Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck

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СКАЧАТЬ even though I am her older brother, and she laughed some more.

      So we walk home, and she’s sort of humming the middle part of the Beethoven thing, and it’s nice out, a little drizzly, but not cold at all, just springlike, so that the rain feels good instead of annoying.

      “I never played that good in my life,” she told me.

      “No, come on,” I said. “You play like that at home all the time. I’m about to blow my brains out, I hear Beethoven in my sleep.”

      Amelia laughed at this, even though it was rather lame. She was really jazzed. “I was good, I was really good,” she said, mostly to herself. Then she kind of looked at me. “Dad says if I’m really good he’ll get me into LaGuardia.”

      Okay. This piece of information just about knocked me out; I almost collapsed right there on the sidewalk. “Oh?” I say, completely casual. “When did you talk to Dad?”

      She is oh-so-casual herself. “I don’t know. On the phone a couple times. He said he was going to try and make the recital but he might be in Brazil, so it’s no big deal he’s not here. I mean,’ cause he’s in Brazil.”

      “Oh yeah, I think I remember hearing about that.” Ha ha, as if anyone ever knows where my father is.

      “So he couldn’t make it, but you were there. Not that, you don’t have to tell him how good I’m getting or anything, I can have Ben do that.” She is still being oh-so-casual, but I’m starting to get the drift of her plan here. As if I don’t know when I’m being played by my own sister. “But will you, though? You will, right?”

      “What, tell Dad you were good at the Garfield Lincoln piano recital? Sure. I’ll tell him whatever you want. If I can find him, when he comes back from Brazil.”

      She pretends not to hear the utter disbelief and rampant sarcasm which has entered my tone here, and continues to blather on. “Thanks, Philip,’ cause you know it’s really important to me. Thanks.”

      I’m still playing it cool with her, waiting to see how far she’s going to try and push this. “Well, because, like, I mean—since when did you decide you wanted to go to LaGuardia?”

      “Well, Ben says I’m pretty good, and he said that LaGuardia, you know it’s not Julliard but it is the best high school for the performing arts and he thinks that my range is not just classical anyway, and I could keep up my other studies and still focus on the piano and I just started thinking about it and then I just wanted to play the piano all the time.”

      This is starting to strike me as obvious and pathetic. For all her talents, Amelia is absolutely the worst liar on the planet. I mean, she simply stinks at it. You have to stop yourself from laughing, that’s how bad it is.

      “So, since you’ve been talking to Dad so much, did you tell him about all this shit that’s been going on with Polly and Daria and the New Yorker? Did you tell him about that?”

      “He knows about it.”

      “So you told him.”

      “Everybody knows about it, Philip.” She’s starting to sound annoyed with me, which is a relief, because at least she’s not putting on this weird I-Want-To-Be-A-Pianist Act anymore. “Where have you been?”

      “Well, I guess I’ve been over here on the Planet of Total Morons; someplace you apparently own property,” I tell her.

      “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “Gee, I wonder.”

      We walk on, in silence, getting rained on. The cool drippy rain is starting to get annoying, such a surprise.

      “I don’t care what you think. I’m going to LaGuardia,” Amelia announces. “Ben thinks I’m really good, and Dad can get me in.”

      “Dad would do anything to mess with Mom’s big plans to turn all three of you into beauty queens,” I announce. “And Ben has a boner for you. And you can’t decide you’re going to be a concert pianist when you’re fourteen. You have to have some lunatic parent decide you’re a genius when you’re six or something, and then they torture you to death making you practice eighteen hours a day until you’re Mozart, and then maybe you get into the most famous school for the performing arts in America. You’re going to LaGuardia. Give me a break.”

      “That is not how it works.”

      “You know it is.”

      “Ben says—”

      “And you called Dad? Are you insane?”

      “I love the piano. I’m really good at it. I’m going to LaGuardia.”

      “Aside from the fact that that’s impossible, Mom won’t let you. If she finds out that Dad had anything to do with it, she’ll put a stop to it before you’ve made it to the subway station.”

      “She won’t be able to.”

      “Dad can’t get you into LaGuardia.”

      “Yes he can, he knows the chairman of the board or something.”

      “So what?”

      “That’s how things are done in New York.”

      “You’ve gone insane.”

      “You just said I was good. I’m good on the piano. Ben thinks I’m really good.”

      “Ben wants to—”

      “Could you not say that again, huh? I mean I found it really offensive the first time.”

      “I don’t care if it’s offensive or not, it’s true.”

      “Since when do you know everything?”

      “Yeah, okay, maybe I don’t know everything, but I do know something about guys who want to bone your sister, and I also know you can’t suddenly decide you’re going to be a concert pianist just because you played the first movement of the Pathétique Sonata pretty good one day in high school.”

      “I’m going to LaGuardia.”

      “You’re full of shit.”

      I don’t know why I got so mad all of a sudden. I just did. And all the feeling just swell about what a good time we had at that stupid recital got rained right out of us. By the time we got home, we were both soaking wet and mad as hell and of course no one even bothered to ask Amelia how it went.

      So the next morning I’m feeling rather hopelessly lousy, and I am in no mood to hear about fingernail polish and agents and modeling careers and lipstick shades at the breakfast table. I particularly am in no mood to hear about my idiot father who has of course run off to Brazil for who knows what reason. My head hurts and I’m tired and no one will look at me or even acknowledge that I’m sitting there eating a two-year-old lemon Zone bar, which just isn’t enough—there’s never enough food around our house because, in spite of the fact that all my sisters plus my mother are pretty much rail-thin, they’re always afraid they’re getting fat—and I am frankly just СКАЧАТЬ