The Pretty One A Novel About Sisters - By Lucinda Rosenfeld Page 0,1
preparing to stand up again…
Blood rushed to Olympia’s cheeks and forehead. “ENOUGH!” she cried. “YOU’RE DRIVING ME FUCKING INSANE!!” With that, she pushed her daughter back onto the mattress—harder than she’d meant to.
Lola burst into hysterical tears. Guilt and fear consumed Olympia. How soon before Children’s Services arrived? “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she said, taking Lola back into her arms. “Mommy’s had a long day.” As Olympia held her close, she lamented the wet spot forming on her new blouse, but felt unable to justify altering the position of her daughter’s drooling mouth.
“You pushed me, too.” The child wept. “You’re a bad mommy!”
“All right, all right,” said Olympia, who, despite feeling bad, thought Lola was laying it on a little thick. “Sometimes grown-ups get mad just like kids get mad.”
“What does ‘fugging’ mean?”
“It means ‘very.’ But only grown-ups can use it.”
“Like, I’m fugging hungry?”
“Something like that,” said Olympia, cringing.
Lola’s bedroom was really just an alcove of her mother’s, separated by a curtain. “Will you lay on your bed until I’m asleep?” she asked.
Every night, Olympia told herself she wasn’t going to do so anymore. And every night she did. How could she say no now? “Okay, but only for two minutes,” she said.
Two minutes, of course, turned into twenty-five, during which time Lola issued a stream of unanswerable questions (“Why can’t people fly?” “Why does cheese smell?” “Why don’t cows and dogs wear underpants?”). Finally assured of her daughter’s slowed breathing and splayed limbs, Olympia tiptoed out of her bedroom and, half closing the door behind her, felt as if she’d just posted bail from a developing-world prison.
Her interests never strayed far from her captor, however. After downing the remainder of a half-filled glass of Côtes du Rhône, Olympia walked over to her black file cabinet—once a floor model; hence the dent—and pulled out a manila folder marked “Lola-Birth.” She opened the folder and removed several sheets of rumpled copy paper, the first page of which was headed “Anonymous Donor Profile #6103.” It had been several years since she’d looked at the printout. Earlier that evening, gazing in fascination at Lola’s hazel eyes, abundant freckles, and flaming red curls, Olympia—who had straight brown hair, light olive skin, and green eyes—had wondered if she’d missed some salient detail that the profile contained.
To both her relief and her disappointment, as she read through the document, she found nothing new in it:
Ethnicity: Anglo-Saxon
Height: 6′ 1″
Weight: 185 lbs
Hair: brown
Eyes: blue
Education: B.A., Ivy League college
Occupation: medical school student
Describes himself as: motivated, thoughtful
Athletic skills: rowing, lacrosse, and cross-country skiing
Clearly the hunky scion of a grand old WASP family, down on its luck, Olympia had thought at the time she’d purchased his genetic material—back when that assumption had been enough. Back then, she’d liked the idea of having a child with no identifiable paternity. Wounded by a tumultuous love affair with a married man that left her in doubt about the self-sufficiency on which she prided herself (and deeply ashamed as well), she’d seen the arrangement as refreshingly uncomplicated. Plus, the married man had had a vasectomy, so there had been no question of becoming pregnant by him.
It was only recently that Olympia had begun to question her decision to have a family on her own. Increasingly, she felt as if there was no one to share her daughter’s small but, to Olympia’s mind, miraculous milestones—from Lola’s first steps without holding on, to the first time she’d drawn a figure with arms and legs, to her sudden ability to write her own name in crooked caps. Olympia’s friends, even those who were parents, couldn’t be expected to care. Her own parents seemed distracted. And when Olympia tried to tell her older sister, Imperia (known as “Perri”), her sister invariably pointed out that her daughter, Sadie, had done whatever it was six months earlier than Lola had.
Olympia also dreaded the inevitable day when Lola would ask who her father was. What would Olympia say? He was a doctor who moved to remote Bangladesh to aid cholera victims?
Little wonder that she’d begun to fantasize about finding the man behind the number. On one level, she knew it was a terrible idea and that she was better off idealizing a set of disembodied statistics than going through the inevitable heartbreak of locating someone—if it was even possible—who didn’t want to be a father except