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Well, I am sorry, but I find Iceland extremely fascinating, and I will not rest until I have visited the ice hotel.
9:45 a.m.–11:45 a.m.–I watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade with Mr. Gianini Senior in what he calls the rec room.
They don’t have rec rooms in Manhattan.
Just lobbies.
Remembering my mother’s warning, I refrain from repeating another one of my traditional holiday rants, that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is a gross example of American capitalism run amok.
At one point during the broadcast, I catch sight of Lilly standing in the crowd outside of Office Max on Broadway and Thirty-Seventh, her videocamera clutched to her slightly squished-in face (so much like a pug) as a float carrying Miss America and William Shatner of Star Trek fame passes by. So I know Lilly is going to take care of denouncing Macy’s on the next episode of her public access television show, Lilly Tells It Like It Is (every Friday night at nine, Manhattan cable channel 67).
12:00 p.m.–Mr. Gianini Junior’s sister arrives with her husband, their two kids, and the pumpkin pies. The kids, who are my age, are twins, a boy, Nathan, and a girl, Claire. I know right away Claire and I are not going to get along, because when we are introduced she looks me up and down the way the cheerleaders do in the hallway at school and goes, in a very snotty voice, “You’re the one who’s supposed to be a princess?”
And while I am perfectly aware that at five foot nine inches tall, with no visible breasts, feet the size of snowshoes, and hair that sits in a tuft on my head like the cotton on the end of a Q-tip, I am the biggest freak in the freshman class of Albert Einstein High School for Boys (made coeducational circa 1975), I do not appreciate being reminded of it by girls who do not even bother finding out that beneath this mutant facade beats the heart of a person who is only striving, just like everybody else in this world, to find self-actualization.
Not that I even care what Mr. Gianini’s niece Claire thinks of me. I mean, she is wearing a pony-skin miniskirt. And it is not even imitation pony skin. She must know that a horse had to die just so she could have that skirt, but she obviously doesn’t care.
Now Claire has pulled out her cell phone and gone out onto the deck, where the reception is best (even though it is thirty degrees outside, she apparently doesn’t mind. She has that pony skin to keep her warm, after all). She keeps looking in at me through the sliding glass doors and laughing as she talks on her phone.
Nathan—who is dressed in baggy jeans and has a pager, in addition to a lot of gold jewelry—asks his grandfather if he can change the channel. So instead of traditional Thanksgiving viewing options, such as football or the Lifetime Channel’s made-for-TV movie marathon, we are now forced to watch MTV2. Nathan knows all the songs and sings along with them. Most of them have dirty words that have been bleeped out, but Nathan sings them anyway.
1:00 p.m.–The food is served. We begin eating.
1:15 p.m.–We finish eating.
1:20 p.m.–I help Mrs. Gianini clean up. She says not to be ridiculous, and that I should go “have a nice gossip” with Claire.
It is frightening, if you think about it, how clueless old people can be sometimes.
Instead of going to have a nice gossip with Claire, I stay where I am and tell Mrs. Gianini how much I am enjoying having her son live with us. Mr. G is very good about helping around the house, and has even taken over my old job of cleaning the toilets. Not to mention the thirty-six-inch TV, pinball machine, and foozball table he brought with him when he moved in.
Mrs. Gianini is immensely gratified to hear this, you can just tell. Old people like to hear nice stuff about their kids, even if their kid, like Mr. Gianini, is thirty-nine and a half years old.
3:00 p.m.–We have to leave if we are going to beat the traffic home. I say good-bye. Claire does not say good-bye back to m
e, but Nathan does. He advises me to keep it real. Mrs. Gianini gives us a lot of leftover turkey. I thank her, even though I don’t eat turkey, being a vegetarian.
6:30 p.m.–We finally make it back into the city, after spending three and a half hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic along the Long Island Expressway. Though there is nothing very express about it, if you ask me.
I barely have time to change into my baby-blue floor-length Armani sheath dress and matching ballet flats before the limo honks downstairs, and Lars, my bodyguard, arrives to escort me to my second Thanksgiving dinner.
7:30 p.m.–Arrive at the Plaza Hotel. I am greeted by the concierge, who announces me to the masses assembled in the Palm Court:
“Presenting Her Royal Highness Princess Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo.”
God forbid he should just say Mia.
My father, the prince of Genovia, and his mother, the dowager princess, have rented the Palm Court for the evening in order to throw a Thanksgiving banquet for all of their friends. Despite my strenuous objections, Dad and Grandmère refuse to leave New York City until I have learned everything there is to know about being a princess . . . or until my formal introduction to the Genovian people the day before Christmas, whichever comes first. I have assured them that it isn’t as if I am going to show up at the castle and start hurling olives at the ladies-in-waiting and scratching myself under the arms. I mean, I am fourteen years old: I do have some idea how to act, for crying out loud.
But Grandmère, at least, does not seem to believe this, and so she is still subjecting me to daily princess lessons. Lilly recently contacted the United Nations to see whether these lessons constitute a human rights violation. She believes it is unlawful to force a minor to sit for hours practicing tipping her soup bowl away from her—“Always, always, away from you, Amelia!”—in order to scrape up a few drops of lobster bisque. The UN has so far been unsympathetic to my plight.
It was Grandmère’s idea to have what she calls an “old-fashioned” Thanksgiving dinner, featuring mussels in a white wine sauce, squab stuffed with fois gras, lobster tails, and Iranian caviar, which you could never get before because of the embargo. She has invited two hundred of her closest friends, plus the emperor of Japan and his wife, since they were in town anyway for a world trade summit.
That’s why I have to wear ballet flats. Grandmère says it’s rude to be taller than an emperor.
8:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m.–I make polite conversation with the empress while we eat. Like me, she was just a normal person until one day she married the emperor and became royal. I, of course, was born royal. I just didn’t know it until September, when my dad found out he couldn’t have any more kids, due to his chemotherapy for testicular cancer having rendered him sterile. Then he had to admit he was actually a prince and all, and that though I am “illegitimate,” since my dad and my mom were never married, I am still the sole heir to the Genovian throne.
And even though Genovia is a very small country (population 50,000) crammed into a hillside along the Mediterranean Sea between Italy and France, it is still this very big deal to be princess of it.
