Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck
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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.”
She’s snipping away at Amelia’s hair while she’s telling us all this. And we’re just listening, I swear, this woman was riveting. It turns out she hugged people for five hours, hugging and listening and telling them they were fine was like her thing she did to help; she went down and hugged people who needed hugs. She was really lively and very interesting and I did think, if I was in a catastrophe, I would want a hug from this person, I really would.
Anyway, she’s telling us this stuff and clipping away a little bit at a time, really, it didn’t look like anything, what La Aura was doing to Amelia’s hair, it just looked like she was picking up a strand here or there and then cutting a tiny piece of it off then tossing the whole thing around again. But all of a sudden I look at Amelia, and she’s just listening, and I just felt my chest do something—it squeezed and hurt for a second, because that’s how beautiful she looked. And then a second later I wanted to cry, I swear, because part of what made her so pretty was her good heart and how much she cared about this haircutting person being nice to sad firemen. A lot of fourteen-year-old girls, really what they care about is who’s going to some idiot’s party this weekend, or what movie star they saw in front of Lincoln Center last week. I guess in that way fourteen-year-old girls are not that different from most people out there. But Amelia still had that thing that really little kids have, where they want to throw their arms around total strangers on the street. You don’t always see it because she’s also kind of annoying a lot of the time, but when it does show up it’s quite staggering, and there it was, in the middle of what turned out to be a really great haircut. No huge surprise there, that La Aura could really cut hair. Amelia looked unbelievable.
This is when another minion in black showed up and announced, “We need her, Laura.” None of the minions seemed to understand that the woman’s name wasn’t Laura, it was La Aura. But La Aura didn’t seem to mind, “Yea, okay, I’m about done, just let me see …” And then she scrunched all those curls around a little, just scrunching in her hand here and there, and Amelia’s hair looked even better, and so La Aura signed off and they took Amelia across the room so she could try on different kinds of blue jeans and snaky little green tops. Daria and Polly were already over there, being transformed, respectively, into Audrey Hepburn and the supermodel of the century.
So then La Aura looks at me, and shrugs. “Those are great-looking girls,” she informs me, as if it’s news.
“Yea,” I say.
“This is exciting, huh?” She doesn’t seem to really think so.
It’s not that she thinks it’s unexciting, it’s just that she’s seen it all before and everyone else thinks it’s exciting.
“I guess,” I say. Sometimes I really do sound like an idiot teenager. I can’t seem to help it; my brain freezes up.
“You could use a haircut. How ’bout I do you, while we’re waiting for Herb?” She says this so friendly there’s no sense of boy, this kid with the glamorous sisters could really use some help. I mean, she’s just kind of studying me, looking over the top of those glasses, businesslike, but, as I said, friendly too. I have to confess it took me by surprise. You live with a lot of beautiful women, you get used to the fact that no one is actually looking at you very much. So it’s startling when it happens.
So La Aura starts in on my hair, and at first it was pretty nice. As I said, when she’s cutting hair, La Aura sort of chatters on, about all sorts of things. Once she got off the World Trade Center she started yakking about movie stars and did I know any?, and then she kind of segued into numerology and astrology, and her dogs—she had somebody do a couple of charts on her dogs, which was surprisingly interesting to hear about—so I was more or less losing track of time when, all of a sudden, Herb arrives. Such a surprise, he’s dressed completely in black, but he’s old, he’s considerably older than I would have thought. Even so, everyone immediately acts like he’s god. They’re all too cool to get excited, so no one flutters or gushes or anything like that, but they all start to circle in a very unimpressed but attentive way.
Herb basically seems all right, but honestly, it’s hard to tell. He’s real distant and doesn’t seem to care about much. Stu waves Polly and Daria and Amelia into the front of the crowd, and introduces them, or actually it’s more like he