The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters (6 page)

How was it possible that her older sister had birthed such a perverse and beautiful child? Olympia wondered. Sadie was tall and slim, with dark blond hair, porcelain skin, a swanlike
neck, and giant aquamarine eyes. Fascinated, amused, and just the tiniest bit threatened, Olympia tiptoed back down the hall.

Returning to the living room, Olympia found the other members of the extended Hellinger-Sims clan indulging their signature manias. Perri was busy DustBusting corn chip crumbs beneath the coffee table. Mike was also on all fours, doing push-ups and sounding as if he were at high risk for having a coronary. Gus was stretched out on the short end of the sectional, barking at Carol, whose crime had been to insist that Aiden’s acumen at the baseball card game Strat-O-Matic was evidence of a young Pythagoras at work. “Can’t you ever just let anyone
be
without having to make them into something more?!” Gus berated their mother.

“Whatever I say is wrong,” said Carol.

Meanwhile, Noah had climbed into Grandpa Bob’s lap and was now picking
his
nose, undeterred by Bob’s chuckling cries of “Careful there, sonny.”

Surveying the scene, Olympia was overcome by the desire to make nice. Being mad at your family was too exhausting and upsetting, she decided. It was far easier to stick to the surface-level chitchat that defined her and her sisters’ current interactions. In fact, the three of them emailed or spoke on the phone nearly every day, even if it was just two lines back and forth, or two minutes of talk. “Hey, Perr. Any chance of hot food in the near future?” Olympia said in a resolutely upbeat voice. “I’m famished.” (Olympia knew how her older sister loved to feel necessary.)

“Five minutes,” said Perri, still out of view. “But the coffee is hot if you want some.”

“Great, thanks,” said Olympia, next turning to her younger sister. “Hey, I’m really sorry about Debbie.”

“Thanks for saying that,” mumbled Gus.

Just then, Lola wandered in.

“Yo, mermaid,” said Mike, still on all fours. “Want to go fishing in Uncle Mikey’s boat?”

“Yay. Fishing!” cried Lola, boarding her uncle’s back and throwing her arms around its captain’s sweat-beaded neck. To Olympia’s vague horror, her daughter seemed to consider “Uncle Mikey” the source of all excitement in the world.

“All passengers aboard!” bellowed Mike, rising onto his knees.

“I see a shark! I see a shark!” cried Lola, pointing at Noah.

“Hey, Lola,” said Gus, half sitting up. “Don’t I even get a hello?”

“Lola, go kiss your aunt Gus hello,” said Olympia.

Lola dutifully disembarked and performed the requested task. Then she climbed into Olympia’s lap and stuck her thumb back in her mouth. Olympia felt a rush of proprietary pride. Paternity questions aside, Lola was still the greatest thing that had ever happened to her, she thought—especially when there were other people around to keep her entertained.

Sadie appeared shortly thereafter, decapitated Barbie still in her grip, but wearing slightly more clothing beneath her cape (a T-shirt and leggings) than she had been in her bedroom.

“Who’s my favorite little witchy witch?” asked Mike, lifting his daughter into the air and enveloping her in a bear hug.

“Daaaaaaaaddddy,” Sadie said languorously as she rested her cheek on his shoulder.

“Hey, what happened to Barbie’s head?” asked Olympia, curious as to how she’d answer.

“She wouldn’t do a split, so I had to punish her,” explained Sadie.

“Sadie—enough!” yelled Perri.

“Oh, stop, Perri!” said Carol, slapping at the air. “She’s just an imaginative little girl trying to make sense of the world.” She turned to Sadie, arms open, and said, “Come here, My Beautiful Thing!”

As Sadie climbed into her grandma’s lap, Olympia looked away. Carol had once called Olympia by that name. It was clear to everyone—except, maybe, to Carol—that Sadie was her favorite grandchild by a margin of ten. No doubt some of the connection could be attributed to the frequency with which grandmother and granddaughter saw each other—at least twice a week. Sadie’s house was just a twenty-five-minute drive from Hastings; Lola lived a subway and train ride away. Even so, it seemed to Olympia that her mother hadn’t made as much of an effort to get to know Lola as she might have. She even bought her cheaper presents than she bought her other granddaughter. After Christmas, Olympia had found herself Internet-price-checking the gifts that Carol had given to Sadie and Lola respectively. To her intense annoyance, Sadie’s Butterfly Bead-Tastic Kit had come in at $26.99, while Lola’s Dress a Doll Magnet Set sold for a mere $13.99.

Five minutes later, just as promised, steam rising from a cobalt blue Le Creuset stoneware baking dish she was carrying, Perri announced, “
Le dîner est servi!
”

“Do I have a dream wife, or what?” asked Mike, walking over to where she stood.

“A dream wife for a dream husband,” said Perri, seeming to
lap up the praise as she lifted her chin and puckered her lips to meet his own.

As the two kissed on the lips, albeit gingerly in order to avoid the scalding receptacle between them, Olympia found herself looking away again.

“Well, I can’t speak for the rest of you,” said Carol, making her way to the table. “But that smells absolutely scrumptious.” She tapped her eldest daughter’s arm. “I’ll never know how you do it, Perri—raising three young children while you run your thing.” She waved her hand through the air.

“You mean,
my company?
” asked Perri, lower lip extended and clearly miffed at Carol’s failure to have come up with the word and, by extension, to take seriously her entrepreneurial success.

“That’s what I meant.”

“With difficulty, is the answer.”

“And did you hear,” said Carol, turning to the others as she pulled out a chair. “Perri’s been invited to China to give a talk to a business group?”

For an intelligent woman, Olympia thought, her mother was shockingly dense about the ways in which she fostered rivalry between her daughters. Not that the proclivity was anything new. Olympia saw herself as a teenager, sitting at the dinner table, seeing how many canned peas she could spear on one prong of her fork, while Carol informed Bob that Perri’s scale model of the Roman Colosseum had won first prize at the History Day Fair—or Gus’s poem about an orphan boy with a cleft lip had won an Honorable Mention in the All Westchester Poetry Runoff for Under Thirteens. “Well, how do you like that,” Bob would say.

“Wow, good for you,” Olympia now said, turning to Perri
and thinking about how she was never invited anywhere—not even to Austria.

“It’s really nothing.” Perri smiled faux modestly. “To be honest, the whole thing sounds completely hokey. I can’t figure out why I was even asked! The keynote speaker is the founder of Apple, Steve Whatshisname. Apparently, the organizers saw that silly article I was in, in
Fortune
magazine last year, about ten female entrepreneurs to watch—”

Olympia felt her body tensing into a thousand individual knots. “I heard Steve Whatshisname is dying of cancer,” she said, then felt bad for saying so in light of her father’s medical issues.

“I went to a conference in Beijing once,” said Bob. “Back then, they called it Peking, of course, raising the question… is it now called Beijing Duck?”

“I was asked to speak, too,” interjected Gus, suddenly vertical. “In court tomorrow morning on behalf of a battered woman who’s about to become homeless unless her baby’s deadbeat daddy steps up to the plate.” She yanked out a chair at the far end of the table, producing a screeching sound that caused Perri to visibly flinch. (Or was it something Gus had said?) “And then, later in the day, I’m giving a lecture on the fundamentals of contract law to three hundred first-years.”

“Such ambitious daughters I have!” declared Carol. She turned to her husband, then her son-in-law. “They certainly didn’t get it from me.”

“Or me,” cut in Olympia, fully aware of the nakedness of her own insecurity, yet in that moment somehow unable to disguise it. At her age, she secretly felt she ought to have been running her own gallery or museum, not ordering cases of Riesling and updating mailing lists for someone else’s and especially not someone nearly ten years her junior. That, or she should have been one
of the featured artists. But despite having attended Pratt for a year and a half and forging some connections in the downtown art world, Olympia had long ago given up trying to be an artist. She’d had her bunny paintings featured in a few group shows, but the exposure hadn’t led anywhere. Maybe it was that she didn’t have the energy or the drive, or that she secretly suspected that her artwork was trite, even corny, and possibly not even worthy of a Hallmark card; and that she couldn’t compete on that front or really any other; and that the only thing she’d ever been good at was looking a certain way, striking a certain pose. That and arranging blind dates. Her sisters were the Impressive Ones, while Olympia flitted from job to job and failed to complete master’s programs (two, so far). She was the only Hellinger sister without an advanced degree. Perri had gotten her MBA from Columbia, and Gus her JD from Berkeley. Olympia had also been the only sister not to break 1400 on the SAT.

“Um, you’re hardly flipping burgers at Mickey Dee’s,” said Gus.

“I didn’t say I was,” said Olympia, hiding behind her water glass.

An awkward silence ensued. It was Mike who lifted the pall. “Well, here’s my public speech for the day: What do you say we all eat?”

“Finally,” grumbled Aiden.

“Sadie, Aiden,” said Perri. “Please go wash your hands!”

“I washed them an hour ago,” murmured Aiden.

“It’s only blood,” said Sadie, lifting her hands, which were covered with red streaks.

“Blood!” cried Perri.

“Just kidding. It’s marker.”

“Fine. Be filthy, all of you,” said Perri as she doled out perfect
squares of her asparagus frittata. “Contact cholera. What do I care?”

Sadie lifted a celery stick off her plate, waved it through the air at her mother, and declared,
“Petrificus Totalus!”

“Anyone care for an omega-three-rich Nova and bagel?” asked Mike, a platter in each hand.

“I do, thanks,” said Olympia, suddenly ravenous.

After Mike served Olympia, he moved on to his father-in-law. “And how about you, Bob? I think this everything bagel has your name on it.”

“Suppose it can’t hurt,” he answered.

“And anything to drink with that, sir? Coffee? Water? Defrosted orange juice that looks a little too yellow for my taste?”

“You know, I was just reading that, in certain ancient cultures, the consumption of one’s own urine was considered medicinal,” said Bob. “I believe the term is ‘urophagia.’ Apparently, it’s quite harmless, assuming it’s taken in small amounts and not highly concentrated or laden with bacteria.”

“Bob, please,” said Carol, making a face.

“Way to be gross, Grandpa,” said Aiden, who, in this case, spoke for the rest of the now snickering Hellinger clan.

“You’re very welcome,” said Bob, smiling brightly.

“I think you mean ‘
Urine
welcome,’ ” said Olympia, who, while in her sisters’ company and for unclear reasons, often found her sense of humor reverting to that of her two-year-old self.

Perri and Gus appeared to have contracted a similar condition. The two of them suddenly burst into laughter so raucous that it nearly propelled them off their chairs. Olympia joined in. The three sisters twisted and gyrated, clutched their stomachs
and shrieked. Why couldn’t it always be like this? Olympia wondered and lamented. Why couldn’t they all decide to be little kids again, free of ambition, envy, and anxiety? Or was she rewriting history? Had there never been such a time, not even when they were three, five, and seven and building sand castles on the Delaware coast? No doubt Perri had criticized Olympia for failing to achieve the correct water-to-sand ratio, then gone ahead and constructed a sand-based Versailles. Then the waves had washed the whole thing away. And Gus had found a way to take it personally and burst into tears of indignation—and Olympia had just stood there, wondering what she was supposed to do next.

Lola was so exhausted by the day’s events that on the train ride back to Brooklyn she fell asleep. Olympia was able to transfer her from lap to stroller to bed without her waking up. With Lola out of the way, Olympia took the opportunity to lavish attention on Clive and feed him a peanut treat. Sometimes she wondered why, in search of a furry low-maintenance pet, she’d gotten a rabbit, not a cat, since rabbits were far harder to house and had shorter life spans too. But having a cat had seemed clichéd, even desperate, in a way that a single woman with a bunny wasn’t. Also, she’d recently learned from a magazine that cats were actually vicious predators who endangered the world’s rare bird populations. So now she could feel righteous, too, about keeping a pet that essentially did nothing all day long but lie on the bathroom floor, twitching its nose, nibbling on carrots, shitting pellets, and looking cute.

After cracking open a bottle of Pinot Noir, Olympia lit a cigarette (she tried not to smoke, but sometimes she didn’t try hard enough) and called up the Huffington Post. As she inhaled
and imbibed, she read a blog post about how the country’s milk supply was being tainted by the use of the bovine growth hormone rBGH. Outraged, she left a lengthy “comment” on the website of the Monsanto Corporation (creator of rBGH and alleged payer-off of the FDA), accusing the powers that be of purposefully giving kids cancer. When had she become such a strident environmentalist? she wondered. Also, when had she become such a hothead? Also, if she cared about the planet, did she have to stop smoking? Did it matter that her cigarettes were made of organic tobacco and additive free? And what if she smoked only two per week? Also, was it criminal that she didn’t always recycle tinfoil and plastic take-out containers—and still loved Phil Collins’s
Greatest Hits
album?

After a while, Olympia got out her watercolors and worked on her portrait of her friends Rick and Carli, who were Couple #4 on her list of Matchmaking Triumphs. If there was one setup of which Olympia was most proud, it was them. Two years earlier and in the space of one month, Carli had lost her job as Sylvester Stallone’s personal art adviser and been diagnosed with lupus. Meanwhile, Olympia’s other friends had given up hope of Rick, a war photographer and famous “wild man,” ever settling down. Now Carli was three months pregnant; Rick had switched to sports photography; and the two were buying a three-story Victorian house in Ditmas Park. If the painting came out well, Olympia planned to have it framed and give it to them as their wedding present. Although Olympia struggled to be close to her family, she prided herself on being the Ultimate Friend.