Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck
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Amelia suddenly yells. I mean it. She just started to yell at me. “I mean what, really … what … you really are, you know—forget it! Just forget it!” That’s what she said, more or less. It was quite dramatic. I just stared at her, and then she turned red, threw the shoes on the floor, and went to tell Mom she wasn’t going because Philip was being an asshole about everything.
I just want to make this clear. She’s the one who was yelling. I didn’t say anything. That is exactly how it happened. You can’t make this crap up.
In any case, as per usual, Mom wasn’t too interested in Amelia’s protests. By then it was pretty clear that, for some reason, all three of them were the deal. You don’t get just two sisters at any given moment, even though Polly and Daria together are not unimpressive. What people wanted was all three. Movie stars included.
So I ended up sitting in front of the television again, totally deserted by the whole female menagerie, eating the tail end of three bags of soy chips, two cans of Diet Pepsi Twist, and an orange and a banana. And then I got bored. I mean, of course I got bored. Everybody kept deserting me and I hadn’t had a decent meal for three weeks, why shouldn’t I be bored? And then I finally got tired of channel surfing, and so then I hacked around with the PlayStation 2 for about an hour, and I murdered about seven hundred aliens, and then I got mad, all of a sudden, and I picked up a six-thousand-dollar crystal sort of thing off the coffee table and threw it at the wall, where it made a dent but didn’t actually break. Which may have been prompted by an hour’s worth of murdering aliens on the PlayStation 2, but in all honesty, I think it was more of a someone-has-to-think-about-feeding-me sort of situation.
In any case, after this impressive display of impotent teen rage, I got bored again, put on my jacket, and decided to go out and stalk my own sisters.
It’s ridiculously easy to get to Union Square from where I live. I’m a two-minute walk from the Seventh Avenue Station on Flatbush, and I picked up a Q Train right away. Then there’s only five stops between Seventh Avenue and Union Square and the W bar is right there, just off the square, half a block up from the subway station. The point being that, I got there so quickly, the whole idea that maybe stalking my own sisters wasn’t the brightest choice I could make never even occurred to me. I just spotted the bar, and walked right in.
It was hot in there. Not “hot” hot, just plain hot, like eighty degrees, the air recirculated so many times it just couldn’t recreate itself into something breathable anymore. I didn’t at first make it past the foyer, where there were like seven bachelors and bachelorettes, all of them squeezed into tight little business suits and looking like they were auditioning for one of those reality shows, where average people dress up like television stars and then pretend to be real in the most unreal circumstances some idiot at the network could cook up. So they were all squashed in there, in their great-looking suits, looking kind of uncomfortable and anxious, while this totally skinny girl in a tight black dress at a kind of mini-podium kept looking down at what might be a seating chart. Then she’d look up, and look over her shoulder at the crowded room, and then she’d sigh, and then she’d whisper to some passing person in another great suit, and then she’d laugh, carelessly, not worried at all about the sweaty crowd waiting in front of her, and then she’d look down at her seating chart again. All the bachelors and bachelorettes shifting on their tight shoes, and trying to act huffy, and it seemed to have occurred to none of them that this was, after all, a bar, not a restaurant; there is no seating, you can just shove your way into the room, push to the bar and get your own drink, can’t you? It’s a goddamned bar.
“Excuse me,” I said to the first bachelorette, and I pushed right by her. She looked pretty annoyed at this, but that’s kind of where she was even before I showed up. Anyway, I just slammed right through all of them, and went right to the podium, and said to Miss Little Black Dress, “I’m here with Rex Went-worth.”
Well. Talk about the magic words. Little BD looks at me, startled, but then she stops, and thinks for a second. But I gave her pause. I mean, I did, after all, know that Rex was there, somewhere. That meant that I was potentially somebody who she really better not throw out.
So she looked at me, suspicious but cool, you know, not too rude but not friendly either, and once again she ran her eyes up and down me fast, clearly considering what I was wearing—a pair of jeans and sneakers, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt over that, completely normal for a teenager who could give a shit, but not exactly the kind of thing you would expect for a member of a movie star’s entourage.
Just then, behind me, someone murmurs, “What’d that kid say? Rex Wentworth is here?”
Little BD gets a kind of look of panic in her eyes. She’s in a bind now. She’s got a weird cool loser in front of her, who’s just loudly running around, asking for Rex, and the word is about to get out that Rex is somewhere in some back room in her crummy overrated bar.
“He’s kind of waiting for me,” I said. “Is there a problem?”
“What’s the name?” she asks me, eyes narrowing.
“Philip Wentworth,” I tell her.
It did the job. Little BD blinked, tipped her head to one side, briefly, trying out her memory about what Rex’s family situation actually was, how many children he had out there, actually: Was it a possibility that I was Rex’s son? Was that a possibility? Maybe I’m a nephew. She is looking down at another list, totally professional, seeing if the name “Philip Wentworth” has been written down anywhere so that she doesn’t have to make a decision about anything, she can just let me in if this totally fraudulent name is anywhere at all; her brain is moving fast because she only has mere seconds to contemplate all of this before Rex will get wind that she kept his nephew/son/career-ruinous adolescent boyfriend waiting at the front door for no reason at all.
“There a problem?” I ask. “You want me to call his cell?” I reach into my pocket, pretending to have a cell. She looks up at me, very friendly, smiles. “No, of course not. Why don’t you just follow me?” And with that she swivels and strides straight back into the promised land.
Okay, this all happened in about five seconds, and while it may sound like I vaguely knew what I was doing, I was actually pulling major shit out of completely thin air. I mean, I did follow this insane woman back into the bar, and I did my best instinctively to slouch and shrug and look around, bored as shit, but frankly the whole performance was a complete joke, because I was in truth utterly clueless. Little BD had hauled out of a pocket somewhere—where, I will never know, because that dress was too small to hide so much as a BIC pen—one of those giant walkie-talkie things that military personnel use when they’re in the middle of the desert trying to coordinate some sort of crack offensive. And then she started murmuring with a kind of discreet determination into the speaker, “Hi, it’s Shelly. I have someone here who claims to …” I was sort of slouching along behind her, acting like this was totally protocol, I was used to babes in black dresses talking in walkie-talkies and checking me out with the security team that constantly surrounds my putative father the movie star. Meanwhile of course I was more or less in a total state of interior panic. I mean, it did suddenly occur to me that I was now not actually stalking my sisters; in actuality, what I was now doing was stalking a movie star. And that’s the kind of peculiar behavior in actuality which gets people tossed in prison.
So now I’m glancing around with casual desperation, wondering what bright idea is out there for me to just glom my brainless self onto, to get myself out of this, now that I’m in it, and Little BD is watching me carefully, as she snakes through the restaurant, and it is kind of occurring to me that in fact she never bought one bit of any of it, she’s heading for some sort of back hallway, at the end of which there seems to be a kind of sinister back office, where three massive security-looking guys are clustered around a door, staring at the kid who is about to spend the next six months in juvie. I mean, these guys were not amused, and they were not kidding, either. The true insanity of what I was doing sank in. I stopped. Shelly kept going. The security gorillas all took a step forward, seeing quite clearly that I had decided to bolt in the opposite direction and make a terrible scene crashing back through the overdressed bachelors and bachelorettes, all clustered together in