Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck

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СКАЧАТЬ conscious enough of the social protocols that it was a definite smile. Mom, sitting across from the banquette, was deep in consultation with an enormous woman who was wearing something that looked like a giant green sack. She also had this major bead thing going on, strings and strings of them, big stone-like things, and crystals hanging off silver chains. She was seriously the only person in the room dressed worse than me, but Mom was hanging on her every word.

      “Daria’s pissed because Polly got to sit next to Rex,” Amelia narrated. “She clearly doesn’t know about the hand down the pants part of the deal. He tried it on me, and I shoved my elbow in his stomach. Then I acted like it was an accident so he couldn’t get mad. What a creep. His last movie sucked anyway, I don’t know why people think he’s so hot. He smells, too: I think he went to the gym and then didn’t take a shower. Isn’t that gross? Plus all those guys who hang out with him? They’re like total morons. I told Mom I wanted to go home like an hour ago—she keeps ignoring me. She thinks he’s so great, she should try sitting next to him. I thought meeting a movie star would be cool but it is so totally no fun. How’d you get here, the subway? Let’s go home.”

      “You think I could get some food first?” I really was hungry by this point, plus now that I had made it past all the different levels of security and screeners and fact checkers into the inner sanctum, I didn’t want to just turn around and go home. Besides which, standing around and holding a huge drink in front of a bunch of adults who couldn’t have cared less really does have a kind of weird thrill. Unfortunately, Amelia didn’t have to fight her way in there past the gate keepers; she wasn’t hungry and she was really bored. “We can go get some pizza,” she said. “Come on. I got homework to do. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.”

      “Who’s the lady in the green tent?” I asked.

      “Philip, who cares? These people are creeps. I’m not kidding. This is no fun. We have to get out of here.”

      “You want to leave, and not tell Mom?”

      “We’ll tell one of the waiters to tell her. Or call her cell from the street. Come on. She won’t care.”

      But a waiter with a giant sort of pu-pu platter of appetizers was heading across the room, toward the near end of the banquette, where the lady in the green tent and Mom were deep in consultation. “I’ve been eating pizza all week,” I said. In retrospect, I wish I had just done whatever Amelia said. That is generally what I think about life anyway: Just do what the fourteen-year-old tells you, you know she’s right. But I was hungry, and no one ever invited me to hang out with a movie star before. I wanted some pu-pu platter.

      “Hey, Mom,” I said, sliding into the chair next to her. Behind me, Amelia was hopping up and down, nervous. I pretended I didn’t see her while I eyed the Chinese appetizers and bolted my margarita.

      “Philip,” Mom observed. “I’m surprised to see you, darling.”

      “Who’s this?” said the woman in the tent, smiling. “Your son? You didn’t tell me you had a son.” This woman, whoever she was, had an incredible voice, musical and light, every syllable perfectly modulated with amusement and kindliness and intelligence. No kidding, it was startling, to hear this beautiful voice come out of a woman wearing a green tent, so I may have stared.

      “His name is Philip,” said Amelia. “He’s come to take me home.”

      “Philip!” smiled the green ogress. “I’m Maureen. I’m Rex’s producer.” It was hard to see her face in the weird light, but her crystals and beads sparkled on her massive chest. The beads in particular were quite distracting, they were enormous, egg-sized pieces of amber, six or seven strands of them. The whole look was puzzling and a little magical.

      “It’s really nice to meet you,” I said. “Um, can I have one of those?” I pointed to the pu-pu platter, which looked unbelievably delicious—golden egg rolls piled neatly on top of each other, little meats on little sticks, plump little dumplings. I can still remember the way it smelled, that’s how hungry I was. My mouth was actually starting to water, so before anyone could say no, that’s for Rex, I just grabbed some food with my fingers, and stuffed it into my mouth. It tasted delicious.

      “Philip, please,” said Mom, handing me a napkin. Maureen the giant laughed, a beautiful bell of a laugh.

      “Boys,” said Maureen. “They’re different from girls.”

      “Oh yes,” said Mom. I thought, if this is the quality of the evening’s conversation, no wonder Amelia is ready to bolt. But then Mom said, “Philip loves Kafka. Tell Philip about your great-grandmother, Maureen. Philip, you’ll find this interesting.”

      Now, I can’t remember the last time my mother worried about me finding anything interesting, and I also can’t remember the last time my mother was interested in the works of Franz Kafka, so I knew immediately that this remarkable statement was for Maureen’s benefit. But as long as they’d let me keep eating, I was more than willing to play along.

      “Sure, Kafka’s great,” I said. “I wrote a paper on The Castle last month, for AP English.”

      “He’s our deep thinker,” Mom cooed.

      “The heir apparent to, what was his name?” asked the ogress. She seemingly was not one of the people who cared about “The Terror of the New.”

      “Leo, Leo Heller,” Mom smiled, gracefully dancing over the intellectual faux pas. Then she came out with a doozy. “Maureen’s grandmother was Kafka’s daughter!” she cried. “Franz Kafka was her great-grandfather. Can you imagine? Isn’t that incredible?” She was all proud and giddy. Because I actually am the grandchild of a minor literary figure, or a majorly minor one at least, I do have some inkling of what it might be like to have a famous writer lurking in your pedigree somewhere. But, frankly, I was more than a little confused by all of this.

      “Really?” I said, trying to sound impressed rather than incredulous. “Wow. Because, wow, I read, you know, that he died kind of, didn’t he die, did he have kids? I didn’t know that.”

      “My great-grandmother was a prostitute,” Maureen said, with great dignity. “Most young girls of a certain class were, in Prague, at the turn of the century. Kafka was quite taken with her for a time.”

      “Wow,” I said.

      Exuberantly interested, suddenly, in Franz Kafka, my mother picked up the narrative thread of Maureen’s saga. “He used to talk to her all the time about coming to America,” Mom announced. “He wrote a novel about it, he was writing it, I mean—is that right?”

      Mom looked to Maureen, who nodded benignly. “Yes, he was writing Amerika, he spoke to her about it all the time. She was full of his stories. When she became pregnant, she knew what she had to do. She didn’t want to stay in Prague, there was nothing for her and her child there, it was a prison. And he could do nothing for her if she stayed. No one knew, of course, that he would soon be hailed as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He had no money, he lived with his parents, you know the whole story.”

      “Oh yeah,” I said.

      “Philip, come on,” whispered Amelia. She had no interest in Franz Kafka; at Garfield Lincoln, you don’t do Kafka until your junior year. “We got to go.”

      I was still eating, though. “So they just came here. Wow. Huh. And then what happened?”

      “Oh, СКАЧАТЬ