Blooming All Over by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online Page B

muttered. “How can you stand working for her?”
    “I’m working for Julia, not her. She hardly ever comes to the store, and when she does, she’s usually hanging off Lyndon’s arm.”
    “Hey, she lives out of wedlock with Lyndon, doesn’t she?”
    Susie laughed. Lyndon was Grandma Ida’s caretaker, cook and companion. He was also young, black and gay. They were not porking each other. Grandma Ida didn’t even seem to mind that Lyndon porked other men without benefit of marriage. They weren’t doing it in front of her, after all. And Lyndon wasn’t her grandson.
    “Does she hassle Rick and Neil about their love lives?” Adam asked, referring to the sons of their father’s brother, Jay. Neil lived in southern Florida, where he ran a charter yacht business, sailing tourists around the Keys for an exorbitant fee. Rick lived in New York and was one of Susie’s closest friends, which meant she knew more details than she wantedabout his love life, and those details weren’t particularly exciting. Rick was a great guy, but the majority of his love life occurred in his imagination. He’d prefer it to occur in the company of her roommate Anna. He’d probably settle for a love life with her other roommate, Caitlin, but Caitlin was so lusty she apparently scared Rick a little, and Anna was Chinese-American, which Rick found exotic.
    “Or you,” Adam pressed her. “Does she give you a hard time about Casey?”
    “You’re not listening to me, Adam. She doesn’t care if her grandchildren are attending orgies every night, as long as they don’t do it in front of her. In front of her, she gets upset. You don’t want her to stroke out, do you?”
    “Is there a real risk of that?”
    She glanced up at Adam and saw that he was smirking, his brown eyes churning with laughter. “When did you get to be so snotty?” she teased.
    “I’m not snotty. I’m going to go nuts this summer. She lives right above Mom. I won’t be able to do anything .”
    Their mother occupied a lavish apartment on the twenty-fourth floor of the Bloom Building, above Bloom’s. Their grandmother occupied the apartment directly above their mother’s. The likelihood was far greater that Sondra would hear activity in Grandma Ida’s apartment than that Grandma Ida would hear activity in Sondra’s. But if Adam chose to host an orgy in their mother’s apartment…The hell with Grandma Ida. Their mother would probably stroke out.
    “Didn’t they teach you anything about discretion at this fine institution?” she asked, waving a hand at theivy-covered gothic halls surrounding the broad lawn across which they were ambling.
    “Nothing at all.” Adam sighed. “How am I going to stand living in New York this summer? I should have found a job in West Lafayette.”
    Susie wrinkled her nose. When she thought of Purdue, she didn’t think of chickens or Indians like Grandma Ida; but she pictured wide-open spaces, flat geography, a university surrounded by nothing. Did they have poetry slams in West Lafayette? Did they have really bad plays staged in warehouse lofts, midnight showings of cheesy martial arts flicks, transvestites strolling through busy intersections and not being gawked at? Did they have genuine bagels and bialys and smoked nova, delicacies you could buy at Bloom’s?
    How could anyone want to spend a summer there?
    “You’ll have fun in New York,” she consoled Adam. Even though he was bigger than her he was still her baby brother, in need of comfort. “If things get wonky at Mom’s, you can probably live in Julia’s apartment. She’s always over at Joffe’s place, anyway. You could even stay at my apartment, if you don’t mind sleeping on the living-room couch.”
    Adam’s expression was a mixture of gratitude and repulsion, as if sleeping on the couch of Susie’s overcrowded East Village walk-up was no better than taking up residence in a cardboard box in an alley. True, she shared the place with two roommates. But on