The Princess Diaries (12 page)

I hate my life.

The Ten Women I Admire Most in the Whole World

by Mia Thermopolis

     
Madonna.
Madonna Ciccone revolutionized the fashion world with her iconoclastic sense of style, sometimes offending people who are not very open-minded—for instance, her rhinestone cross earrings, which made many Christian groups ban her CDs—or who have no sense of humor—like Pepsi, which didn’t like it when she danced in front of some burning crosses. It was because she wasn’t afraid to make people like the Pope mad that Madonna became one of the richest female entertainers in the world, paving the way for women performers everywhere by showing them that it is possible to be sexy onstage and smart off it.

     
Princess Diana.
Even though she is dead, Princess Diana is one of my favorite women of all time. She, too, revolutionized the fashion world by refusing to wear the ugly old hats that her mother-in-law told her to wear, and instead wore Halston and Bill Blass. Also she visited a lot of really sick people, even though nobody made her do it, and some people, like her husband, even made fun of her for doing it. The night Princess Diana died I unplugged the TV and said I would never watch it again, since media was what killed her. But then I regretted it the next morning when I couldn’t watch Japanese Anime on the Sci-Fi channel, because unplugging the TV scrambled our cable box.

     
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Hillary Rodham Clinton totally recognized that her thick ankles were detracting from her image as a serious politician, and so she started wearing pants. Also, even though everybody was talking bad about her all the time for not leaving her husband, who was going around having sex with people behind her back, she pretended like nothing was going on and went on running the country, just like she’d always done, which is how a president should behave.

     
Picabo Street.
She won all those gold medals in skiing, all because she just practiced like crazy and never gave up, even when she was crashing into fences and things. Plus she picked her own name, which is cool.

     
Leola Mae Harmon.
I saw a movie about her on the Lifetime channel. Leola was an air force nurse who was in a car accident and the lower part of her face got all mangled, but then Armand Assante, who plays a plastic surgeon, said he could fix her. Leola had to endure hours of painful reconstructive surgery, during which her husband left her because she didn’t have any lips (which I guess is why the movie is called
Why Me?
). Armand Assante said he would make her a new pair of lips, only the other air force doctors didn’t like the fact that he wanted to make them out of skin from Leola’s vagina. But he did it anyway, and then he and Leola got married and worked together to help give other accident victims vagina lips. And the whole thing turned out to have been
based on a true story
.

     
Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc—or Jeanne d’Arc as they say in France—lived in like the twelfth century and one day when she was my age she heard this angel’s voice tell her to take up arms and go help the French army fight against the British (the French were always fighting the British, all the way up until the Nazis attacked, and then they were like, "
Zut alors!
Can you help us?" and the British had to go in and try to save their lazy butts, for which nobody French has ever been properly grateful, as exemplified by their sloppy highway maintenance; see death of Princess Diana, above). Anyway, Joan cut off her hair and got herself a suit of armor, just like Mulan in the Disney movie, and went and led the French forces to victory in a number of battles. But then, like typical politicians, the French government decided Joan was too powerful, so they accused her of being a witch and burned her to death at the stake. And unlike Lilly, I do NOT believe that Joan was suffering from adolescent onset schizophrenia. I think angels really DID talk to her. None of the schizophrenics in our school have ever had their voices tell them to do something cool like lead their country into battle. All Brandon Hertzenbaum’s voices told him to do was go into the boys’ room and carve "Satan" in the door to the bathroom stall with a protractor. So there you go.

     
Christy.
Christy is not really a person. She is the fictional heroine of my favorite book of all time, which is called
Christy,
by Catherine Marshall. Christy is a young girl who goes to teach school in the Smokey Mountains at the turn of the century because she believes she can make a difference, and all these really hot guys fall in love with her and she learns about God and typhoid and stuff. Only I can’t tell anyone, especially Lilly, that this is my favorite book, because it’s kind of sappy and religious, and plus it doesn’t have any spaceships or serial killers in it.

     
The Lady Cop I Once Saw
give a truck driver a ticket for honking at a woman who was crossing the street (her skirt was kind of short). The lady cop told the truck driver it was a no-honking zone, and then when he argued about it, she wrote him another ticket for arguing with an officer of the law.

     
Lilly Moscovitz
. Lilly Moscovitz isn’t really a woman, yet, but she’s someone I admire very much. She is very, very smart, but unlike many very smart people, she doesn’t rub it in all the time, the fact that she’s so much smarter than me. Well, at least, not much. Lilly is always thinking up fun things for us to do, like go to Barnes & Noble and secretly film me asking Dr. Laura, who was signing books there, if she knows so much how come she’s divorced, then showing it on her (Lilly’s) TV show, including the part where we got thrown out and banned from the Union Square Barnes & Noble forever after. Lilly is my best friend and I tell her everything, except the part about me being a princess, which I don’t think she’d understand.

     
Helen Thermopolis.
Helen Thermopolis, besides being my mother, is a very talented artist who was recently featured in
Art in America
magazine as one of the most important painters of the new millennium. Her painting
Woman Waiting for Price Check at the Grand Union
won this big national award and sold for $140,000, only part of which my mom got to keep, since 15 percent of it went to her gallery and half of what was left went to taxes, which sucks, if you ask me. But even though she’s such an important artist, my mom always has time for me. I also respect her because she is deeply principled: She says she would never think of inflicting her beliefs on others and would thank others to pay her the same courtesy.

Can you believe Grandmère tore this up? I’m telling you, this is the sort of essay that could bring a country to its knees.

Saturday, October 11, 9:30 a.m.

So I was right: Lilly
does
think the reason I’m not participating in the taping today is because I’m against her boycott of the Hos.

I told her that wasn’t true, that I had to spent the day with my grandmother. But guess what? She doesn’t believe me. The one time I tell the truth, and she doesn’t believe me!

Lilly says that if I really wanted to get out of spending the day with Grandmère I could, but because I’m so codependent, I can’t say no to anyone. Which doesn’t even make sense, since obviously I am saying no to
her.
When I pointed that out to Lilly, though, she just got madder. I can’t say no to my grandmother, since she’s like sixty-five years old, and she’s going to die soon, if there’s any justice at all in the world.

Besides, you don’t know my grandmother, I said. You don’t say no to my grandmother.

Then Lilly went, "No, I don’t know your grandmother, do I, Mia? Isn’t that curious, considering the fact that you know all
my
grandparents"—the Moscovitzes have me over every year for Passover dinner—"and yet I haven’t met any of
yours?"

Well, of course the reason for
that
is that my mom’s parents are like total farmers who live in a place called Versailles, Indiana, only they pronounce it "Ver-sales." My mom’s parents are
afraid
to come to New York City because they say there are too many "furinners"—by which they mean foreigners—here, and anything that isn’t 100 percent American scares them, which is one of the reasons my mom left home when she was eighteen and has only been back twice, and that was with me. Let me tell you, Versailles is a small, small town. It’s so small that there’s a sign on the door at the bank that says if bank is closed, please slide money under door. I am not lying, either. I took a photo of it and brought it back to show everyone because I knew they wouldn’t believe me. It’s hanging on our refrigerator.

Anyway, Grandpa and Grandma Thermopolis don’t make it out of Indiana much.

And the reason I’d never introduced Lilly to Grandmère Renaldo is because Grandmère Renaldo hates children. And I can’t introduce her now because then Lilly will find out I’m the princess of Genovia, and you can bet I’ll never hear the end of
that.
She’d probably want to interview me, or something, for her TV show. That’s all I need: My name and image plastered all over Manhattan Public Access.

So I was telling Lilly all of this—about how I had to go out with my grandmother, not about my being a princess, of course—and as I was talking I could hear her breathing over the phone in that way she does when she’s mad, and finally she just goes, "Oh, come over tonight then, and help me edit," and slammed the phone down.

Geez.

Well, at least Michael didn’t tell her about the lipstick and panty hose.
That
would have really made her mad. She never would have believed I was only going to my grandmother’s. No way.

This was all at like nine-thirty, while I was getting ready to go to Grandmère’s. Grandmère told me that for today I don’t have to wear lipstick or panty hose. She said I could wear anything I wanted. So I wore my overalls. I know she hates them, but hey, she said anything I wanted. Hee hee hee.

Oops, gotta go. Lars just pulled up in front of the Plaza. We’re here.

Saturday, October 11

I can never go to school again. I can never go
anywhere
again. I will never leave this loft, ever, ever again.

You won’t believe what she did to me.
I
can’t believe what she did to me. I can’t believe my dad
let
her do this to me.

Well, he’s going to pay. He’s totally paying for this, and I mean BIG. As soon as I got home (right after my mom went, "Well, hey, Rosemary. Where’s your baby?" which I suppose was some kind of joke about my new haircut, but it was NOT funny), I marched right up to him and said, "You are paying for this. Big time."

Who says I have a fear of confrontation?

He totally tried to get out of it, going, "What do you mean? Mia, I think you look beautiful. Don’t listen to your mother, what does she know? I like your hair. It’s so . . .  short."

Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because his mother met Lars and me in the lobby as soon as we’d turned the car over to the valet, and just pointed at the door. Just pointed at the door again, and said, "
On y va,"
which in English means "Let’s go."

"Let’s go where?" I asked, all innocently (this was this morning, remember, back when I was still innocent).

"Chez Paolo," Grandmère said.
Chez Paolo
means "Paul’s house." So I thought we were going to meet one of her friends, maybe for brunch or something, and I thought, huh, cool, field trip. Maybe these princess lessons won’t be so bad.

But then we got there, and I saw Chez Paolo wasn’t a house at all. At first I couldn’t tell what it was. It looked a little like a really fancy hospital—it was all frosted glass and these Japanese-looking trees. And then we got inside; all of these skinny young people were floating around, dressed all in black. They were all excited to see my grandmother, and took us to this little room where there were these couches and all these magazines. So then I figured Grandmère maybe had some plastic surgery scheduled, and while I am sort of against plastic surgery—unless you’re like Leola Mae and you need lips—I was like, Well, at least she’ll be off my back for a while.

Boy, was I ever wrong! Paolo isn’t a doctor. I doubt he’s ever even been to college! Paolo is a
stylist!
Worse, he styles
people!
I’m serious. He takes unfashionable, frumpy people like me, and he makes them stylish—for a
living.
And Grandmère sicced him on
me!
Me!!
Like it’s bad enough I don’t have breasts. She has to tell some guy named
Paolo
that?

What kind of name is Paolo, anyway? I mean, this is America, for Pete’s sake! YOUR NAME IS PAUL!!!

That’s what I wanted to scream at him. But, of course, I couldn’t. I mean, it wasn’t Paolo’s fault my grandmother dragged me there. And as he pointed out to me, he only made time for me in his incredibly busy schedule because Grandmère told him it was this big emergency.

God, how embarrassing.
I’m
a fashion emergency.

Anyway, I was plenty peeved at Grandmère, but I couldn’t start yelling at her right there in front of Paolo. She totally knew it, too. She just sat there on this velvet couch, petting Rommel, who was sitting on her lap with his legs crossed—she’s even taught her
dog
to sit ladylike, and
he’s
a boy—sipping a Sidecar she got somebody to make for her and reading
W.

Meanwhile, Paolo was picking up chunks of my hair and making this face and going, all sadly, "It must go. It must
all
go."

And it went. All of it. Well, almost all of it. I still have some like bangs and a little fringe in back.

Did I mention that I’m no longer a dishwater blond? No. I’m just a plain old blond now.