The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters Read online

  “You’re all strong-willed, I suppose. I don’t know.” Carol shook her head, bit her lip.

  “Yes, and did it ever occur to you that all your labeling and comparing and boasting has made us all insanely competitive?”

  “I never compared you,” insisted Carol.

  “Well, maybe you never compared us directly. But telling us all how perfect and successful Perri was all the time; and how passionate and committed Gus was in her quest to raise a thousand dollars for the starving children of Biafra; and how beautiful and artistic I was—didn’t exactly help.” Olympia wasn’t even sure if she believed half the things she was saying, but the words tumbled out of her mouth now as if her life depended on it. As if they’d waited four decades to come out (maybe they had).

  “I’m sorry for being proud of you!” cried Carol.

  “Proud—or not as proud as you wish you could be of me?” asked Olympia.

  “Proud of you just the way you are.”

  “Well, there are ways of being proud that don’t turn us all into caricatures.”

  “You defined yourselves. I had nothing to do with it. Dad and I gave all of you the same opportunities.”

  “But you were always push-push-pushing for us to achieve something, be something! It made all of us neurotic messes. You want to know why I never made it as an artist? Because the expectations in this family were too high. I couldn’t handle any kind of rejection. And you know why I never found a great guy and got married? No one was ever good enough, because you taught me to believe that I was special in some way, better than other people. And you taught me to be critical, too. That’s why I’m being such a Huge Bitch right now.”

  This time Carol didn’t answer. She pursed her lips, hung her head.

  Out of accusations, and filled with shame at all the people she seemed to have hurt and disappointed in one day, Olympia ran up the stairs and into her childhood bedroom, or what was left of it. Now it was more like a storage locker. In one corner there were National Geographic magazines piled nearly to the ceiling, their skinny yellow spines cracking like late autumn leaves. In the other corner was a picture window with views into the Romanos’ backyard, with its neatly planted azalea bushes all in a row like Civil War soldiers ready to do battle. Growing up, the Hellingers had been the North to the Romanos’ South, with disputes regularly breaking out over everything from overly bright Christmas lights (the Romanos) to maple trees whose untrained branches created unwanted shade (the Hellingers). The previous fall, however, Carol had been delighted to announce that a new family had moved in, a young Serbian couple with a baby. Meanwhile, the Romano elders, who’d once toiled in the chemical factories on the Hudson, had retired to the Gulf Coast of Florida with the proceeds from their house sale. A happy ending for all, if only…

  Stretching out on her old twin bed, which was half covered with garment bags, Olympia felt exhausted and disoriented. It wasn’t just the thought that she no longer knew anyone who lived on Edmarth Place with the exception of her own parents. It was the fact that she was no longer on speaking terms with anyone in her family with the exception of Lola and Bob, neither of whom were fully verbal. For the second time in twenty-four hours, tears cascaded down Olympia’s face and dripped into her mouth. She’d never felt so alone.

  But single mothers don’t have much time for self-pity. Minutes later, Lola appeared in the doorway, claiming to be hungry and demanding spaghetti—and wondering why Mommy’s eyes were all red.

  “Mommy’s got hay fever again,” Olympia told her. “But I’m fine now.” And so she was, because she had to be.

  Five minutes after that, three generations of Hellinger women (Carol, Olympia, Lola) were back in the kitchen, talking about trivial matters in strained voices (“Does she want butter with that?”), when the doorbell rang. “This darn leg,” said Carol, trying to lift herself off her chair.

  “Don’t bother. I’ll get it,” said Olympia.

  “I want to come!” said Lola, rising too.

  “Eat your pasta,” said Olympia, pushing her daughter’s tiny shoulders back down.

  “Maybe it’s the boogeyman,” offered Lola, before exploding into giggles.

  “At this point, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised,” said Olympia. On her way out of the room, she snuck a glance out the bay window, which afforded views of the driveway. Parked behind Carol’s Honda was a navy blue VW Jetta, seemingly fresh off the assembly line. No doubt some faculty member from Hastings High, coming to check on Carol or some such, Olympia thought. But what if it wasn’t? For a fleeting second, she imagined that Mike had sent a hit man to kill her off, so he’d never have to see her again, never have to face the temptation. She could already see the headlines: “Sister Murdered in Love Triangle Drama.” Then again, the Internet had killed the newspaper headline. Now they came and went every two hours. It was sad in a way, Olympia thought. She cracked the door.

  Standing there, her shoulders thrown back and chin lifted, was an extremely attractive Asian female, about five feet eight inches, of indeterminate age. She was wearing a trench coat, a black V-neck shirt, black pants, and ludicrously high, very expensive-looking, black patent leather stilettos. Her shiny black hair hung practically down to her waist; a tiny butterfly barrette held it off her forehead. Fine lines fanning out of the corners of her mascara-caked eyes were the only evidence of time’s passage. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she began with a smile that fell somewhere between shy and officious. “My name is Jennifer Yu. And I’m looking for Robert Hellinger?”

  It had become a beautiful spring day. Even the crabgrass in the front lawn looked verdant and lush. Birds called to one another. Olympia could have sworn they were saying, “The-o-dore, the-o-dore.” (Theodore?) In her twenties, she’d dated (that was a nice word for it) a bartender named Theo who had green-tinted glasses, was obsessed with anal sex, and called her “O.” As if she were the protagonist of that dirty French novel from the 1950s with which everyone in college was obsessed. Olympia couldn’t imagine what this “Jennifer Yu” could possibly want. She held no clipboard containing a petition, no flyer to indicate a fund-raising request. Olympia was stumped. It was her impression that the only people who ever came calling for her dad these days were the UPS man and, on occasion, Bob’s old friend and onetime bluegrass band mate, Jim, a mustachioed biochemist who moonlighted on the mandolin. Feeling protective of her father, Olympia assumed her haughtiest art world voice, and said, “May I ask what this is in reference to?”

  Jennifer lifted up her shoulders. As if it pained her to have to admit “It’s sort of a personal matter.”

  A personal matter?! Bob Hellinger didn’t have a personal life. Or at least he didn’t have one outside of Carol. Olympia’s imagination ran wild with the possibilities. Was Jennifer some kind of nuclear activist about to deliver a Unabomber-inspired package that, when opened, would blow up in her father’s face, punishment for all the years he’d spent splitting atoms? The strangest part was: there was something familiar about the woman’s smile. Olympia wondered if they’d met somewhere before, maybe at an art opening or wedding or even daycare holiday party? In that event, she didn’t want to be rude. “Oh, right,” she said. “Well, do you want to come in while I go get him?”

  “It’s fine. I’ll wait outside,” she said.

  “Okay, well, I’ll be right back.” Olympia left the door ajar.

  But as she climbed the stairs to Bob’s study, she wondered if she should have closed it, even locked it.

  She found her dad fiddling with her old Rubik’s Cube, his legs elevated and extended on the desktop, his satellite radio tuned to what sounded like a Quebecois station. Olympia had studied French for ten years but couldn’t understand a single word apart from oui. She’d never had a gift for languages. Maybe she’d never had a gift for anything. “Dad,” she began. “There’s a woman here to see you.”

  “A woman? What kind of woman?” he asked, looking up.

  “The kind with two bre
asts.”

  “Ho-ho. I mean, who is she?”

  “Beats me,” said Olympia, shrugging. “She says it’s personal.”

  “How strange.” His brow knit, Bob turned down the volume on his radio, let down his legs, and pulled himself up and out of his leather chair. “Maybe she’s an old colleague from Nevis. What color hair?”

  “Black, and shiny. She looks Asian, or maybe part Asian.”

  Bob made a final adjustment to Olympia’s old Rubik’s Cube, producing two simultaneous rows of orange. “That’s better!” he declared.

  “And she’s waiting outside,” said Olympia. “So can you hurry up?”

  “Here I am.”

  The stairs creaked and groaned as the two walked single file down them, Bob in front. Though it was Olympia who reopened the door to its full capacity.

  Jennifer was bent over Carol’s lilac bush, apparently enjoying the scent of its fledgling blooms. At the sight of Olympia and Bob, however, she quickly straightened her posture, then extended her arm to Bob. “Are you Robert Hellinger?” she asked, blinking.

  “Indeed I am,” said Bob, meeting her hand. “And you are…?”

  She pursed her lips primly and said, “Jennifer Yu.” Then she released his hand. “My mother was an old… friend, I believe. Shirley Yu?”

  “Shirley Yu from Los Alamos?!” Bob looked somewhere between fascinated and horrified.

  “She worked there until the early seventies. We moved to Palo Alto after that.”

  “Well, I have to admit I haven’t heard her name in, well, it must be forty years!” He let out an ostensibly jolly laugh that revealed jagged edges.

  “My mother died in the early nineties—just after I finished college—of breast cancer.”

  Bob stopped laughing. “I’m very sorry to hear that. I didn’t know.”

  Jennifer glanced away from the house. Olympia’s eyes followed. A squirrel darted across the front yard like a flasher at a Broadway show. “I’ve spent many years looking for my father,” she said. “She never told me who he was… only that he was a postdoc at Alamos named… Bobby.” She turned back toward Bob. “It’s taken me many years to figure out who Bobby was.”

  Just like that, Bob turned ashen. “You’re not saying—”

  “I’m saying exactly that.”

  “That I’m your father?!”

  “Most likely so, yes,” she said quietly.

  “But how can you be sure?”

  “I hired a private investigator. There was only one Robert working in the lab as a postdoc in nineteen sixty-eight. And it was you.”

  Bob tried to form the word “incredible,” but he couldn’t get past the syllable “cred.”

  “Which means I’m your half sister,” Olympia cut in. The words seemed to be coming out of someone else’s mouth. And yet her own lips were forming the words, and it was her own voice that emerged, albeit a squeaky and strangulated version. Her father had slept with a woman who wasn’t her mother? It seemed impossible. And yet, if Jennifer Yu was to be believed, she and Olympia were living proof of it.

  “I guess that’s true, too.” Jennifer smiled almost sweetly.

  “It’s Olympia, by the way,” Olympia said, extending a hand. It seemed only right and, at the same time, so incredibly wrong. Olympia’s whole identity was founded on being sandwiched between two sisters and therefore desperate to escape, yet somehow unable ever to do so. Finding out now that the top slice had slid off to make room for yet another sister left her feeling exposed to the point of nakedness. Her only consoling thought was the realization that, if this woman’s story panned out, Perri would be stripped of her title as Sister Superior. What’s more, Olympia might find out she got along better with Jennifer Yu than she did with her original sisters. At the moment, she couldn’t get along any worse.

  “Call me Jenny, please,” said Jennifer.

  Just then Carol appeared in the doorway. Perhaps predicting conflict, Jennifer was suddenly all business; whatever softness she’d displayed with Bob had been extinguished like a birthday candle after the song had ended. “And you must be Carol Hellinger,” she said quickly.

  “And who are you?” said Carol, who kept her hands on her crutches.

  “I’m Jennifer Yu. I’ve been looking for your husband, Robert—or, rather, Bob—for years.” She smiled a strange, almost giddy smile, it seemed to Olympia. As if she relished the opportunity to destroy someone else’s family, just as her own family had been destroyed before she’d ever had the chance to see it whole. “I believe I’m his daughter,” Jennifer went on.

  “WHAT?!” screeched Carol. She turned to Bob. “Is this true?”

  “I—I don’t know the answer to that,” he said, his eyes on his Wallabies. “I can’t honestly remember that far back.”

  Carol glared at Jennifer. “When exactly were you born?”

  “June thirteenth, nineteen sixty-nine,” she answered.

  Carol looked aghast as she turned back to Bob. “But that’s only a week after our wedding!” There was silence. Bob wiped his brow. Carol looked as if her brain were about to burst out of her skull. “You filthy swine!” she snarled at her husband. And then, since she couldn’t stomp off, she hobbled away down the slate path that led to the street.

  “Mom,” cried Olympia, her own irritation rendered null and void by her mother’s distress. “Don’t leave.” She grabbed her mother’s sleeve.

  “Why not?” said Carol, shaking her off. “I just found out that my husband of nearly forty-one years is a liar!”

  “You don’t know that for a fact,” Olympia said quickly. “And, come on, whatever happened, it was a long, long time ago. And you know Dad loves you.” Did Olympia even believe the things she was saying? Did it matter? In that moment, all she wanted was for the family to be whole again, for everyone to be talking to everyone else as if they were mild nuisances to whom they were eighty-five percent resigned to tolerating and even, on occasion, finding amusing—not mortal enemies they wanted to see struck dead by lightning.

  “And he apparently loved his secretary, or whoever she was, too!” declared Carol. “Unless it was what we used to call a one-night stand. Which is an equally disgusting thought to entertain.” Olympia was now blocking her mother’s way. Carol poked her calf with her crutch. (It hurt.) “Let me walk, please.”

  Sighing, Olympia got out of the way, then returned to the front step, whereupon Jennifer cleared her throat, as if to remind everyone of her existence. (They didn’t need reminding.) “Well, it sounds like you all have a lot to discuss,” she said, in what struck Olympia as an inappropriately upbeat voice. “I’m actually here for the year—up at Columbia Presbyterian.” She extended her business card to Bob. “If you’d like to be in touch, and I hope you will, here’s my contact info. I’m living on the Upper West Side.”

  Bob took the card out of her hand as if he were receiving a parking ticket. “Thank you—Jennifer,” he said lugubriously.

  Jennifer next turned to Olympia. “And it would mean a lot to me if I could meet you again, Olympia.” She handed over another card.

  “Of course,” said Olympia, quickly scanning it. It read, “Jennifer Yu. Associate Professor of Pediatric Oncology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.” Another telephone number, presumably Jennifer’s cell phone, had been written beneath the printed information in tiny, precise, right-slanted numerals. Both her handwriting and her French-manicured fingernails were Neatness Incarnate. How would Perri ever cope with a sister who was even more “together” than she was? Olympia wondered. For a moment, she almost felt sorry for her—until she remembered that Perri wasn’t speaking to her.

  “I understand there are three sisters?” asked Jennifer.

  “There are,” said Olympia.

  “I’d love to meet them, too.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I should be going.”

  “I’ll be in touch for sure.”

  “Great. Well… bye now.” Jennifer started back to
her car, handbag held firmly against her slender side.

  As Olympia watched her go, she tried to hate her for disturbing the family peace. But then, at present, there wasn’t much peace for her to disturb. And none of this was Jennifer’s fault, Olympia thought. She hadn’t asked to be born any more than she or Gus or Perri had. And it was only natural to want to find out who your father was: How could Olympia pass judgment on Jennifer’s mission when she’d been making similar inquiries on Lola’s behalf? And she seemed perfectly nice. She was also stunningly attractive. It was on that last count that Olympia felt hostility rising within her. It seemed grossly unfair that Jennifer should get to be impressive and beautiful.

  Jennifer slowly backed her Jetta out of the driveway and pulled out onto Edmarth Place. Then she was gone. Alone now at Bob’s side, Olympia searched for something apt to say to fill the space but came up with nothing. Her embarrassment at the mere fact of her father’s sexuality was too deep. She thought back to the time in late childhood when she’d accidentally walked in on him in the changing house of a family friend’s pool. He’d had one leg in his bathing trunks but his genitals had been fully exposed. And the sight of them, flapping between his legs like a sprig of giant wrinkled raisins, had shocked and disgusted her. “Sorry,” she’d mumbled and quickly turned her back—and he’d done the same. But it hadn’t been quick enough. Even hours later, Olympia had been too mortified to look him in the eye. Somehow, the whole thing had felt like her burden, just as it did now…

  Just then, Carol reappeared, audibly weeping. If only Perri were here to take charge, Olympia thought. Except she wasn’t. She was busy destroying her own family. Bob wasn’t in any position to comfort his wife, either. It was therefore left to Olympia—despite her lingering anger over Carol’s reaction to the news of Lola’s paternity—to escort her mother inside, take her into her arms, and cradle her head against her shoulder, supporting her weight as best she could. “Mom, it’s okay,” Olympia said, patting Carol’s coarse hair. “Forty-one years was a long time ago. And Dad loves you. You know that. And the woman died of cancer.”