Three Girls and their Brother

“That is so amazing,” said Mom. “I have goose bumps. And they never told anybody! That is even more astonishing.”

“They tried,” shrugged Maureen, bitterly accepting her fate. “No one believed them.”

“So you’re Kafka’s, uh, great-granddaughter,” I said. “That’s pretty cool.” I smiled politely. But Maureen narrowed her eyes. Now, it may be that occasionally a kind of skepticism sometimes creeps into my manner. I heard later, from Amelia, that in fact not only did I sound actively sarcastic, I also quite literally rolled my eyes before stuffing my mouth with some sort of fried shrimp thing. At which point she, of course, pinched my leg and started snickering. Such a surprise, neither Mom nor Kafka’s gigantic offspring found any of this completely juvenile behavior from me and Amelia all that remarkably clever.“Kafka was one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century,” the jolly green giant informed me, as if I needed to be informed, as if that were in fact what I was rolling my eyes about.

“I am … I love Kafka,” I responded, my mouth full of gourmet Chinese food. Amelia, oh so helpfully, continued to snicker.

“Philip. Amelia. Please,” whispered Mom, mortified.

“Never mind,” laughed the giantess, waving her hand with gay dismissal of my hopeless social ineptitude. Instantly, Mom laughed with her, all that beauty queen charm eddying in new directions, right on cue. “Oh Philip, you’re hopeless,” she sparkled. “And frankly I’m surprised to see you here, don’t you have homework?” she asked, tipping her head toward the door.

“I have homework, Mom,” said Amelia, renewing her mission to escape. “Philip said he’d take me home, you guys can stay, this is so total fun, but I really have to go study. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.” This last bit was politely addressed to the magical ogress Maureen, who smiled benignly on the whole act. “It’s just like a third of my grade and I really have to study.” She was yanking on my arm, which I kind of enjoyed—it was annoying, I mean, but it was also nice to have someone paying attention to me for once, even under such bizarre circumstances. I stood up and grabbed a couple of dumplings and an egg roll to go.

“What an extraordinary girl,” said Maureen. “Most girls her age would give their eye teeth to meet Rex, but I honestly don’t think Amelia is all that impressed.”

“Of course she’s impressed! Good heavens, you should have seen us all when we got your call, what a flurry of nerves we were. And here’s Philip, who decided to party crash I’m sure because he just couldn’t stand his sisters having all the fun, isn’t that right, Philip?” This sentence I could not even figure out, so I looked at my hostile mother and said, “What?” in an overtly teenage way that I was sure would work her last nerve.

Amelia butted in again. “He came because I called him, Mom,” she lied. “I knew you wouldn’t want me taking the subway by myself. This way you and Polly and Daria can stay, ’cause this is so cool. I really do think it’s cool, I so love it, and please tell Rex I had such a cool time.” She was laying it on thick now, with her hand on my sleeve, pulling. The ogress was watching her and, I have to say, she was not impressed. She was kind of leaning back out of the light again, and all those crystals and giant beads were left sparkling on her chest, while her eyes were in shadow. It was quite peculiar, really. Amelia was, as usual, right; this party had a bad feel to it, as did Kafka’s massive green great-granddaughter. I slammed back the rest of my mango margarita and stood. It was time to cut our losses and beat it out of there.

“Of course, I completely understand, Amelia. It’s so lovely to see a girl with the right priorities,” said the ogress, in her perfectly modulated voice. She held out her hand to Amelia, and gave her a friendly little good-bye shake.

“Rex!” she called, leaning back and smiling at him, “Amelia is saying good-bye.”

The great man turned and looked at us. His hand was still down Polly’s pants, and she seemed pretty happy, curled under his arm, but his interest had already started to roam. In retrospect, I have to say, I found this aspect of movie stars to be the most peculiar of all: They were bored with the girls they were screwing, even before they had screwed them. This guy had not even done my gorgeous and smart and fun sister Polly, who truly was gorgeous and smart and fun, in addition to being less than half his age. He planned to, and he was working on it, and he knew it was going to happen, maybe a couple times, even, and then he would get bored and dump her. But psychologically, he had already skipped the ride and gone straight to the boredom. And I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know why. I don’t know why everyone thinks it would be so great to be a movie star; aside from the fame and the money and everybody sucking up to you all the time, there doesn’t seem to be a lot in it.

Anyway, as soon as the ogress tipped old Rex Wentworth off as to Amelia’s escape plans, his future boredom with Polly peaked. She didn’t even exist anymore. “No, come on, what are you talking about? Hey, where you going? Get over here, short stuff.You’re not getting off that easy.” Rex grinned, a really fun guy, just a swell fun camper, and he leaned out, away from Polly, and reached across the table to grab Amelia by the arm. In his swell-guy, fun-party mode, he was going to playfully grab her, I guess, make her sit in his lap, and tickle her, or something.

Amelia took a step back, so Rex’s arm swung through midair.

Okay. A second before, old Rex couldn’t have been less interested in what was going on at our end of the table; there were something like twelve people hanging on his every word, waiters coming and going, drinks and people laughing and talking about nothing, and he wasn’t anymore interested in Amelia than he was in anything else. But boy, that little step back got to him. He looked at her, surprised, and then you could tell he really liked that. That she wouldn’t let him grab her by the arm, and make her sit on his lap? He thought that just was so cool.

“Whoooa. Hey, what’s that? Where you going? What’s that, what’s that?” He was on his feet now, reaching for her, forcing her to dodge him, making what looked like a game out of it. Amelia laughed at him, playing along, batting his arms away from her, and the hangers-on all started to laugh. Then old Rex grabbed Amelia and swung her in the air, just like somebody having a good time rough-housing with a little kid. She was kind of laughing and squirming, like a little kid, trying to keep it light, even though it wasn’t light, the whole thing was creepy as hell. Rex started to whisper something in Amelia’s ear, or maybe he was blowing in it, I don’t know, she was smiling and wriggling and pushing his hands down, away from her chest, and he was holding on tight, enjoying every last bit of this. Polly was watching this with no expression on her face, looking more like Daria than like herself. Daria by this point was in the dark, you couldn’t even see her, all the way down in Siberia at the far end of the banquette.

Someone snapped a picture. Rex swung Amelia into the air, grabbing her in between her legs, by her crotch, making like he was going to carry her off. And she bit him.

She did, she bit him. On the arm. And she must’ve bit him pretty hard, because he suddenly howled and dropped her, yelling, “Jesus Christ!” Everybody leapt to their feet and a couple of the hangers-on rushed to Rex’s side, including Mom, even though Amelia was the one who got dropped on the floor.

“She bit me!” Rex yelled. “That little bitch bit me!”

Then there was a moment of huge chaos, people looking for napkins and ice water and smelling salts, during which Amelia rolled away from the table, got up, and took a few steps backward. She was mad and scared and totally confused; later on she told me that for a second there she thought maybe she could get arrested. For biting a movie star? That has to be against the law, at least in SoHo. She didn’t mean to do it, she told me, but she just freaked, this total strange guy had his hands all over her, and she freaked. But for about ten seconds, at least, no one was paying attention to Amelia freaking. They were all obsessed with Rex, who was, no surprise, kind of a big baby.

“No, it’s okay,” he said, tough, like he had survived a gunshot wound, and wanted to make sure his men knew he could still lead the assault. “I don’t think it broke the skin.”

“You should have someone look at that, man, it could get infected,” said one of his genius friends.

“It didn’t break the skin, I said!” said Rex.

“It’s gonna bruise, though. Wow, she really got you, man.”

“Relax, it’s not that big a deal,” said Rex, magnanimous now that he had had his moment of making a big deal out of it. And then he looked over at Amelia, not very friendly, but ready to make up.

Amelia by this point was long gone. I was too. We ducked out during the mayhem and didn’t stop running until we were on the Q Train, snaking our way back to the relative sanity of good old unhip, movie-star-less Brooklyn. We stopped for pizza and coke and, when we got home, I walked her through all the shit she missed in chemistry, while she was off taking meetings with agents and PR people, so that she had a shred of a chance of passing that test. Mostly I was walking her through all that chemistry so that we both could focus on something other than the disaster that was right around the bend. And sure enough, when Mom and Daria and Polly finally got home, Mom reamed us both. I’ve never seen her so mad; she was purple and kind of spitting, which Mom obviously never does because it isn’t attractive, but she was really mad. At one point she threatened to ground us both, but we knew she’d never make that stick. The New Yorker was hitting the newsstands the next day, and drinks with Rex Wentworth was maybe the tip of the iceberg as far as their social life was concerned, so there was no use pretending to ground Amelia.

Later on, Polly snuck in to Amelia’s room to tell her what happened after we left. I heard them giggling in there, so I snuck in too, and she told us how everybody had gone ballistic about Amelia and the fact that she was maybe unhinged, or had rabies or something. We all thought this was hilarious, but not as hilarious as the end of the story, when the mighty Rex decided that, after all, they should take him to the emergency room at St Vincent’s, just to “make sure” he was all right.

My favorite part of the story involved Maureen Kafka, the green ogress, who really was all for dragging Amelia into court on grounds of assault—apparently you actually can get arrested for biting a movie star—until Daria pointed out that to a lot of people, it might actually look like Rex was the one who was doing the assaulting. Apparently that insinuation shut old Maureen up, and it also seems to have turned the tide on the let’s-arrest-Amelia issue.

And it’s the only part of the whole mess that I was sorry to have missed. Daria doesn’t say much, but she’s no idiot. None of my sisters are.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Rough-housing with the stars got a little rough Tuesday night at W, where pint-sized It Girl Amelia Heller took a bite out of Rex Wentworth,” claimed Rush & Molloy the very next day. There was a huge photograph of Rex swinging Amelia through the air right before she bit him, and an unnamed source giving it up that Rex had to go to the hospital, although there would be no charges filed.

Meanwhile, everyone in America was paging through their New Yorker, and stopping to look at a spectacularly fun picture of three gorgeous redheaded teenagers, dressed in green, dancing and looking like fairies or princesses or mermaids or whatever your own particular female fantasy might be. Under the picture they ran the clever cutline, “Daria, Polly and Amelia Heller, granddaughters of lit giant Leo Heller, on the verge of their own breed of greatness. Herb Lang photographs the terrific trio in a loft on Spring Street, high above the isle of Manhattan, site of their grandsire’s many triumphs.” Cool, huh? But that old La Aura, the hair stylist, was dead right: Nobody really cared about who our literary grandfather was. What they really cared about was: “Which is the one who bit Rex Wentworth?”

School was hell. Everyone was screaming at me all the time. “Did your sister really bite Rex Wentworth? What’s that about? Is she crazy? Awesome, man! Were you there? Did you see it? Why’d she bite him? Your sisters are hot. Are they all like, going out with movie stars now?” All the teachers spent the whole day digging me out from gangs of kids I didn’t even know. I mean, the Garfield Lincoln School isn’t exactly Stuyvesant; there are only sixty kids per grade level, so you pretty much know everybody in the high school by the time you’re a junior. But kids I never even heard of were everywhere all of a sudden, swarming all over me like a pack of rats.

Polly actually made an appearance at school that day, because who in their right mind would miss this spectacular opportunity to be the center of so much attention? She totally enjoyed the whole ruckus, wearing her fishnets, posing in the hallways, laughing and tossing her new spiky do about like a total pro. She was brilliant. You really do have to give it up to Polly; she makes being famous look like more fun than anybody I ever saw. I mean, she was having a great time, until it sank in that the picture was losing first position to the biting incident, as reported in the Daily News. I passed behind her, in the middle of the chaos, and heard her explaining, in the most discreet terms, that it wasn’t Amelia who was the center of the Rex Wentworth event, actually. It was her. “She didn’t bite Rex—god, that whole thing is just, you know, the newspapers are always sooo full of shit,” she bubbled, in a kind of edgy way. “They were just horsing around. He’s really fantastic. I talked to him for something like three hours, Amelia was leaving. That whole biting thing was a total nonevent. He’s not even upset about it! I talked to him, this morning he called me, we’re going to dinner tomorrow? And he didn’t even mention it.” This last bit, obviously, was a terrific whopper.

Amelia’s life was a disaster. She has a bit of a temper, as I’ve mentioned, so all the kids surrounding her and screaming questions about why she bit Rex Wentworth set her off about every two minutes or so. She never got to take that chemistry test; there was so much chaos in the chemistry lab they finally told her she had to go to Dean Morton’s office. The chemistry teacher, Dr Nussbaum, was trying to explain to her that she could make the test up another day but that she needed to go see the dean and sort out the controversy. Amelia told me this later; she rather obsessively focused on being told that she had to go “sort out the controversy,” because that struck her as being an especially stupid thing for old Nussbaum to say. And in fact, if you think about it, it is a pretty stupid thing to say to a fourteen-year-old girl who was being harassed by absolutely everybody in her high school, because she had bitten a movie star who was trying to feel her up. Anyway, at that point Amelia was so frustrated she started to cry, and then argue about how hard she had studied, and then she started babbling on even more, apparently, about how she’s missed so much school and it wasn’t her fault and were they all a bunch of fucking idiots, blaming her for this mess?

I’m not being euphemistic; she did in fact call Dr Nussbaum a “fucking idiot,” which sort of finished off the question of whether or not she was going to the dean’s office.

By the time Amelia got down to Morton’s office, the whole situation—gorgeous redheads, the Daily News, a bitten movie star, screaming students everywhere—had exhausted the school so much that the dean instantly decided to simply send Amelia home. Which was not, technically, a brilliant solution, as the front sidewalk of the school was positively lousy with photographers, and had been since ten in the morning. So when Amelia stormed out the front door, alone, at noon, there were thirty or forty of them waiting there, crawling all over each other and ready to commit multiple acts of homicide on the off-chance that it might net them an out-of-focus photograph of the fourteen-year-old girl who bit Rex Wentworth.

I could see all of it from the third floor, where I was trapped in a Spanish lab. That dipshit Morton hadn’t even arranged for someone to come pick her up; it says in our files that we’re authorized to walk ourselves home, but wouldn’t you think he’d have a half a clue?

The paparazzi went haywire. I mean, as upsetting as it had been to be mobbed by our fellow students all morning, they were rank amateurs compared to these bozos. They descended as one, shouting questions, grabbing, pushing, shoving their cameras right into her face, acting really like she was some sort of stupid animal in a zoo, instead of just a little kid. Amelia stood on the front steps of the high school, frozen, and then she totally just disappeared. I mean, one minute she was there, and the next minute she wasn’t. It was like they had eaten her.

I bolted. I mean, what else are you going to do, just sit there and watch your sister get eaten? Señor Martine (his real name is Mr Martin, but he makes us call him Señor Martine) shouted something at me in Spanish, but I was truly in no mood. I made it outside in maybe ten seconds, but the situation was already way out of control. The shoving was unbelievable, it was like being at some insane British soccer match. Photographers were pushing and shoving and cursing wildly, and I had to literally pull at arms and legs and throw myself up against somebody to get him out of the way, just so I could clamber one or two inches further into the onion layers of photojournalists who had encrusted themselves around my little sister. People were screaming, “Fuck you, fucking asshole, get in line, fucker, hey who is this fucker?” while I pushed and shoved and yelled, “Amelia! Hey, Amelia, where are you?”

By the time I got to her she was just curled up in a little ball. Seriously, she was like all folded in on herself, a little turtle of a person, crouched down over her feet, her arms crossed over her head, down on the cement sidewalk. You got to wonder what’s wrong with those guys, why they thought this would be a cool picture to take, a little kid so scared she’s doing something that spooky. I mean, I wondered that about a minute later, but while I was surrounded by the crazy people with her, I was mostly just screaming at them to get away. Amelia was crying and hitting at me, because she didn’t want to move, that’s how freaked out she was, but I was pretty sure they’d just start stomping on her if I left her there, so I started dragging her back toward the front door of the school. They of course kept taking pictures and shoving at both of us. It was a ridiculous mess.

By the time we got back through the glass doors and into the security lobby, a whole bunch of teachers and students was gathering. Meanwhile, all those journalists were like in a feeding frenzy or something; it was like once they got started on the craziness they didn’t know how to turn it off, so they actually tried to come in after us. Which finally turned into a kind of a showdown. Señor Martine, Dean Morton and Luke, the black guy who sits at the front desk and makes you sign in if you’re tardy, charged the mob and started yelling at them.

“This is private property! I am asking you to leave! You are not allowed entrance to this building! This is a private high school!” yelled Morton. He was actually holding his arms out, sort of like he was being crucified, but more like he thought those photographers were actually chickens or pigeons or something he could just shoo away. “If you do not leave this property immediately, we are calling the police!”

This was not good enough for Luke. “Motherfuckers! Get out of here, you fuckheads! The police are coming to kick your ass—get out—GET OUT.” He grabbed one guy, a kind of short, fat guy with a big beard and a huge lens, who was shooting wildly at anything and everything.

“Don’t you fucking touch me, man!” the short photographer yelled. “I can sue you! That’s assault!”

“You take another picture of these kids, I’ll show you what assault looks like,” Luke told him, sticking his finger in the guy’s face. Meanwhile, two other photographers were deep in it with Morton.

“The police are coming. You are not permitted in this building,” Morton droned. These idiots started to argue about freedom of the press.

“You want to do that? Show these kids that the press can be silenced? What’s that teaching them? This is a free society. This isn’t fucking China, we’re covering a legitimate story.” Meanwhile the rest of the gang behind them kept clicking away.

It really was enough to make you sick. Luckily Luke is rather large, and when he gets mad enough to yell it’s rather undeniable. “GET OUT OF HERE,” he yelled. “I DON ‘T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, YOU SHITHEAD, YOU THINK I WON ‘T HIT YOU, YOU TRY IT, MAN, JUST TRY ONE MORE STEP IN THIS BUILDING, THESE ARE MY KIDS. MY KIDS, MOTHERFUCKER.”

Dean Morton cringed a little at that; obviously he was not thrilled that Luke was cursing so freely in front of all us fragile teenagers, but there was no denying that it was an impressive performance. And all of us fragile teenagers were definitely stoked that our security guard was willing to slug it out with all of the representatives of the free press that New York could spare that morning. Truth be told I think Morton was impressed too. In any event, he didn’t say anything, and after they managed to get off another few hundred shots, the so-called protectors of all American freedoms finally took off.

Everybody got sent back to class and I got sent to the nurse’s office, because I had a scraped-up face and a split lip. By the time they patched me up, Amelia had already been sent home, which really pissed me off. I mean, they couldn’t wait and let us go together? But people don’t think of these things. Anyway, the next day we all got the beginnings of a clue as to how serious the shit was that Amelia had stepped in. The many pictures taken by all those protectors of a free press were really quite impressive. And they printed all of them. Pictures of Amelia screaming, Amelia hitting photographers, Amelia kicking photographers, Amelia kicking me. Amelia curled up in a little ball on the sidewalk; they printed that one, too. A couple of those geniuses actually had video of the whole thing, which they showed on three local news shows, Entertainment Tonight and CNN, which, due respect to CNN, but there was in fact a war going on in Iraq at the time; you had to wonder why they actually cared about some kid who hit a couple of photographers in Brooklyn.

In any event, they showed the footage on television quite a bit, and the story that went along with the visuals went something like this: “Pint-sized It Girl Amelia Heller is burning through her fifteen minutes as fast as she can. Recently showcased in the New Yorker magazine, the fourteen-year-old heiress to a major American lit legacy has been spending her nights partying with the likes of film actor Rex Wentworth, who she allegedly bit in a scuffle at a Manhattan hot spot last week. Here she lets the paparazzi get a taste of her teen angst. An unidentified fellow student comes to her aid …”

The unidentified fellow student, that’s me.

Polly and Daria were livid. Their moment in the sun had been completely obliterated by Amelia’s shenanigans. Our home life now veered between long stretches of sullen silence and endless hours of screeching female rage.

“This is not about you, Amelia. None of this was ever supposed to be about you,” Daria would hiss.

“I said, I didn’t want to do it in the first place!”

“Do you know, do you have any idea of how long it’s taken me to get my career to this point? Do you even have half a clue—”

“Oh, what career?”

“Look, people say that no publicity is bad publicity.” This halfway optimistic opinion, or something like it, coming from Polly.