Blooming All Over

“Julia said we had to talk,” Susie reminded Casey.

“So talk.”

“I’m leaving town for a while,” she said. Her voice sounded wobbly again, hesitant, almost teary.

She was leaving town. He didn’t bother to ask how long “a while” was.
Goodbye
was all he had to know.

“I’m going to help my cousin make a movie.”

Her cousin was flakier than phyllo pastry. Running off to make a movie with him was the exact opposite of a picket fence.

“I don’t want to go,” she admitted. “I mean, I
do
want to go. I think it’ll be an interesting adventure. Maybe we’ll rent a truck.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say.
Bon voyage? Have a good life? Take another little piece of my heart?

“But I don’t want to leave you. I just feel…” She sighed shakily. “I feel like I don’t have a choice.”

“You do have a choice,” he disputed.

“Not the choice I want.”

“Okay.” He felt his emotions leaking out of him like hydraulic fluid out of an old car engine, leaving behind a collection of dry, rusting metal. “Go and make a movie.” He stood, gave himself a minute to make sure his legs were steady and strode to the door. He wanted to look back at her, one last glimpse. But it would only hurt.

So he opened the door and walked away without turning.

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Bloom’s Bulletin
Written and edited by
Susie Bloom

A fellow addicted to knishes

Found at Bloom’s all his favorite dishes.

He bought bagels, a blintz

And some stuffed cabbage, since

Bloom’s cuisine fulfills all his wishes!

Welcome to the May 14 edition of the
Bloom’s Bulletin
, which is jam-packed with tasty tidbits, recipes and—of course!—news about sales and specials throughout the store. Bloom’s has become the most famous kosher-style food emporium not just on Manhattan’s Upper West Side but all over the world by fulfilling our customers’ wishes.

All over the world? Believe it. Jay Bloom is the director of Bloom’s Internet and Mail-Order Services, which distributes Bloom’s Seder-in-a-Box, a package containing matzo, gefilte fish, horseradish,
charoset
, chicken soup with matzo balls, salt and Haggadahs—just add eggs, wine and an entrée for a complete seder. According to Jay, by mid-April, the store had filled Seder-in-a-Box orders from thirty-seven states and fif
teen foreign countries, among them Finland, Japan, South Africa, New Zealand, Bolivia and…are you ready?…the research station at the South Pole! Yes, Bloom’s has extended its reach into Antarctica. When an order arrived from the McMurdo Station on Ross Island, Bloom’s was able to get four Seder-in-a-Boxes prepared and ready for delivery by the New York Air National Guard, which serves the U.S. Antarctic Program. The seders arrived in time for the holiday, along with two complimentary bottles of Passover wine, Bloom’s gift to the intrepid researchers who live and work at the South Pole. Good
yontif!

Feeling bleu?

French cheeses are specially priced all this week at Bloom’s. Camembert, Port Salut, Brie, Roquefort—come on in, buy some cheese and keep the change!

Did you know…

The word
schmaltz
, which is used to describe music or a story that’s overly sentimental, is derived from the Yiddish word
schmaltz
, which means congealed fat. In Ida Bloom’s day, chicken
schmaltz
spread on a slice of dark pumpernickel was considered a gourmet treat. These days, the mere thought of it is enough to give most people heartburn. If you’re in the mood for
schmaltz
, listening to Rachmaninoff is a whole lot healthier.

Employee Profile:

Who’s that tall-blond-and-handsome fellow standing behind the bagel counter? None other than Casey Gor
don, co-manager of the bagel department. Casey studied at the Culinary Institute of America before transferring to St. John’s University, where he earned a degree in English. Ask nicely, and he might just recite a little Shakespeare while he counts a dozen sesame-seed bagels into a bag for you.

Since joining the Bloom’s staff three years ago, Casey has put his culinary-school experience to work by designing an assortment of new flavors of bagels. Thanks to him, Bloom’s sells pesto bagels, cranberry bagels, apple-cinnamon bagels and sour-yogurt bagels, along with the standard plain, egg, garlic and poppy-seed varieties. “Some flavors rotate in and out,” Casey says. “Some are interesting experiments that just don’t click. Others become very popular, so we make them a permanent addition to our inventory.” Among those that didn’t “click” he mentioned curry bagels and banana-cream bagels. His most recent surprise hit? Dill pickle bagels, which customers seem to love.

When he’s not dreaming up sensational new bagel flavors, Casey says he likes to play basketball, analyze movies and spend time with his girlfriend. What’s her favorite kind of bagel? “Egg,” Casey reports. “But she’s adventurous. She’ll try anything.”

Wise Words from Bloom’s founder, Ida Bloom:
“There’s a reason for everything, but some reasons are stupid.”

On sale this week:
pita crisps, all varieties of blintzes, smoked sable and more. Turn the page for details!

S
usie could have been using this time to contemplate the course of her life. Instead, she was driving a truck—which was a lot more fun.

It wasn’t so much a truck as a van on steroids. The rear seats had been removed, leaving a vast cargo space in the back. The front seat was elevated, the windshield broad and the steering wheel as big as a bicycle tire. She and her sister had rented the van from a downtown outfit called Truck-a-Buck, which specialized in cheap rates and vehicles that looked as if they kissed bumpers with slutty abandon. Among the van’s special features were an ashtray crammed with chewing-gum wrappers, a crack in the passenger’s-side mirror, mysterious streaks of dark red paint—or maybe it was blood—staining the driver’s-side door and an aroma of gasoline with notes of Lysol and barbecue sauce permeating the interior.

Susie loved the idea that she, a member of the Bloom family, a poet, a Bennington College alumna, the Bloom’s newsletter writer/editor—a position that came with the fancy title “creative director”—and a sometime pizzeria waitress, was driving a truck. It felt right.

It felt more right than mentally rehashing the conversation she’d had last night with Casey, when he’d asked her to move in with him.

Casey was wonderful, she adored him, he was without a doubt the sweetest, hottest, smartest guy she’d ever hooked up with. But merely thinking about living with him gave her the willies. So she decided not to think about it. She thought, instead, about inching her way through the ooze of traffic on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, wishing she were actually driving across the North American continent behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler packed with freight of incalculable value—gold ingots or high-tech machines or cartons of Ghirardelli semisweet chocolate.

It would be a lot easier to imagine if Grandma Ida weren’t riding shotgun beside her.

“You’re driving too fast,” Grandma Ida said. She sat strapped into her seat, her arthritic hands clenched in her lap, her hair so black it resembled a blob of licorice glued to her skull. Someone ought to talk to her about her stylist’s lack of skill with hair color. Someone
had
talked to her about it: Susie and her sister, Julia, had both mentioned to their grandmother that perhaps a new coiffure was in order, one that suited her face. Grandma Ida was eighty-nine years old, and for eighty-nine she looked amazingly good. But even if her face hadn’t been laced with lines, her eyes slightly faded and her neck pleated, the ink-jet hair wouldn’t work. She needed a softer color with variations in tone—some silver mixed in, some gray, natural colors that might have actually sprouted from a human scalp.

Grandma Ida should have gone in the car with Susie’s mother, Sondra; Julia; and her fiancé, Ron Joffe. All four of them could have fit comfortably in the Toyota Camry Joffe had borrowed from his brother, and Susie could have driven the van up to Cornell Univer
sity for her brother Adam’s graduation solo. She could have blasted Ben Harper and Ani DiFranco through the van’s admittedly feeble speakers and sung along at vocal-cord-popping volume.

Of all the configurations the family could have sorted themselves into for their journey, assigning Grandma Ida to the van rather than the car had made the least sense. Climbing into the high-riding vehicle had been as big a challenge for her as scaling Annapurna might be for an aging Sherpa. The seats were stiff and unforgiving, and the smell could upset an elderly woman’s delicate constitution. But Susie’s mother had wanted to ride in the car so she could discuss Julia and Joffe’s wedding plans during the trip, and everyone except Susie felt Susie should not have to make the four-hour drive to Ithaca alone.

For a person who shared a tiny one-bedroom walk-up with two other women, four hours alone would be a luxury. Of course, if Susie moved in with Casey, she wouldn’t have to share the tiny one-bedroom walk-up with Anna and Caitlin anymore.

No. She wasn’t moving in with Casey. He lived in
Queens
, for God’s sake.

“You’re driving too fast,” Grandma Ida said again.

“I’m driving three miles an hour,” Susie retorted. “It’s impossible to drive too fast on the Cross-Bronx Expressway.”

“You’re going faster than three miles an hour. You think I can’t tell? You think I don’t know from cars?”

Yes
, Susie almost answered. “This is a van, not a car.”

“It’s too big. Who needs all this room?”

“Adam does. He’s graduating from college. He’s got
four years’ worth of junk he has to move out of his dorm room.”

“Junk? You rented this van so he can move junk?”

“He doesn’t think it’s junk,” Susie explained.

“What is he, an idiot? All that money for a fancy-schmancy education, and he wants to move junk,” Grandma Ida muttered. “Where is he going to put the junk?”

“In Mom’s apartment. And then he’ll take it with him when he leaves for graduate school in September.”

“Graduate school.” Grandma Ida sniffed disdainfully. “Where’s he going again? That place with the chickens?”

“Purdue,” Susie told her. “And it has nothing to do with chickens. It isn’t even spelled the way the chicken company spells it.”

“Purdue.” Grandma Ida sniffed again. “I never heard from Purdue. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, right?”

“Indiana.”

“That’s what I thought. Who needs graduate school, anyway? I never went to college, and I made a life for myself. My Isaac, he never even finished high school, but he knew how to sell knishes. You don’t need graduate school with Indians to know how to sell knishes.”

“True—and if Adam wanted to sell knishes, he wouldn’t have applied to graduate school,” Susie pointed out. “He doesn’t want to sell knishes. He wants to get a Ph.D. in mathematics and become a college professor.”

“He should consider sales. You and Julia work at the store. It wouldn’t kill Adam to work at the store, too.”

“Julia’s the president of the store. I’m only a part-
time consultant.” Julia had given Susie a fancy title—creative director—in an effort to entice her into a fulltime job with the family enterprise. But she refused to quit her waitressing at Nico’s. Keeping that job reminded her of her roots—or, more accurately, helped her to escape her roots.

“I don’t know why you want to sell food downtown and not in your own family’s store,” Grandma Ida muttered.

Susie sighed. If she was going to have to listen to the old lady rant all the way to Cornell, the drive would be a very long one.

“As for Adam,” Grandma Ida continued, clearly warming up, “Isaac and I never got Ph.D.’s. We never even got Ph.A.’s or Ph.B.’s. And we built the biggest delicatessen in the world.”

If Susie were smart, she would keep her mouth shut, just nod and smile and let Grandma Ida run at the mouth. But she couldn’t help herself. “Bloom’s is not the biggest deli in the world.”

“The biggest
good
deli. We started with my parents’ pushcart—they were selling knishes from the cart, in all kinds of weather, you shouldn’t know from standing in the rain on a cold day in November and trying to sell knishes…”

Susie braced herself for the entire up-by-the-bootstraps saga. She’d heard it enough times to be able to recite it verbatim. Her lips moved, shaping Grandma Ida’s words as the older woman spoke them.

“Just a cart on Upper Broadway, that was all it was until Isaac and I moved the store indoors. And it grew, and we expanded, first to the storefront on one side of us, then to the storefront on the other side, until we took up half the block. I did the books, but your grand
father—” she wagged her index finger at Susie for emphasis “—he had a gift for selling. Borscht, gefilte fish, bagels, kishka—if it was edible, he could sell it. Chicken soup. I didn’t think we’d do so well with the chicken soup, but people got sick, they came into Bloom’s and Isaac would sell them chicken soup. And before you know it, they’d be feeling better.”

“Right,” Susie said wearily.

“Adam wants to be a doctor? Your grandfather Isaac was a doctor without college. People came in sick, he sold them chicken soup and they went home and got well. Without college he did this. Who could afford college? We were too busy working.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, your brother is going to the chicken school out there with the Indians to get a doctor degree, and your sister is marrying that reporter. And what are you doing with your life, Susie?”

“Right now, what I’m doing with my life is driving you to Cornell so we can see Adam graduate.”
And I’m listening to you—for which I deserve a medal
.

“You’re a waitress. All that education, and you work as a waitress.”

“I work for Bloom’s, Grandma. You know that.”

“Once a week.”

“More than once a week. I write and edit
Bloom’s Bulletin
. That takes a lot of time.”

“It’s an advertising circular.”

“It’s a newsletter with ads mixed in. Julia hired me to write it because I’m a good writer. And I redesigned the store windows.” And she wasn’t going to do a damn thing more for the store. Enough was enough.

From the time she was old enough to daydream about what she wanted to be when she grew up, she’d
resisted working at Bloom’s. Her father had been the president of the company until his death two years ago, and the store had been the pulsing heart of his existence. Her mother had worked side by side with him, and now she was working side by side with Julia, whom Grandma Ida had named president of the company last year. Her father’s brother, Uncle Jay, ran the store’s online business and its mail-order program. Enough Blooms had been sucked into the place. Susie preferred to live her own life, a life that had nothing to do with borscht, gefilte fish, bagels, kishka or any of the hundreds of other items that filled Bloom’s shelves: breads, gourmet coffees, overpriced olive oil, cookies and kugel, cheese and chopped liver and a spectacular array of kitchen gadgets—potato peelers, garlic presses, melon ballers, pepper mills, vegetable steamers and egg timers.

She just wanted to live downtown, go to poetry slams, stay up late drinking wine, have mind-blowing sex when the opportunity arose—and not make a capital-C Commitment, or do capital-S Something with her life. She just wanted to be herself and enjoy each day. Was that so much to ask for?

Apparently, if you were a Bloom, it was.

Adam felt Tash stir against him. “You’re not asleep?” she asked.

“No.”

“You always fall asleep after.”

“No, I don’t.” He knew he sounded gruff, but now wasn’t a good time for her to complain about their sex life. As far as he knew, that sex life was about to end. Sex, pot, music, freedom—every fun activity he’d indulged in over the past four years would become taboo
starting tomorrow. College graduation was supposed to be a joyous event, but in his case, graduation doomed him to spend the next three muggy, dreary summer months in his mother’s Upper West Side apartment, where he was sure that bringing a woman to his room and firing up even the skinniest little joint would create a family crisis so huge World War II would seem like a tiff in comparison.

He loved his family. But he loved them a hell of a lot more when they were two hundred miles away.

“Thinking about tomorrow?” Tash asked.

“Thinking about the day after tomorrow.” Tomorrow was commencement. He’d don his cap and gown, pose for photos, grab his diploma, load up the van Susie and Julia had rented and travel back to New York City. The day after tomorrow he’d wake up in his mother’s apartment.

Shit.

“It won’t be so bad,” Tash assured him. She stretched, and he tried not to stare at her body. She wasn’t fat, just solid, with lots of firm curves and dimpled knees. She ate a lot and didn’t care what she weighed.

That was what he liked best about her: she didn’t care. She didn’t care about impressing people. She didn’t care about high fashion. She didn’t care about being graceful or elegant or loved, or any of the things every other girl he knew cared about. She did care about the decimation of old-growth forests and the exploitation of Third World laborers, which was for the most part okay with him. She could get a little sanctimonious when she launched into one of her lectures about eight-year-olds stitching soccer balls in Bangladesh for ten cents a day—or maybe it was ten-year-
olds stitching soccer balls in Bangladesh for eight cents a day. Adam listened to her harangues, but they tended to bleed together in his mind.

So she was passionate about that stuff. Why shouldn’t she be? Her mother worked for Planned Parenthood and her father published a socialist newspaper, and they’d named her Natasha. She’d told Adam how they used to sing her to sleep with Woody Guthrie and early U-2 songs and explicate her bedtime stories for their political subtexts. “‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is about the exploitation of the proletariat,” her father would instruct her. “The wolf represents capitalism. When he devours her grandmother, it’s like management devouring the laborers.”

Adam didn’t agree with her about everything. He didn’t disagree with her about everything, either. Mostly he let her rant and then had sex with her. And he didn’t always fall asleep after. Usually, but not always.

In a matter of hours, his mother, his grandmother, his sisters and his future brother-in-law were going to drive onto the Cornell campus and bring his sex life to a crashing halt. He’d have one more night with Tash, and then he’d graduate and return to New York City with them.

Shit.

“I’m going to miss you,” he confessed, tangling his fingers into the frizzy brown curls that churned around Tash’s face.

“It’s just for the summer. In September, you’ll go to Purdue, and I’ll do meaningful work in Indiana, and we’ll be together again.”

“What kind of meaningful work? They don’t have old-growth forests in Indiana.”

“I’ll find something,” Tash promised. “I’m sure there are downtrodden people in Indiana. They live in Indiana, after all. By definition they must be downtrodden.”

He couldn’t argue that.

“So, is your mother going to be bringing bags of bagels with her?” she asked.

He’d told Tash about Bloom’s. Growing up in Seattle, she’d visited New York City once, but she’d never heard of Bloom’s until Adam had mentioned it. He found this bizarre. Everyone in the world had heard of Bloom’s. Tourists from Belgium, Brunei and Botswana visited the store and posed for photos outside its main entrance, holding kosher salamis. People from Yonkers and Massapequa and Bayonne showed up at the store at 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning to shop for the brunch they’d be eating later that day. A few years ago, a New York City guidebook had labeled Bloom’s “the eighth wonder of the world, and the wonder with the most cholesterol.”