Three Girls and their Brother

“People who have never had this kind of spectacularly shitty publicity say that! And it’s not my fault! None of this is my fault! All of it is her fault, and she doesn’t even care!”

“I care! I want to go to school! I can’t even go to school, everybody hates me, and I hate everybody!”

This was occasionally punctuated by a series of slamming doors.

And in fact, she couldn’t go to school—Collette called, the first morning, and put everyone in lockdown. Nobody was allowed to leave the apartment, and nobody was allowed to talk to anybody, either. Which put everyone in an even worse mood. The phone would ring off the hook until Mom finally answered it, and then she would hold the receiver tightly to her ear, cover her face with one hand and melodramatically whisper, “No comment.” Then, infinitely bereaved, she would set down the receiver. It was quite an act and, as far as I could tell, gained us not one shred of legitimacy from the reporters on the evening news, who just kept reporting, snidely, “No comment from the girl’s family. Looks like they’re trying to keep this under wraps.”

And then the anchor-idiot would say, “Little too late for that!” And they’d all chuckle. I mean, you really wanted to blow your brains out.

After three days of this I came home from school—the lockdown only counted for girl members of the family; nobody out there really seemed to give a shit, frankly, about the unidentified fellow student—to find Collette holding a major powwow around our kitchen table. In spite of how crucial she had become to everyone’s lives over the past six weeks, this was in fact the first time I had ever laid eyes on Collette, and she was, frankly, pretty impressive. She wore one of those perfect suits—tight, curvy, both sexy and severe—and she was drinking ice water, and crossing her legs to one side, so that anyone who entered the room could see right off what great legs she had.

“All right, the fact is, Maureen Piven got out in front of us in every media outlet,” she announced. “She had them all in her pocket within twenty-four hours, caught us absolutely flat-footed. She’s brilliant at this, absolutely flawless. I would have warned you ahead of time not to take her on, but I had no idea Amelia would do anything as stupid as biting Rex Wentworth.”

“He was—”

“Save it, Amelia. The damage is done.” Collette clearly was not interested in discussion at this point, but the level of anxiety was pretty high. Mom leaned forward, wringing her hands.

“But why can’t we even defend ourselves? It’s not doing any good. We don’t say anything and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse, what they’re saying about us, in the news papers, on the television—”

“I know it feels that way,” Collette nodded, not terribly sympathetic. “But you don’t want to provoke Maureen any further. This is completely personal to her. Karl Rove could take lessons from Maureen, when she’s in a mood like this. Did you guys do anything to piss her off? Besides biting Rex, did you say anything or do anything that I need to know about? Because we have maybe one shot to save this situation. I need to know everything.”

Amelia glanced at me, worried, then looked away. I looked down. We were fast, but not fast enough. Mom caught the look, thought for a moment, then another moment. She can be stupid about some stuff, but on other stuff she’s crackerjack. “Philip was rude to her,” she said. Daria and Polly turned and stared at me. Amelia kept looking at the floor.

“I wasn’t,” I said. “I barely said two words.”

“You were rude. She was telling us about her family, a story about her family, and Philip—”

“She said her great-grandfather was Franz Kafka!” I said.

Amelia’s face twitched. She was trying not to laugh. Daria caught it.

“You’re a moron, Philip,” said Polly. “What were you even doing there, anyway? No one invited you.”

“I was fucking polite! I was pretty fucking polite, if you ask me, about such a spectacular piece of bullshit!”

“He was polite about it, he really was, considering,” Amelia chimed in.

“No one was fooled, by either of you,” Mom snorted.

Really, the whole thing was ludicrous. It was suddenly my fault there were thirty crazed reporters in front of our building waiting to tear us all to pieces, because I didn’t say, “Oh really?” with enough conviction when a giantess in a green dress told me she was the direct descendant of a hooker who had once slept with Franz Kafka.

“Oh my god,” said Daria. “That’s what happened? That’s why they went after us? Because Philip was—”

“I wasn’t anything!” I yelled. “I hardly exist around here, you can’t dump this on me!”

“It doesn’t matter,” sighed Collette. “If that’s what’s behind it, the damage is done. She’s notoriously sensitive, so if she thought Philip was playing her she was going to punish everybody sooner or later. It’s just as well that we got it over with.”

“Is it over with?” Polly asked, raising an eyebrow. “’Cause it sure doesn’t look like that from where I sit. We’re all under house arrest.”

“You let the story have its natural life,” Collette explained, standing and pacing now, like a drill sergeant. “I couldn’t have you talking to the press because they want nothing more than to keep it all going—statements from you, statements from Rex, statements from Maureen—and she’s just too good at this. You go to war with Maureen Piven, you’re all dead before you’ve even started.”

“You mean we’re not? Dead?” said Daria. This was the news she was waiting for. And Collette sighed, apparently at our collective stupidity.

“No,” she said. “Not quite yet.”

Collette’s opening gambit, as it turned out, was to drag the two offending dimwits into the belly of the beast, whereupon both dimwits were expected to throw themselves on the beast’s mercy. I’m not kidding, that was the entire plan. We didn’t even call ahead; she just tossed us into the back of her town car and the next thing I knew we were standing around in the waiting room of the swankest offices I had ever seen. I mean, this place was spectacular: Leather chairs, walnut paneling, a little Jackson Pollock action on one wall and a full southern exposure of Central Park on the other. And that was the waiting room. A skinny guy in a white shirt and tie sat in a tiny cubicle around the corner; he had no expression on his face and kept telling people on his headset to hold, while he simultaneously listened to Collette explain that Maureen would see us.

“But she doesn’t know you’re coming,” he observed, with a kind of expressionless skepticism.

“No,” said Collette, smiling politely at this little shit. “Nevertheless, as I said, I’m fairly sure that she will see us.”

“Hold please,” he said into his headset. “Take a seat, please,” he told Collette.

Since she was already in a power struggle with him, Collette opted to stand, but Amelia and I slouched in that leather furniture obediently. I kept trying to catch Amelia’s eye in some insane attempt to establish a kind of Vulcan mind-mold so that we might have something resembling a game plan when we went in and faced the Ogress, but no matter what I did she wouldn’t look at me. “Knock it off, Philip,” Collette told me, the third time I tried to get Amelia to communicate with me without actually saying anything. She clearly didn’t want us cooking anything up. We were just supposed to go in there and suck up.

Which I was fairly sure was never going to happen, since Kafka’s giant offspring kept us waiting just long enough for me to think this might turn into one of those stories about how they made you wait for two days and then said oh by the way that person isn’t even here! We were there a long time; and then we were there even longer. The sun was setting gloriously across Central Park, in fact, when suddenly there she was, herself, in a purple tent this time—mauve let’s say—again with those giant amber stones glittering on her chest.

“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting,” the giantess sighed. “It’s just been a nightmare, I’ve been on conference calls about three different films all afternoon.” Then she smiled happily, as if we were the most delightful interruption she could ask for on this busy afternoon. “It’s so good of you to come by.”

“Of course we wanted to come,” Collette smiled back.

“Amelia, the picture, in the New Yorker! Wonderful. You must be so pleased,” said Maureen as she opened the door to her office.

“Oh, sure, yeah. Oh! The picture. Yeah, it’s good, I guess,” said Amelia, completely confused. Who could blame her? They were being so nice. The whole thing was so weird you didn’t know what to say.

“No. It’s better than good. Herb Lang. He’s a genius. He did one of my clients years ago: It absolutely put her on the map. It made her. As I’m sure it’s going to make you,” Maureen nodded.

I had the total urge to say “make her what?” but Amelia stepped on my foot. So instead I said, “Ooooow, you stepped on my foot, jerk.” Which finally got Amelia to look at me, and shake her head and roll her eyes like, stop it, you moron. At which point apparently Collette knew that she’d better get us in and out of there fast, so she just launched in.

“We wanted to come by and see if there was anything we could do—any of us—about this terrible, terrible misunderstanding with Rex,” Collette began. “Amelia feels just terrible about it.”

“Oh,” said Maureen, taking this in as if it were entirely surprising information instead of the complete reason we were even there. She looked at Amelia, a little snake for a moment appearing behind those sincere, kind eyes.

Amelia jumped a little bit, startled, as I was, by the sudden appearance of the snake. But she got right with the picture. “I’m really sorry, I really am,” she said. “I totally did not mean to bite anybody. Wow. I just don’t even know how it happened. And Philip and I also, you know, if you thought that we thought it was stupid that your great grandfather was Kafka? I so hope you didn’t think that. Because it is really awesome, that you, know, that you—Philip was saying—”

It was clearly time for me to chime in. “Yeah, I think it’s cool, I really do,” I said.

Kafka’s great-granddaughter thought about this, without responding, and suddenly turned to look out the window. There was a kind of creepy silence that settled in, while this enormous woman considered the intricacies of apologies, and what it means to make them, and what it means to accept them, and how long you should wait, in fact, before doing something so pedestrian. No one said anything. Just below, in Central Park, a couple of little kids suddenly bolted into the fading light of the sunset, and ran recklessly down the path, leaving their Jamaican nannies calling after them. They were all laughing, you could see it; the air was so clear, you could see them laugh. I totally wished I was out there.

“That story is very precious to me,” Maureen said. “I don’t tell it to everyone.”

“Well, no, I mean, I totally understand that,” I said. Which okay, that wasn’t what I meant, what it sounded like I meant? It’s just the whole thing was so stupid. “I mean, Kafka is really a great writer and it is awesome that he’s, you know.”

Collette leaned forward, crossing her legs fast, like a pair of scissors. “Are you cast yet, on The Fury of the Titans?” she asked pleasantly.

“I saw you on the news, Philip,” Maureen announced.

At this point I was ready to blow my own brains out. I mean, I could not follow any of this. The only thing that was clear to me was that I was completely tanking and that the only safe bet now was to say as little as possible. I kept my head down, figuring that she hadn’t asked a direct question—maybe that meant I didn’t have to respond.

“Philip was on television?” said Collette, surprised.

“It’s cute, he feels protective of his little sister,” Maureen said. “Isn’t that what he was doing when she got attacked by the photographers?’

This floored Collette, it really did. “What do you mean?” she asked, curious.

“He’s in all the pictures,” Maureen informed her. That giant ogress with the magic stones on her chest was literally the only person who had figured out that the “unidentified student” was me. Collette looked back and forth between Maureen and Amelia, still not getting it.

“He saved me,” said Amelia, simple.

“Yes, it was very sweet, very sweet,” said Maureen. “I have a brother, too. He sells auto parts out of a storefront in Astoria. Every other year he sends me a screenplay that he’s written with one of his friends, every one of them worse than the next. My sister is married and living on Long Island. I hear from her when she needs money. But she’s very sweet too. She has two hideously ugly daughters, they both want to be actresses. Do you want to be an actress, Amelia?”

Amelia squirmed like a six-year-old. “Not particularly,” she said.

“No?” smiled Maureen Piven, all those stones winking on her chest. “I thought everybody did.”

“I heard you were from Long Island, I didn’t realize you still had family there,” Collette purred, as if we were at a cocktail party. “They must be proud of you.”

“I don’t often speak to them,” Maureen purred back. “The distance. You know. Where you’re from and where you’re going. They don’t really mix.”

“How did you manage it? I mean, how did you get from there—to here!” Collette wondered, astonished. “I’ve always wanted to ask, if it’s not too personal.”

“I stalked Sidney Lumet until I got him alone,” Ogress laughed coyly, charmed to be asked to narrate the seminal event of her life’s story. “He was waiting for a cab and I made a complete fool of myself, insisting that I wanted to work for him, that I’d do anything! He absolutely brushed me off but he’d had a couple drinks and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t even remember what he actually said. So I showed up at his office the next day, and started making coffee. It took a week for everybody to realize he hadn’t actually hired me, but by then it was too late, I was indispensable.”

“You started by making coffee for Sidney Lumet!” Collette bubbled, elegant.

“There are worse ways to start in this business, as I think you know,” Maureen noted. The two women laughed one of those “boy do we ever” laughs.

“It sounds like you were a totally different person,” Collette smiled, both sucking up and narrating. “You really transformed yourself, didn’t you?”

“Just like The Metamorphosis,” I said.

We were all there to suck up, right? And she was the one all hung up on the Kafka thing. They all stared at me, like I was suddenly speaking a foreign language.

“You know, The Metamorphosis,” I said. “The guy wakes up one morning and he’s a giant bug, and no one in his family knows how to talk to him anymore?”

“Really?” said Maureen, unfriendly as hell.

“You haven’t read it?” I asked.

“No, I missed that one.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“I just meant, you know, you were like, a different person and your family understood you and then you transformed yourself and now you’re like totally mysterious to them. That’s all,” I concluded lamely.

“Thank you for the exegesis,” she said.

Okay, I happen to go to the Garfield Lincoln School, and I’m also the grandson of Leo Heller so I actually do know what “exegesis” means. “You’re welcome,” I told her, with a slightly edgy tone, to match her own.

“Is this you?” Collette cooed. “Look, Amelia, it’s a picture of Maureen with Ron Howard!” I was suddenly feeling like I was stuck in The Castle.

“Hey Collette, you know, I kind of have a lot of homework,” Amelia said. “This has been really fun and I’m so glad to see you, Maureen, and I’m really really sorry for biting Rex and I’m especially sorry if I said anything that bugged you that night in the bar, and Philip is too, but we need to get home, okay, Maureen?” Even though she was saying all the right things, Amelia sounded even worse than me. She has no idea how to spin anything. Next to Maureen and Collette we sounded like a couple of rude teenagers, and the fact is, we were there to prove that we weren’t rude teenagers. I actually saw Collette raise her eyes to the heavens for a split second. I couldn’t say that I blamed her.

But Maureen was suddenly in a forgiving mood. She smiled, half to herself, and leaned back, letting the side-lighting play on her giant beads on her giant chest. I swear, it is no wonder I thought of her in the light of The Metamorphosis; she really did look like a giant cockroach, with all those beady eyes.

“Amelia means—”

“It’s all right, Collette, I know what Amelia means. You too, Philip. No hard feelings. But perhaps you’d better go before either one of you opens your mouth again.” She twinkled at us, benign. Who could keep track of this? I was getting whiplash. But the offer to leave came none too soon.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I really do like Kafka, I really do.”

“Good,” she told me.

And everything would have been fine if we had just gotten our butts out of there before Rex showed up. Really. We were out of there; we were all about to stand up and wave goodbye to this whole hideous interchange when the door swung open and the king himself walked in.

“Oh hey, sorry, Maureen, no no, stay, you know you can use the place whenever you want, I just didn’t know you were in here,” he said, giving up the fact that this was his office, not hers, before he even saw that in fact Maureen was using his office to have a sit-down with the kid who bit him, along with her dorky brother. But of course we all turned to stare at him, and then he saw Amelia, who was unfortunately wearing a teeny little turquoise tank top over black jeans in which she looked awesome.

“Oh hi,” Rex said. “Yeah, hi.”

She didn’t say anything. She just turned white.

“Nice picture. I mean, the thing in the New Yorker, that’s …” Rex trailed off. He was totally giving himself away. Amelia looked at the ground.

“Thanks,” she said. That was it. She was not too nice about it, either.

“Amelia and her brother came by to apologize about what happened at W the other night,” Maureen narrated, expressionless. I thought it was weird because she had been so nice to us and now here was Rex and she was suddenly a block of ice.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Rex. “Just finish it up, huh? I mean, it’s okay for you to use this place, but I wish you’d clear it with me ahead of time.” Maureen looked at him, sort of like a mother who is thinking about whether or not slapping her own kid is maybe a good idea. He looked back at her, like one of the shitty kids on the playground who’s getting off on being a jerk. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Not at all,” said Maureen, pulling out that dazzling smile. “As I said, we were just finishing up.”

“Whatever,” he said, and he grabbed the doorknob and turned to go.

And just as he did he snuck another look at Amelia. I saw him do it. And it was so clear, just in that one little sneaky look, that the asshole had the hots for her. I’ve seen it enough times, it’s not like I’m likely to miss it. That guy was forty years old, at least, and he had the hots for my fourteen-year-old sister.

But anyway, then he was gone and we were going. So Collette reached over and held Maureen’s hand meaningfully for a few seconds, smiling at her sincerely.

“I really appreciate your helping us through this,” she said.

“Of course,” said Maureen. I reached for the door.

“There’s just one thing,” she added. We all turned. Maureen, looking out the window, sighed. “It’s wonderful that you came by and apologized,” she noted. “But this really is so private. And the whole … event … wasn’t private, was it? Was it, Amelia?”

“What?” said Amelia.

“I just mean,” smiled Maureeen, “for an event that public—the apology will have to be public too, won’t it?”

CHAPTER FIVE

The next thing we knew, Daria, Polly, and Amelia were on Regis and Kelly.

This took an endless amount of time to work out, even though it happened by the end of the week. Collette was on the phone with everybody in town for hours, but at first most of them were so mortally afraid of pissing Rex and Maureen off that none of them would touch us. So even though Maureen was the one who had insisted that the apology had to be public in the first place, it was apparently impossible to set up a public interview because that might make Maureen and Rex more angry, even though Maureen was the one who wanted it. It was like a Möbius strip of stupid logic that went on and on and on until almost out of the blue the whole situation flipped on its head and what we had was an exclusive on Regis and Kelly, the perfect chance to get those girls out in front of the public so that everyone could see that these were really very sweet and adorable teenagers, nothing like what had been reported by other media outlets. And, during this exclusive, Amelia would find the perfect opportunity to apologize to Rex, on the air, for biting him.

By this point, we were all just doing whatever Collette told us. Of course we were; we were in deep shit and the only way out, seemingly, was to let that shapely barracuda call the shots. Everyone even let her pick out the outfits they would wear, which for Amelia turned out to be a subtle variation on the blue jeans/T-shirt ensemble she had on in the Herb Lang photo. “We want them falling in love with you because you’re such a great kid,” she announced. “You need to wear something simple. No one likes a sexy fourteen-year-old.”

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