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Except that it’s NOT a nightmare. I know it’s not a nightmare, because to have a nightmare, you actually have to fall ASLEEP, something I can’t do, because Grandmère is SNORING TOO LOUDLY.
That’s right. My grandmother snores. Some scoop for the Post, huh? I should give them a call and hold up the phone to the door to my room (you can hear her even with the door CLOSED). I can just see the headline:
THE DOWAGER PRINCESS: A ROYAL SNORE
I can’t believe this is happening. Like my life isn’t bad enough. Like I don’t have enough problems. Now my psychotic grandmother has moved in with me?
I could hardly believe it when I opened the loft door and saw her standing there, her driver right behind her with about fifty million Louis Vuitton bags. I just stared at her for a full minute, until finally Grandmère went, “Well, Amelia? Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
And then, before I even had a chance to, she just barged right by me, complaining the whole way about how we don’t have an elevator and did we have any idea what a walk up three flights of stairs can do to a woman her age? (I noticed that she didn’t mention what it can do to a chauffeur who has been forced to carry all of her luggage up the same aforementioned three flights of stairs.)
Then she started walking around the loft like she always does when she comes over, picking up things and looking at them with a disapproving expression on her face before putting them down again, like Mom’s Cinco de Mayo skeleton collection, and Mr. G’s NCAA Final Four drink holders.
Meanwhile, my mom and Mr. G, having heard all the commotion, came out of their room and then froze—both of them—in horror as they took in the sight before them. I have to admit, it did look a bit scary… especially since by then Rommel had worked his way free from Grandmère’s purse and was staggering around the floor on his spindly Bambi legs, sniffing things so carefully, you would have thought he expected them to explode in his face at any given moment (which, when he gets around to sniffing Fat Louie, might actually happen).
“Um, Clarisse,” my mother (brave woman!) said. “Would you mind telling us what you’re doing here? With, er, what appears to be your entire wardrobe in tow?”
“I cannot stay at that hotel a moment longer,” Grandmère said, putting down Mr. G’s lava lamp and not even glancing at my mother, whose pregnancy—“at her advanced age,” Grandmère likes to say, even though Mom is actually younger than many recently pregnant starlets—she considers an embarrassment of grand proportions. “No one works there anymore! The place is completely chaotic. You cannot get a soul to bring up a morsel of room service, and forget about getting someone to run your bath. And so I’ve come here.”
She blinked at us less than fondly. “To the bosom of my family. In times of need, I believe it is traditional for relatives to take one another in.”
My mom totally wasn’t falling for Grandmère’s poor-little-me act.
“Clarisse,” she said, folding her arms over her chest (which is quite a feat, considering how big her boobs have gotten—I can only hope that if I ever get pregnant, my own knockers will swell to such bootylicious proportions). “There is a hotel worker strike. No one is exactly lobbing SCUD missiles at the Plaza. I think you’ve lost your perspective a little bit….”
Just then the phone rang. I, of course, thinking it was Michael, dove for it. But alas, it was not Michael. It was my father.
“Mia,” he said, sounding a trifle panicked. “Is your grandmother there?”
“Why, yes, Dad,” I said. “She is. Would you care to speak with her?”
“Oh God.” My dad groaned. “No. Let me talk to your mother.”
My dad was totally in for it, and did he ever know it. I handed the phone to my mom, who took it with the long-suffering expression she always wears in Grandmère’s presence. Just as she was putting the phone to her ear, Grandmère said to her chauffeur, “That will be all, Gaston. You can put the bags down in Amelia’s room, then leave.”
“Stay where you are, Gaston,” my mom said, just as I yelled, “MY room? Why MY room?”
Grandmère looked at me all acidly and went, “Because in times of hardship, young lady, it is traditional for the youngest member of the family to sacrifice her comfort for the eldest.”
I never heard of this cockamamie tradition before. What was it, like the ten-course Genovian wedding supper, or something?
“Phillipe,” my mom was growling into the phone. “What is going on here?”
Meanwhile, Mr. G was trying to make the best out of a bad situation. He asked Grandmère if he could get her some form of refreshment.
“Sidecar, please,” Grandmère said, not even looking at him, but at the magnetic alphabet Algebra problems on the refrigerator door. “Easy on the ice.”
“Phillipe!” my mother was saying, in tones of mounting urgency, into the phone.
But it didn’t do any good. There was nothing my father could do. He and the staff—Lars, Hans, Gaston, et al.—were okay to rough it at the Plaza under the new, roomservice–free conditions. But Grandmère just couldn’t take it. She had apparently tried to ring for her nightly chamomile tea and biscotti, and when she’d found out there was no one to bring it to her, she’d gone completely mental and stuck her foot through the glass mail chute (endangering the poor postman’s fingers when he comes to collect the mail at the bottom of the chute tomorrow).
“But Phillipe,” my mom kept wailing. “Why here?”
But there was nowhere else for Grandmère to go. Things were just as bad, if not worse, at all the other hotels in the city. Grandmère had finally decided to pack up and abandon ship… figuring, no doubt, that as she had a granddaughter fifty blocks away—why not take advantage of the free labor?
So for the moment, anyway, we’re stuck with her. I even had to give her my bed, because she categorically refused to sleep on the futon couch. She and Rommel are in my room—my safe haven, my sanctuary, my fortress of solitude, my meditation chamber, my Zen palace—where she has already unplugged my computer because she didn’t like my Princess Leia screensaver “staring” at her. Poor Fat Louie is so confused, he actually hissed at the toilet, because he had to express his disapproval of the whole situation somehow. Now he has hidden himself away in the hall closet— the same closet where, if you think about it, all of this started—amid the vacuum cleaner parts and all the three-dollar umbrellas we’ve left there over the years.
It was an extremely frightening sight when Grandmère came out of my bathroom with her hair all in curlers and her night cream on. She looked like something out of the Jedi Council scene in Attack of the Clones. I was about to ask her where she’d parked her landspeeder. Except that Mom told me I have to be nice to her, “at least until I can think of some way to get rid of her, Mia.”
