Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck

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      “You know how many calories there are in a beer?” asks Daria. Polly laughs.

      “I know exactly how many calories there are in a beer, and tonight I don’t care,” she says, waving the bottle in Daria’s face.

      “So it went good, huh?” I ask.

      Amelia shrugs. “It was about what you’d think,” she says. She doesn’t seem too bothered by it, though, and then she starts to laugh again, all flushed and happy and transfixed by the surreal shenanigans of some pink cartoon dog with a hole in its tooth. She’s all flushed and happy, Polly’s all flushed and happy, Mom’s all flushed and happy, and Daria’s just flushed—who can ever tell if she’s happy? So it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that all four of them are pretty well tanked.

      Which makes me mad, frankly, although it’s not like I don’t believe in people getting tanked, or like I’ve never seen it or anything. It’s not like I’ve never done shots of tequila in the laundry room of Jack Metzger’s sister’s apartment on Sterling. Amelia is tanked, and I’ve never seen her tanked and, the fact is, the last time I saw her she said she didn’t want to be a model because she was just a little kid. I mean, you can’t say you’re a little kid one minute and then go and get tanked with your mother that afternoon. You can’t watch cartoons, and be tanked. You can’t do both.

      This logic seems pretty irrefutable to me but, such a surprise, I seem to have no clear idea how to be the cool, rational, not-tanked person in a room full of tanked women. So instead I act like a big baby and grab the clicker from Amelia. “What are you watching?” I mumble, and I start to zip through all the channels again.

      “Hey!” she says. She shoves me. “I was watching that.”

      “You’re drunk,” I say, quiet, like an insult. Which is relatively stupid, as Amelia is the one who snuck me up in the elevator and got me to my room, and later to the bathroom, without anyone knowing, after the tequila episode.

      “I’m not drunk,” she says, and then she starts to laugh like an idiot, like “I’m not drunk” is the most hilarious thing she’s ever said in her life. I swear, she thinks this whole situation is just hilarious.

      “What did you say?” asks Mom, all fake-startled and guilty as hell.

      “Philip thinks I’m drunk.“

      “Don’t be ridiculous, Philip.”

      “Mom,” I say back. Like there’s nothing else to say, really; sometimes, there just isn’t, and this is one of those times. Not that she’s going to give an inch.

      “Today was a big day for everyone, and if you can’t be happy for your sisters, then I think you might want to think about that.”

      “Yeah, sure, I’ll do that, Mom,” I tell her. And that’s all I say about it. Amelia keeps giggling, and Mom goes into the study, probably to sneak another drink, because she’s got liquor stashed in there too, and Polly and Daria drift back into their bedrooms to consult with the stars, and I find a Star Trek rerun, the one where Captain Kirk falls in love with an android and then she dies at the end of the episode because she learned that feelings hurt too much to live with. I swear, that show was really brilliant, it really just was, and I’m not embarrassed to mention it. I mean, I’m not one of those idiots who goes to conventions and dresses up like Mr Spock. I’m just saying. That show was not near as stupid as everything that’s been on television since.

      CHAPTER THREE

      No one ever said Herb Lang was overrated, and the fact is, he isn’t overrated. He’s a very good photographer, even if he is a bit spooky in person. So the picture, when it comes out, is very hot. Daria the Ice Queen has a big smile on her face, her head is tipped back and she looks like joy, she just does. Polly looks like she’s grabbing Daria and trying to push her out of the frame, which maybe could be a little too accurate, in terms of the reality of their relationship, but it doesn’t look mean or competitive. It just looks nice, like a nice sisterly sort of thing to do. The spiky hair is great, the little green dress with the black beads, also great. She has a killer pair of heels on, also great. And then there’s old Amelia, all the way on the other side of the frame, with her blue jeans and T-shirt, and those nutty little bare feet and little green toenails. She’s sort of half in profile, head down, but looking up, right at the camera. And she just looks smart, and a little bit devilish and like someone you just want to know, who also happens to be so pretty you need to fall over. The whole thing is killer, there’s no question.

      When Mom took it out of the FedEx envelope, it was pretty wild. We were all sitting around the kitchen—I don’t know why we always hang out in the kitchen, there’s never any food there—but anyway we were hanging out in the kitchen, collectively on pins and needles, while Mom took her own damn time opening that FedEx.

      “Just a minute, just a minute, would you please?” she laughed, turning away from Polly and Daria, both of whom were actively trying to rip it from her hands.

      “Mom, it doesn’t take normal people sixteen minutes to open a FedEx!” Polly screeched, still grabbing.

      “Well, then I’m not normal,” Mom informed her, elegantly cheerful. “I just want to savor this, is that all right with you?” What an act. I thought Daria was going to brain her with the blender. Amelia was sitting next to me, trying not to care, but even she couldn’t stand the tension finally, and she practically knocked her chair over, bolting to the other side of the table so she could get a good look as soon as the thing was out of the envelope. It was kind of goofy and sweet, honestly; all of them were laughing and nervous and happy and shoving at each other to get the best look. And then they all saw it, at once, and I’m not kidding, they all just shut up. That picture shut them all up. Because it was impossible to look at it and not know that something was going to happen. You just couldn’t not know.

      This was like two days before the magazine hit the stands, that’s when they finally sent us a so-called “advance” copy. I thought for sure they’d give us more preparation than that, but that old Collette apparently really had to pull strings just to get that much special treatment. Anyway, things had gotten pretty hot by then. In those six weeks while we were waiting for the magazine to come out, Collette set up a whole mess of meetings all over town with different ad agencies and magazines and stylists and publicists, TV execs, talk-show producers, it went on and on. Amelia spent the entire time kicking and screaming and saying “fuck you,” and then getting dragged to all the meetings anyway. Which meant that she missed quite a bit of school, which meant that several of her teachers started calling to give Mom a hard time about it. No one particularly cared about Polly virtually dropping out; that was sort of understood as the sort of thing that was just going to happen, and Polly was always a little bit of a hell-raiser anyway, so truth be told I think the school was finally glad that she was taking off of her own accord. But Amelia was a freshman and known to be a fairly responsible little student, so the school got bent out of shape about her not showing up for algebra tests, and Amelia was bent out of shape, and Mom was bent out of shape. And then Ben the piano teacher got way bent out of shape, probably because, as I think I’ve mentioned, he had a completely illicit and illegal crush on her, which he had to pretend was, like, a more legal kind of concern about her development as an artist. So Ben called Amelia at home about six times, about missed lessons, and then he called Mom, who told him off, and then Amelia called Dad, who was back from Brazil, and he called Mom and expressed his supreme disapproval, and he reamed her out for yanking Amelia out of school, and Mom reamed him back, which just bent Polly completely out of shape, and sent Daria into a complete shrieking rage. So that’s what life was like, up until the day we got that picture in the mail and realized СКАЧАТЬ