Theresa Rebeck - Three Girls and their Brother

My favorite part of the story involved Maureen Kafka, the green ogress, who really was all for dragging Amelia into court on grounds of assault—apparently you actually can get arrested for biting a movie star—until Daria pointed out that to a lot of people, it might actually look like Rex was the one who was doing the assaulting. Apparently that insinuation shut old Maureen up, and it also seems to have turned the tide on the let’s-arrest-Amelia issue.

And it’s the only part of the whole mess that I was sorry to have missed. Daria doesn’t say much, but she’s no idiot. None of my sisters are.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Rough-housing with the stars got a little rough Tuesday night at W, where pint-sized It Girl Amelia Heller took a bite out of Rex Wentworth,” claimed Rush & Molloy the very next day. There was a huge photograph of Rex swinging Amelia through the air right before she bit him, and an unnamed source giving it up that Rex had to go to the hospital, although there would be no charges filed.

Meanwhile, everyone in America was paging through their New Yorker , and stopping to look at a spectacularly fun picture of three gorgeous redheaded teenagers, dressed in green, dancing and looking like fairies or princesses or mermaids or whatever your own particular female fantasy might be. Under the picture they ran the clever cutline, “Daria, Polly and Amelia Heller, granddaughters of lit giant Leo Heller, on the verge of their own breed of greatness. Herb Lang photographs the terrific trio in a loft on Spring Street, high above the isle of Manhattan, site of their grandsire’s many triumphs.” Cool, huh? But that old La Aura, the hair stylist, was dead right: Nobody really cared about who our literary grandfather was. What they really cared about was: “Which is the one who bit Rex Wentworth?”

School was hell. Everyone was screaming at me all the time. “Did your sister really bite Rex Wentworth? What’s that about? Is she crazy? Awesome, man! Were you there? Did you see it? Why’d she bite him? Your sisters are hot. Are they all like, going out with movie stars now?” All the teachers spent the whole day digging me out from gangs of kids I didn’t even know. I mean, the Garfield Lincoln School isn’t exactly Stuyvesant; there are only sixty kids per grade level, so you pretty much know everybody in the high school by the time you’re a junior. But kids I never even heard of were everywhere all of a sudden, swarming all over me like a pack of rats.

Polly actually made an appearance at school that day, because who in their right mind would miss this spectacular opportunity to be the center of so much attention? She totally enjoyed the whole ruckus, wearing her fishnets, posing in the hallways, laughing and tossing her new spiky do about like a total pro. She was brilliant. You really do have to give it up to Polly; she makes being famous look like more fun than anybody I ever saw. I mean, she was having a great time, until it sank in that the picture was losing first position to the biting incident, as reported in the Daily News . I passed behind her, in the middle of the chaos, and heard her explaining, in the most discreet terms, that it wasn’t Amelia who was the center of the Rex Wentworth event, actually. It was her . “She didn’t bite Rex—god, that whole thing is just, you know, the newspapers are always sooo full of shit,” she bubbled, in a kind of edgy way. “They were just horsing around. He’s really fantastic. I talked to him for something like three hours, Amelia was leaving . That whole biting thing was a total nonevent. He’s not even upset about it! I talked to him, this morning he called me, we’re going to dinner tomorrow? And he didn’t even mention it.” This last bit, obviously, was a terrific whopper.

Amelia’s life was a disaster. She has a bit of a temper, as I’ve mentioned, so all the kids surrounding her and screaming questions about why she bit Rex Wentworth set her off about every two minutes or so. She never got to take that chemistry test; there was so much chaos in the chemistry lab they finally told her she had to go to Dean Morton’s office. The chemistry teacher, Dr Nussbaum, was trying to explain to her that she could make the test up another day but that she needed to go see the dean and sort out the controversy. Amelia told me this later; she rather obsessively focused on being told that she had to go “sort out the controversy,” because that struck her as being an especially stupid thing for old Nussbaum to say. And in fact, if you think about it, it is a pretty stupid thing to say to a fourteen-year-old girl who was being harassed by absolutely everybody in her high school, because she had bitten a movie star who was trying to feel her up. Anyway, at that point Amelia was so frustrated she started to cry, and then argue about how hard she had studied, and then she started babbling on even more, apparently, about how she’s missed so much school and it wasn’t her fault and were they all a bunch of fucking idiots, blaming her for this mess?

I’m not being euphemistic; she did in fact call Dr Nussbaum a “fucking idiot,” which sort of finished off the question of whether or not she was going to the dean’s office.

By the time Amelia got down to Morton’s office, the whole situation—gorgeous redheads, the Daily News , a bitten movie star, screaming students everywhere—had exhausted the school so much that the dean instantly decided to simply send Amelia home. Which was not, technically, a brilliant solution, as the front sidewalk of the school was positively lousy with photographers, and had been since ten in the morning. So when Amelia stormed out the front door, alone, at noon, there were thirty or forty of them waiting there, crawling all over each other and ready to commit multiple acts of homicide on the off-chance that it might net them an out-of-focus photograph of the fourteen-year-old girl who bit Rex Wentworth.

I could see all of it from the third floor, where I was trapped in a Spanish lab. That dipshit Morton hadn’t even arranged for someone to come pick her up; it says in our files that we’re authorized to walk ourselves home, but wouldn’t you think he’d have a half a clue?

The paparazzi went haywire. I mean, as upsetting as it had been to be mobbed by our fellow students all morning, they were rank amateurs compared to these bozos. They descended as one, shouting questions, grabbing, pushing, shoving their cameras right into her face, acting really like she was some sort of stupid animal in a zoo, instead of just a little kid. Amelia stood on the front steps of the high school, frozen, and then she totally just disappeared. I mean, one minute she was there, and the next minute she wasn’t. It was like they had eaten her.

I bolted. I mean, what else are you going to do, just sit there and watch your sister get eaten? Señor Martine (his real name is Mr Martin, but he makes us call him Señor Martine) shouted something at me in Spanish, but I was truly in no mood. I made it outside in maybe ten seconds, but the situation was already way out of control. The shoving was unbelievable, it was like being at some insane British soccer match. Photographers were pushing and shoving and cursing wildly, and I had to literally pull at arms and legs and throw myself up against somebody to get him out of the way, just so I could clamber one or two inches further into the onion layers of photojournalists who had encrusted themselves around my little sister. People were screaming, “Fuck you, fucking asshole, get in line, fucker, hey who is this fucker?” while I pushed and shoved and yelled, “Amelia! Hey, Amelia, where are you?”

By the time I got to her she was just curled up in a little ball. Seriously, she was like all folded in on herself, a little turtle of a person, crouched down over her feet, her arms crossed over her head, down on the cement sidewalk. You got to wonder what’s wrong with those guys, why they thought this would be a cool picture to take, a little kid so scared she’s doing something that spooky. I mean, I wondered that about a minute later, but while I was surrounded by the crazy people with her, I was mostly just screaming at them to get away. Amelia was crying and hitting at me, because she didn’t want to move, that’s how freaked out she was, but I was pretty sure they’d just start stomping on her if I left her there, so I started dragging her back toward the front door of the school. They of course kept taking pictures and shoving at both of us. It was a ridiculous mess.