The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “Well, then, the timing is perfect.”

  “She’s gay, Olympia!”

  “If your story pans out, I’d have to say ‘bi.’ ”

  “The guy isn’t a toxic bachelor. He’s a one-man Superfund site.”

  “Ouch,” said Olympia, wondering at the violence of Perri’s reaction. Assuming the story was even true—Olympia had her doubts—was her older sister just being protective? Or was it possible that Perri was jealous of Gus? Olympia hadn’t seen Jefferson Sims in years, but he was famously handsome. Twenty years later, it was probably also safe to assume that Mike and Perri’s sex life wasn’t what it used to be. Not that Perri would ever talk about sex. She’d always been prudish that way.

  “I’m sorry, it’s true!” Perri said defiantly. “We need to get Gus away from him, and fast.”

  “She’s thirty-six years old, Perri,” Olympia told her. “I think she can take care of herself.”

  “She’s also in a fragile state emotionally. And the guy has women coming out of his ears. What do you think he was doing in Breckenridge all year?”

  “Skiing?”

  “Please,” said Perri.

  “Nailing half-pipes in the terrain park?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Anyway, we’re just walking in the door,” said Olympia. “Let me call you later.”

  “Thanks for your help—not!” said Perri.

  “What can I do?!” cried Olympia, turning the key in the front door. “Gus has no interest in anything I say, anyway. You’re the only one she listens to.”

  “Mommy, you talk too much,” said Lola. “Get off the phone now!”

  “Listen, Lola’s freaking out. I really have to go,” said Olympia, happy for once to have her daughter make demands on her time.

  “Fine,” said Perri, as if it weren’t.

  “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Bye.”

  Olympia opened the door to her apartment and flicked on the lights. At the sight of her and Lola, Clive stood up on his hind legs and let out a noise that fell somewhere between a squeak and a purr. “Hello there, bunny rabby,” said Olympia.

  “He made a silly noise!” cried Lola.

  As Olympia walked over to where Clive now lay and began to stroke his luscious fur, it occurred to her that he was the only male in her life on whose love she could count. Then again, she held him in captivity. By all accounts, rabbits had extremely small brains. She’d also had him castrated. Clive’s nose twitched, but for the rest of the evening he was quiet.

  9

  PERRI HUNG UP FEELING ANGRY. Here she’d called her middle sister seeking commiseration. In return, Olympia had offered nothing but mockery! For Olympia, sex was nothing but a joke, Perri thought. Well, it wasn’t a joke to Perri, who had slept with only two men in her entire life, or, okay, maybe three. She sometimes worried about what kind of mother Olympia would make to Lola, especially when Lola hit adolescence. Would she be one of those awful “my best friend is my daughter” types who outfitted their kids with birth control prescriptions before they even reached puberty? To Olympia’s credit, she was very affectionate with the child—when not shipping her off to some filthy childcare center all day, every day. Perri tried not to judge working women and, in particular, other working mothers. But how could her sister justify exposing her own flesh and blood at such a tender age to that many germs?! As Perri resumed cleaning the kitchen, her mind boggled.

  But she also felt at peace. Secretly, she found loading the dishwasher and wiping down the counters to be: (a) cathartic and (b) more enjoyable than playing Spin Master Air Hogs Zero Gravity Micro Car with Aiden; Singing Pizza Elmo with Noah; or American Girl Doll Gets Hit by a Bus and Buried in a Shoe Box Coffin with Sadie. Not that she was willing to admit so much to her family, lest they take advantage of the confession and never again clear a dish. Just as Perri was banging the drain catch against the inside of the trash compactor, Mike appeared in the doorway. “Thanks for helping with the cleanup,” she cracked.

  “Perri, why do you think I just walked in here?!” he asked with an exasperated sigh. “If you want to do the dishes before anyone else has a chance to so you can play the biggest martyr, fine. But if you actually want my help, give me a chance. Or just ask me!”

  “Whatever,” said Perri. “I’m not going to beg you to help around the house!” Why did she give him such a hard time about doing household chores, when some part of her preferred doing them herself? Mike didn’t answer but rolled his eyes and shook his head. Who was the outrageous one? Perri wondered. (She no longer knew.) “Anyway, that was an interesting evening.”

  “Interesting. That’s the word,” said Mike, opening the fridge.

  “You need to talk to Jeff,” Perri told him.

  “Excuse me?” Mike squinted contemptuously at her while he grabbed a Heineken off the shelf.

  “I’m not letting him screw Gus over!”

  “Perri,” said Mike, raising his palm, as if to indicate that she should stand back. “Organize all the flatware drawers in Westchester. But STOP TRYING TO CONTROL MY FAMILY!” With that, he yanked open the cutlery drawer, grabbed the bottle opener, and pried off the top of his beer.

  His family—as opposed to hers? After this many years of marriage, was there really any difference! Perri felt unfairly maligned. She also felt misunderstood. She wasn’t trying to control anyone. She was just protecting her family. Wasn’t she?

  Or was it possible that she didn’t even understand her own motives? As she ran a damp sponge over the countertops, she wondered if she was worried on Gus’s behalf, or on her own—or maybe both. She knew that old chestnut about imitation being the most sincere form of flattery. But what if she didn’t want to be imitated? What if she liked the idea of each Hellinger sister having a distinct identity and personal life with no potential for overlap? She knew that when they were growing up, Carol had had a tendency to pigeonhole all of them. She’d heard both Olympia and Gus complain about it. But the labels they’d all been assigned (The Pretty One, The Political One, The Perfect One) had secretly pleased and comforted Perri. Also, what if the things that Perri told Mike in presumed confidence wound up being passed on to Jeff, who told Gus, who told the world?!

  There was also the mind-bending fact that Gus appeared to be the object of a Sims brother’s lust—Perri had seen the heated way that Jeff had looked at her sister all through dinner—and Perri could no longer claim to be the same. She could never have guessed at the role reversals at work. Growing up, it had been Olympia, not Gus, whom Perri had felt rivalrous with. Statuesque yet skinny, Olympia had even managed to sail through puberty with her comeliness unmarred by pimples or braces. She was so pretty that Perri had sometimes been proud to be related to her: it had made her feel glamorous by association. On occasion, Perri would even play up Olympia’s looks to her friends, even boyfriends. “Admit you’re secretly in love with Pia,” she’d told Andy Lyons so many times in high school that it had become a joke between them—a joke and a way of preempting her paranoia that he actually was in love with Olympia. Not that she would have blamed him if he was. Even today, Perri felt like a grim-faced moose in the presence of Olympia. The previous summer, three generations of the Hellinger and Sims families had gathered at a rental beach house in Cape May. In a frenzy of masochism, while Olympia was in the shower, Perri had found herself trying on Olympia’s jeans—just to see if she could get them past her knees. (She couldn’t.)

  And yet, it had never just been about appearances. Perri thought back to their adolescent and late-adolescent years. She and Olympia had been close—up to a point. But there had always been secrets on Olympia’s end, secrets that, by the time Perri had found out about them, had already managed to make her feel excluded from the inner sanctum. This had been true even when the secrets had had no bearing on her life. For example, Olympia hadn’t told Perri who she was going to prom with until the day of the event. (Perri felt she deserved to know earlier.) It seemed to Perri
that her middle sister had no real loyalty to anyone, not even her family. She’d never felt this so much as when, in college, Olympia had become dangerously thin and refused to admit there was any problem. Instead, she’d hurled the accusation back in Perri’s face, saying that it was Perri who suffered from body dysmorphic disorder and needed help (and to please leave her alone, she had a class to attend).

  Gus’s chronic love troubles were another issue. In truth, it had taken Perri a long time to accept the fact that her baby sister was gay. After extensive reading on the subject in the years after Gus had “come out,” however, Perri had come to believe that homosexuality was a trait, like left-handedness, athleticism, or perfectionism, with which one was born. After all, growing up, Gus had never shown the slightest interest in fashion or primping—unless you counted the black eyeliner and white face powder she’d favored during her short-lived Goth phase in ninth grade. Until now, Perri’s main complaint regarding Gus’s love life had been her failure to have met a nice suit-jacketed lawyer and marry in one of the states in which it was already legal. Instead, she always seemed to pick the gruffest, most unkempt women she could find. The last time Perri had seen Debbie, the latter had been wearing painter pants and a “wife beater” undershirt. Why did lesbians want to look like plumbers? Perri had never received a good answer to this question. And now Gus had picked Jeff. Now she wasn’t even a lesbian anymore?

  “What I don’t understand,” Mike was saying, “is why you can’t just be happy for people.”

  “You’re right,” said Perri, blood rushing to her face. “I should be happy for Gus. At least someone is about to get laid.” She couldn’t believe she’d said that. Apparently, neither could Mike. The last thing she saw before she exited the room was his mouth hanging open like a trapdoor.

  Perri dipped her parsley into salt water, placed it on her tongue, and winced ever so slightly at the acrid taste. As in years past, Perri’s best friend from high school, Becky Kahn (now Goldstein), had invited the Sims-Hellinger family to a seder at their new-construction Colonial in nearby Harrison. Once a crazed Dead Head who’d attended thirty-eight shows in five years, Becky had gone “modern orthodox” after college, possibly just to spite her hippie parents, who had founded Hastings’s first community puppetry theater. Perri herself had little patience for religion and had therefore been secretly relieved to marry “out of the faith” insofar as it had given her an excuse to do none of the above. But she liked the idea of living according to a strict set of rules and half wished that, like Becky, she was someone who could believe.

  Except she couldn’t. She’d never seen any evidence of God, except maybe once in a California Closets showroom. Bob or Carol, both of them confirmed atheists, had never pushed any kind of formal religious education on her or her sisters. That said, Perri thought it was good for her children to be exposed to all facets of their ethnic heritage. Bob hailed from rabbinical Jews in Vilnius and Carol from shopkeepers in Budapest, while Mike’s parents back in Buffalo were twice-a-year Presbyterians of Scottish-Irish origin. On Easter, Mike had taken the kids to church, followed by an Easter egg hunt. And now they’d all come here, minus Noah, who was still on an early schedule (Perri had put him to sleep before they left), and Bob. So there were eight of them seated at the long shiny cherry-wood table, including Becky, her two teenage daughters (against trend in her socioeconomic cohort, Becky had had kids in her twenties), and her husband, Jason, who was wearing a pale pink yarmulke that reminded Perri of her old diaphragm turned upside down. The chairs had high carved backs that looked as if they belonged in a medieval castle and felt somehow punitive. Becky had always had terrible taste, Perri thought pityingly as she reached for an etched crystal wineglass with a thick purple stem.

  “Sadie, I understand you’re quite the reader these days. How about you pose the Four Questions?” asked Jason. Perri swelled with pride.

  “No thanks,” Sadie replied. “I don’t believe in God.”

  In an instant, Perri’s pride turned to mortification. “Sadie!” she cried.

  “She doesn’t have to do it if she doesn’t want to,” said Mike.

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Okay, then,” asked Jason, clearly miffed. “What about you, Aiden? Would you care to do the honors?”

  “Sure,” he said, shrugging.

  “Thank you, Aiden,” said Perri, hoping Sadie felt guilty.

  “Why is this night different from all other nights?” he began in a mumbly monotone, a Haggadah gripped in his pudgy fists. “Why do we eat only matzo on Pesach? Matzo reminds us that when the Jews left the slavery of Egypt they had no time to bake their bread. They took the raw dough on their journey and baked it in the hot desert sun into hard crackers called matzo. Why do we eat bitter herbs at our seder? Maror reminds us of the bitter and cruel way the pharaoh treated the Jewish people when they were slaves in Egypt.” He let out a tremendous fart.

  Becky’s daughters tittered maniacally.

  “Rachel, girls, please,” bellowed Jason.

  Perri’s mortification compounded. How had she given birth to such crude and irreverent children? She feared that their poor manners reflected badly on her own parenting skills. She also loved Aiden in particular as if he were her own arm. Sometimes, when he was sleepy, he still curled up in the crook of it and let her stroke his thick velvety brown hair. But he was such a boy—a boy’s boy, really. Perri had trouble imagining how, even when grown, he’d ever find a woman to marry him. “Aiden, say excuse me,” she told him.

  “Don’t embarrass the kid,” barked Mike. “It was obviously an accident.”

  Becky and Jason stared at their hands. Perri felt embarrassed on her own behalf now, too. No doubt her friends were thinking that she and Mike were having marital discord. (She supposed they were.) Aiden looked from one to the other of his warring parents, trying to figure out whose side to take. Finally, he mumbled, “Sorry.”

  “Why don’t you continue with the questions, Aiden,” suggested Jason.

  Aiden cleared his throat and began again: “Why do we dip our foods twice tonight? We dip bitter herbs into charoset to remind us how hard the Jewish slaves worked in Egypt. The chopped apples and nuts look like the clay used to make the bricks used in the pharaoh’s buildings. We dip parsley into salt water. The parsley reminds us that spring is here and new life will grow. The salt water reminds us of the tears of the Jewish slaves. Why do we lean on a pillow tonight? We lean on a pillow to be comfortable.” With that, Aiden closed his eyes and let his head fall to one side, as if a pillow awaited him there. Except it didn’t. Once again, the teenage daughters exploded in hysterics.

  “Girls, enough!” Jason bellowed in a stentorian tone of voice.

  Perri suddenly felt deep loathing for Becky’s husband and his superior attitude. Who was he, a man who manufactured radiant floor mats, to chastise her son for finding humor in religion?! Besides, the text was kind of idiotic. We lean on pillows to be comfortable? Talk about stating the obvious. “Aiden, sit up,” said Perri, wishing she could lean her own head on a pillow. The fact was that she felt exhausted by her own life, exhausted by her need to do the right thing and to maintain order. From the earliest age, Perri had doodled perfect cubes, all the lines straight and connecting. But lately, she’d been entertaining the shocking conclusion that alignment didn’t actually make her happy and that her need to control things was more of a compulsion than a pleasure. At the age of thirty-nine and eleven-twelfths, she’d also taken up smoking. Thanks to the peppermint-flavored breath spray she kept in her purse, she’d so far kept the habit hidden from her family. But for how much longer could she keep up the lie? “Aiden, did you hear what I said?” she bellowed.

  “I heard,” he said, slowly uncoiling his torso, clearly shocked at his mother’s tone of voice.

  The previous night, Perri had dreamed that strange men with paper bags over their heads with only the eyes cut out were lowering her naked body onto a white canvas. They painted
her breasts and thighs with bright red oil paint, their brushes flipping like dying fish. Then they rolled her across the canvas—rolled and rolled until the ceiling was the wall, and wall was the floor. Then they began to massage her body. They rubbed red paint into her breasts and tummy and then farther down. And she let it happen. That was the fantasy—that just once she surrendered control. “I’m sorry. I have to go,” Perri heard herself announcing. “Thank you for a lovely meal.” She grabbed her purse and stood up.

  “Mom?” said Sadie.

  The other guests stared back at her, slack-jawed. Reaching for her coat, Perri left the room, then the house. The moon was nearly full, the air crisp. A dog barked in the distance. She figured she’d call a taxi from the street. Or maybe she’d just start walking. All she knew was that she had to get away. The men were after her—the big bad men wielding five-gallon canisters of Benjamin Moore Ladybug Red. It was a great color for the interior of coat closets, you know…

  10

  SO, WHAT’S YOUR DEAL, ANYWAY?” Gus asked over coffee.

  “Define ‘deal,’ ” said Jeff.

  “Like, I don’t know—what do you live for?”

  He shrugged, then pushed out his lips. “I don’t know. Just getting by. Trying to have a good time while I still can.”

  “I guess that’s hard for me to understand, since I’ve never lived that way,” said Gus.

  “You always knew you wanted to be a lawyer?”

  “Maybe not a lawyer, but I knew when I was pretty young that this was a fucked-up world, and I had to do my part to change it.”

  “Wow,” said Jeff, laughing lightly. “I was never that motivated. My only strong emotion was that I wanted to whip Mike’s ass at every sport we played. Which, frankly, wasn’t that hard.”

  “You’re really competitive with your brother. Aren’t you?” said Gus.

  “And you’re not with Perri or Pia?” he asked.

  “We’re all a little competitive. But we’re nothing alike.”