Three Girls and their Brother

Amelia rolls her eyes, which doesn’t help, as Mom sees it and puts her lips together, determined that her own child is not going to look down on her. “You’re coming, and that’s that.”

“You can’t yank me out of school for some stupid meeting with some stupid agent,” Amelia retorts. “What kind of a mother are you?”

“What did you say?” says Mom. She looks like she might actually strike somebody.

This is stupid, I’m thinking. I’m also thinking, Amelia hasn’t even played her trump card yet; she has yet to even mention the word “Dad” and this whole thing is already a mind-numbing mini-disasteroid.

At which point, Daria lets loose. She’s not sneering, like Polly, nor is all superior and hurt and outraged like Mom. She’s just straight out pissed off. “Believe me,” she announces, “it was never my plan to drag my sisters along on my life, but now that I’m stuck with you, I’m not going to let either one of you screw it up. You’re coming. Amelia, and you’re going to keep your mouth shut and do whatever anybody tells you to do.”

“For-fucking-get it,” says Amelia.

“I’ve already warned you about that word, Amelia,” Mom announces, like a queen.

“I’m going to LaGuardia next year; Dad said he could get me in,” Amelia tells her. “So I have to practice and I’m not going into midtown to meet some stupid FUCKING agent.”

Okay. This announcement has the hoped-for effect of silencing the entire room. Daria looks like she’d like to stab Amelia with something, but all she has in her hands is a glass of filtered water.

“She talked to Dad?” says Daria. She turns to Mom, filled with outrage. “She talked to Dad?”

Mom is no longer posing for the camera. “Is that what you did, Amelia?”

“I just said I did! Are you deaf? He thinks it’s a good idea!”

“This conversation is over,” says Mom. “I will let your father know he has nothing to say about—”

“About what? About me taking piano lessons? That’ll look good.”

“I don’t care how it looks.”

“He’ll get custody of me,” she announces.

Everybody stares at her. I start to sense once again that being a boy is a distinct disadvantage in this world. I mean, this plan Amelia’s cooked up just so she can get out of being a model has levels I never even dreamed of.

“Your father is not getting custody of anybody. The courts made that clear a long time ago,” Mom announces.

“Let her go. See how she likes it,” Daria says. Mom turns on her, going white. This is apparently the worst thing anyone has said all morning.

“That’s enough, Daria. That’s enough out of all of you.”

“I’m calling Dad,” says Amelia. Like so many smart people, she simply doesn’t know when she’s lost. Which I could have told her, bringing Dad up would end any shot she had of getting out of this, which was never a good one anyway.

“I am NOT TALKING about your father ANYMORE,” Mom hisses at her. It’s impressive when she loses her temper, it really is. She’s like Medea or something; you take it seriously. Even so, it looks like Amelia’s about to go head to head with Medea, so I finally put my foot in.

“He’s in Brazil,” I announce. “You can’t call him anyway, you told me yourself, he’s in Brazil.”

This silences everybody, and a sort of dread calm descends. Dad’s in Brazil. That’s that.

“Brazil, huh,” says Polly, looking out the window. “I’d like to go to Brazil, sometime.”

“Sometime, but not today,” says Mom, shoving books together, pushing them at me and Amelia abruptly. “If you don’t get out the door right now, you’re going to be tardy.”

“Mom—”

“We’ll pick you up at two.”

Amelia is going to make one last stab. “The stupid meeting’s not till four!”

“You need time to change and do your face. You can’t just show up for these things.”

“I’m not doing my face,” says Amelia.

“I’ll do it for you,” says Polly. “Eat it, Amelia. They want all three of us. You’re not getting out of this.” And she pushes us to the door, and shuts it behind us.

The elevator ride is grim. Amelia hates losing more than any person I’ve ever met.

“You were a big help,” she tells me.

“I tried to help you last night,” I tell her back. “It’s a dumb idea.”

“Why? Why is wanting to play the piano any dumber than being a model?”

“Because you actually have a shot at being a model,” I tell her.

“Fuck you,” she sends back. This use of the word “fuck” is a new thing with her. She does pretty well with it. I mean, she’s not one of those people who doesn’t know how to land it. It sounds pretty authoritative, coming out of her perfect little rosy pink mouth.

Obviously I was not involved in the first big agent powwow. While Amelia was being dragged away from the Garfield Lincoln School and her stunning career as a glamour-babe pianist, I was finishing a physics lab which had something to do with creating alternative energy sources out of teeny-tiny waterwheels. It was sort of relaxing, truth be told, sort of like building a Lego castle and then seeing what happens when you pour water all over it. So I built my waterwheel, which was boring but fun, and then I went to soccer practice, which was just boring, and then I stopped for pizza on the way home, had four slices, and then I went home. No one showed up until nine-thirty, so it was a pretty good thing that I stopped for the pizza.

By the time they showed up, I have to confess I was dead curious about how it went. Although by then it’s not exactly a big mystery, is it; if the stupid agent didn’t want them, it’s doubtful it would have taken her until nine-thirty to drop the boom. So I’m zoning in front of the television set, zipping the clicker coolly, as if I have no interest in anything whatsoever, when the four of them waft into the apartment. Mom leads the way, opening the door and turning to usher them in, cooing over all three of them like they were precious baby chicklings, or a hot piece of real estate.

“It’s been a big night. All three of you should probably head straight to bed,” she announces.

“It’s nine-thirty, Mother,” says Daria. Daria is all flushed and haughty; she’s standing so tall she looks like someone cast a spell over her and she grew into a pope or something, like the woman in that fairy tale where the fish gives the fisherman too many wishes. Polly, on the other hand, looks short. This is the only thing I can think about for a minute—why does Daria look so tall and Polly look so short? Did they do something to them at the modeling agency, to make the threesome more marketable?—and then I realize, duh, that Polly took her shoes off because her feet had started to hurt.

“I think we should celebrate,” she announces. She goes to the mini-fridge where Mom keeps the alcohol, and grabs herself a beer. Which all of us have done many times, just not in front of Mom.

But Mom doesn’t notice, or at least she doesn’t care to notice; she’s still floating around the room like a dazed and happy flower, bobbing in a cool breeze on somebody’s deck or something.Amelia tosses herself on the couch, next to me, rolling over the back and landing like a ton of bricks. Before I can give her a hard time about it, she is laughing at pretty much nothing.

“What a dweeb. What a dweeboid you are. What are you watching? I’m not watching Star Trek, how many times can you watch that stupid show? Give me the clicker.” She grabs it off me and immediately concentrates on channel flipping even faster than I do.

“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.