Read Online The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters by Lucinda Rosenfeld - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lucinda Rosenfeld
Tags: Fiction, Romance, Contemporary, Family Life, Contemporary Women, Fiction / Romance - Contemporary, Fiction / Family Life, Fiction / Contemporary Women
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live-in housekeeper and nanny than listen to Perri bitch and moan at him about babysitting for the next sixteen years. But she didn’t want some stranger living in her house!
It was also possible that she didn’t want to give up the right to complain about how much she did (that Mike didn’t appreciate), from making lunches, to organizing PTA Visiting Artist committee events, to packing and unpacking and repacking backpacks, to removing the plastic wrapping from juice-box six-packs, to applying Band-Aids to semifictional booboos, to spraying and slathering sunscreen, to photocopying birth certificates, to filling out permission slips in which emergency contacts had to be named four separate times and primary phone numbers another three. (As if the repetition alone would prevent anything bad from ever happening.) There were also stroller tires that needed air, and special soccer cleats, and ballet tights, and violin chin rests that were unavailable locally and had to be tracked down online. Laundry too—endless laundry, mountains upon mountains of balled-up socks and sweats. (Perri could press Warm/Large/Start in her sleep.) And while it was true that Perri didn’t have to make her own mayonnaise, Aiden preferred it to the store-bought kind, especially in his tuna fish salad sandwiches. And, of course, there were toys blanketing the floor space of the house each night—football fields’ worth of plastic gizmos that had been made in Chinesefactories for the benefit of American children, who could apparently never have enough of them. Perri occasionally thought of a photograph she’d seen of Palestinian boys of eight or nine in the Gaza Strip, playing handball in a dirt lot. The boys hadn’t seemed bored at all. And what if the happiest kids on earth were the ones who didn’t have any toys?
Pulling herself together, Perri got out of the car and set off up the slate path to her childhood home. Her cell phone pinged again. She looked down, but it had started to flurry, and the precipitation made it difficult to read the screen. Hunching over, she wiped it with her glove, then squinted into the glare:
u know you want me, she finally made out—and nearly jumped out of her Wellingtons.
u r insane, she typed frantically, her fingers stiffening in the cold.
But as she rang the bell, she had to wonder if she was talking not about Roy but about herself.
3
O LYMPIA HAD PROMISED HER SISTERS that she’d arrive in Hastings at three thirty at the latest. But it was close to four thirty when the train she was on pulled into the station. She felt guilty, of course—but maybe not that guilty. It wasn’t as if she could just leave work after lunch. Also, their father wasn’t having open-heart surgery. As Olympia understood it, it was a routine procedure. In truth, she’d only come out to Westchester to avoid the censure of Perri, who’d given her a guilt trip on the phone the night before about not helping out, even as she’d insisted that she was the only one who could handle Carol and Bob. Though it was probably also true that some escapist or standoffish impulse in Olympia made her particularly unhelpful on days like these. In any case, she was here now. Olympia stepped onto the platform and looked around her.
Between the train tracks and the Hudson lay the scourge of her hometown—namely, the remnants of two possibly toxic factories, both of them now enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. The shell of one, the Anaconda Copper Wire and CableCompany, had always reminded Olympia of a giant hunk of Parmesan cheese that had been painted black. The other one, reputed to be more noxious, had been flattened and paved over, but nobody who knew anything about Hastings-on-Hudson had been fooled. (It was the newcomers who were pushing for a riverside park.) Zinsser Chemical, producer of dyes, pigments, and photography chemicals, had made a mess of the site. Ironically enough, factory founder Frederick Zinsser’s name lingered in the
It was also possible that she didn’t want to give up the right to complain about how much she did (that Mike didn’t appreciate), from making lunches, to organizing PTA Visiting Artist committee events, to packing and unpacking and repacking backpacks, to removing the plastic wrapping from juice-box six-packs, to applying Band-Aids to semifictional booboos, to spraying and slathering sunscreen, to photocopying birth certificates, to filling out permission slips in which emergency contacts had to be named four separate times and primary phone numbers another three. (As if the repetition alone would prevent anything bad from ever happening.) There were also stroller tires that needed air, and special soccer cleats, and ballet tights, and violin chin rests that were unavailable locally and had to be tracked down online. Laundry too—endless laundry, mountains upon mountains of balled-up socks and sweats. (Perri could press Warm/Large/Start in her sleep.) And while it was true that Perri didn’t have to make her own mayonnaise, Aiden preferred it to the store-bought kind, especially in his tuna fish salad sandwiches. And, of course, there were toys blanketing the floor space of the house each night—football fields’ worth of plastic gizmos that had been made in Chinesefactories for the benefit of American children, who could apparently never have enough of them. Perri occasionally thought of a photograph she’d seen of Palestinian boys of eight or nine in the Gaza Strip, playing handball in a dirt lot. The boys hadn’t seemed bored at all. And what if the happiest kids on earth were the ones who didn’t have any toys?
Pulling herself together, Perri got out of the car and set off up the slate path to her childhood home. Her cell phone pinged again. She looked down, but it had started to flurry, and the precipitation made it difficult to read the screen. Hunching over, she wiped it with her glove, then squinted into the glare:
u know you want me, she finally made out—and nearly jumped out of her Wellingtons.
u r insane, she typed frantically, her fingers stiffening in the cold.
But as she rang the bell, she had to wonder if she was talking not about Roy but about herself.
3
O LYMPIA HAD PROMISED HER SISTERS that she’d arrive in Hastings at three thirty at the latest. But it was close to four thirty when the train she was on pulled into the station. She felt guilty, of course—but maybe not that guilty. It wasn’t as if she could just leave work after lunch. Also, their father wasn’t having open-heart surgery. As Olympia understood it, it was a routine procedure. In truth, she’d only come out to Westchester to avoid the censure of Perri, who’d given her a guilt trip on the phone the night before about not helping out, even as she’d insisted that she was the only one who could handle Carol and Bob. Though it was probably also true that some escapist or standoffish impulse in Olympia made her particularly unhelpful on days like these. In any case, she was here now. Olympia stepped onto the platform and looked around her.
Between the train tracks and the Hudson lay the scourge of her hometown—namely, the remnants of two possibly toxic factories, both of them now enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. The shell of one, the Anaconda Copper Wire and CableCompany, had always reminded Olympia of a giant hunk of Parmesan cheese that had been painted black. The other one, reputed to be more noxious, had been flattened and paved over, but nobody who knew anything about Hastings-on-Hudson had been fooled. (It was the newcomers who were pushing for a riverside park.) Zinsser Chemical, producer of dyes, pigments, and photography chemicals, had made a mess of the site. Ironically enough, factory founder Frederick Zinsser’s name lingered in the
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