandma Ida today, Susie definitely wanted to be there to witness it.

  A few blocks north of the subway station, she spotted the Bloom Building. Above the broad ground-floor display windows chaotically crammed with what appeared to be at least one of every single product in the store’s inventory, a banner sign circled the building with Bloom’s-Bloom’s-Bloom’s painted in white letters against a dark-brown background. The repeated names sloped upward, each B at the bottom of the sign and each s banging against the top edge. For some reason, the effect made Susie think of the Rockettes, a line of dancers all leaning back and kicking high.

  She knew the store. It had changed over the course of her life, but so had she. She wasn’t the three-year-old she used to be, chasing her big sister along the aisles, her flailing hands swiping at boxes of crackers and delicately balanced pyramids of sardine tins. Bloom’s had grown up, too. Sometime in the eighties, the linoleum floors had been replaced by hardwood floors that looked simultaneously more rustic and more elegant. Varnished oak shelves had appeared where once uninspired metal shelving had stood. The second floor had been reborn as a kitchenware center, walls hung with copper-bottom pots and cast-iron skillets, displays jammed with potato peelers, apple corers, egg slicers and rice steamers, counters crammed with bread makers, yogurt makers, pasta makers, melon-ball makers, ice-cream makers and any other kind of maker a person might want in her kitchen.

  So much stuff. It boggled Susie’s mind that her family had been able to accumulate a significant fortune by selling people four different kinds of specialized cheese slicers when any old knife would get the job done.

  Or corkscrews. These had been articles of great fascination to her as a teenager, when sneaking the occasional bottle of wine with her friends had been considered the ultimate triumph. Bloom’s sold about a dozen different kinds of wine bottle openers, from the basic portable corkscrew model to hundred-dollar gadgets. Susie used to fantasize about owning a wine bottle opener—any style would do—but of course she couldn’t ask her father to bring one home from the store for her. Nor could she purchase one herself. In those days, all the clerks had known the boss’s daughters, which meant they’d also known Susie was years below the drinking age and had no legitimate use for a corkscrew.

  She could legally drink wine now, and she owned a simple corkscrew with “Nico’s” etched into it, from the pizza place. As for all the other kitchen gizmos sold at Bloom’s, well, she and her roommates didn’t do that much cooking. Their kitchen wasn’t much bigger than the average shower stall; they couldn’t all fit into it at the same time. They went through a lot of coffee and tea, and the refrigerator was usually full of bottled water, clementines, leftover sushi and Caitlin’s nail polish, which she claimed lasted longer if it was kept cold. Susie got free dinners at Nico’s, and other than that, she lived on cereal, yogurt and fresh fruit. Most of the meals she knew how to cook weren’t worth eating, at least not the way she cooked them.

  Entering Bloom’s, she acknowledged that if she lived uptown, she’d stock her fridge with gourmet cheeses. Bloom’s was a study in indulgence run amok. Only the sort of people who needed four different kinds of cheese slicers would demand seven different kinds of extra-sharp cheddar, imported from upstate New York, Vermont, Wisconsin, England, Ireland, Canada and Australia. Australian cheddar cheese, she thought with a faint shudder. A big hand-printed sign announced that the Australian cheddar cheese was priced at a special discount. Susie wasn’t surprised.

  She wandered farther into the store. The Sunday-afternoon crowd included lots of tourists—people from the outer boroughs and New Jersey for whom Bloom’s was worth a special trip to Manhattan. They carried canvas totes with “Bloom’s” stenciled onto the cloth, the word angled just like on the sign outside. People actually bought these totes and used them whenever they made the pilgrimage to Bloom’s, as if the tote marked them as cognoscenti.

  Real cognoscenti lugged their Bloom’s purchases home in free plastic bags.

  The store might have changed, but its aromas were the same as she remembered from her childhood. The cheese section smelled dense and earthy. The coffee section smelled dark and rousing. The bread section smelled the best—rich and crusty.

  She was nearing the bakery department when she spotted Julia’s bright-red pashmina scarf. Julia had spent way too much money on that thing. Susie had told her she knew a guy on Houston Street who sold pashmina scarves for less than half of what Bloomingdale’s charged, but Julia preferred to be ripped off by fancy department stores. “Who is this man on Ho
uston Street?” she’d asked indignantly. “How do you know he’s not selling stolen merchandise?”

  “I take his word for it,” Susie had said.

  “And how do you know it’s really pashmina? It could be just regular cashmere.”

  “If a person can’t tell the difference, why pay more for it?”

  Julia had shaken her head, as if gravely dismayed by her sister’s lack of class.

  The scarf was pretty, a vivid clutch of color underlining Julia’s pale face. She was always pale, so Susie didn’t take her chalky complexion as a sign of disaster. And her hands didn’t seem to have any blood on them, so Grandma Ida was probably still alive.

  Susie worked her way around a trio of overweight women braying to one another about the nuances of virgin olive oil and extra-virgin olive oil in heavy Bronx accents. She almost paused to listen. She’d always wondered how a thing could be extra virgin. Either it was virgin or it wasn’t, it seemed to her. Being extra virgin was like being a little pregnant.

  But she continued on to her sister, who looked, if not apoplectic, deeply concerned. She was studying a rack of small olive oil bottles as if searching for the meaning of extra virgin. Susie sidled up to her and tapped her shoulder. “Hi.”

  Julia flinched, spun around and relaxed. “Look at this.” She pointed to a slender bottle featuring a painfully tasteful label. “Fifty-nine dollars for this.”

  “Fifty-nine dollars?” Susie squinted at the bottle. Olive oil. Six ounces. Extra virgin. “Why would anyone pay fifty-nine dollars for that? One salad and it’s gone.”

  “I think you use it a teaspoon at a time.”

  “For that price, it ought to be in a crystal bottle with a stopper, so you can dab it behind your ears. Lucky I found you here. I thought we were supposed to meet by the olives, not the olive oil.”