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I have never seen Grandmère beam before. Glare, plenty of times. But never beam.
Which might be why my dad started chewing the ice in his whiskey and soda in a very irritated manner. Grandmère’s smile disappeared right away when she heard all that crunching.
“If you want to chew ice, Phillipe,” Grandmère said, coldly, “you can go and have your dinner at McDonald’s with the rest of the proletariat.”
My dad stopped chewing his ice.
It turns out Grandmère brought Sebastiano over from Genovia so that he could design my dress for my nationally televised introduction to my countrymen. Sebastiano is a very up-and-coming fashion designer—at least according to Grandmère. She says it is important that Genovia supports its artists and craftspeople, or they will all flee to New York, or even worse, Los Angeles.
Which is too bad for Sebastiano, since he looks like the type who might really enjoy living in LA. He is thirtyish, with long, dark hair tied back in a ponytail, and is all tall and flamboyant-looking. Like for instance, tonight, instead of a tie, Sebastiano was wearing a white silk ascot. And he had on a blue velvet jacket with leather pants.
I am fully prepared to forgive Sebastiano for the leather pants if he designs me a dress that is nice enough. A dress that, should he happen to see me in it, will make Michael Moscovitz forget all about Judith Gershner and her fruit flies, and fill his head with nothing but thoughts of me, Mia Thermopolis.
Only of course the chances of Michael ever actually seeing me in this dress are very slim, as my introduction to the Genovian people is only going to be on Genovian television, not CNN or anything.
Still, Sebastiano seemed ready to rise to the challenge. After dinner, he even took out a pen and began sketching—right on the white tablecloth!—a design he thought might accentuate what he called my narrow waist and long
legs.
Only, unlike my dad, who was born and raised in Genovia but speaks fluent English, Sebastiano doesn’t have a real keen grasp of the language. He kept forgetting the second syllables of words. So narrow became “nar.” Just like coffee became “coff,” and when he described something as magical, it came out as “madge.” Even the butter wasn’t safe. When Sebastiano asked me to please pass him the “butt,” I had to practically stuff my napkin in my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
All my efforts to stifle myself didn’t do any good, though, since Grandmère caught me and, raising one of her drawn-on eyebrows, went, “Amelia, kindly do not make light of other people’s speech habits. Your own are not even remotely perfect.”
Which is certainly true, considering the fact that, with my swollen tongue, I can’t really say any word that starts with s.
Not only did Grandmère not mind Sebastiano saying the word butt at the dinner table, she didn’t mind his drawing on the tablecloth, either. She looked down at his sketch and said, “Brilliant. Simply brilliant. As usual.”
Sebastiano looked very pleased. “Do you real think so?” he asked.
Only I didn’t think his sketch was so brilliant. It just looked like an ordinary dress to me. Certainly nothing to make anyone forget the fact that I’m about as likely to clone a fruit fly as I am to use animal-tested hair products.
“Um,” I said. “Can’t you make it a little more . . . I don’t know . . . sexy?”
Grandmère and Sebastiano exchanged looks. “Sexy?” Grandmère echoed, with an evil laugh. “How? By making it lower cut? But you haven’t got anything there to show!”
Now, seriously. I would expect to hear this kind of thing from the cheerleaders at school, who have made demeaning other people—especially me—a sort of new Olympic sport. But what kind of person says things like this to her only grandchild? I had meant, of course, a side slit, or maybe some fringe. I wasn’t asking for anything Jennifer Lopez-ish.
But trust Grandmère to turn it into something like that. Why do I have to be cursed with a grandmother who shaves off her eyebrows and seems to enjoy making light of my inadequacies? Why can’t I have a normal grandmother, who bakes me cookies and can’t stop bragging to her friends in her bridge club about how wonderful I am?
It was while Grandmère and Sebastiano were cackling to themselves over this great witticism at my expense that my dad abruptly got up and left the table, saying he had to make a call. I suppose it’s every man for himself where Grandmère is concerned, but you would think my own father would stick up for me once in a while.
I don’t know, maybe I was feeling odd about the giant hole in my tongue (which doesn’t even have a nice hypoallergenic stud in it so I can pretend to have done it on purpose to be controversial). I sat there listening to Grandmère and Sebastiano chatter away about how pathetic it was that I would never be able to wear anything strapless, unless some miracle of nature occurred one night that inflated me from a 32A to a 34C, and I couldn’t help thinking that probably, given my luck, it will turn out that Sebastiano isn’t in town just to design me a dress for my royal introduction, but to kill me so that he can assume the throne of Genovia himself.
Or, as Sebastiano would say, “ass” the throne.
Seriously. That kind of stuff happens on Baywatch all the time. You wouldn’t believe the number of royal family members Mitch has had to save from assassination.
Like supposing I put on the dress that Sebastiano has designed for me to wear when I’m introduced to the people of Genovia, and it ends up squeezing me to death, just like that corset Snow White puts on in the original version of the story by the Brothers Grimm. You know, the part they left out of the Disney movie because it was too gruesome.
Anyway, what if the dress squeezes me to death, and then I’m lying in my coffin, looking all pale and queenly, and Michael comes to my funeral and ends up gazing down at me and doesn’t realize until right then that he has always loved me?
Then he’ll have to break up with Judith Gershner.
Hey. It could happen.
Okay, well, probably not, but thinking about that was better than listening to Grandmère and Sebastiano talk about me as if I weren’t even there. Seriously. I was roused from my pleasant little fantasy about Michael pining for me for the rest of his life by Sebastiano saying suddenly, “She has bute bone struck,” which, when I realized I was the she he was referring to, I took to be a compliment about my bone structure.
Only a second later it wasn’t such a compliment when he went, “I put makeup on her that make her look like a mod.”
