Theresa Rebeck - Three Girls and their Brother

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.”

“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.