Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  She was wearing her favorite black jeans—for which she’d paid only forty dollars at a denim emporium above an Indian restaurant in the East Village—along with a teal T-shirt and her black denim jacket, which Caitlin and Anna had jointly given her for her twenty-fifth birthday. She’d donned hoop earrings, a silver bangle that was sort of David Yurman-ish, only a bit more industrial-looking and a lot cheaper, black leather sneakers and a touch of black eyeliner. She wasn’t sure nubile would describe her, but she felt good about her appearance. Her haircut was truly a miracle—nearly a month old, and it still looked great.

  Up ahead she saw the store, with its sign of high-kicking Bloom’s-Bloom’s-Bloom’s extending across the top of the showcase windows. She took a couple of deep breaths to steady her pulse, shivered as the lines of her poem—which had not been deemed worthy of the two-hundred-fifty-dollar prize, damn it—flashed across her brain like the electronic headlines gliding around the skyscraper at the center of Times Square, and marched toward the store.

  The familiar aromas of Bloom’s wrapped around her as she stepped inside: cheese, warm bread, coffee, parsley. Honey and vanilla. Olives and onions. An indigestible stew of fragrances, yet they didn’t clash. They swirled around one another in a chaotic ballet that made her hungry. That puny orange hadn’t been much of a breakfast.

  She’d simply have to buy a bagel.

  Smiling to herself, she moved farther into the store. As always, it was crowded, but the crowd was different on a Thursday morning from what she usually found when she visited. The people meandering up and down the aisles, steering carts or carrying plastic baskets, looked not like tourists but like native New Yorkers—retirees and young mothers on outings with their toddlers. Susie was surprised by the number of cutting-edge strollers clogging the aisles. The women pushing them were trim and well made up, clad in Banana Republic and L.L. Bean and wearing blindingly large diamonds on their ring fingers. Their children were just too precious in their Baby Gap outfits, sucking on high-tech pacifiers.

  The women all looked older than Susie. A good thing, since she was years away from settling down and having children—and when she did, she wouldn’t have state-of-the-art children. No, her babies would be scruffy and energetic, like her. They would refuse to sit sedately in their Mercedes strollers and Jaguar strollers, but would instead race up and down the aisles the way she used to, terrifying the clerks and making the customers either gasp or giggle. She expected to have utterly wonderful children.

  She might just skip the husband part, too.

  She moved as directly as she could to the bagel counter, veering around babies in unbearably cute caps and plodding elders who clogged aisles while they bickered over whether the sesame breadsticks were a better deal if they bought the fourteen-ounce package instead of the eight-ounce package. She swept past the coffee corner and the gourmet bottles of olive oil priced as if they were liquid gold, reached the bagel counter—and he wasn’t there.

  How dared he not be there? Had Julia fired him?

  Maybe he’d quit. Maybe he’d been so terribly underpaid he’d walked out. Why hadn’t Julia done something about the salaries of the bagel workers?

  The older fellow who’d been working the bagel beat last time Susie was at Bloom’s stood behind the counter today. Perhaps he’d been unable to quit. Perhaps he had a wife and kids and a mother crippled by arthritis, all of them crammed into a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, and he couldn’t afford to walk away from Bloom’s, even though that rotten bitch of a president, Julia Bloom, exploited her workers.

  Susie would organize them. She’d bring in union representatives, and if Julia balked, she’d design rhyming picket signs for them. That would teach her sister to let a Godiva-quality employee get away.

  She strode to the counter, and the exploited laborer on the other side gave her a smile. “What can I get you, sweetie?”

  “Actually, I was wondering about another guy who works here sometimes.” Or used to, she almost added.

  “Another guy, huh?” He rubbed his index finger along the seam where his cheek met his bulbous nose. “Don’t tell me he broke your heart. You’re too pretty to let any man do that to you.”

  In spite of herself, she smiled. “He hasn’t had a chance to break my heart yet,” she explained. “I need to find out his name.”

  “His name.” The man nodded as if this were the most ordinary request in the world. “Well, we’ve got a good four, five guys who work here. Couple of ladies, too, but you did specifically mention that it’s a guy.”

  “He’s got longish blondish hair, green eyes…in his twenties, I’d guess.”

  “Now, that sounds like about five different guys who work here,” the man said.

  For a moment she believed him. Then she realized he was teasing her.

  “That’d be Casey,” he said.

  “Casey?” What a divine name. Much better than Engelhoffer—or even Studman. “Casey What?”

  “Now, I don’t know about giving you his last name. I don’t think that would be right.”

  A white-haired woman in a garishly colored warm-up suit, the fabric of which hissed when she walked, approached the counter. Susie generously stepped aside so he could serve her. She wanted two of everything, and then she wanted to change her mind about half her selections, and then she wanted to complain about the freshness of the bagels she’d bought at Bloom’s last week: “They were fresh, but not fresh fresh, you know what I’m saying? Make sure these are fresh fresh, Morty. I’m not kiddin’ around.”

  “Fresh fresh,” he said with a nod. He caught Susie’s eye and winked, then pulled one of the raisin bagels out of the bag. “This one feels fresh, but not fresh fresh. I’ll put in another. There, that’s better,” he concluded, sliding a different raisin bagel into the bag. “Will that do it for you, sweetheart?”

  “Don’t get fresh with me,” she snapped, taking the bulky bag and dropping it into her cart. She pushed her cart away from the counter, muttering.

  “Is she a regular?” Susie asked.

  “She’s a fine gal,” he said. Susie decided she liked him—for protecting Casey’s identity and for not speaking ill of a fussy customer. If she ran Bloom’s, she’d make sure he got a good salary and excellent benefits.

  “So…about Casey. Can you tell me his shifts?”

  “He’s here now,” he said. “He’s downstairs checking on the new batches, which—” he leaned forward conspiratorially “—will be even fresher fresh, once they come out of the ovens.”

  “I’ll remember that. In the meantime,” she said, feeling much better now that she knew Casey was in the building, “I’ll take an egg bagel.”

  “You got it.” He used a waxy square of tissue to protect the bagel he lifted out of the bin for her.

  “Thanks.” She crossed to a cashier, paid for it and left the store.

  One of the outdoor basement entries was open, the heavy steel doors yawning wide against the sidewalk, the room at the bottom of the steep metal stairway bright with light. The outside entries were used by truckers delivering stock; they were equipped with both stairs and conveyor belts. Bloom’s staff had access to an indoor stairway and a freight elevator, but she’d always loved the sidewalk entrance. When the steel doors were shut and flush with the sidewalk, they seemed mysterious. They rattled and echoed when stepped on; they were strangely textured and rusty-looking. She could pretend they were the portals to hell.

  She knew that what was going on underneath them was not hell, but a bustling world of shelves and hand trucks and a separate kitchen area where the heat-n-eat meals, the roast meats and the salads, the knishes and the kugels were prepared, and where the breads, bagels and specialty cakes were baked so they would be fresh fresh when they reached the shelves upstairs. She’d rarely been allowed into the basement as a child, but every now and then she’d managed to sneak in. She’d loved wandering through the maze of shelving, counting the inventory, comparing the packagin
g.

  She’d loved even more venturing into the kitchen, where she definitely hadn’t belonged. The cooks would yell at her—it was too dangerous for a little girl to be there, what with all those hot surfaces and sharp implements. But oh, the aromas. The sight of dishes being prepared—not just the traditional Jewish foods but pasta salads, potato salads, couscous with chopped onions and peppers, rotisserie chickens. She would stand in the doorway, as quiet as she could manage, and take it all in, wondering why once she went upstairs to her family’s apartment she’d find nothing as exotic as the foods being cooked here. No couscous for her family’s dinner. No chopped liver and pickled herring and latkes. If Sondra was going to serve a rotisserie chicken for dinner, she’d buy it at the supermarket down the street, where it was cheaper.

  Susie stared at the open doors for a moment, gnawing on her bagel as she contemplated her options. She might not be a child anymore, but she still wasn’t allowed down there. The people who worked now for Bloom’s probably didn’t realize she was a Bloom. If she went downstairs, they might arrest her for trespassing, and then she’d have to tell them who she was, and then they’d be embarrassed and worried about their jobs.

  But he was down there. Her deluxe chocolate. Casey.

  With a shrug, she descended the stairs and ducked behind one of the towering shelves when she heard a couple of guys approaching, their conversation accompanied by a squeaking wheel on one of the hand trucks. They were discussing the Knicks in tones of great disgust, as if they believed they could have done a far superior job against the Cleveland Cavaliers last night. She waited until they’d climbed the stairs, then slipped out from behind a shelf full of dried gourmet pasta—why gourmet pasta? This was Bloom’s, not Bloomicelli’s—and headed for the door leading to the kitchen.

  It was cracked open, and she inched it wider, until she could peek around it. Several middle-aged women wearing yellow smocks and shower caps mixed salads in huge stainless-steel bowls. Across the way the wall was filled with industrial ovens.

  There he was, pulling trays of hot bagels out of one of the ovens and sliding them onto a six-foot-tall rack on wheels. Once the rack was full of trays, he would wheel it to the freight elevator and bring it upstairs so the trays could be emptied into the bins behind the bagel counter.

  He didn’t have to wear a shower cap, thank God. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and his apron was a classic style: white bib, straps tied at his waist, hem dropping to his knees. Under the apron he had on a slate-gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up and faded blue jeans.

  He had the kind of legs jeans had been designed for. Seventy-dollar jeans or twenty-buck irregulars—it didn’t matter. What mattered was the way the denim traced the shape of his butt.

  A slow sigh escaped her.

  Casey.

  Smiling to herself, she tiptoed past the door and around to the elevator. She waited with barely contained patience until he emerged from the far door of the kitchen, wheeling the towering rack of bagels in front of him. He couldn’t possibly see her around the rack, which was fine.

  He pressed the button, and the door slid open at once. She slipped inside. He pushed the rack in, followed it into the dreary but spacious car and pressed the button to make the door close.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Another man might have jumped. Another man might have seen her and gone ballistic, and harangued her about how many safety regulations she was breaking—to say nothing of her trespassing and, for all he knew, stealing inventory.

  Casey wasn’t another man, though. He stared at her for a moment, then frowned, then smiled slightly. “Do I know you?”

  “You sold me a bagel two weeks ago,” she said, holding up the half-eaten bagel she’d bought upstairs. “You said I was nubile. My name is Susie.”

  “Okay,” he drawled.

  “And your name is Casey.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So I thought, maybe we could get to know each other.” Susie was missing the shyness gene—at least, that was what her mother had always said. She herself wasn’t sure it was genetic; Julia and Adam were both endowed with a share of shyness. Maybe it was a result of birth order. Being the middle child, she had always opted to go after what she wanted. Julia got attention for being the eldest, Adam for being the youngest. Whatever Susie got, she got by helping herself.

  Casey contemplated her as the elevator rose. His eyes looked deceptively drowsy; she could see, beneath his half-mast lids, eyes that were sharply focused on her.

  “In what way did you want to get to know me?” he asked.

  The elevator bumped to a halt. “Like, we could go get a coffee and talk?” she suggested. “Or maybe catch a movie, or a poetry slam. Or,” she added when none of those suggestions ignited any obvious interest in him, “you could come to my grandmother’s seder.”

  “Your grandmother’s seder.”

  “It’s a mob scene. One more mouth to feed wouldn’t matter.”

  He laughed. He had a great-sounding laugh, dark and husky. “I hate matzo,” he told her. “It tastes like drywall.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never tasted drywall.”

  He laughed again. She realized he was holding the Door Close button.

  “When I release this button,” he instructed her, “you’re going to hurry down the hall to the door and outside. If anyone finds you in that hall, it’s bad news.”

  She considered telling him her last name—proof that she would be in no more trouble lurking in the back hall now than she’d been as a child scampering around the store. But his effort to protect her from punishment, rather than report her to store Security, was kind. And promising.

  “So, you just want me to leave,” she said, testing him.

  “You leave the building, walk around the corner to the front door and come back in. I’ll be in the bagel department.”

  “Okay.” He was still smiling, so she smiled back. “And then what?”

  He released the button. The door creaked open and he motioned with his chin that she was to exit.

  “Then what?” she persisted.

  “We’ll discuss your grandmother’s seder,” he promised, heaving the rack into motion and pushing it down the hall in the opposite direction.

  She felt her mouth spread in a triumphant grin as she strolled down the hall to the outer door. If Casey had the balls to attend one of Grandma Ida’s seders, he was definitely worthy of her undying love.

  At least for a while.

  7

  “You look pale,” Grandma Ida declared. “And what’s that on your lips? You think you’re going to get sunburn in my apartment?”

  Julia sighed. She’d come to Grandma Ida’s apartment a half hour early, just as Grandma Ida had requested. One of these days, she would learn to say no.

  But Grandma Ida was eighty-eight. How could Julia say no to someone that old?

  The air was heavy with the aromas of good things cooking. Lyndon had let Julia peek into the kitchen, where he and a friend—“Howard is Jewish and he’s a chef, so he knows from gefilte fish, as your grandmother would say”—were orchestrating the feast the family would pray over and then devour as soon as the sun set. Although Julia would have loved to linger in the kitchen, Lyndon had sent her on her way. “She’s in the living room, waiting for you,” he’d said.

  “How’s her mood?”

  “The usual.”

  Julia hadn’t considered that a particularly useful warning. Grandma Ida’s usual mood was inscrutable.

  Grandma Ida was dressed for the occasion in a long gray skirt, a cotton blouse with a quaintly rounded collar and a wool cardigan that might have begun its life as lilac but had faded to an uneasy gray. Her hair was a shapeless smudge of black—clearly one of Bella’s masterpiece coiffures—and she wore thick-soled leather oxfords. Gold bangles circled both wrists.

  “So, why are you so pale?” she asked.

  Because I’m working too hard, Julia wanted to answer.
But she couldn’t. Grandma Ida probably thought she wasn’t working hard enough at Bloom’s. Two brief visits a week did not epitomize a workaholic’s schedule.

  Julia sank back into the spongy cushions of the sofa, across a dark cherry wood coffee table from her grandmother, who sat with regal posture in a wingback chair. The sofa’s upholstery was soft enough to drown in. And damn it, Julia felt as if she were drowning.

  “It’s been a stressful few weeks for me,” she admitted.

  “Are you having trouble running Bloom’s? You’re the smartest of the bunch, Julia. If you can’t run it, there’s something wrong with you.”

  The only thing wrong with her was that she had a full-time job elsewhere. And the other only thing wrong with her was that she had no training or expertise in retail merchandising, and her heart pounded with dread whenever she neared her father’s office or glimpsed some new package of documents from the lawyers, and she still wasn’t clear on the difference between Greek and Turkish olives, let alone Iranian and Albanian olives, and she couldn’t get the bagel department numbers to add up.

  Now that she considered it, there were a lot of “only things” wrong with her.

  “It’s just a bit much for me,” she admitted.

  “It’s not too much. If you don’t take good care of Bloom’s, who will?”

  “My mother,” Julia said, attempting to keep her tone casual.

  “Your mother is all right, up to a point. But that point is over there—” she extended her left index finger in one direction “—and Bloom’s is over here.” Her right index finger pointed in the other direction.

  Reflexively, Julia tapped her two index fingers together, as if that might bring her mother and Bloom’s into proximity.

  “You need to put in more hours at the store,” Grandma Ida lectured her. “Jay tells me you’re invisible there, like a ghost floating in and out.”

  She should have known Uncle Jay would tattle on her. Didn’t he realize that if Julia wasn’t the figurehead president, Grandma Ida would have to align her index fingers and give the job to Sondra? Once she did, he would be in a weaker position than he was in now. Julia didn’t resent him the way her mother did. She actually liked some of his ideas, and she had faith that the Internet sales would eventually become more profitable. But he didn’t deserve to be president of the company—and whether or not Julia held that title was irrelevant.