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“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 starving to death. So I’m thinking about how hungry I am, and why isn’t there ever more food in our house, and I’m feeling a little light-headed and not fully paying attention, and then breakfast proceeds to go south, at approximately eighty miles per hour.
“My piano recital went great last night, in case anyone is interested,” Amelia announces. It all seems innocuous enough to start; of course it does, it always does.
“That’s terrific, sweetheart,” says Mom, while she whips up some kind of inedible shake full of flax and ice cubes.
“Good for you, honey.” Polly is all warm and fuzzy, in a completely self-absorbed way. “That’s sensational.”
“Great,” says Daria, pouring herself a glass of water. Apparently she has decided to see if she can live on water; I don’t think I’ve seen her eat any actual food since their big-deal photo shoot.
“I mean, I never played that good in my life. Or at least, that’s what I thought, but then Ben said I’ve been playing really well for a while and that if I just keep practicing the way I have been, I could really be good.” This is an approximation, obviously, of the conversation, but the tone is what I’m going for here. I mean, the whole thing sounded completely surreal to me, kind of way too bright and people kept saying things like “great” and “terrific” and “really really good,” but it was hard to keep straight what was so good, like the thing everyone was talking about was just somewhere else, or maybe didn’t even exist at all.
“Philip said I was great,” Amelia continues. I roll my eyes at this, as it is strictly true but nowhere near the whole truth, but no one is actually all that interested in having me leap into this noteworthy conversation. Least of all Amelia, who is rolling along now, in her great and fantastic and really really good universe. Which leaves me sitting there, waiting like a dolt for the punch line. “Ben thinks I should maybe even be training.”
“Training?” Mom says, her voice going up a little too high. My mother is not necessarily bright, but she is not necessarily stupid, either. She’s starting to get wind that this little story about what a swell time everyone had at the piano recital isn’t going to end well, as far as she’s concerned.
Daria pours herself another glass of water. “What do you mean, training?” she asks. She is very cool. Polly is listening, also cool, while she scrapes the thinnest layer of tofutti imaginable along the inside of a hollowed-out bagel. No kidding, I would eat the bagels, except our housekeeper Lucinda has orders to scrape the insides out of them before I can even get a shot at one. Then she freezes them, these little skins of bagels, so that any time someone wants a damn bagel that’s all that’s available to you, frozen bagel skins.
So everybody’s sitting around, hovering around the word “training,” instinctively knowing that there’s another shoe going to drop around whatever the word “training” is actually going to mean.
“Yeah,” says Amelia. “Like for now I think he’s just talking about maybe doing another lesson a week, but more practicing, you know, and then maybe in six months or something I’d be ready to audition for someplace really good.”
The train wreck is picking up speed.
“Is that what you want to do, sweetheart?” says Mom. Her voice is so phony now you could put her on television.
“Yeah, I do. I really, I do.” Amelia is getting good and firm.I think this plan of hers is a total crock but I also admire its strange daring. “I don’t have to practice at home all the time, ’cause I know that probably could get really annoying—”
“Not at all,” says Mom, tilting her head, poised.
“… Ben says I can use one of the rehearsal pianos at school, he’ll help me with that—”
“I think maybe I should have a talk with Ben before we let this plan get finalized, sweetie,” Mom coos.
“It’s just that if I’m really going to take this seriously, because he seriously thinks—”
“I’ll call Ben and find out what he thinks, honey,” says Mom. Polly and Daria are just watching now.
“Yeah, but—”
“I’m so excited for you, sweetheart! The recital must’ve really gone well. I’m so sorry I missed it.”
“You got to talk to Ben.”
“I will. Oh, and I’ve left a message with Mrs Virtudes about picking you up at two today. The appointment with Collette isn’t until four, but I don’t know what traffic is going to be like, the bridges are always such a mess, and I think she’s enough of a pain, we don’t want to start off on the wrong foot.”
Amelia looks at the table. Polly licks her fingers, as if there’s a shred of spare tofutti somewhere to be found. Daria sips her water. My stupid Zone bar tastes like straw.
“I can’t go,” says Amelia. “Ben and I have to talk about my rehearsal schedule.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You just had a recital last night. You can take one day off from practicing, darling. You’ve been practicing so much lately the rest of us can hardly think without hearing da, da, daaaah …” Mom does her little musical bells laugh as a finish to this clever speech.
“I can’t go, Mom. I can’t go,” Amelia says.
“She has to go,” Daria tells Mom. She is not happy with any of this.
“Why do I have to go?”
“Collette wants to meet all three of you.”
“I don’t want to be a model. I’m a little kid,” Amelia points out.
“I think you should leave that to her to decide,” Mom smiles.
“Ben wants to meet with me. How am I going to—”
“Jesus.” Daria is really disgusted now, and making no attempt to hide it. Which pisses Amelia off.
“What do you care?” she asks. “I’m not saying you can’t go off and be some kind of idiot model. I’m just saying, I don’t want to do it, and I especially don’t want to do it today. I have something else to do today.”
“What, be a pianist?” Polly is laughing at this, and she always has that attitude thing going, which doesn’t help, when she laughs. It makes her look like she’s sneering, which isn’t necessarily what she means. Sometimes it is what she means, it’s just hard to tell, all the time. And now she’s got the spiky hair thing going too, from the shoot, so she’s really got attitude now. Which means Amelia is starting to bristle.
“Fuck you,” she says. “I’m not doing it.”
Mom jumps up, shocked, shocked to hear such language come out of the mouth of her youngest daughter.
“That is quite enough, young lady,” she says. “I won’t have that kind of language in this house.”
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.
This logic seems pretty irrefutable to me but, such a surprise, I seem to have no clear idea how to be the cool, rational, not-tanked person in a room full of tanked women. So instead I act like a big baby and grab the clicker from Amelia. “What are you watching?” I mumble, and I start to zip through all the channels again.
“Hey!” she says. She shoves me. “I was watching that.”
“You’re drunk,” I say, quiet, like an insult. Which is relatively stupid, as Amelia is the one who snuck me up in the elevator and got me to my room, and later to the bathroom, without anyone knowing, after the tequila episode.
“I’m not drunk,” she says, and then she starts to laugh like an idiot, like “I’m not drunk” is the most hilarious thing she’s ever said in her life. I swear, she thinks this whole situation is just hilarious.
“What did you say?” asks Mom, all fake-startled and guilty as hell.
“Philip thinks I’m drunk.“
“Don’t be ridiculous, Philip.”
“Mom,” I say back. Like there’s nothing else to say, really; sometimes, there just isn’t, and this is one of those times. Not that she’s going to give an inch.
“Today was a big day for everyone, and if you can’t be happy for your sisters, then I think you might want to think about that.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll do that, Mom,” I tell her. And that’s all I say about it. Amelia keeps giggling, and Mom goes into the study, probably to sneak another drink, because she’s got liquor stashed in there too, and Polly and Daria drift back into their bedrooms to consult with the stars, and I find a Star Trek rerun, the one where Captain Kirk falls in love with an android and then she dies at the end of the episode because she learned that feelings hurt too much to live with. I swear, that show was really brilliant, it really just was, and I’m not embarrassed to mention it. I mean, I’m not one of those idiots who goes to conventions and dresses up like Mr Spock. I’m just saying. That show was not near as stupid as everything that’s been on television since.
CHAPTER THREE
No one ever said Herb Lang was overrated, and the fact is, he isn’t overrated. He’s a very good photographer, even if he is a bit spooky in person. So the picture, when it comes out, is very hot. Daria the Ice Queen has a big smile on her face, her head is tipped back and she looks like joy, she just does. Polly looks like she’s grabbing Daria and trying to push her out of the frame, which maybe could be a little too accurate, in terms of the reality of their relationship, but it doesn’t look mean or competitive. It just looks nice, like a nice sisterly sort of thing to do. The spiky hair is great, the little green dress with the black beads, also great. She has a killer pair of heels on, also great. And then there’s old Amelia, all the way on the other side of the frame, with her blue jeans and T-shirt, and those nutty little bare feet and little green toenails. She’s sort of half in profile, head down, but looking up, right at the camera. And she just looks smart, and a little bit devilish and like someone you just want to know, who also happens to be so pretty you need to fall over. The whole thing is killer, there’s no question.
When Mom took it out of the FedEx envelope, it was pretty wild. We were all sitting around the kitchen—I don’t know why we always hang out in the kitchen, there’s never any food there—but anyway we were hanging out in the kitchen, collectively on pins and needles, while Mom took her own damn time opening that FedEx.
“Just a minute, just a minute, would you please?” she laughed, turning away from Polly and Daria, both of whom were actively trying to rip it from her hands.
“Mom, it doesn’t take normal people sixteen minutes to open a FedEx!” Polly screeched, still grabbing.
“Well, then I’m not normal,” Mom informed her, elegantly cheerful. “I just want to savor this, is that all right with you?” What an act. I thought Daria was going to brain her with the blender. Amelia was sitting next to me, trying not to care, but even she couldn’t stand the tension finally, and she practically knocked her chair over, bolting to the other side of the table so she could get a good look as soon as the thing was out of the envelope. It was kind of goofy and sweet, honestly; all of them were laughing and nervous and happy and shoving at each other to get the best look. And then they all saw it, at once, and I’m not kidding, they all just shut up. That picture shut them all up. Because it was impossible to look at it and not know that something was going to happen. You just couldn’t not know.
This was like two days before the magazine hit the stands, that’s when they finally sent us a so-called “advance” copy. I thought for sure they’d give us more preparation than that, but that old Collette apparently really had to pull strings just to get that much special treatment. Anyway, things had gotten pretty hot by then. In those six weeks while we were waiting for the magazine to come out, Collette set up a whole mess of meetings all over town with different ad agencies and magazines and stylists and publicists, TV execs, talk-show producers, it went on and on. Amelia spent the entire time kicking and screaming and saying “fuck you,” and then getting dragged to all the meetings anyway. Which meant that she missed quite a bit of school, which meant that several of her teachers started calling to give Mom a hard time about it. No one particularly cared about Polly virtually dropping out; that was sort of understood as the sort of thing that was just going to happen, and Polly was always a little bit of a hell-raiser anyway, so truth be told I think the school was finally glad that she was taking off of her own accord. But Amelia was a freshman and known to be a fairly responsible little student, so the school got bent out of shape about her not showing up for algebra tests, and Amelia was bent out of shape, and Mom was bent out of shape. And then Ben the piano teacher got way bent out of shape, probably because, as I think I’ve mentioned, he had a completely illicit and illegal crush on her, which he had to pretend was, like, a more legal kind of concern about her development as an artist. So Ben called Amelia at home about six times, about missed lessons, and then he called Mom, who told him off, and then Amelia called Dad, who was back from Brazil, and he called Mom and expressed his supreme disapproval, and he reamed her out for yanking Amelia out of school, and Mom reamed him back, which just bent Polly completely out of shape, and sent Daria into a complete shrieking rage. So that’s what life was like, up until the day we got that picture in the mail and realized that, as weird as it all was getting? It was about to get worse.
The next day, it did. The phone rang. Mom picked it up, listened for no more than fifteen seconds, hung it up, turned around and informed everyone that they were going into Union Square to have drinks with a movie star whose name I cannot mention because he’d definitely sue me. This is a true story. One of the things that happen in New York, that people don’t always put together is, there are plenty of famous people out there who would like to meet pretty girls who are about to become famous themselves. PR people and agents do this sort of thing all the time; it’s their job to arrange these meetings between the famous and the nearly famous at a time when photographers might be around to snap some so-called candid shots of these exceptional encounters. So our friend Collette is somewhat on the ball, it seems, because Mom suddenly announced that Amelia, Daria and Polly had to go doll themselves up fast, because this major movie star was going to be holding court at W in an hour, and he wanted to meet them.