Love in Bloom's Page 20

  “Knishes,” he suggested.

  She shook her head. “Knishes are a delicacy. Bagels are a staple. We’re selling tons of them, according to all the figures I’ve seen. More accurately, we’re turning over tons of inventory.”

  “But?”

  “But the income isn’t matching the number of bagels we’re selling. By my calculation, more than a hundred bagels are disappearing every week.”

  He wiped his fingers on a paper napkin and gestured for her to pass him her folder. “How much more than a hundred?”

  “It varies. Maybe a dozen dozen. What’s that called?”

  “A gross.” He opened the folder, took another bite of his bagel and chewed as he read. “One gross a week? What are we talking?” He blotted his fingers with the crumpled napkin, then set them loose on his adding machine, flicking on its motor and hitting the keys so rapidly his fingertips scarcely touched the buttons. “A little more than a hundred dollars a week. Not a catastrophic loss, sweetie.”

  Julia let the endearment go unchallenged. Myron had known her since her training-pants days. As long as he didn’t pinch her cheek, she’d cut him some slack. “In dollars and cents it’s not much. But it bothers me that it’s happening every week. I think someone’s stealing from the department.”

  “What, one of the bagel guys? You’ve got Morty Sugar-man there—he’s been with Bloom’s for ages. The man’s solid as a rock.”

  “Maybe he’s a rock who filches spare bagels.”

  “Or maybe it’s the younger one—what’s his name?”

  “Casey Gordon,” Julia muttered. Wouldn’t it be just swell if she had to inform her sister that the man she had a crush on was a bagel thief? “He’s the guy who introduced the cranberry bagels,” she told Myron.” He comes up with all the weird flavors.”

  Myron looked stricken. He gazed adoringly at his pink bagel. “I hope he’s not your problem.”

  “It’s more than just bagels, Myron. A few other departments are showing small but regular losses, too. The coffee department, the pastry department—everything’s selling, selling, selling, but the income isn’t matching up with the units sold. I’m guessing the reason no one has noticed this is that the sales numbers are so good. Nobody bothered to check and see whether the money coming in made sense.”

  “So.” Myron popped the remainder of his bagel in his mouth, swallowed and patted his lips with his napkin. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I was hoping you could give me some ideas.”

  “What am I, Scotland Yard? I’m an accountant, bubby. You got theft, you need to find out who’s stealing. Simple as that.”

  Julia snorted. As simple as what? Hiring an army of rent-a-cops to patrol the store? Installing hidden cameras like the ones they used in convenience stores and banks? This was Bloom’s they were talking about. Bloom’s had an aura, a style—and that style did not accommodate mechanisms for spying on shoplifters.

  Unfortunately, she doubted the problem was shoplifters. Shoplifters wouldn’t be moving merchandise out of the store so regularly, in such constant quantities. This was something else, something organized, something premeditated.

  Myron patted the folder as affectionately as he would have patted the hand of a loved one. “The store’s breaking even, right? It’s been breaking even for a while. So it’s not growing. This is not the end of the world. I stopped growing when I was fourteen, and I’ve lived another fifty years so far without any ill effects.”

  She was kind enough not to point out that he might not have looked quite so wretched in his plaid blazers and tacky bow ties if he’d kept growing into his late teens and wound up a few inches taller. Myron’s height wasn’t the issue. The store’s future was.

  At least she could talk to him. She couldn’t talk to her mother or Uncle Jay because she suspected they were part of the problem. Not that they were filching bagels from the bins. Her mother always bought frozen bagels from the cheap supermarket down the block when she wasn’t on one of her diets and swearing off bagels altogether. If she desired the superior quality of Bloom’s bagels, she could easily afford them. Julia had learned her mother was being paid one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars from the store.

  Uncle Jay was drawing two hundred thousand dollars, which Julia felt was unfair. Her mother ought to be earning as much from the store as Uncle Jay. She certainly worked hard enough. But everything in the Bloom’s corporate structure operated with all the rigor and precision of a Florida election. “It’s family,” Grandma Ida told Julia when she’d telephoned her to question the haphazard system. “All the money’s going into the same pot.”

  Julia had tried to argue that Uncle Jay’s pot was not the same as Sondra’s pot. She’d asserted that if a person was working, that person ought to know what her job was and what salary that job paid. The cashiers and clerks had titles and pay levels. Why not the Blooms?

  What made the salary thing even more of a mystery was that Julia’s mother was supposed to be receiving the same amount of money the store would have been paying her father if he were alive. The store accounts showed her earning twenty-five thousand dollars less. But when she’d discussed the shortfall with her mother, Sondra had said she was in fact receiving the full two hundred thousand a year. The difference was coming out of the Bloom Building income. “It’s to preserve your uncle’s fragile ego,” Sondra had explained. “It would kill him to know I was making the same amount as him.”

  Creative bookkeeping bothered Julia. So did the family dynamics polluting Bloom’s management.

  The fact was, she earned less than anyone on the third floor but Deirdre, whose salary equaled hers. Evidently, Grandma Ida thought Julia was experienced enough to be the company’s president, but too young and green to pull down the kind of money her mother and uncle made. Julia didn’t mind too much, though. She’d feel peculiar earning more than her mother—and besides, she wasn’t going to be working at Bloom’s forever. She hadn’t resigned from Griffin, McDougal; she’d just taken a leave of absence. Sooner or later, she would be returning to the firm, where when people threw hissy fits or played ego games it didn’t affect her personally because she wasn’t related to any of them.

  One reason she was troubled by her mother’s and uncle’s generous salaries was that the store wasn’t making a profit. It should be. It was Bloom’s, for God’s sake—the finest delicatessen in New York City if not the world. The aisles were always crowded, the cash registers always humming. Clusters of visitors speaking French or German or Japanese held their Bloom’s tote bags high and posed for photographs in front of the main entrance. People stranded in Nigeria or Fiji could enjoy a Passover meal catered by Bloom’s, as long as they had access to a phone line and an international delivery service.

  How could the place not be showing huge profits?

  She wished she knew someone with an up-to-date business degree. Myron had graduated from City College sometime during the Kennedy administration, and as far as she knew he hadn’t contemplated business theory since then. Heath would probably know some business experts, but if she called him, he’d tell her to haul her ass out of the delicatessen and return to the work she was born to do—trying to keep estranged spouses from killing each other—and while she was at it, she should also sleep with him.

  “Thanks for your time, Myron,” she said, pushing to her feet and gathering her folder from his desk.

  In a spasm of paternal courtliness, he stood, reached across the desk and squeezed her shoulder. “Everything’s going to be fine. Don’t let the numbers worry you. That’s my job—the numbers.”

  She wanted to point out that if he were doing his job, he’d be worrying about the numbers, too. But he was from the old world of Bloom’s, her grandmother’s world, her parents’ and uncle’s world. She was an interloper, a snippy little upstart who didn’t know bupkes about how to run a food store.

  Bupkes. Look at her. She’d been the official president of Bloom’s less than two month
s, and already she was thinking in Yiddish.

  She left Myron’s office and hesitated outside Deirdre’s door, thinking she could pester her for the insights Myron had failed to supply. Then she heard Susie calling through the open door of her own office: “Hey, Julia?”

  She’d rather talk to her sister than Deirdre any day.

  She found Susie lounging on Grandpa Isaac’s desk, which had apparently become her favorite seat in the room. She was fondling the coleus, stroking the leaves and adjusting a few that were tangled with the stems.

  “This thing needs food,” she said. “If you don’t want to feed a plant, get a cactus.”

  “I water it,” Julia told her.

  “Did I say it was thirsty? It’s hungry. Feed it.”

  Julia was too frazzled to argue, and too relieved by Susie’s presence to resent her bossiness. After closing the door, Julia flopped down onto the sofa and groaned.

  Susie seemed oblivious to her mood. “I’ve been working on concepts for the windows. I’ve got some ideas I wanted to run by you before I start making changes.”

  “Just tell me—are these changes going to cost a lot of money?”

  “No. I’ll be using what we’ve already got.” She abandoned the plant, lifted a notepad and hopped down from the desk. “I said concepts, and that’s the operative word. We’re going to conceptualize the windows.”

  Julia gazed warily at her. “How do you conceptualize a window?”

  “Unify it. Make it be about something other than ‘Look at all the crap we sell.’ Let it talk to the browser, the passerby. Let it say, ‘If you come in here, you will leave happier than you felt when you entered.’”

  “Happier? You really think buying a chunk of goat cheese is going to make people happier?”

  “If it doesn’t make them happier, they’re not going to buy it. So here’s what I’m thinking.” She plunked herself on the sofa, forcing Julia to shift to make more room. Susie flipped open her pad to show Julia a pencil sketch. “Here’s my first concept. Grandma’s home. It’s warm. It’s inviting. It’s a place where you went when you needed great food and unconditional love.”

  “That doesn’t sound like any grandmother I know.”

  “Myths, Julia. Don’t be literal. We’re exploring the myth of the ideal grandma.”

  “Do you want to fill the windows with Depression glass?”

  “That would work. I was thinking more of overstuffed chairs with faded antimacassars on them, and a decanter of schnapps and a bunch of those long-stemmed crystal glasses that always seemed to survive the journey from the Old Country. On the table, a plate of rugelach and a glass dish piled high with fruit and chocolates. That would be one window—dessert at Grandma’s. And the next window would be brunch at Grandma’s—a plate of lox, a bowl of bagels. They’re served in linen-lined baskets nowadays, but mythical grandmothers never served bagels in wicker. So it would be a bowl of bagels, with one bagel out, sitting on a cutting board with a sharp knife next to it. And a crystal dish of cream cheese, garnished with a black olive—”

  “Turkish or Greek?”

  “Whatever. These would all be fake. You don’t put real food in windows. It spoils.”

  “This all sounds very expensive,” Julia reminded her.

  “Yeah, I know.” Susie sighed. “I just wanted you to see this brilliant concept before you rejected it.”

  “So now I’ve seen it and I’m rejecting it.”

  Susie flipped the page. “Here’s the next concept. Food is fun.”

  Julia stared at the drawing. It appeared to be a lot of bagels levitating.

  “We hang them on threads. They float through the air. It’s like a dream. A bagel dream.”

  “You said we can’t use real food in windows.”

  “I think we can use bagels. We’d spray them with a low-gloss polyurethane or something to preserve them. We’d have some floating in the air, and others doing other things. Like this one is hooked over the spout of a teapot. And we could stack a few of them up and prop utensils inside—a whisk, a stirring spoon, a garlic press, whatever. Eye-catching juxtapositions. We could even seat a Barbie doll inside one of the bagels, like it’s a tire swing. Then in the next window, we do the same thing with bread sticks. And in the next one, we do it with boxed and bottled goods—hanging by fish wire from the ceiling, stacked in interesting configurations on the ground, jars of pickles placed here and there for emphasis. All very whimsical.”

  “Pickles for emphasis?” Julia scowled. “It would remind people less of the ideal grandma than of some nightmare preschool.”

  Susie rolled her eyes at Julia’s lack of whimsy. “Okay. My third concept—” she flipped a page again “—also involves bagels. The theme is ‘Bagels are lifesavers.’”

  “Lifesavers.”

  “Like on cruise ships. The shape is perfect. We can even use Barbie again—dressed in a swimsuit, with a bagel around her waist.”

  “Our bagels are much too big for her skinny little waist.”

  “We could work it out. Maybe we could stuff Ken into the bagel with her. We could even have him tugging on the bra of her bikini…Just joking,” she added, obviously sensing Julia’s disapproval. “We could have bagels lined up like life preservers along a railing, with ‘Bloom’s’ stenciled on them instead of, say, S.S. Titanic. Maybe Neil could give us some ideas.”

  Julia shook her head.

  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that? Okay, here’s my last concept, and if you don’t like it I’m going back to Nico’s, where I’m appreciated.”

  “I’m sure I’ll love it,” Julia said, praying that she would. She couldn’t afford not to. If she wanted changes in Bloom’s earnings, she was going to have to make changes in the store. The windows seemed to her the least dangerous thing to change. If new displays didn’t destroy Bloom’s, she could move on to bigger changes.

  “The theme is ‘Eat your bagels.’ We’d have little signs scattered through the windows with bagel sayings on them—‘Eat your bagels.’ ‘Bagels are the eighth wonder of the world.’ ‘A bagel a day keeps hunger away.’ ‘The best bagels are born, not made.’”

  “You want to imply we’re hatching bagels instead of baking them?”

  Susie gave her a withering look, then continued with her bagel signs: “‘Real men eat bagels.’ ‘I was a teenage bagel.’ ‘My kingdom for a bagel.’ ‘Lox, stock and bagels.’ Of course, we’d have lots of bagels scattered around the windows, too—and maybe a few nonperishables. The concept is to get people laughing, to make them believe Bloom’s is a fun place.”

  “It’s great,” Julia said.

  “You think it’s stupid. You think it implies we’re hatching bagels.”

  “I was only kidding when I said that,” Julia assured her, angling her head to scrutinize Susie’s sketch. The signs dangled on threads like the bagels in the earlier concept, and some bagels dangled, too. It gave a surreal impression—but also a playful, inviting one. And it could be done cheaply.

  “So you think we should emphasize bagels in the windows.”

  Susie shrugged. “A kosher-style deli. Bagels. What else would you emphasize, a bacon cheeseburger?”

  “I’m only asking whether your concepts were maybe influenced by Casey.”

  “Absolutely not,” Susie retorted. “I came up with some non-bagel concepts, too.”

  One non-bagel concept, and it was too expensive. Julia studied the “Eat your bagels” window, wondering if decorating the display windows like that would use up a gross of bagels a week.

  “What?” Susie must have sensed her thoughts had taken a turn.

  “Nothing.” Julia put down the pad. “The last one is good. Are you sure this polyurethane thing will work?”

  “I’ll grab a couple of bagels and experiment with them,” Susie said, folding up her pad. “Maybe I can work downstairs in the kitchen. They’ve got those long tables down there.”

  “You’re not going to spray polyurethane in a
place where food preparation is going on,” Julia argued. “You can work in here, if you want. Use Grandpa Isaac’s desk.”

  “I’d rather work downstairs,” Susie said, eyeing the desk.

  “You can’t spray where there’s food!”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got to accumulate hours.”

  “What hours? I’m paying you a flat fee for this job.”

  Susie shook her head. “Hours with Casey. It’s this deal we’ve got. The more hours I spend with him, the better.”

  “Better for what?” As soon as the words were out, Julia regretted them. She didn’t want to know what Susie was up to with Casey. She already had too much on her mind; she couldn’t waste time contemplating an hourly romance between her sister and a possible in-house bagel robber. “Susie, this is a crazy thing to ask you, of all people, but do you know any business experts?”

  “Me?” Susie laughed. “Yeah, like I hang out with the Wharton crowd. Maybe Rick would know some. He’s always hitting up businesspeople for money to invest in his movie.”

  And all those businesspeople said no, which, Julia considered, meant they might have some intelligence. “Maybe Adam’s business professor up at Cornell,” she said.

  “He’d never go within ten miles of a business professor,” Susie pointed out. “He’s so afraid if he had any expertise at all, someone might make him come to New York and work for Bloom’s.”

  “He should work for Bloom’s. You and I are working for Bloom’s.”

  “I’m only doing it because you’d kill me if I didn’t.” Susie pushed away from the couch and tucked her pad under her arm. “I’m going downstairs for some bagels. I can get in a few minutes before I start spraying them.”

  “Whatever you say.” Julia held up her hand, warding off any explanation of why Susie wanted to accumulate hours with Casey. Let Susie accumulate as much time as she wanted with him. Maybe, if Susie got close enough to him, she’d be able to find out if he was stealing a gross of bagels a week from the store.