Authors: Judith Arnold
Julia hauled her cell phone from her purse. “I’ll call her, and if she’s home I’ll tell her we’re coming up.”
Susie nibbled on her bagel and issued a silent prayer that her mother wouldn’t answer. God must not have been paying attention, because in the time it took her to swallow, Julia was saying, “Mom! You’re home! Wonderful!”
Wonderful,
Susie thought grimly.
Just wonderful.
J
ay Bloom steered his BMW Z3 coupe down the ramp to the garage beneath his East Sixty-Third Street apartment building. A few degrees warmer and he might have put down the convertible top. But while it was a bit too chilly for top-down driving, it hadn’t been too chilly for golf.
He adored golf. A nice Jewish boy, born and reared in the heart of Manhattan, and he’d fallen deliriously in love with this
goyishe
suburban sport. Until four years ago, he’d never even swung a club, except for miniature golf with the boys on family vacation trips to Point Pleasant, New Jersey. But then his attorney had invited him out to Great Neck one Sunday for a round of golf, “to celebrate your divorce being finalized.” Jay had definitely been ready to celebrate, so he’d accepted the invitation.
He’d been dazzled by the beautiful setting, all those gorgeous rolling lawns, the meticulously groomed trees and ponds and sand traps, the discreet paths and white fencing. For a city dweller, being surrounded by such lush greenery was a treat,
and Jay always responded to visual appeal, whether in a location, a car, a woman or a Web page layout. But even more than the splendid scenery of the golf course, what Jay loved was swinging a club, feeling the muscles expand and contract in his shoulders and along his spine, the shift of balance in his hips, the liberating sweep of his arms and that fat, satisfying
thwack
as his club hit the ball.
Athletics had always come easily to him. It didn’t surprise him that by the eighteenth hole of his divorce celebration he was able to drive the ball three-hundred-plus feet with consistency, any more than it had surprised him eight years ago when he’d tried squash for the first time and wound up beating the photographer, a fellow fifteen years Jay’s junior, who shot the layouts of gift baskets and braided bread that appeared in the Bloom’s catalogs. Or twelve years ago, when Jay had strapped on a pair of skis for the first time at Hunter Mountain and by the end of the day had figured out how to use his edges to make clean turns.
These skills came naturally to him. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t a jock.
But now he was a member of the Emerald View Country Club out on the island, and the owner of a magnificent set of titanium golf clubs for which Wendy had bought little socks with breakfast pastries embroidered on them: a bagel, a croissant, a muffin, a doughnut, a Danish—“They reminded me of Bloom’s,” she’d explained. And on the first sunny Sunday in March, Jay had spent the day out at Emerald View with Stuart, being the suburban golfer.
If his mother knew he spent his Sundays golfing on Long Island, she’d hold it against him. She was a tightly clenched woman with a lot of what Martha, his first wife, would call “issues.” After Ben died last year, the old lady had become even more tightly clenched and issued.
He wasn’t finding fault that she’d grown crankier since Ben’s death. He had two sons; he couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to lose one of them. He missed Ben, too. He’d
grieved, he’d mourned, he’d sat shivah at his mother’s house for the week, wearing a cheap black necktie with a symbolic rip in it. It was terrible that Ben had died. It stank. Tragic. Awful.
But life went on, and not playing golf wasn’t going to bring Ben back.
He waved to the garage attendant on his way to his reserved space. He had to pay extra for the privilege of parking his own car, but he considered the expense more than worth it. With his own parking space, he never had to wait for one of the attendants to shuffle the cars around, jiggling this one here and that one there in order to free up a car buried in the back. The reserved spaces were right in the front, just past the gate, and Jay could come and go at will. He liked that.
In fact, he liked a lot about his life right now: his pretty wife, his seven handicap, the tiger-purr of the Z3’s highly tuned engine and the fact that the year of mourning was finally over. Now even Ida might be ready to accept that life went on.
Life wasn’t the only thing that went on, either, he thought as he climbed out of the car, pulled his clubs from the trunk and wiped an errant fingerprint from the chrome latch with the knitted sleeve of his jacket. Bloom’s also went on.
He had been more or less running the business single-handedly all year. Oh, sure, Sondra butted in every now and then, meddling and carping and muttering, “Ben always did it
this
way. Ben reconciled the inventory lists using
that
format,” as if Jay didn’t know computers better than she did. But he had essentially run the show, and now that a year was up, Ida was going to have to name him president.
He’d never fill Ben’s shoes, of course. Younger brothers never got to fill their older brothers’ shoes, never got to be the Number One Son, never served as first in line to the throne…but when older brothers passed on, younger brothers moved up. It was simply the way of things. He’d understood it when Ben was alive, and he understood it now.
On the seventh day of shivah after Ben had died, Myron Finkel, Ida’s accountant since forever, had asked her about who
was going to become the company’s president now. Ida had peered up from her stool—she’d gotten a sudden surge of religion with the death of her firstborn, and had insisted that the immediate family sit on low stools instead of the comfortable upholstered sofas and chairs in her spacious living room—and said, “For a year I’ll be in mourning. When that year is up I’ll make decisions.”
The year was up now, and the decision would be made. Jay would be the president of Bloom’s.
It was going to feel good. To take on the office, the power, the prestige…Oh, yeah. It was going to be sweet. Sweeter than cruising the Z3 down the winding, tree-lined driveway of Emerald View with the first hints of new grass dotting the fairways as winter thawed away. Sweeter than sinking a driver into a ball and watching it soar in a perfect arc through a weekend-blue sky and land on the green. Sweeter than telling Sondra to go
shtup
herself, because he was going to be doing things his way from now on.
Very sweet.
He could hardly wait.
Stepping out of the elevator, Julia saw Aunt Martha emerging from her apartment. She would have dived back into the elevator and slapped the Door Close button, but Susie was right behind her, blocking the way, and by the time Susie realized that Aunt Martha was out there and that escaping back into the elevator would be a prudent move, Aunt Martha had spotted them.
“Girls,” she said in a growl that seemed to seep through a bed of gravel in her throat. Martha was tall, with a football-shaped head—a narrow forehead and chin widening into her cheekbones—and eighteen inches of gray-streaked brown hair rippled down her back like yarn with kinks in it. She wore a dowdy skirt, thick, ribbed stockings and Birkenstock sandals. She’d wrapped around her an outer garment that looked like a wool blanket with armholes cut into it, and she carried a can
vas tote bag stenciled with the women’s power symbol. Earrings that resembled the contents of a man’s trouser pocket—clusters of coins and lint—dangled from her ears. She looked as though she were heading to the nearest bazaar to haggle over the price of a camel.
“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.