“Hi, Aunt Martha,” Julia said politely. Susie echoed the words half a beat behind her.
“Going to visit your mother?”
“Yes,” Susie said, carefully avoiding eye contact with Julia. Where else would they be going? The only people they knew on the twenty-fourth floor of the Bloom Building were their mother and Aunt Martha, who had refused to give up the apartment when Uncle Jay divorced her. Allowing her to remain in their seven-room residence in the Bloom Building had been quite a sacrifice for him, but he’d consoled himself by buying a place just as big on the East Side and setting his new wife, Wendy, loose inside it. Wendy had decorated the entire place in Laura Ashley, a huge change from Aunt Martha’s decor, which tended toward terra-cotta and burlap.
“Where are you off to?” Julia asked, since Aunt Martha was trying so hard to be affable, something she had to put a real effort into.
“A poetry reading at the Women’s Center,” Aunt Martha told them. “Sharnay Clingan is reading. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?”
“Sharnay Clingan” sounded like a character from a cheesy science-fiction movie. “No,” Julia said, “but I’m sure she’s good.”
“She has her strengths, one of them being a marvelous sense of diction. Well, I’d best be off. I don’t want to get there late. You girls really should stop by the Women’s Center sometimes. Your generational cohort seems to think it’s unnecessary to be feminists, but it’s more important than ever. The fight has not yet been won.”
“We’re feminists,” Susie cheerfully assured her.
“Then, come to the Women’s Center. You’ll like it.”
Julia thought she’d like it about as much as she liked doing her income tax, but she didn’t say so. She also thought that if her aunt was such a committed feminist, she ought to call her nieces “women” instead of “girls.” “Thanks for the invitation, Aunt Martha,” she mumbled, starting down the hall to her mother’s apartment.
“Give Sondra my best,” Aunt Martha ordered them before stepping into the elevator and disappearing.
“Her best isn’t very good,” Susie whispered, as if afraid the elevator door would slide back open and Aunt Martha would overhear the insult.
“She hangs out with people named Sharnay Clingan. What do you expect?”
“Did she always give us the willies?” Susie asked, falling into step next to Julia. “Or is it just recently? I can’t remember.”
“She always gave us the willies.”
They’d reached their mother’s door and Julia pressed the doorbell. She wasn’t worried about Aunt Martha overhearing anything they might have to say. Grandma Ida, one floor above, was the one who worried her.
Grandma Ida wouldn’t hear them. The floors were thick. And anyway, Julia wasn’t going to say anything Grandma Ida didn’t already know.
Her mother swung open the door and beamed. “What a wonderful surprise! There I was, just sitting around this afternoon, doing the Times crossword puzzle and feeling lonesome, when all of a sudden my sweethearts telephone me from downstairs and say they’re coming up! It’s a mother’s dream come true!” She wrapped one arm around each of them and stepped back, simultaneously hugging them and pulling them into the foyer. They momentarily got jammed in the doorway, and then Susie moved forward while Julia moved backward, and they wiggled through without breaking free of their mother’s double embrace.
Sondra Bloom kissed each of them, then released them, took a step back and beamed at them. Julia contemplated how lucky she was to have been born to this woman instead of, for instance, Aunt Martha. Not that her mother was perfect. She could be abrasive, temperamental and melodramatic. She could damn with faint praise—and often did. And her rhinoplastic nose was too small for her face. Grandma Ida was right about that.
But she never dressed as if she were on her way to the bazaar to buy a camel. She wore flowing slacks and long sweaters that hid her age-widened hips, sensible flat suede loafers from Land’s End and a discreetly sumptuous tennis bracelet around her left wrist. Her hair framed her face in a tidy chestnut-hued pageboy, and she always layered her mouth with a subtle lipstick—to protect her lips against sunburn.
She also still wore her wedding band, which Julia considered touching, even though it would likely scare away potential suitors. If asked, Sondra would probably claim she wasn’t ready for suitors yet. Julia could respect that. She only hoped her mother would change her mind eventually. Sondra Bloom was still a vibrant woman, and if her entire life revolved around her children, every time Julia looked up her mother would be orbiting her like a nosy, hyperactive satellite.
“Susie, look at you! New haircut, right? It’s perfect. Let me see.” Rather than walking around Susie, Sondra lifted Susie’s hand and spun her like a music-box ballerina. “It’s perfect. Isn’t it perfect, Julia?”
She’d said “perfect” enough times to suggest she hated Susie’s haircut. “It looks great,” Julia said, pulling off her coat.
“You’re just glowing, Susie. The haircut really brings something out in your face.”
“She’s in love,” Julia interjected, pulling Susie’s denim jacket down her arms and carrying both coats to the closet. “With the bagel guy downstairs,” she added.
“I’m not in love with him,” Susie argued. “He picked out a very nice bagel for me, though.”
“So, you’ve eaten? Are you girls hungry? I’m sure I’ve got something…” She wandered down the hall to the kitchen, mumbling about what edibles she might have in stock.
“I’m always hungry,” Susie called after her, then shot Julia a hostile look. “I’m not in love with the bagel guy,” she said. “All I ever said was, he’s cute.”
“Yeah, sure. I was standing right next to you, Susie. I heard you hyperventilating.”
“That wasn’t love. That was lust. Too bad you don’t know the difference.”
Susie’s taunt irked Julia. It also irked her that she was hanging up Susie’s coat as well as her own. But if she didn’t hang it up, Susie would just toss it on the leather settee beside the mail table in the spacious foyer, and that would have irked their mother. The poor woman was going to be irked enough once Julia told her why they’d come. She didn’t need to be irked about uncloseted jackets, too.
“What is she going to feed us?” Susie asked, waiting while Julia shut the closet door, as if by doing so she was helping. “More bagels, do you think?”
“Carrot sticks, probably.” Sondra was usually on a diet. The Blooms had been blessed with vigorous metabolisms. Even if they did eat their merchandise, they wouldn’t get fat. But Sondra was a Bloom only by marriage, and she’d inherited the Feldman physique, which was unfortunately susceptible to such forces as childbirth, age, gravity and caloric consumption.
Susie wrinkled her nose and strolled down the hall with Julia. Although their mother’s apartment had a floor plan identical to Grandma Ida’s, it didn’t feel at all prewar. The walls were assorted shades of white, the furniture streamlined and modern and the artwork abstract, giving the rooms a chilly atmosphere. Sondra always claimed it was less an aesthetic choice than a practical one: modern furniture was easier to keep clean. “None of those little nooks and curlicues,” she explained. “None of those ornately carved feet to collect dust.” She had a woman who came in once a week to clean—it used to be twice a week when their father was alive, because he’d insisted on a high degree of tidiness in his residence. But the apartment was so big that their mother probably went weeks without entering some of the rooms. The place managed to stay neat—especially when Julia made sure Susie’s jacket was properly put away.
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.”
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br /> “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 sentiments. 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.
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