Authors: Judith Arnold
“Susie, it’s me,” Julia’s voice came through the phone. “I’m sorry I’m calling so late. Are you at work?”
“It’s not that late and I’m not at work. What’s up?” Something was, if Julia’s tense voice was anything to
judge by. Susie stepped inside the cramped kitchen and opened the fridge, hoping to find an open bottle of wine in it. Life was sweet; a screw-top bottle half full of Chablis stood on the top shelf. Caitlin’s, probably; her palate was about as discriminating as that of the guy Susie often found sleeping it off in the alley behind Nico’s. Screw-top Chablis was probably Susie’s least favorite wine in the world—it tasted like water with a few mild pollutants mixed in—but wine was wine.
Tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder, she poured some wine into a tumbler and returned to the table. “I need to kill Mom,” Julia said. “Will you help?”
“Sure.” What were sisters for? Susie sat on one of the chairs and kicked her tired feet up on another. She used her toes to pry off her sandals, leaned her shoulders back and decided that the dining set she and her roommates had bought for fifty bucks from their upstairs neighbor three years ago, when he’d decided on a whim to quit his job as an auditor for the Transit Authority to work on a salmon boat in Alaska, was just barely worth what they’d paid for it. The back of the chair didn’t conform to her back at all, and the seat was hard and unmolded, making her uncomfortably aware of her hipbones. “Why are we killing her?” she asked before sipping from her glass.
“I told her Ron and I were going to have our wedding reception in Grandma Ida’s apartment.”
“You are?” Susie nearly choked on her wine. She nudged the pizza box to one side of the table and put down her glass, then swung her legs around to a different chair so she would have her back to Caitlin and Anna. She didn’t care if they overheard the conversation, but seeing them hunched over their feet, with
wads of cotton protruding from between their toes, was too distracting. Susie couldn’t afford to be distracted when her sister was telling her something so bizarre. “Why?”
“We weren’t planning on a big reception with a huge invitation list,” Julia explained. “And Grandma Ida’s apartment is spacious. We can fit everyone in. We figured the musicians could set up in the foyer, and we could do a buffet in the dining room, and everyone could mill around.”
“What did Grandma Ida say about this?”
“She said yes. So we decided to go for it. I want my wedding catered by Bloom’s, and we were really struggling to find a place where we could bring our own caterer in. Of course, Grandma Ida has no objection to letting Bloom’s cater the wedding.”
“Great.” Grandma Ida’s apartment gave Susie the creeps, but that was mostly because it was filled with so many memories of Grandma Ida criticizing her, Grandma Ida telling her to calm down, Grandma Ida complaining that she shouldn’t jiggle her legs so much while she was eating because all that jiggling made her drop crumbs on the floor. She probably wouldn’t be able to jiggle much in a bridesmaid’s dress—God only knew what Julia had in mind for her to wear—and she’d hardly be the only guest to drop crumbs on the floor. If Grandma Ida was okay with it, Susie had no objections. “So why are we killing Mom?”
“She went ballistic when she heard the plan. She wants me to have the wedding at the Plaza.”
“Big deal. It’s not her wedding.”
“It’s her daughter’s wedding, which she thinks is the same thing.” Julia sighed. “I told her the wedding was
going to be at Grandma Ida’s, and she went whining to Norman.”
“Norman?”
“Ron’s father. Her boyfriend. Only, he’s not her boyfriend anymore, because he told her it was up to Ron and me where to have the wedding, and she should stay out of it. At which point, I gather she blew up at him, and now they haven’t talked to each other for days and she claims it’s all my fault.”
Their mother had a boyfriend? Where had Susie been?
Up in Maine, communing with Linus and the potatoes. In Boston, standing ankle deep in decaying lettuce leaves at Haymarket Square. At Pine Haven, sitting on a rickety cabin porch and staring at the muddy water of Pine Haven Lake and convincing herself that home and family were wonderful, and perhaps marriage wasn’t the absolute worst thing in the world.
And all that time, while she was starring in Rick’s movie and rethinking her life, her mother was dating Ron’s father?
Apparently, her mother wasn’t dating him now, because he refused to meddle in Julia’s wedding plans. He sounded like a nice guy. “Look, Julia. It’s your wedding. If I’ve got to wear a gown, Mom can survive a party in Grandma Ida’s apartment. After a few drinks, she might not even know where she is.”
“I can only hope,” Julia muttered. “Meanwhile, she’s making me crazy. She was so happy with Norman, he was so intelligent, he was such a gentleman—by which I think she meant they weren’t sleeping together, thank God—and now they’re not talking because he refuses to support her in her
mishegas
.”
“So they’re not talking,” Susie said, then took a sip
of the wine and tried not to cringe. It tasted like piss water with a finish of tin. “It’s her
mishegas
, not yours.”
“Right. I’m going to have a wedding where the mother of the bride isn’t talking to the father of the groom.”
“Well, the mother of the groom isn’t talking to the father of the groom, either, is she?” As Susie recalled, Joffe’s parents were still fuming over their divorce, which had occurred twenty-something years ago. “It’s your wedding, Julia. Have it wherever you want, and serve whatever food you want. If Mom doesn’t like it, tough shit.”
“You don’t work two doors away from her office,” Julia pointed out. “She spent most of today giving me grief. Even Uncle Jay intervened. He told her to leave me alone. Who would have guessed that Uncle Jay, of all people, would come to my aid over something like this?”
“Uncle Jay loves you.” More than that, Susie thought, Uncle Jay hated their mother. However the family dynamics shook out, Julia should grab whatever allies she could find and hang on to them.
“Listen—could you come up to the store tomorrow? I know it’s not your usual day to be here, but I was hoping maybe you could talk to Mom.”
Susie shuddered, and not just from the wine’s metallic aftertaste. Julia was the sane sister, the mature one, the one who kept the rest of the family on an even keel. She was the fixer, the peacemaker, the minister of logic in a family that embraced rational thought with all the enthusiasm of French royalty facing the guillotine. If she couldn’t calm their mother down, Susie certainly wouldn’t be able to.
“How about Adam?” she suggested. “Maybe he can get through to her.”
“Adam is out of it,” Julia muttered.
“Out of it? What, is he getting stoned? While he’s living with Mom?”
“I don’t know about that. I doubt it. He’s just…
in love
.” Julia put enough ironic spin on those two final words to cause Susie’s head to buzz. Or maybe it was the bad wine creating that unpleasant hum inside her skull.
“Sure, but isn’t the lady he’s in love with out in Seattle eating tofu and braiding her leg hair?”
“No. He’s in love with Elyse, the ballerina, and she’s in New York, and she seems to shave her legs on a regular basis.”
“Really? What about Tash?”
“I think he sent her a kiss-off e-mail.”
“Ouch.” Susie had no great fondness for Tash, but breakups were often painful and sometimes tragic. If anyone should know, it was Susie. “Geez. It’s going to get ugly when they both settle in West Lafayette this fall. Or was Tash only planning to move there because she expected to be with Adam?”
“I don’t know if he’s going to Purdue, either,” Julia said.
“What?” Susie felt as if she’d returned not from New England but from the far side of the moon. How could so much have happened in her absence? How could her mother have grown so close to Joffe’s father that their falling-out would unhinge her? How could Adam have completely overhauled his plans for next year? How could Grandma Ida have agreed to host a wedding in her apartment?
If Susie was the sanest member of her family, her family was in major big trouble.
“So, will you come uptown tomorrow?” Julia pleaded.
Susie looked at her pizza box. She thought about the words scrawled inside it, the passion, the anger and sorrow, her soulful, lyrical outpouring inked onto paper towels, paper place mats and toilet paper from the ladies’ room. Much as she loved Julia and wanted to help her, she had problems of her own. One was how to piece together her poem. Another was how to piece together her heart.
“I can’t,” she said, ignoring the twinge of guilt at the understanding that she was abandoning her sister. It wasn’t as if Julia had no one else to turn to. She had Joffe. For all his curmudgeonly pretense, he was utterly devoted to Julia. If she asked him to slay their mother, his response would be to start sharpening a carving knife.
There was a time, Susie thought sadly, when she’d been certain Casey would sharpen a carving knife for her. There was a time she’d believed he loved her enough to do anything she asked of him—except the one thing she’d ever asked of him, which was to relax his hold on her. She’d never asked him to kill anyone, or to change his habits for her, or to rinse the little blond flecks of hair down the drain in the bathroom sink when he was done shaving. He knew enough to rinse the sink, anyway, but she’d never asked him to do that, or to wear his hair differently, or to skip his regular basketball games to spend time with her. She’d never asked him to treat her mother with deference or change his work hours or sit through a chick-flick with her.
She’d asked him only one single thing: to respect her
independence. And when she’d swallowed her pride and placed her independence on a sacrificial altar for him, what had he done? Nothing, other than stare at her as if she were the one with antennae and claws after she propped Linus against the wall of his entryway.
“Susie? Am I losing you?”
Susie could have pretended her phone’s reception was fading, but she was too honest for that. “I’m here,” she said. “I just can’t come to Bloom’s tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
Because she had problems of her own. Because she was pissed and pathetic. Because she didn’t give a rat’s ass where Julia held her wedding.
“Because I’ve got to put together a poem,” she said, eyeing the square white box on the table and wondering whether putting that poem together would make her feel better or worse.
“Come,” Julia said. “Bring the poem with you.”
S
usie strolled through Julia’s open office door, carrying a large white pizza box. No aroma emanated from it, so Julia doubted it contained anything edible. That was all right with her; she’d just polished off a sesame bagel and a mug of Bloom’s Kona blend, and she wasn’t in the mood for pizza.
What she was in the mood for was fulfilling her fantasy by flying to Vegas with Joffe and paying an Elvis impersonator to marry them. Yet seeing Susie imbued her with an inexplicable surge of optimism.
“I’m here,” Susie announced, dropping the box onto their grandfather’s old desk, which stood idle in the corner of the office. “I’ll talk to Mom if you want, but you’re going to have to let me spread my poem out in here so I can put it together.”
“That’s your poem?” Julia eyed the pizza box warily.
“Yup.” Susie straightened and spun around to face Julia. Susie looked better than she had in weeks—more color in her cheeks, the shadows under her eyes less obvious and her hair freshly cut into a brisk, breezy style. Along with her standard black jeans she wore an orange tank top—a burst of unexpected color.
Julia smiled. If Susie was coming out of her depression, she might be able to salvage Julia’s wedding. Julia
wasn’t used to having to depend on her kid sister to mend the family’s fissures, but at least Susie acted as if she had enough energy to tackle such a challenge.
“Are you going to talk to Mom?” Julia asked.
“Actually, what I thought…” Susie surveyed the office and raked her hand through her hair. Every lock slid back into its precise place. Where was she getting her hair done? Some hip downtown salon—Julia couldn’t remember what it was called, other than it was a midwestern city with a French-sounding name. Eau Claire? Fond du Lac?
“Actually, what you thought…” Julia prompted her when her sentence went unfinished for a full minute.
Susie nodded. “What I thought was, you should have a meeting.”
“A meeting?”
“You know, like one of your Bloom’s meetings.”
When Julia had become president of Bloom’s last year, she’d started chairing executive meetings. Her mother, Dierdre, Myron, Uncle Jay and sometimes Grandma Ida would attend—Susie, too, if she was involved in a Bloom’s project. At first, the third-floor denizens had considered the idea of gathering everyone into the same room revolutionary, if not downright incendiary. They much preferred to shout back and forth through their open doors than sit together in the same room and talk face-to-face. Julia had brought everyone around by serving bagels at the meetings. Delicious Bloom’s food had pacified them enough to let her manage the business in her own style.
Now, a year later, she didn’t hold meetings as often as she used to. Things ran more smoothly at the store, and she’d finally established herself in her position as the head honcho. But every now and then, she brought
Dierdre, Myron and various Blooms together in her office for a sit-down. She wished they had a conference room, but space on the Bloom Building’s third floor was limited. If Susie had to write the
Bloom’s Bulletin
from a desk tucked into an alcove in the hall, a conference room was out of the question.
“What kind of meeting?” Julia eyed the pizza box again. For some reason, she expected something to jump out of it when Susie opened it.
“A meeting of the affected parties. You, Mom, Grandma Ida—I guess Lyndon should be included, too. And Joffe, if he can make it.”
“Not his father, though,” Julia warned. Her mother and Norman Joffe weren’t on speaking terms, after all. In truth, Julia liked the current freeze between them better than the previous heat they’d been generating.
“He won’t be necessary. How about Joffe’s mother?”
“She won’t be necessary, either,” Julia said, realizing that she had somehow come around to believing this meeting was a good idea. “Do you think she knows her ex-husband took Mom out on a few dates?” God, what if she did? Wouldn’t
that
make for a pleasant atmosphere at the wedding? Vegas and an Elvis impersonator sounded better and better.
“Not your problem,” Susie reminded her. “Forget about it. So, are you going to organize this meeting?”
“What meeting?” Sondra Bloom’s voice resounded through the suite of offices.
“Wonderful,” Julia muttered, kissing goodbye her hope of reviewing a report she’d received earlier that morning from her seafood manager, who was having problems negotiating with their longtime pickled-herring supplier.
“Are we having a meeting?” Myron shouted from his office. He sounded awfully eager—probably because he lived for the free bagels Julia supplied at the meetings. Pink cranberry bagels were his favorite, especially when spread with pink strawberry-flavored cream cheese.
“It’s family,” Julia shouted back to him. “Go downstairs and treat yourself to a bagel if you want one.”
“What meeting?” Sondra shouted again. Just seconds after her voice swept through the open door she materialized in the doorway. Clad in an A-line jumper that emphasized her broad hips, she frowned at her two daughters. Ever since her latest blowup over the Plaza Hotel, frowning had been her expression du jour. “Are we having a meeting?” she asked.
“Let me call Grandma Ida,” Julia said. “If she’s available, we’ll have a meeting.”
“I don’t want a meeting with her,” Sondra retorted. “She conspired with my daughter behind my back.”
“Mom.” Julia swallowed a groan to refrain from saying what she was really thinking. Most of the words she’d need to articulate her opinions were bad, bad words.
“Mom, come with me,” Susie said, hooking her arm around their mother’s elbow and steering her to her own office. Over her shoulder, Susie added to Julia, “Call Grandma Ida. And Joffe, if you want him to be around for this.”
Julia watched her sister and mother disappear, then leaned back in her oversized chair and groaned again, allowing a few of those bad, bad words to slip out. She didn’t want a meeting. What she wanted was for her mother to let her have the wedding of her dreams. Was that really so much to ask for? She’d been a good
daughter. She’d brought her mother such
nachus
by graduating with honors from Wellesley, then excelling in law school, then accepting a miserable job at an extremely prestigious law firm, then quitting that job to take the reins at Bloom’s. She’d met a guy who was not only smart, sexy and affluent but also Jewish, and they loved each other and wanted to get married. Why wasn’t that enough to satisfy her mother? Why did the Plaza have to be a part of the deal?
All right. Susie was on the case. The least Julia could do was try to set up this meeting.
She started with Grandma Ida. Lyndon answered the phone and, after checking various schedules, announced that he and Grandma Ida would both be downstairs in fifteen minutes. She dialed Ron’s office and got his voice mail, then tried his cell phone and got that voice mail. She left a message about the meeting but assured him he didn’t have to attend. Actually, she’d prefer for him not to come. He’d been exposed to enough
mishegas
with her family. Any more, and he might decide he couldn’t bear to marry a Bloom.
She hung up in time to see Adam hovering in the doorway. His hair had gotten long enough that she’d asked him to start wearing a cap to work. He wasn’t involved in food preparation, but she tried to keep the rules uniform among all the staff. Today he’d obliged by tucking the longer front locks behind his ears and jamming on a Yankees cap. If his hair got a little longer, he’d be able to pull it into a ponytail like Casey.
Maybe she could convince him to try Susie’s salon. St. Louis? French Lick? She wished she could remember the name.
“I got this great idea,” Adam said, bounding into the office as soon as he saw he had her attention. “If
you organized the inventory by shelf height, you could adjust the shelves to different heights and fit more inventory onto them.” He grabbed a pen from her desk and started sketching diagrams of shelf heights on the back of the envelope the report about the pickled-herring merchant had come in.
He was well into his explanation when Uncle Jay showed up. “I heard you were setting up one of your meetings,” he said, sneering only the slightest bit. He thought her meetings were inane, and he’d made that opinion quite clear to her on more than one occasion, but he so enjoyed watching her spar with her mother that he attended all her meetings, apparently on the chance that he’d get to witness a fight.
“What meeting?” Adam asked, pen poised above an array of lines, arrows and numbers that resembled hieroglyphics to her. “I’ve heard about your meetings. Can I sit in?”
She didn’t bother to ask what he’d heard, or from whom. “It’s not a store meeting,” she said. “It’s just a family thing.”
“I’m family,” Uncle Jay said, strolling into the office and planting himself on the couch as though eager to reserve one of the more comfortable seats for himself.
“I’m family, too,” Adam said, shooting Julia a hopeful smile.
What the hell. With all the open office doors on the third floor, and all the kibbitzing, no meeting would be private, anyhow. “If you really care that much about where Ron and I get married, be my guest,” she conceded.
Adam continued drawing on the envelope for another few minutes. Then he clicked the pen shut and pre
sented the envelope to her with a flourish. “See?” he said.
She saw an envelope covered by a lot of indecipherable jottings. “We can discuss this later,” she said, thinking longingly of the report the envelope had once contained. She’d never get to it this morning, not with Adam and Uncle Jay already in her office and Grandma Ida and Lyndon heading in her direction, visible through the doorway. Grandma Ida rested her hand on Lyndon’s forearm, but she was definitely moving on her own power, using him not for balance but merely as an old-fashioned escort. Not that there was much old-fashioned about Lyndon, who looked dapper in crisp olive-green trousers, a shirt with a polo-player logo embroidered onto the chest pocket and leather moccasins, his hair neatly cornrowed and his eyes sparkling as he ushered Grandma Ida into the office.
Julia wheeled her chair out from behind her desk for Grandma Ida to sit in. The chair was too big for her, but she didn’t like sitting on the couch, which she said was like sinking into a vat of cold kasha.
Susie and Sondra must have watched for them from Sondra’s office, because they immediately appeared on the threshold. “Is everyone here?” Susie asked as Sondra entered, plopped herself into the kasha and glowered at Julia. “Where’s Joffe?”
“I left him a message. I don’t know if…” Julia trailed off when she spotted Dierdre behind Susie, towering in the doorway in her stiltlike high heels.
Why not include Dierdre? She was practically family, anyway. Julia smiled limply in welcome, and Dierdre followed Susie into the room.
People took a few minutes to arrange themselves. Adam courteously sacrificed his couch seat for Dierdre.
Susie usually sat on Grandpa Isaac’s old desk, but the pizza box she’d brought took up most of it, so she asked Adam to drag in some chairs from another office. Julia perched herself on a corner of her desk and tried to ignore the tide of hostility surging toward her from her mother.
At last, everyone was settled. Julia turned to Susie. This meeting was her idea; she could preside over it.
“Okay,” Susie said, hooking her feet around the legs of her chair, then unhooking them, then crossing one leg over the other knee and jiggling her foot. “I’m no expert on love, that’s for sure.”
“You’re going to lecture us on love?” Sondra groaned.
“
I’m
an expert on love,” Uncle Jay announced. “I’m married to the most wonderful lady, and that’s what love is all about. Julia, are we going to have bagels at this meeting?”
Before Julia could answer, Susie continued. “I’m not an expert, but the bottom line is, Julia and Joffe are in love and they’re going to get married, and if we love Julia, the most loving thing we can do is get the hell out of her way.”
Well, that was blunt. Julia would have been more diplomatic, and probably less effective. Susie had never cared if her family approved of her—the butterfly tattoo on her ankle, partly visible beneath the hem of her jeans when she bounced her foot, had caused grief and wailing among the family, but Susie wore that tattoo proudly—and she wasn’t aiming to win anyone’s approval now.
“Who’s in her way?” Sondra erupted. “We’re trying to make her wedding the best day of her life.”
“The best day of
your
life,” Susie argued. “Mom, it’s
her
wedding!”
“And her idea of a wedding is to jam a hundred fifty people into Ida’s apartment? What kind of cockamamie idea is that? People will be
schvitzing
, they’ll be spilling their drinks on the rugs, Lyndon’ll be running around like a maniac trying to keep order—”
“I was under the impression I’d be a guest,” Lyndon said, glancing at Julia.
“Of course. You and Howard—or whoever you’d like to bring.” Julia turned to her mother. “I’m hiring people to serve and clean up.”
“A hundred fifty people you’re going to cram into my mother’s apartment?” Uncle Jay blurted out. “What are you, crazy? We have a dozen people in the apartment for Pesach and it feels too crowded.”
“That probably has to do with the identities of those people,” Dierdre muttered. Julia silently agreed; when it was just the family, without non-Blooms to dilute them, their Pesach gathering could seem like a mob on the verge of rioting.
“Julia wants a wedding in my apartment. She should have it where she wants it,” Grandma Ida said, pumping her hand up and down emphatically. Her gold bangle bracelets clattered.
“She has a wedding there I’m not coming,” Sondra said.
Silence billowed through the room.
If Julia had half Susie’s guts, she’d say,
Fine. Don’t come
. Susie never let her loved ones blackmail her. She loved Casey, but when he’d tried to pressure her into marrying him, she’d stuck to her ideals, even at the cost of losing him. Julia should stick to her ideals, too.
But she’d always been the family conciliator, the one
who knocked herself out to make everyone else happy. If sticking to her ideals meant alienating her loved ones, she wasn’t sure she could do it. And the thought of her mother not attending her wedding…