The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters (16 page)

Mike opened the front door. He was wearing jeans, a UPenn T-shirt, and bedroom slippers that appeared to be made of crafting felt. His face was less pink than usual—more like beige with hints of green. “Thanks for coming out,” he said gravely.

“Of course,” said Olympia, fighting the urge to ask him for reimbursement for her travel expenses.

Aiden was playing Fruit Ninja on his father’s phone with the dim-eyed gaze of a professional drunk, his pointer finger frantically waggling. Noah, dressed in tiny elastic-waist jeans and a Yankees jersey, was fast asleep on the couch, albeit at a strange angle, his legs elevated higher than his head. Bob was nowhere in sight and presumably already in bed. Sadie was eating Cheerios and milk and watching
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

“Scary!” said Lola, hiding behind her mother’s leg as a giant serpent sank its fang into the boy wizard’s flesh.

“Sadie, turn that garbage off,” said Mike. “You’re scaring your cousin. And you’re going to get nightmares.”

“No, I’m not,” said Sadie, munching away happily. “And it’s not garbage.” She took another bite. “Besides, it’s not like Harry dies. Dumbledore’s phoenix, Fawkes, saves him.”

Mike narrowed his already sliverlike eyes, shook his head. As if the misery were all-encompassing.

“Speaking of nightmares,” said Olympia. “I need to try and get Lola to sleep. Is there room for her in Sadie’s bedroom?”

“There’s a trundle under her bed. I can get some sheets for it
if I can remember where Perri keeps them.” He scratched his head, glanced over at Sadie. “Yo, Sade, where does Mom keep the twin sheets for your room?”

“Hall closet,” came the reply.

“I’m sure I can find them,” said Olympia, walking toward the stairs.

“It’s fine, I’ll get them,” said Mike, knocking into Olympia’s shoulder as he tried to beat her to the landing. It actually hurt. Was the man made of rock?

“I can make the bed,” she said, following him upstairs.

Mike turned the knob to the linen closet, whereupon Olympia suppressed a gasp. Even the fitted sheets, impossible for the average mortal to tame, had been expertly folded into perfect squares. What’s more, a black satin ribbon encircled each sheet set.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Mike mumbled as he knelt and sorted through the pile.

“Maybe she’s just upset about turning forty,” offered Olympia, who dreaded the day herself. “It’s kind of a traumatic birthday—at least for women. I mean, George Clooney is allowed to be a sex symbol in middle age, whereas women his age are basically told to disappear.”

“Maybe,” said Mike. “But—no disrespect to Perri—being a sex symbol was never her thing.”

Although Olympia secretly agreed with the assessment, she was startled by his words and by the betrayal that seemed to be implicit in them. “I guess,” she replied, struggling to think of something to say that would sound neutral. “So, have you tried calling her?”

“I’m not going to chase after her,” Mike announced defiantly. He picked himself up off the floor, one knee at a time, a
pale pink sheet set with a French rose motif in his arms. “If she wants to be part of this family, she can come back on her own account.”

“Right,” said Olympia, even though it seemed to her that he was taking the wrong approach. Wasn’t this the time for Mike to show Perri how much she meant to him?

“Have
you
talked to her?” he asked.

“I just left a message,” said Olympia.

She followed him into Sadie’s bedroom with its outrageous canopy bed, fit for a royal. Again descending to his hands and knees, Mike yanked out the trundle. Olympia, in turn, bent down to help secure the fitted sheet across the mattress. Her face was now a foot away from his. Curious somehow, she found herself glancing over at him. She’d never noticed the yellow-green speckles in his eyes before. “You look like Perri right now,” he said, returning her gaze. “I hadn’t seen it before just now.”

Olympia quickly looked away. The comparison felt too intimate. It felt strangely threatening, too. Olympia still hated to have her looks contrasted to those of her sisters, if only because it brought her back to a time in adolescence when differentiating herself had been paramount. Back then, clothes had often felt like her only weapons. Olympia had lived in oversized Ts, low-slung belts, long winter underwear, and a Levi’s jean jacket she’d decorated with campaign-style buttons advertising the names of various West Village boutiques. Perri had favored white canvas Tretorns, bleached jeans, and giant Benetton rugby shirts that she’d paid for with money saved up from her after-school job at a local jeweler’s. (Gus, though still in junior high at the time, had already perfected the art of androgyny with the help of Doc Martens, black jeans, and a black leather
motorcycle jacket with lots of unnecessary zippers.) Somehow the three of them had still managed to be in and out of one another’s closets, pulling things off hangers, cutting deals. “Guess button-flies for your CP Shades mock?” They’d managed to hurt one another’s feelings, too. Olympia still recalled the time she’d worn a shirt with a Nehru collar to school, and Perri had addressed her as “Yo, Gandhi.” Even though Olympia had considered Perri’s own fashion sense to be the antithesis of cool, she’d never worn the top again.

“No one has ever said we look alike before,” she told Mike. “It’s probably just that we were talking about her.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Anyway, I can finish up here.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

Relief flooded Olympia’s chest at the sight of her brother-in-law lumbering away.

But there was no escaping him after the kids were all finally asleep. Since Bob was in the guest room, Olympia’s bed for the night was the living room sofa. Which was also the TV couch. Then again, it was Mike’s house. He plunked himself down in a club chair across from her and cracked open a beer. She was watching 2001
: A Space Odyssey.
“You gotta love the nineteen-sixties idea of advanced computer technology,” Mike offered at the spectacle of Hal the talking computer telling one of the astronauts that the spaceship was about to malfunction. “Hal,” he went on. “How come no one uses that name anymore? Hal Sims. Not bad. Right?”

“You thinking of having a fourth?” Olympia joked.

“Not likely to happen at present, since my wife doesn’t appear to live here anymore.”

“I’m sure she’ll be back,” said Olympia, who wasn’t sure of anything.

Mike took a sip of his beer and sighed a world-weary “Who knows.”

“Speaking of walking out,” Olympia told him. “I basically quit my job this afternoon after I talked to you. Like, I’m not sure it’s going to be waiting for me on Monday.” She had to tell someone.

“No shit.”

“Yes shit.”

Mike folded down his lips. “Wow. Well, welcome to the unemployed people club. It’s not that bad once you get used to it.”

“I guess,” said Olympia, unconvinced.

“Hey.” He paused, took another sip of his beer. “I appreciate you coming out here.”

“Of course.”

“It’s nice having you here.”

Olympia couldn’t, in good faith, tell Mike that it was nice being there, so she said nothing.

A few minutes before eleven, he wandered off with a “ ’Night.”

“Sleep well,” she told him. She watched a few more minutes of the movie. Then she flicked off the power button, curled up under her blanket, and attempted to shut out the world and all its myriad confusions, if only for the night.

It couldn’t have been much more than six a.m. when Olympia woke. The kids weren’t even up yet. Her back ached. Yet there was something strangely calming, even copacetic, about lying there staring at the ceiling beams. The silence was as heavy as
the velvet drapes in the dining room. The morning light was just beginning to filter through the bay window that looked out into the backyard. It was early spring, and crocuses and daffodil buds were poking through the thaw. Olympia thought back to her earliest love affairs. All of them had started in late March or early April. It made her think that human beings were eighty-five percent biologically programmed and, to that extent, completely predictable. As for the remaining fifteen percent, there was no saying where it would lead.

Or where it had led her sister Perri. The Rocky Mountains? Rio de Janeiro? A thought struck Olympia: Was it possible that she really didn’t know the first thing about her older sister? What if the roles we assumed in our families had little to nothing to do with the people we actually became in the outside world? A mutual acquaintance in New York had once described Perri as “such a sweetheart,” and the description had shocked Olympia. Was that how her older sister came across in public? And was Perri’s critical streak reserved only for her younger sisters and husband? And had it really been so intolerable here in Larchmont? Olympia wondered as she gazed around her at the creamy walls, plush carpets, iron chandelier, leather upholstery, and solid wood furnishings. Olympia had yet to graduate from the Ikea stage of home furnishing, the particleboard and MDF interspersed with the occasional flea-market find.

Bob was up next. Olympia saw him before he saw her. He was dressed in his flannel bathrobe, and his upper body was bent at a seventy-degree angle. Scurrying down the hall, his eyes darting this way and that, he reminded her of a frightened bandit. Clearly he couldn’t wait to go home, Olympia thought with a heavy heart. And why did it so upset her to see her parents looking needy or vulnerable in any way? Growing up,
she’d hear the two of them talking in the kitchen in low voices about how her father had been passed over for yet another plum assignment. Carol would express outrage at the head of the lab. Quietly defensive, Bob would try to justify the decision to make Kit Furlong or Dan Lieblich, rather than himself, the team leader of the Booster Neutrino Oscillation Experiment, or some other initiative. As Olympia understood it, her father, while a young atomic scientist at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, had once been deemed a rising star in his field. There had even been talk of a future Nobel. What had happened since then (to change his fortunes) was unclear. Bob never talked about that period of his life. And Olympia didn’t have the nerve to ask, not wanting to be nosey or to upset him.

In truth, it was strange to think of her father having ever had a life outside his wife and three daughters and in a place other than Hastings. Still, Olympia always longed to know more about the man he once was. And had he been a virgin when he’d married Carol? It seemed unlikely, but who knew. Clearly, he’d been a serious nerd. “Hi, Dad,” she called to him.

Apparently startled, he froze in place before his head swiveled to face her. “Perr-Gus-I-mean-Pia—what in the world are you doing here?!” he asked, his eyebrows up near his hairline.

“I came out last night,” she said. “Lola’s up in Sadie’s room.”

“And where’s Perri? She’s usually the first up.”

“She went on a last-minute business trip,” Olympia said, improvising. “Some kind of closet organization conference in San Diego, I think. She would have said good-bye, but she didn’t want to wake you.”

“I see.” Bob furrowed his brow. “Well, it’s nice to see you! Maybe you’ll come to the hospital with me today to see Mom.”

“Of course.”

“Though I don’t know how we’ll get there. Perhaps someone can drive us.”

“We’ll figure it out,” said Olympia, conjecturing that Perri and her Lexus were the glue that kept the Hellinger family from splintering into four disparate units.

Noah and Mike appeared soon after that, Noah in the same Yankees jersey and jeans from the previous night and Mike in the same T-shirt—and now sweats. As the latter lumbered down the stairs, his son hanging off his neck, Olympia could just discern the outline of his penis swinging to and fro. “Morning,” he mumbled.

“Hey,” she said, suddenly as embarrassed by her own semidressed state as she was by his—and glad now that her father was nearby. “Hey, Pops,” she said, turning to him. “Do you want me to go get the newspaper for you?” Perri still got home delivery of the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal,
though it was unclear if anyone read them.

“Please,” replied Bob.

Olympia took her time walking to the front door, then walking back, so as to avoid sharing counter space with Mike. Indeed, by the time she made it to the kitchen, he was already on his way back upstairs, both bottle and baby in tow.

Sadie appeared shortly after that, followed by Lola.

“Good morning, you two!” said Olympia.

“I want pancakes,” said Sadie.

“Me, too,” said Lola.

“You’re just saying that because Sadie wants them,” said Olympia, then realized she was being unnecessarily critical of a not-quite-four-year-old.

“No, I’m not!” cried Lola, sounding hurt.

Olympia couldn’t blame her. “You’re right. That was bitchy. Sorry,” she said.

“What’s
bitchy?
” asked Lola.

“Mean,” said Olympia.

“Supermean,” said Sadie. “I love being supermean!”

“Why?” asked Lola.

“I don’t know,” said Sadie, shrugging.

At least she was honest, Olympia thought. “Well, if Sadie shows me where the ingredients are, I’m happy to give the pancakes a go,” she said.

“Mom keeps the organic buckwheat mix over here,” she said, leading her aunt to a pullout pantry that made the linen closet look haphazard. The twist ties that accompanied already-opened products such as rice and pasta appeared to have been color-coordinated to their packaging. What’s more, all the cereal boxes were lined up so that no box stuck out farther than any other. Olympia felt as if she needed a double dose of her anxiety medication. It wasn’t just the perfection of Perri’s pantry that unnerved her. The very idea of cooking filled Olympia with dread and self-doubt. She never understood how other women she knew all seemed to know how to make braised lamb shanks and turnip puree. When had they learned? And who had taught them? Carol, a would-be women’s libber in her day, had seen cooking as a form of servitude and had done as little of it as possible while her daughters were growing up. The Hellinger sisters had therefore subsisted on TV dinners, pizza, raw carrots, and macaroni and cheese.