Three Girls and their Brother

For Cooper and Cleo, my own little beauties

CHAPTER ONE

Now that it’s all over, everybody is saying it was the picture, that stupid picture was the primal cause of every disaster that would eventually befall my redheaded sisters. Not that it’s anybody’s fault; not that anybody blames anybody. It’s more like fate; the picture had to happen, and then everything else had to happen because the picture happened. Everybody sitting around, shaking their heads and saying, How could they know? Like total doom is just the mystery du jour.

But you know, I’m like—the New Yorker calls you up and says we want to do this thing, take a picture of those girls, it’s all set up, Herb Lang doing color for once because of all that red hair—to me, the question isn’t, How could they know? The question is, Why go for it? Why would you go for it? Why not hurl yourself in the opposite direction, run for cover to Ohio or Iowa or Idaho, any one of those places where the most famous anybody ever gets is for like raising an especially gorgeous cow or something. I’m not saying it would have solved everything. But overall I don’t know anyone who could now argue that moving to Ohio would not have been a better choice than announcing in the New Yorker that my sisters were the It Girls of the Twenty-First Century.

“Herb Lang is going to do us,” Polly smirked. This is in the kitchen, all three of them are sort of lounging around, Daria’s got her head in the refrigerator, and Polly is posing, like some glamour girl from the forties, her hip up against the counter and her cheekbones up against the light. On the one hand it’s ridiculous when she tries that stuff, but on the other hand she seriously knows how to pull it off. She wears fishnet stockings half the time. So she’s doing this thing with her hips and her cheekbones, and what she just said sounds just crazy enough to be possibly true, so I don’t immediately call her a liar. I look over at Daria, who has closed the refrigerator door and is now leaning against the counter, opening an Evian. She’s actually too cool to even glance my way, to see how I’m taking this earth-shattering piece of information, but you can tell from the way she’s holding her head that she too is also smirking. Seriously, you should have seen those two. They looked like they’d already been in the goddamned New Yorker, and that thing that the Indians talk about, how pictures steal part of your soul, like that had happened already.

And yet, they also looked insanely beautiful. They always looked insanely beautiful. This is a sad truth of my life: Since the moment of my birth, I have always been surrounded by female beauty. It’s a bit of a distraction. I mean, it is not something you ever get used to, even when you’re related to it. Sometimes all three of them, it gets hard to concentrate. All that creamy skin and hair, shoulders and legs, lips—they’re my sisters, don’t get me wrong—but it’s definitely overwhelming.

“Herb Lang? How’d you pull that off?” I say. I’m playing this very cool, which makes them doubly sure that I am impressed.

“It’s for the NewYorker,” Daria repeats.

Okay, our grandfather, just for the record, was Leo Heller. I never knew the guy, he was dead before I was even born, but, the point is, he was a really famous literary critic in the fifties, who wrote a lot of books about the history of American literature. Even though hardly anybody understands them, they are considered a big deal and, in addition, old Granddad at some point wrote an essay called “The Terror of the New,” which apparently blew a lot of people’s minds, if your mind actually gets blown by that stuff. So now “The Terror of the New” is one of those lines about literature and thought and America that people actually quote. People ask questions, like in graduate seminars, at universities, about how this or that idea fits into Heller’s notion of “The Terror of the New.” Literary critics write whole chapters of books about how Heller’s theory of “The Terror of the New” explains the collapse of the Harlem Renaissance. Your average person of course doesn’t know about any of this, unless they do. So if I say “I’m Leo Heller’s grandson” to a specific subset of human beings, they’ll act like that’s the coolest thing possible. Everyone else will stare at me like I’m a moron.

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.