Theresa Rebeck - Three Girls and their Brother

Okay. I’m just doing the best I can here. I didn’t ask this guy to look at me, and if you want my opinion, the only reason he noticed me at all was because La Aura had done a pretty good job cutting my hair and suddenly there was something to look at—mainly, a decent haircut. I didn’t go asking to be in that picture.

But the next thing I know, Herb has his arm around me—really, in a kindly way, Herb is one of those people who gets you to do things because he makes you feel important and charming, so you’re lost in this haze of warm fuzzy feelings and not really paying attention to what you’re doing, you’re just going along. His arm is around me, he’s chatting to me in this low voice and I’m just walking with him, across the room and toward the drapes and the windows and the klieg lights. I can’t really hear much. He turns me, stands me by a window. There’s a kind of rustling and hum going on now, but I can’t see anything, as all those lights are on me, and everything behind them disappears. You really can see the dust motes in these moments, that’s one thing I remember. And then the next thing I remember is Amelia, and Polly and Daria, moving around me like angels. Really, they all looked so pretty and I’m just a mess—the only thing any of those style dudes did to me was ignore me and let La Aura cut my hair, so I’m kind of standing there in blue jeans and a T-shirt and this big old sloppy other shirt on top of that. Daria meanwhile is glowing, practically, she’s in this shimmery sea-green snakeskin-like evening gown, and her hair is piled on her head—really she didn’t look like Audrey Hepburn, she looked more like Lady Macbeth, but a very glamorous version of Lady Macbeth, there was no question about that. And then Polly is in this incredible little number, the smallest dress I think I have ever seen in my life, pale green, strapless, with black beads all over the joint, Stu apparently having decided that green was the theme but there was no point being ruthless about it. Her hair is spiky, a look I don’t tend to respond to, but now that I know that the nice hairdresser La Aura is behind all this I decide it’s sheer genius. I mean, Polly looked great, no doubt about it. Sort of like a very tasteful punk rocker. Then there’s Amelia, hopping around like a little bird. Blue jeans, no shoes or socks, green toenails, which looked strangely beguiling, and some sort of tie-dyed green T-shirt. She really looked so simple, and so great, and so herself. So as it turns out, Stu isn’t so stupid after all.

Except there I am, in the middle of this meticulously designed land of green dresses and red hair and great-looking girls. There I am, a big boring teenage boy, nothing matches, poor Stu hasn’t had half a second to figure out how to fit me into his picture, when Herb starts snapping away, I mean that Herb got right to the point. Stu is dodging around behind him, trying to get a word in edgewise, you can hear him saying, “Herb, maybe if I had just a minute … Herb, listen, we had no idea you’d be interested in the brother … Herb, really … Herb …” But Herb is just clicking wildly, one camera then another, he had like six draped around his neck, he looked like some mythical beast with too many eyes growing out of his chest. I swear, after all that picking and changing minds, and nothing seeming to happen for hours, all of a sudden everything was happening at lightning speed and no one was thinking about anything at all. I don’t remember much of this part, to be frank, maybe that’s why it seems that way in retrospect. I was so surprised to be suddenly tossed into the middle of the action, I think I may have been in a bit of a daze. So that’s really what I remember. Stu, Herb, me feeling like a dweeb, Amelia laughing; she thought it was funny that I was suddenly part of the whole mess. Somebody put some music on, I guess, I don’t remember if it was on before and they just turned it up, but all of a sudden Elvis Presley was blasting, loud. Mom kept yelling something from the sidelines, who knows what. Daria and Polly sort of kept turning around, following Herb, I think, like flowers turning toward the sun anytime he moved. That’s really all I remember.

And then it was over. Not completely over, just over for me. Herb ran out of memory in half his cameras at the exact same moment he ran out of film in the other half, so he had to take a break and have some underling reload them. The music snaps off, people start to suck on water bottles, hair and makeup rush in to do a dust-up on the girls. So while this is going on, Stu takes Herb aside and whispers to him, respectful, but urgent and firm, and while Herb doesn’t really seem to say anything in response, he does turn and look at me, with those photographer eyes again, and then he turns back to listen, while Stu keeps talking. Stu is talking and talking and talking. And then, after a minute, Herb shrugs, nods, he doesn’t care, he sort of looks over, casual, and says, “Okay, the brother, we don’t need you, let’s do some with just the girls.” Just like that, like I was just a stupid prop all along anyway. Which in fact I was.

I didn’t care. Mostly I was relieved that it was over. The whole time it was going on—which was longer than I thought; afterwards I found out my part of the shoot went on for half an hour—I felt so self-conscious I just wanted to crawl into a hole and I couldn’t, obviously, as everybody was staring at me. Well, they weren’t looking at me, really; they were looking at Polly and Daria and Amelia, when they weren’t looking at Stu and wondering if he was going to have heart failure. So I mostly spent the whole time looking at the ground and stuff. It was just, near the end, I more or less got in the swing of things. Amelia had decided it was just a big joke anyway, and so she’s kind of doing this little dance with me, and I decide what the hell, and I start to dance back, so we’re starting to have some fun finally. We were doing these old corny dances from the fifties, not that we know what they even look like. But we’re just pretending to be big old hipsters. And then Polly I think was getting bored, or at least she got tired of competing with Daria for the front and center spot, so she started to dance with us, too. So the three of us were doing these ridiculous dances, and Daria was staring at us like we were just a bunch of juvenile delinquents, but also like some part of her actually finds us secretly amusing. So for maybe two minutes or something all of a sudden we were just ourselves again, not the selves we are when we’re torturing each other, but the ones who know how to have fun.

So of course that would be when old Herb has to stop and reload. That’s just the way of the universe, it seems like, sometimes. You take so long to figure things out and, just when you get there, when you really figure something out that’s maybe kind of good, they tell you you’re out of time. I don’t know why that is, but it does seem that way. Like most of your life, you sit around all tense, going, I know life is supposed to feel better than this, how do I figure out how to feel better? And everybody’s got opinions about how to feel better—get drunk, go to the movies, read a comic book or a porno magazine, watch TV, whatever. And so you do all that, and it doesn’t work, but you’re trying, you know, everybody gets points for trying. And then something happens and it just clicks; one day you’re lying under a tree or something and it suddenly feels like you almost know it, how to be yourself, and then you do know it, for a second, and then something else happens, a catastrophe, they blow up the World Trade Center or something. Someone dies. You lose everything. And then you think, why didn’t I know how to feel happy and content and at home in my life when I had everything I ever needed? How come as soon as I knew it, it all went away?