Three Girls and their Brother

“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.”