Three Girls and their Brother

For Cooper and Cleo, my own little beauties

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

Now that it’s all over, everybody is saying it was the picture, that stupid picture was the primal cause of every disaster that would eventually befall my redheaded sisters. Not that it’s anybody’s fault; not that anybody blames anybody. It’s more like fate; the picture had to happen, and then everything else had to happen because the picture happened. Everybody sitting around, shaking their heads and saying, How could they know? Like total doom is just the mystery du jour.

But you know, I’m like—the New Yorker calls you up and says we want to do this thing, take a picture of those girls, it’s all set up, Herb Lang doing color for once because of all that red hair—to me, the question isn’t, How could they know? The question is, Why go for it? Why would you go for it? Why not hurl yourself in the opposite direction, run for cover to Ohio or Iowa or Idaho, any one of those places where the most famous anybody ever gets is for like raising an especially gorgeous cow or something. I’m not saying it would have solved everything. But overall I don’t know anyone who could now argue that moving to Ohio would not have been a better choice than announcing in the New Yorker that my sisters were the It Girls of the Twenty-First Century.

“Herb Lang is going to do us,” Polly smirked. This is in the kitchen, all three of them are sort of lounging around, Daria’s got her head in the refrigerator, and Polly is posing, like some glamour girl from the forties, her hip up against the counter and her cheekbones up against the light. On the one hand it’s ridiculous when she tries that stuff, but on the other hand she seriously knows how to pull it off. She wears fishnet stockings half the time. So she’s doing this thing with her hips and her cheekbones, and what she just said sounds just crazy enough to be possibly true, so I don’t immediately call her a liar. I look over at Daria, who has closed the refrigerator door and is now leaning against the counter, opening an Evian. She’s actually too cool to even glance my way, to see how I’m taking this earth-shattering piece of information, but you can tell from the way she’s holding her head that she too is also smirking. Seriously, you should have seen those two. They looked like they’d already been in the goddamned New Yorker, and that thing that the Indians talk about, how pictures steal part of your soul, like that had happened already.

And yet, they also looked insanely beautiful. They always looked insanely beautiful. This is a sad truth of my life: Since the moment of my birth, I have always been surrounded by female beauty. It’s a bit of a distraction. I mean, it is not something you ever get used to, even when you’re related to it. Sometimes all three of them, it gets hard to concentrate. All that creamy skin and hair, shoulders and legs, lips—they’re my sisters, don’t get me wrong—but it’s definitely overwhelming.

“Herb Lang? How’d you pull that off?” I say. I’m playing this very cool, which makes them doubly sure that I am impressed.

“It’s for the New Yorker,” Daria repeats.

Okay, our grandfather, just for the record, was Leo Heller. I never knew the guy, he was dead before I was even born, but, the point is, he was a really famous literary critic in the fifties, who wrote a lot of books about the history of American literature. Even though hardly anybody understands them, they are considered a big deal and, in addition, old Granddad at some point wrote an essay called “The Terror of the New,” which apparently blew a lot of people’s minds, if your mind actually gets blown by that stuff. So now “The Terror of the New” is one of those lines about literature and thought and America that people actually quote. People ask questions, like in graduate seminars, at universities, about how this or that idea fits into Heller’s notion of “The Terror of the New.” Literary critics write whole chapters of books about how Heller’s theory of “The Terror of the New” explains the collapse of the Harlem Renaissance. Your average person of course doesn’t know about any of this, unless they do. So if I say “I’m Leo Heller’s grandson” to a specific subset of human beings, they’ll act like that’s the coolest thing possible. Everyone else will stare at me like I’m a moron.

But everyone at the New Yorker, trust me, knows all about “The Terror of the New.” Which is why Daria actually didn’t need to say anything else in explanation as to why Herb Lang might be taking their picture. Red hair, plus Leo Heller? Definitely New Yorker material.

“It Girls,” I shrug, deliberately unimpressed. “Wow.”

“All three of us,” Amelia hisses, from the corner.

Okay now, the thing about Amelia is, she is nowhere near as big an idiot as Polly and Daria. She has that thing that happens to youngest children, sometimes, where she just sits and watches the disasters all the rest of us are cooking up, which makes it much easier for her not to participate in them. She’s, like, a genius at this. Seriously, she basically figures out how everything’s going to go hours or years ahead of everyone else, and then she tries to explain it to the rest of us morons, in an attempt to give us half a clue. None of us ever listens and then it all happens, just the way she said. It’s quite spooky, to tell the truth, almost like she’s a character out of a comic book, with super powers, that’s how accurate it sometimes is. I’m not kidding.

“It’s not going to go anywhere good,” she notified us.

Nevertheless, three days later we found ourselves in the middle of a decrepit loft on the Lower East Side, surrounded by lights and photographers and droolers galore. It really just happened, like that fast: One day they call and say we’re going to do this stupid thing that’s going to change your lives forever, and then, like, suddenly there you are in some sort of deserted garment district kind of place where a lot of young women were chained to sewing machines in the nineteenth century, and now there are stylists everywhere. I got to see the whole thing because I faked a cold to get out of school, and then faked getting better when the car showed up. Mom was too out of her mind to notice, or care. The New Yorker! It Girls! It was enough to drive everyone bonkers.

Polly was in heaven, it was exactly the sort of thing she’s been looking for her whole life, being the center of attention in a roomful of people who think being the center of attention is the only reason to live. Mom likewise was practically purring with delight. This is the thing you need to know about my mother: She was Miss Tennessee in 1977 and then the first runner up in the Miss America contest that same year. This is a dead fact, it’s no joke. It’s not the kind of information Mom ever actually spread around New York because the circles my dad traveled in would frown on that sort of thing, so she couldn’t tell anybody and neither could we. When things were falling apart between them it would come up in fights, like the biggest skeleton we had in the old family closet, as if he didn’t marry her in the first place because she’s hot. At the same time, allow me to add that he did have a point. You look at the pictures of her in her swimsuits and evening gowns, they’re fairly nerve-wracking. The big-hair thing was still going on in the seventies and so you truly have to flinch. Nevertheless, that is obviously not the way she looks at it, and in fact it’s fairly clear that she has not actually ever recovered from the experience of being a beauty queen, and this played no small part in the collapse of her marriage to my dad, who is mostly sort of brainy and above it all, when he’s not falling for stupid but gorgeous women.

So Polly’s delirious, Mom is purring, Queen Daria is too cool to react, which is her way of pursuing her bliss, and Amelia just keeps looking at the floor, wishing it were over. All the hair and makeup people have to ask her about twelve zillion times to hold her head up. Then they start telling her how gorgeous she is—well, everyone’s telling each other that, and it’s hardly news, it’s more like white noise in this place—and then they start telling her to smile. It was really kind of frightening, to tell the truth, and in addition you could see it was more or less making her head split. I finally slid over sort of to one side of her, she’s drowning in gay men who are picking at everything, her hair of course, face, toenails; she was really just surrounded. So I sort of stood there like a fool and yelled, “Hey, Amelia, you look gooorrrrrgeouuuuus!” She looked around, just like suddenly mad as hell, and I thought, oh shit, she doesn’t get it, and then she did, and she grinned and rolled her eyes at me. She really does hate all that stuff.

I of course am totally not supposed to be there. I’m just the idiot brother, only nobody of course knows even that much, because nobody introduces anybody around here. I swear, I don’t know why anybody bothers teaching their kids manners; you go out into the world and expect people to say things like, “Hello, my name is Stu, what’s yours?” Or even, “Hi, I’m the makeup guy, who are you?” But not one of these people does anything remotely like this; they are all too hip to introduce themselves to anyone, or take notice of some pathetic teenager hanging out in the corner because his sister has been abducted by the New Yorker. So everyone just keeps flicking their eyes over me like I’m just some total loser who snuck in without a hall pass and as soon as security shows up I’ll get tossed. I’m standing around doing nothing, so obviously the only reason I would be there is because I’m desperate to be a part of this devastating scene, which means that my loserdom can provide everyone with an opportunity to be even more hip, because then they can strut around and prove to themselves that they’re above saying hello to losers like me.

For all the frenzy, nothing really happens for the longest time. I swear, hours they’re working on the girls and running around and yelling at each other about lip gloss. The head stylist, who is bossing everybody around and making all the decisions, is some guy named Stu. Stu apparently has been hired by Herb, who doesn’t want to have to be bothered with all the decisions about what the models are going to wear and how to do their hair up, so he brings in Stu, who arranges everything and then Herb can just show up and take the pictures. Actually, it might be the New Yorker that hires Stu to do all this. I can’t remember. The point is, Stu is flying around like the queen bee he is, surrounded by flocks of minions who wait breathlessly while he decides who’s going to wear what, what color toenail polish goes on which girl, and what to do with all that red hair. And then everybody tells him why that won’t work, he screams, then changes his mind anyway, and it goes on like that for hours.

Which obviously takes a lot of concentration. There are maybe six thousand decisions to change your mind about. Do they all wear the same basic outfit, maybe three micro-minis in different colors, playing up the sister act? Micro-minis are so five minutes ago, maybe we should accentuate the classical allure of their beauty and just put them in evening gowns. Or do you put all three of them in get-ups which are all stylistically different, accentuating their separate personalities? Stu ends up going with a version of this last plan. There is great general relief at this point, and no one bothers to point out that Stu actually doesn’t know what the differences in my sisters’ personalities are, as he has just met them that morning. This is clearly going to be considered entirely irrelevant to the concept.

But Stu has moved on from evening gowns, and he’s living in a fantasy of three gorgeous girls with gorgeous red hair, all of them different, completely “about” different things, awaken ing male desires in three completely different ways. Daria is going to be the picture of elegance, the princess every boy yearns to marry, Audrey Hepburn at the ball; I swear the words “Audrey Hepburn” actually came out of Stu’s mouth and Daria got a real glint in her eye. I thought Polly was going to strangle her. But then Stu starts in on Polly and her raw sexuality, compares her to Christina Aguilera, which, let’s face it, isn’t as good as Audrey Hepburn, but Polly knows enough to play it cool and sure enough it gets better. Stu starts going on about Naomi Campbell and how she supposedly has the best body in the business but Polly’s is better, plus she exudes sex like all the supermodel greats—I swear, the words “supermodel greats” also came out of his mouth—and then he runs off a whole string of names which I had never heard of but she sure had. And then old Stu starts in on Amelia, and how she’s this androgynous girl-boy figure, a wood nymph, the mysteries of nature and earth and mind, Shakespearean heroines, I kid you not, Stu was an impressive bullshit artist. Anyway, it all amounts to the fact that Amelia gets to wear blue jeans. Which is such a relief for her that she actually gives herself permission to enjoy the whole mess for five or ten minutes, and for that brief period of time no one has to tell her to smile.

The announcement that Amelia will be wearing blue jeans turns the tension down a point in general, as Polly and Daria seemed to dig the fact as well. Polly even had a sort of vague, sisterly moment where she told Amelia that that would look cool, blue jeans are so sexy. It was so warm and gooey it was not hard to figure out what was going on. The fact is, you put three sisters in a room and say, well, now everyone is going to see how pretty we can make you all look? And then keep at it for hours, with everyone screaming about how beautiful one thing or another is, eyes lips hair, hair hair hair; well, sooner or later the question of who is the most beautiful is going to rear its ugly head. As you may know, there’s a whole Greek myth about this kind of situation; it supposedly started the Trojan War. Anyway, the point is, all three of my sisters are very beautiful; my mother’s genes were ruthlessly efficient in this area. But Amelia got one thing from my dad the Jew that nobody else got: Her hair curls. In big, red-gold ringlets.

Which, as you can imagine, got their share of attention from the attention hounds. You should have heard them, in the middle of all that bullshit, there was this endless sort of dumb repetition, over and over, “And god, look at this one, it curls. Not only did she get the color, it curls. Fucking amazing … Did you see the curls? Christ. And there’s a fucking lot of it. What a head of hair. And it curls …” So you can’t blame Daria and Polly for getting a little worried; I was worried and what do I know? I’ll tell you what I know: Amelia’s only fourteen, Polly and Daria are seventeen and eighteen; it would be horrible beyond words for her to walk away with the shot. She’s fourteen—put her in blue jeans, don’t tempt fate.

So that’s why we were all so relieved, for the moment. And once the blue-jeans decision was made, we moved onto the shades-of-green discussion. Different girls, different styles, red hair: The unifying element would naturally be shades of green.In which, as you might expect, my sisters all tend to look rather devastating. Any shade of green pretty much works. In spite of which Stu whips himself into a frenzy; none of the greens go together and some of them are olive and dowdy and these are beautiful girls: What idiot would put girls who look like this in olive? Which got the clothes stylist kind of defensive and she started to argue about what’s in this season and Donna Karan’s fall line and Stu sneers abo ut camouflage chic, and drops several pieces on the floor, which makes her even madder, and that goes on for another couple of hours.

There was one person in the middle of all this nonsense who resembled a human being. This is the hair stylist, who actually is so concentrated on what she’s doing that she doesn’t yell at anyone, ever, which made me think for the longest time that she was just somebody’s assistant. Then at one point I slid over to see what she was cooking up for Amelia and all those damn curls and she looked at me and said, “Hey, who are you?” Which just about knocked me over; it was the most interest anyone expressed in me all day.

I was so surprised that anyone had spoken to me that it took me a minute to respond, so Amelia said, “This is my brother, Philip,” and the hair stylist grinned and said, “This exciting for you, to see your sisters doing a big photo shoot like this?” And again I was so stunned by anyone expressing interest in what I thought that I sort of mumbled and said, “I don’t know.” But this hair stylist didn’t even seem to notice, or, if she did, she didn’t particularly care or—here’s a stunning possibility—she was too well mannered to act like I was a jerk. This person was almost like the opposite of everyone else in the room: Nothing rattled her, and she actually seemed to be enjoying herself, while everybody else was running around screaming and miserable. She kept telling Amelia her hair was gorgeous, so in that regard she was part of the general trend, but somehow, when she said it, it didn’t sound like such a bad thing.

“God, look at that, that’s something,” she’d say, holding up a wad of curls. She had a funny accent, sort of British but with kind of a turn in it, it’s hard to describe, you have to hear it. “You hit the jackpot, didn’t you? Course what am I supposed to do with all this here? Can I cut some of this, around the face, you think, you mind? Just shape it a little, not much, get it too short you got a bit of a wedge going on, that’s no good. What do you think, just a little round the face, yea? Wow, this color really is something. That’s why they’re doing this, right? The New Yorker?’ Cause of the color? Funny if you think about it, getting into a big magazine like that ’cause you got red hair. I mean it’s pretty, but still. Kind of thing that makes you wonder.”

“Our grandfather …” I offered, not even bothering to finish the thought. The hair stylist didn’t care, she picked up the thread for me, and kept on rocking.

“Right, he was some famous writer, like a critic or something, somebody told me that and I said, please! Like everybody’s really interested in the granddaughters of some big-deal intellectual shithead! That’s just a riot! If those girls didn’t have hair like that, there’s no way the New Yorker would be interested, that’s what I say. The fucking New Yorker. Supposed to be some big culture magazine, and you get your picture in it cause you got red hair! How cultural is that?” She just kept talking, not expecting anyone really to answer. It was soothing, frankly, because her voice was nice and she wasn’t mean or stupid, and she was also kind of saying stuff that you were thinking anyway so you felt less crazy when you listened to her.

She was a very unusual person. While she was just rattling on like that, it came out that after they blew up the World Trade Center she got so upset she decided to walk her dogs down there and hug people. This is a true story. I mean, obviously everybody got wigged out when that happened, that was a very strange time, but we were out in Brooklyn where, other than the smell in the air, and what happened to the firemen, things seemed pretty normal. Aside from the loss of telephones and not being able to go into the city and people crying on the street. But anyway, this La Aura—that was her name, La Aura, not just plain Laura, I thought that was so sweet, La Aura—she took her dogs, the second day after it happened, and just walked all the way down there, and no one stopped her.

“I think they thought the dogs were rescue dogs or something, which I didn’t say anything, I just kept walking and then they had those little stations, yea? Where people are handing out soup and donuts, you wouldn’t believe the tray of donuts that was down there, it was huge.” She held her hands out to show us, they must have had eight-dozen donuts in this box, that’s how wide her arms went, to show us. “Anyway there’s these two firemen there, in those black coats with the yellow bands, you know, that you just saw the whole time that happened, and they looked so tired, just really wiped, and I just said, ‘How’s it going?’ And this one guy started to cry, so I put my arm around him and he just cried like that, it was wild. And I talked to a lot of people, I asked them how they do it and one of them said, you know, he put it all in a place where he just couldn’t deal with it right then, and he knew he’d deal with it later. And then someone else said, you know, the first two days, there were a lot of women, not a lot, but some, with the rescue teams, and it just got to be too much for them. That women take it in too much, what happens at a big disaster, they feel it too much, and that after two days there were only men down there, taking the bodies out. And god you know, hey! I’m a lesbian! I don’t usually want to go along with all that gender shit, who does? But these guys were amazing. And I could see it was true, they were doing things no one else could even face, I couldn’t of done it.”

She’s snipping away at Amelia’s hair while she’s telling us all this. And we’re just listening, I swear, this woman was riveting. It turns out she hugged people for five hours, hugging and listening and telling them they were fine was like her thing she did to help; she went down and hugged people who needed hugs. She was really lively and very interesting and I did think, if I was in a catastrophe, I would want a hug from this person, I really would.

Anyway, she’s telling us this stuff and clipping away a little bit at a time, really, it didn’t look like anything, what La Aura was doing to Amelia’s hair, it just looked like she was picking up a strand here or there and then cutting a tiny piece of it off then tossing the whole thing around again. But all of a sudden I look at Amelia, and she’s just listening, and I just felt my chest do something—it squeezed and hurt for a second, because that’s how beautiful she looked. And then a second later I wanted to cry, I swear, because part of what made her so pretty was her good heart and how much she cared about this haircutting person being nice to sad firemen. A lot of fourteen-year-old girls, really what they care about is who’s going to some idiot’s party this weekend, or what movie star they saw in front of Lincoln Center last week. I guess in that way fourteen-year-old girls are not that different from most people out there. But Amelia still had that thing that really little kids have, where they want to throw their arms around total strangers on the street. You don’t always see it because she’s also kind of annoying a lot of the time, but when it does show up it’s quite staggering, and there it was, in the middle of what turned out to be a really great haircut. No huge surprise there, that La Aura could really cut hair. Amelia looked unbelievable.

This is when another minion in black showed up and announced, “We need her, Laura.” None of the minions seemed to understand that the woman’s name wasn’t Laura, it was La Aura. But La Aura didn’t seem to mind, “Yea, okay, I’m about done, just let me see …” And then she scrunched all those curls around a little, just scrunching in her hand here and there, and Amelia’s hair looked even better, and so La Aura signed off and they took Amelia across the room so she could try on different kinds of blue jeans and snaky little green tops. Daria and Polly were already over there, being transformed, respectively, into Audrey Hepburn and the supermodel of the century.