The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters (3 page)

“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.

“Well, we have a wonderful new bagel shop on Main Street in Hastings,” said Carol, who seemed truly to believe that the suburbs were Bounty Incarnate.

“Meanwhile, did you hear about Cousin Stacy?” said Perri, bowl in hand as she made her way back to the island.

“What?” said Olympia.

“Apparently, Scott has moved out.” Stacy, a massage therapist, was the daughter of Bob’s troubled sister, Elaine. Scott was Stacy’s wine-distributor husband.

“According to who?” said Olympia, who, although she pretended otherwise, never tired of family gossip—so long as it wasn’t about herself.

“Gus, of course,” said Perri. (Gus had always been the family big mouth.)

“Well, I say, ��Good riddance!’ ” declared Carol, a committed Hillary Democrat. “Wasn’t he a follower of that awful Rush Limbaugh?!”

“Where did you hear that?” snapped Perri, who was married to a man whom all the Hellingers suspected of being a Republican as well, though he’d never admitted as much. Even so, Mike Sims’s politics were a source of tension between Perri and her mother. (Perri herself insisted she was “apolitical.”)

“I thought you told me,” said Carol.

“I never told you anything like that,” Perri said quickly. “In any case, politics are the least of Scott’s problems.” She overturned the bagel bag into the bowl. Sesame and poppy seeds sprayed across the white marble countertop, whereupon Perri quickly secured a spray can of “stone revitalizer” and a roll of paper towels. “According to Gus, he’s an online poker addict, and he owes massive debts,” she continued as she cleaned.

“He’s a gambler?!” cried a now flabbergasted Carol, who was as uninterested in the amassing of money as she was in modern medicine. “Poor woman.”

“Gus said Stacy sounded okay when she talked to her. But Scott Jr. is apparently taking it
really hard.
” Perri turned pointedly to Olympia. Or was Olympia projecting? Maybe Perri was
just glancing at the clock to see how soon the frittatas needed to come out of the ovens. But even if the eyeballing was unintentional, she might have skipped that line about how hard the split was on Scott Jr. Lola didn’t have a father at home, either. It wasn’t necessarily the end of the world. Her sister could be so insensitive, Olympia thought as she lifted the bagel bowl off the counter and walked out.

She found her own father seated open-legged on a microfiber sectional in Perri and Mike’s beam-ceilinged living room, diagonally across from a lackluster fire burning in a stone hearth. The flattened toes of his enormous brown suede Wallabies lent his feet a kangaroo-like appearance, while his silver beard bore a certain resemblance to Santa Claus’s. His body type, however, had more in common with Ichabod Crane’s. His long hands rested on opposing knees of threadbare brown corduroy pants. Beneath his not-quite-matching blazer he was wearing a paisley shirt with giant swirling patterns and a spread collar that looked as if it had been lifted from Led Zeppelin’s dressing room in the late 1960s. “Hello there, Daughter!” he said with a quick wave. Which either did or didn’t imply that he couldn’t remember which daughter she was.

“Hi, Dad,” said Olympia, kissing her father’s sunken cheek. “What’s happening?”

“Oh, nothing much. Just hurtling through space at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour!” he replied.

She’d heard that one before—several times. “Whatever you say, Pops,” she said.

Then she turned to greet Aiden, Perri and Mike’s blubbery elder son, who lay tummy down and elbows up on a geometric
area rug, his butt crack visible over the waistband of his Spider-Man underpants. A pack of baseball cards spread out before him, he appeared to be in the process of composing a fantasy all-star team. He was also surreptitiously nibbling on a pack of Twizzlers that he’d hidden in the pocket of his gray hoodie. The only candy Perri allowed in the house were Yummy Earth Organic Vitamin C Pops. Also, the kids were required to brush their teeth immediately after eating one. “Aiden,” said Olympia, “what’s up?”