The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  Olympia would rather have run naked through Times Square.

  Exiting the supply room, she was further distressed to find Viveka standing there, hands on her nonexistent hips. Had she overheard Olympia’s conversation? “We promote the fine art of Austria here,” was all she said before stomping away in her gladiators.

  “Too bad you can’t see it,” Olympia muttered to herself on her way back to her desk.

  And then, two weeks later, the Inevitable Day arrived. It happened to be January 1. Olympia was getting herself and Lola ready for the Hellinger family’s annual New Year’s Day brunch. (Olympia looked forward to and dreaded the event in equal parts. She fitted Lola’s arms into her favorite pink polyester-velour jumper dress with the rubberized heart decal. Lola’s closet was filled with beautiful European fashions by Jacadi, Catimini, and Bon Nuit, most of them purchased secondhand on eBay. But the child’s most cherished dresses were from Target and the Disney store. Olympia was wearing skintight dark-wash cigarette jeans, a black wool turtleneck, gray suede booties, a short fake-fur jacket, and oversized square sunglasses. Which is to say that she still cared about keeping up appearances in front of her two sisters—namely, the appearance that she led such a busy and sophisticated existence that she lacked both the time and energy to care what they thought of her, even though, in truth, she obsessed about them constantly. “Mommy, who’s my daddy?” Lola asked.

  “You don’t have a daddy, cookie,” Olympia replied in the most lighthearted voice she could summon.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because not everyone has a mommy and a daddy. Some kids have just a mommy. A few have just a daddy… There, you’re all zipped!” How could she lie? If she made up someone, Olympia had decided, Lola would just ask to meet him. In preparation for this moment, Olympia had bought her daughter picture books about “modern families.” But the child seemed completely uninterested. Apart from Madeline, her favorite titles were Olivia and The Story of Babar, both of which featured mommies and daddies, all of the four-legged variety, but still.

  “And a few kids just have gymnastics teachers,” Lola said.

  Olympia had no clue what her daughter was talking about. But not wanting to disappoint any more of her expectations, she said, “That’s right. A few just have gymnastics teachers.” Then she lifted up Lola’s dress and yanked her bunching turtleneck down over her Tiana underpants. Tiana was Lola’s favorite Disney Princess, a fact that Olympia advertised widely, believing it reflected well on her own parenting since Tiana was the only African American in the stable.

  Seemingly unfazed, Lola soon moved on to a new line of questioning: “Mommy, what day comes after Friday, again?”

  But the earlier inquiry haunted Olympia the whole way from Brooklyn to Larchmont. That was where Olympia’s sister, Perri, almost forty, lived with her husband, Mike, forty-one, and their three naturally conceived children: Aiden, nine; Sadie, six; and Noah, just two.

  To pass the time it took to get there, Olympia suggested that Lola try to count the number of people in their Metro-North car. “One… twoooo… threeeee,” the child began in a high-pitched cheep, standing up in her seat as she pointed at the various domes in her line of vision. “Foooour… fiiiive… six… seven… eight… nine… ten… eleven… twelve… thirteen… fifteen… sixteen.”

  Olympia sighed and tutted with undisguised frustration. “After thirteen comes fourteen. Then fifteen.” How many times did she have to go over it? She knew you weren’t supposed to judge children at this age. And yet Lola’s inability to count to twenty had left Olympia secretly dubious about the child’s intelligence, and, by association, the mental faculties of #6103. What if he’d lied about his Ivy League degree and was actually a high school dropout who worked in a supermarket parking lot, corralling shopping carts? Or maybe he didn’t even have a job, not on account of the recession but because he’d never even tried to get one, preferring to spend his days on street corners making lewd remarks at passing women—when he wasn’t busy relieving himself at sperm banks. Or maybe it was all the infant formula that Olympia had fed Lola when she was a newborn. Olympia had managed to breastfeed for only four weeks, and even then she’d supplemented. No doubt that was ten points erased from Lola’s IQ right there. Olympia fretted, then scolded herself for obsessing.

  Mount Vernon East was the next stop, followed by Pelham and New Rochelle. Finally, the train pulled into lily-white Larchmont. The doors slid open. Olympia grabbed Lola’s hand, and the two stepped down and out. BMW’s 5 Series ruled the station parking lot. Olympia flagged an idling taxi. Five minutes later, she and Lola were turning up North Chatsworth Avenue, past a fake stone well, into a woodsy development with big old homes. Perri and Mike’s circa-1930 “stockbroker Tudor,” as they were locally known, sat up high on a hillock. Pristine snow blanketed the sloping front lawn. A silver late-model Lexus SUV was parked at the end of a neatly shoveled, S-shaped driveway. Another well-defined path led to an oak front door with miniature yellow square windows and a giant brass knocker. “Here we are,” chimed Olympia in as enthusiastic a voice as she could muster.

  “I want to ring the bell,” said Lola.

  “Hold on,” said Olympia, lifting her into the air.

  With difficulty, Lola pressed her tiny thumb into the opalescent button.

  Moments later, Perri appeared in the doorway. “Well, look who’s shockingly on time!” she declared.

  “Happy New Year to you, too,” said Olympia, leaning in to greet her big sister.

  “Same to you, Anna Wintour,” said Perri, returning the air kiss.

  “Try to be nice,” said Olympia, sighing as she lifted her sunglasses to the top of her head. Did her sister ever stop?

  “It might kill me,” conceded Perri as she closed the door behind them.

  “Try anyway,” said Olympia.

  “And how’s my favorite niece?” asked Perri, squatting to embrace Lola. “You know, your aunt Perri has missed you.”

  Lola dutifully clutched Perri around the knees before she announced, “I want apple juice.”

  “Lola, say ‘please’ before you ask for something,” said Olympia.

  “Please I want apple juice,” said Lola.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” said Perri, making a clown face. “We don’t keep juice in the house for kids.” She glanced up and over at Olympia. “You know, juice is terrible for their teeth.”

  “She doesn’t drink very much of it,” said Olympia, irked again. “Besides, it’s mostly bourbon for this girl.” She patted Lola’s head.

  “Excuse me!” said Perri, eyes bugging.

  “That was a joke.”

  “Oh. Funny!” Perri flashed an exaggeratedly bright smile as she stood up.

  While Olympia removed her jacket, she glanced around her. To the left of the entrance, a silver-framed botanical print hung over a mahogany console topped with an alabaster lamp fitted with a silk shade. She thought of the many guided tours through the Great Homes of the Hudson Valley to which their mother had subjected them while they were growing up. The writing desk to the left is a Chippendale original, purchased by Josiah Archibald Stanhope III, Franklin Roosevelt’s great-uncle once removed, in 1761. Olympia still remembered getting chewed out by a guard for trying to swing on a velvet rope…

  “Sorry,” said Perri, teeth gritted apologetically, “but would you guys mind taking off your shoes, too? We just got our rugs cleaned.”

  “Not a problem,” said Olympia, unfazed as she bent down to unzip Lola’s boots. Her sister’s hang-up about dirt and germs had a long history. What’s more, Perri’s neurotic worldview wasn’t entirely alien to Olympia herself. The two shared a deep loathing of stray hairs, especially those found blanketing drains and curling around bars of soap. Unlike Olympia, however, Perri had found a way to monetize her madness: she was the cofounder and CEO of a home organization company called In the Closet. After starting out as an in-home consultation service, it had since expanded to encompass an
online store, a magazine, a catalogue, a smart phone app, and numerous accessories lines. When the economy improved, Perri was hoping to take the company public.

  “I appreciate it,” said Perri who, Olympia noticed upon closer viewing, was wearing an ivory silk blouse with a wedding present–sized bow, a long brown cardigan the color of dog doo, boot-legged camel-colored wool trousers with a crease down the front of each leg, and matching patent leather flats with hieroglyphic-like gold hardware on each toe.

  Olympia had never understood where her sister got her fashion sense. Insofar as it made for a sharp contrast with what Olympia considered to be her own impeccable eye, it both alarmed and tickled her. “New pants?” she found herself asking.

  Perri suddenly froze in place, her expression stricken. “What? You think they’re ugly?” she asked.

  “I just asked if they were new!” cried Olympia, not entirely genuinely.

  “I could tell what you were thinking.”

  “You have ESP?”

  “I’m not stupid. You think I look fat in them, too. Just admit it.”

  “Ohmygod, can you please stop being so insecure about your appearance?” said Olympia, sighing and rolling her eyes again (and secretly enjoying herself).

  “But you don’t like them,” said Perri.

  “They’re a little—I don’t know—mustard for my taste,” said Olympia, wrinkling her nose. “To be honest, I think your whole look could use some updating. It’s kind of stuck in the nineties.” A thought struck her: Was she being a horrible bitch? Did Perri deserve it?

  “Well, I’m sorry we can’t all be fashion plates!” cried Perri, neck elevated.

  “You asked!”

  “Anyway.” Apparently done with the topic, Perri cleared her throat. Then she turned to Lola, and said, “You know, Sadie is very excited to play with you.”

  “I want to see her. Where she is?” said Lola, who worshiped her not-quite-three-years-older cousin as if she were a small god. Olympia found the attachment both endearing and disturbing.

  “I think she’s up in her room,” said Perri, raising her eyes to the stairs, over which dozens upon dozens of family photos in identical, pristine white wood frames blanketed the wall. “Oh, Saaaadiieee!” Perri called up to her. “Lola and Aunt Pia are here!”

  “NO KIDS WHO AREN’T IN HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY ARE ALLOWED IN MY ROOM!” came the reply.

  “Sadie, Lola has come all the way from Brooklyn to see you,” Perri barked with a noticeably tense jaw. “Please be nice.”

  “I don’t feel like being nice,” Sadie called back.

  Turning back to Olympia, Perri shook her head, and, her lids heavy over her eyes, sighed. “Apparently, this is what you get when you birth a frigging genius,” she said, making quote marks in the air. “You know, Sadie has an IQ of two-ten and is reading at a fourth-grade level already.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Olympia, flinching internally. “Cookie, why don’t we go say hi to Grandma instead.”

  “But I want to see Sadie!” cried Lola.

  At that very moment, Carol Hellinger, Perri and Olympia’s mother, appeared in the hallway. She was dressed in a purple cowl-neck sweater, a long peasant skirt made of kente cloth, and a clunky necklace that appeared to have been made of shark teeth and that sat nearly horizontally over her prodigious bosom. A navy blue bandana, tied like a kerchief, half obscured her silver-speckled pageboy. More or less the right age to have been a member of the original hippie movement, she’d somehow managed to absorb the style of the day without any of the tenets (i.e., free love, drug use). And she’d clung to the look long after her more freewheeling peers had moved on to sportswear. For the previous twenty-five years, Carol had been teaching social studies at the local high school, with a special focus on ancient Rome and Greece. At Smith College in the 1960s, she’d been a classics major—hence, the heroic and dynastic names of her three daughters, names to which they could never live up. (Olympia and Imperia’s younger sister was named Augusta.) Or, at least, Olympia felt as if she could never fulfill the dreams of world domination sacrificed by her mother after she got pregnant and failed to pursue graduate school—and put all her ambition into her kids.

  “Pia!” declared Carol, arms outstretched as she walked toward her middle daughter.

  “Hi, Mom,” said Olympia, bending down to kiss her mother, who, at five foot one, stood nearly eight inches shorter than her.

  “Don’t you look like your glamorous self.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And how’s my Little Orphan Annie?” Carol turned to Lola. “Come say hi to your old grandma.”

  “Mom, I really wish you wouldn’t call her an orphan,” said Olympia, annoyed already. “She does have a mother.”

  “I was just alluding to the hair!”

  “Grandma,” came a voice from inside Carol’s bosom. “Are you going to die soon?”

  “Lola, shush,” said Olympia, irritation turning to embarrassment.

  “I certainly hope not!” Carol said, laughing caustically as she released her granddaughter.

  Lola turned to Olympia, her brow knit. “But you said people die when they get really old.”

  “Grandma’s not that old,” Olympia said quickly. Then she turned back to her mother and said, “Sorry, she just learned about death.”

  “It’s fine,” said Carol, smiling stiffly.

  Lola disappeared up the stairs, yelling, “Saaaaddieeeeeeee!”

  Then Olympia turned to Perri. “Is Gus here yet?” she asked.

  “She’s on her way,” said Perri.

  “Some kind of political rally,” said Carol with a flourish of her hand.

  “On New Year’s Day?” said Olympia. “It’s a national holiday.”

  “You know my daughter Augusta!” cried Carol. “Every day of the year is Cinco de Mayo.”

  “Is Debbie coming too?” asked Olympia. A field organizer for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Debbie was Gus’s girlfriend of several years’ standing.

  Carol shrugged and turned down her lower lip, “I assume so. Isn’t she always tagging along?”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a rally with my bed right now.” Olympia yawned. In the presence of her immediate family, she often found herself suffering from some variant of narcolepsy.

  “I hear you. I’ve had a completely crazed week,” said Perri, who could get competitive about who the busier, more exhausted, and more overworked sister was. Though, since Perri slept only four hours a night, woke at five twenty a.m. each morning to run on a treadmill, and breastfed all three of her children until they turned four, she always took first prize. The only check in Olympia’s column was the fact that she was a single mother. Which is possibly why Perri was always downplaying her husband’s contribution. “And of course Mike’s barely been here,” she added.

  “Speaking of fathers, where’s Dad?” asked Olympia, keen again to change topics.

  “In the living room, no doubt staring into space,” said Carol, pursing her lips and, in doing so, revealing deep striations in her philtrum, remnants of a long-ago love affair with Virginia Slims. “Between you and me, I wish he’d never retired. You know, he sits in his study all day long playing with Gus’s old Rubik’s Cube!”

  “How do you know if you’re at school teaching?” asked Perri.

  “Because I know,” Carol snapped back.

  “I was actually the one who liked the Rubik’s Cube,” Olympia felt compelled to point out.

  “Funny,” said Carol. “I don’t remember you being good at spatial things.”

  “Thanks,” said Olympia.

  “He’s not even riding his bike?” asked Perri, looking concerned. Every morning until just recently, Bob Hellinger, now seventy, had ridden his ten-speed along the old aqueduct to the historic Irvington estate on which Nevis Laboratories was housed. Despite being a particle physicist who studied motion, he’d somehow never managed to pass his driver’s test.

 
Carol shook her head and tsked. “He says he’s conserving angular momentum where L is the moment of inertia. Some kind of inside physics joke.”

  “Funny, I’m sure—if you understand it,” said Olympia. “What about the banjo?”

  “Not interested in playing.”

  “And what’s the latest on the medical front?” asked Perri.

  “What medical front?” said Carol, even though, the month before, her husband had experienced pain while urinating and received a borderline-high PSA score. All of which either did or didn’t indicate early-stage prostate cancer.

  “I thought Dad was going in for a biopsy next week,” said Perri.

  “Oh, that,” said Carol, looking away. “If you ask me, it’s all in his head.”

  This time, Olympia’s and Perri’s eyes rolled in sync. Their mother’s refusal to engage with modern medicine was becoming more and more extreme. Not that she was any more interested in the homeopathic version than the Western variant. For a decade at least, the same peeling jar of ginkgo biloba supplements had been sitting unopened next to the herbal teas.

  Mother and daughters proceeded to Perri’s huge kitchen. Judging from the smell, several frittatas were baking away in various corners of the room. During her recent kitchen renovation, Perri had had three separate convection ovens installed—in case she decided to become a professional pastry chef on the side? “Anyway, here are the bagels,” said Olympia, setting a large paper bag down on Perri’s cryptlike island.

  “Oh, thanks,” said Perri, standing on tiptoe to reach an oversized Deruta majolica serving bowl in one of her double-height cabinets. “I have to say, that’s the one thing I miss about living in the city,” she declared upon her return to earth. “You just can’t get proper bagels out here.” For several years in her mid-to late twenties, while working as a junior analyst at McKinsey, Perri had lived with a roommate in a generic postwar high-rise on Broadway in the 80s.

  “That’s the only thing you miss?” asked Olympia.

  “Well, not the only thing,” said Perri, laughing lightly.

  Olympia didn’t inquire further.