Theresa Rebeck - Three Girls and their Brother

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.