LITMIR.BIZ

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he couldn’t make it, but you were there. Not that, you don’t have to tell him how good I’m getting or anything, I can have Ben do that.” She is still being oh-so-casual, but I’m starting to get the drift of her plan here. As if I don’t know when I’m being played by my own sister. “But will you, though? You will, right?”

      “What, tell Dad you were good at the Garfield Lincoln piano recital? Sure. I’ll tell him whatever you want. If I can find him, when he comes back from Brazil.”

      She pretends not to hear the utter disbelief and rampant sarcasm which has entered my tone here, and continues to blather on. “Thanks, Philip,’ cause you know it’s really important to me. Thanks.”

      I’m still playing it cool with her, waiting to see how far she’s going to try and push this. “Well, because, like, I mean—since when did you decide you wanted to go to LaGuardia?”

      “Well, Ben says I’m pretty good, and he said that LaGuardia, you know it’s not Julliard but it is the best high school for the performing arts and he thinks that my range is not just classical anyway, and I could keep up my other studies and still focus on the piano and I just started thinking about it and then I just wanted to play the piano all the time.”

      This is starting to strike me as obvious and pathetic. For all her talents, Amelia is absolutely the worst liar on the planet. I mean, she simply stinks at it. You have to stop yourself from laughing, that’s how bad it is.

      “So, since you’ve been talking to Dad so much, did you tell him about all this shit that’s been going on with Polly and Daria and the New Yorker? Did you tell him about that?”

      “He knows about it.”

      “So you told him.”

      “Everybody knows about it, Philip.” She’s starting to sound annoyed with me, which is a relief, because at least she’s not putting on this weird I-Want-To-Be-A-Pianist Act anymore. “Where have you been?”

      “Well, I guess I’ve been over here on the Planet of Total Morons; someplace you apparently own property,” I tell her.

      “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “Gee, I wonder.”

      We walk on, in silence, getting rained on. The cool drippy rain is starting to get annoying, such a surprise.

      “I don’t care what you think. I’m going to LaGuardia,” Amelia announces. “Ben thinks I’m really good, and Dad can get me in.”

      “Dad would do anything to mess with Mom’s big plans to turn all three of you into beauty queens,” I announce. “And Ben has a boner for you. And you can’t decide you’re going to be a concert pianist when you’re fourteen. You have to have some lunatic parent decide you’re a genius when you’re six or something, and then they torture you to death making you practice eighteen hours a day until you’re Mozart, and then maybe you get into the most famous school for the performing arts in America. You’re going to LaGuardia. Give me a break.”

      “That is not how it works.”

      “You know it is.”

      “Ben says—”

      “And you called Dad? Are you insane?”

      “I love the piano. I’m really good at it. I’m going to LaGuardia.”

      “Aside from the fact that that’s impossible, Mom won’t let you. If she finds out that Dad had anything to do with it, she’ll put a stop to it before you’ve made it to the subway station.”

      “She won’t be able to.”

      “Dad can’t get you into LaGuardia.”

      “Yes he can, he knows the chairman of the board or something.”

      “So what?”

      “That’s how things are done in New York.”

      “You’ve gone insane.”

      “You just said I was good. I’m good on the piano. Ben thinks I’m really good.”

      “Ben wants to—”

      “Could you not say that again, huh? I mean I found it really offensive the first time.”

      “I don’t care if it’s offensive or not, it’s true.”

      “Since when do you know everything?”

      “Yeah, okay, maybe I don’t know everything, but I do know something about guys who want to bone your sister, and I also know you can’t suddenly decide you’re going to be a concert pianist just because you played the first movement of the Pathétique Sonata pretty good one day in high school.”

      “I’m going to LaGuardia.”

      “You’re full of shit.”

      I don’t know why I got so mad all of a sudden. I just did. And all the feeling just swell about what a good time we had at that stupid recital got rained right out of us. By the time we got home, we were both soaking wet and mad as hell and of course no one even bothered to ask Amelia how it went.

      So the next morning I’m feeling rather hopelessly lousy, and I am in no mood to hear about fingernail polish and agents and modeling careers and lipstick shades at the breakfast table. I particularly am in no mood to hear about my idiot father who has of course run off to Brazil for who knows what reason. My head hurts and I’m tired and no one will look at me or even acknowledge that I’m sitting there eating a two-year-old lemon Zone bar, which just isn’t enough—there’s never enough food around our house because, in spite of the fact that all my sisters plus my mother are pretty much rail-thin, they’re always afraid they’re getting fat—and I am frankly just starving to death. So I’m thinking about how hungry I am, and why isn’t there ever more food in our house, and I’m feeling a little light-headed and not fully paying attention, and then breakfast proceeds to go south, at approximately eighty miles per hour.

      “My piano recital went great last night, in case anyone is interested,” Amelia announces. It all seems innocuous enough to start; of course it does, it always does.

      “That’s terrific, sweetheart,” says Mom, while she whips up some kind of inedible shake full of flax and ice cubes.

      “Good for you, honey.” Polly is all warm and fuzzy, in a completely self-absorbed way. “That’s sensational.”

      “Great,” says Daria, pouring herself a glass of water. Apparently she has decided to see if she can live on water; I don’t think I’ve seen her eat any actual food since their big-deal photo shoot.

      “I mean, I never played that good in my life. Or at least, that’s what I thought, but then Ben said I’ve been playing really well for a while and that if I just keep practicing the way I have been, I could really be good.” This is an approximation, obviously, of the conversation, but the tone is what I’m going for here. I mean, the whole thing sounded completely surreal to me, kind of way too bright and people kept saying things like “great” and “terrific” and “really really good,” but it was hard to keep straight what was so good, like the thing everyone was talking about was just somewhere else, or maybe didn’t even exist at all.

      “Philip said I was great,” Amelia continues. I roll my eyes at this, as it is strictly true but nowhere near the whole truth, but no one is actually all that interested in having me leap into this noteworthy conversation. Least of all Amelia, who is rolling along now, in her great and fantastic and really really good universe. Which leaves me sitting there, waiting like a dolt for the punch line. “Ben thinks I should maybe even be training.”

      “Training?” Mom says, her voice going up a little too high. My mother is not necessarily bright, but she is not necessarily stupid, either. She’s starting to get wind that this little story about what a swell time everyone had at the piano recital isn’t going to end well, as far

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