Three Girls and their Brother

“How did you manage it? I mean, how did you get from there—to here!” Collette wondered, astonished. “I’ve always wanted to ask, if it’s not too personal.”

“I stalked Sidney Lumet until I got him alone,” Ogress laughed coyly, charmed to be asked to narrate the seminal event of her life’s story. “He was waiting for a cab and I made a complete fool of myself, insisting that I wanted to work for him, that I’d do anything! He absolutely brushed me off but he’d had a couple drinks and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t even remember what he actually said. So I showed up at his office the next day, and started making coffee. It took a week for everybody to realize he hadn’t actually hired me, but by then it was too late, I was indispensable.”

“You started by making coffee for Sidney Lumet!” Collette bubbled, elegant.

“There are worse ways to start in this business, as I think you know,” Maureen noted. The two women laughed one of those “boy do we ever” laughs.

“It sounds like you were a totally different person,” Collette smiled, both sucking up and narrating. “You really transformed yourself, didn’t you?”

“Just like The Metamorphosis,” I said.

We were all there to suck up, right? And she was the one all hung up on the Kafka thing. They all stared at me, like I was suddenly speaking a foreign language.

“You know, The Metamorphosis,” I said. “The guy wakes up one morning and he’s a giant bug, and no one in his family knows how to talk to him anymore?”

“Really?” said Maureen, unfriendly as hell.

“You haven’t read it?” I asked.

“No, I missed that one.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“I just meant, you know, you were like, a different person and your family understood you and then you transformed yourself and now you’re like totally mysterious to them. That’s all,” I concluded lamely.

“Thank you for the exegesis,” she said.

Okay, I happen to go to the Garfield Lincoln School, and I’m also the grandson of Leo Heller so I actually do know what “exegesis” means. “You’re welcome,” I told her, with a slightly edgy tone, to match her own.

“Is this you?” Collette cooed. “Look, Amelia, it’s a picture of Maureen with Ron Howard!” I was suddenly feeling like I was stuck in The Castle.

“Hey Collette, you know, I kind of have a lot of homework,” Amelia said. “This has been really fun and I’m so glad to see you, Maureen, and I’m really really sorry for biting Rex and I’m especially sorry if I said anything that bugged you that night in the bar, and Philip is too, but we need to get home, okay, Maureen?” Even though she was saying all the right things, Amelia sounded even worse than me. She has no idea how to spin anything. Next to Maureen and Collette we sounded like a couple of rude teenagers, and the fact is, we were there to prove that we weren’t rude teenagers. I actually saw Collette raise her eyes to the heavens for a split second. I couldn’t say that I blamed her.

But Maureen was suddenly in a forgiving mood. She smiled, half to herself, and leaned back, letting the side-lighting play on her giant beads on her giant chest. I swear, it is no wonder I thought of her in the light of The Metamorphosis; she really did look like a giant cockroach, with all those beady eyes.

“Amelia means—”

“It’s all right, Collette, I know what Amelia means. You too, Philip. No hard feelings. But perhaps you’d better go before either one of you opens your mouth again.” She twinkled at us, benign. Who could keep track of this? I was getting whiplash. But the offer to leave came none too soon.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I really do like Kafka, I really do.”

“Good,” she told me.

And everything would have been fine if we had just gotten our butts out of there before Rex showed up. Really. We were out of there; we were all about to stand up and wave goodbye to this whole hideous interchange when the door swung open and the king himself walked in.

“Oh hey, sorry, Maureen, no no, stay, you know you can use the place whenever you want, I just didn’t know you were in here,” he said, giving up the fact that this was his office, not hers, before he even saw that in fact Maureen was using his office to have a sit-down with the kid who bit him, along with her dorky brother. But of course we all turned to stare at him, and then he saw Amelia, who was unfortunately wearing a teeny little turquoise tank top over black jeans in which she looked awesome.

“Oh hi,” Rex said. “Yeah, hi.”

She didn’t say anything. She just turned white.

“Nice picture. I mean, the thing in the New Yorker, that’s …” Rex trailed off. He was totally giving himself away. Amelia looked at the ground.

“Thanks,” she said. That was it. She was not too nice about it, either.

“Amelia and her brother came by to apologize about what happened at W the other night,” Maureen narrated, expressionless. I thought it was weird because she had been so nice to us and now here was Rex and she was suddenly a block of ice.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Rex. “Just finish it up, huh? I mean, it’s okay for you to use this place, but I wish you’d clear it with me ahead of time.” Maureen looked at him, sort of like a mother who is thinking about whether or not slapping her own kid is maybe a good idea. He looked back at her, like one of the shitty kids on the playground who’s getting off on being a jerk. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Not at all,” said Maureen, pulling out that dazzling smile. “As I said, we were just finishing up.”

“Whatever,” he said, and he grabbed the doorknob and turned to go.

And just as he did he snuck another look at Amelia. I saw him do it. And it was so clear, just in that one little sneaky look, that the asshole had the hots for her. I’ve seen it enough times, it’s not like I’m likely to miss it. That guy was forty years old, at least, and he had the hots for my fourteen-year-old sister.

But anyway, then he was gone and we were going. So Collette reached over and held Maureen’s hand meaningfully for a few seconds, smiling at her sincerely.

“I really appreciate your helping us through this,” she said.

“Of course,” said Maureen. I reached for the door.

“There’s just one thing,” she added. We all turned. Maureen, looking out the window, sighed. “It’s wonderful that you came by and apologized,” she noted. “But this really is so private. And the whole … event … wasn’t private, was it? Was it, Amelia?”

“What?” said Amelia.

“I just mean,” smiled Maureeen, “for an event that public—the apology will have to be public too, won’t it?”

CHAPTER FIVE

The next thing we knew, Daria, Polly, and Amelia were on Regis and Kelly.

This took an endless amount of time to work out, even though it happened by the end of the week. Collette was on the phone with everybody in town for hours, but at first most of them were so mortally afraid of pissing Rex and Maureen off that none of them would touch us. So even though Maureen was the one who had insisted that the apology had to be public in the first place, it was apparently impossible to set up a public interview because that might make Maureen and Rex more angry, even though Maureen was the one who wanted it. It was like a Möbius strip of stupid logic that went on and on and on until almost out of the blue the whole situation flipped on its head and what we had was an exclusive on Regis and Kelly, the perfect chance to get those girls out in front of the public so that everyone could see that these were really very sweet and adorable teenagers, nothing like what had been reported by other media outlets. And, during this exclusive, Amelia would find the perfect opportunity to apologize to Rex, on the air, for biting him.

By this point, we were all just doing whatever Collette told us. Of course we were; we were in deep shit and the only way out, seemingly, was to let that shapely barracuda call the shots. Everyone even let her pick out the outfits they would wear, which for Amelia turned out to be a subtle variation on the blue jeans/T-shirt ensemble she had on in the Herb Lang photo. “We want them falling in love with you because you’re such a great kid,” she announced. “You need to wear something simple. No one likes a sexy fourteen-year-old.”