Blooming All Over by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online

sleeping arrangements. Sondra and Grandma Ida sat across a scratched and stained coffee table from Susie and Julia. The couches seemed to have been subjected to torture by some tinhorn dictator or underground spy agency. Scuff marks on the vinyl indicated that they’d been kicked; swatches of duct tape held tears in the fabric together, and Susie could see at least three places on the arms where cigarettes had been extinguished.
    Susie wanted food. She’d already searched the dorm’s first floor for a vending machine, but couldn’t find one. Adam had mentioned something about a math department reception—reception meant food, didn’t it?—but first Joffe had to work out his sleeping arrangements in the dorm. So Susie sat next to Julia on one ofthe tortured sofas and listened to her mother critique Adam’s girlfriend.
    “She looked fat to me,” Sondra insisted.
    “She’s sturdy,” Susie argued.
    “If anyone knows from fat, it’s me.” Unlike her thin daughters—unlike all the thin Blooms—Sondra Bloom was cursed with the inability to burn as many calories as she wished to consume. Over the past few years, she’d developed a pear shape, her body spreading beyond its natural borders just south of her waist. Susie would call her mother sturdy more than fat, but she didn’t know from fat the way her mother did. Sondra often implied that she considered herself well beyond plump and hurtling toward obese.
    “If you’re going to criticize Adam’s girlfriend,” Julia muttered, “you could start with the fact that she doesn’t shave her legs.”
    “Tush,” Grandma Ida said with a sniff. “What kind of a name is Tush? ”
    “Tash, Grandma,” Susie said. “It’s short for Natasha.”
    “How is Tush short for Natasha?”
    “It’s Tash ,” Julia corrected Grandma Ida.
    “Go through life being called Tush? Like someone’s toches? It’s embarrassing!”
    “She’s not Jewish,” Sondra hissed, her words once again resonating beyond their decibels. “A Jew wouldn’t name her daughter anything that sounded like Tush .”
    “Who cares if she’s not Jewish?” Susie snapped, managing to keep her voice lower than her mother’s and grandmother’s.
    Her mother’s eyes zeroed in on her. Sondra’s hair was impeccable once again, every brown strand doingits part to create the perfect pageboy around her face. For a fifty-four-year-old woman with a pear-shaped body, she was attractive, her cheeks smooth, her forehead surprisingly unlined, her lipstick reapplied, her eyebrows gently arched when she wasn’t staring hard, the way she was staring at Susie right now. The only feature that appeared out of whack was her nose, which she’d had fixed when she was sixteen. Susie had never known her mother with any other nose, but this nose looked like flesh-hued Silly Putty protruding from the center of her face, shiny and shaped to some abstract ideal, the tip too round, the nostrils too angled, the bridge too narrow.
    Her glare implied that she was thinking Susie, of all people, wouldn’t care if Adam’s girlfriend wasn’t Jewish because Susie herself was involved with the distinctly not-Jewish Casey Gordon. Of course, Sondra believed Susie was involved with Casey. Susie had no idea if that was true.
    She still hadn’t convinced herself that discussing her dilemma with Julia had been a wise thing; she certainly wasn’t going to bring joy and satisfaction to her mother by mentioning that she and Casey were on shaky ground. Her mother probably liked Casey well enough—he made damn good bagels for the store, after all—but Susie suspected Sondra would have preferred for her to hook up with someone more affluent, more grounded, more traditional and definitely more Jewish. She never exactly came right out and said so, though, probably because she was just so relieved that her daughter was dating someone steadily. Like maybe this meant Susie was on the verge of settling down.
    Which was the last thing Susie was