Theresa Rebeck - Three Girls and their Brother

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.”