The Princess Diaries (4 page)

English: proposal

World Civ: questions at end of Chapter 4

G & T: none

French: use
avoir
in neg. sentence, rd. lessons one to three, pas de plus

Biology: none

B = {x|x is an integer}

D = {2,3,4}

4ED

5ED

E = {x|x is an integer greater than 4 but less than 258}

Tuesday, September 30

Something really weird just happened. I got home from school, and my mom was there (she’s usually at her studio all day during the week). She had this funny look on her face, and then she went, "I have to talk to you."

She wasn’t humming anymore, and she hadn’t cooked anything, so I knew it was serious.

I was kind of hoping Grandmère was dead, but I knew it had to be much worse than that, and I was worried something had happened to Fat Louie, like he’d swallowed another sock. The last time he did that, the vet charged us $1,000 to remove the sock from his small intestines, and he walked around with a funny look on his face for about a month.

Fat Louie, I mean. Not the vet.

But it turned out it wasn’t about my cat, it was about my dad. The reason my dad kept on calling was because he wanted to tell us that he just found out, because of his cancer, that he can’t have any more kids.

Cancer is a scary thing. Fortunately, the kind of cancer my dad had was pretty curable. They just had to cut off the cancerous part, and then he had to have chemo, and after a year, so far, the cancer hasn’t come back.

Unfortunately, the part they had to cut off was . . . 

Ew, I don’t even like writing it.

His
testicle.

GROSS!

It turns out that when they cut off one of your testicles, and then give you chemo, you have like a really strong chance of becoming sterile. Which is what my dad just found out he is.

Mom says he’s really bummed out. She says we have to be very understanding of him right now, because men have needs, and one of them is the need to feel progenitively omnipotent.

What I don’t get is, what’s the big deal? What does he need more kids for? He already has me! Sure, I only see him summers and at Christmastime, but that’s enough, right? I mean, he’s pretty busy running Genovia. It’s no joke trying to make a whole country, even one that’s only a mile long, run smoothly. The only other things he has time for besides me are his girlfriends. He’s always got some new girlfriend slinking around. He brings them with him when we go to Grandmère’s place in France in the summer. They always drool all over the pools and the stables and the waterfall and the twenty-seven bedrooms and the ballroom and the vineyard and the farm and the airstrip.

And then he dumps them a week later.

I didn’t know he wanted to
marry
one of them and have kids.

I mean, he never married my mom. My mom says that’s because at the time she rejected the bourgeois mores of a society that didn’t even accept women as equals to men and refused to recognize her rights as an individual.

I kind of always thought that maybe my dad just never asked her.

Anyway, my mom says Dad is flying here to New York tomorrow to talk to me about this. I don’t know
why.
I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with
me.
But when I said to my mom, "Why does Dad have to fly all the way over here to talk to me about how he can’t have kids?" she got this funny look on her face and started to say something, and then she stopped.

Then she just said, "You’ll have to ask your father."

This is bad. My mom only says "Ask your father" when I want to know something she doesn’t feel like telling me, like why people sometimes kill their own babies and how come Americans eat so much red meat and read so much less than the people of Iceland.

Note to self: Look up the words
progenitive, omnipotent,
and
mores

distributive law

5
x
+ 5
y
- 5

5(
x
+
y
- 1)

Distribute WHAT??? FIND OUT BEFORE QUIZ!!!

Wednesday, October 1

My dad’s here. Well, not here in the loft. He’s staying at the Plaza, as usual. I’m supposed to go see him tomorrow, after he’s "rested." My dad rests a lot, now that he’s had cancer. He stopped playing polo, too. But I think that’s because one time a horse stepped on him.

Anyway, I hate the Plaza. Last time my dad stayed there, they wouldn’t let me in to see him because I was wearing shorts. The lady who owns the place was there, they said, and she doesn’t like to see people in cutoffs in the lobby of her fancy hotel. I had to call my dad from a house phone and ask him to bring down a pair of pants. He just told me to put the concierge on the phone, and the next thing you know, everybody was apologizing to me like crazy. They gave me this big basket filled with fruit and chocolate. It was cool. I didn’t want the fruit, though, so I gave it to a homeless man I saw on the subway on my way back down to the Village. I don’t think the homeless man wanted the fruit either, since he threw it all in the gutter and just kept the basket to use as a hat.

I told Lilly about what my dad said, about not being able to have kids, and she said that was very telling. She said it revealed that my dad still has unresolved issues with his parents, and I said, "Well, duh. Grandmère is a
huge
pain in the ass."

Lilly said she couldn’t comment on the veracity of that statement since she’d never met my grandmother. I’ve been asking if I could invite Lilly to Miragnac for like years, but Grandmère always says no. She says young people give her migraines.

Lilly says maybe my dad is afraid of losing his youth, which many men equate with losing their virility. I really think they should move Lilly up a grade, but she says she likes being a freshman. She says this way she has four whole years to make observations on the adolescent condition in post–Cold War America.

STARTING TODAY I WILL

1. Be nice to everyone, whether I like him/her or not

2. Stop lying all the time about my feelings

3. Stop forgetting my Algebra notebook

4. Keep my comments to myself

5. Stop writing my Algebra notes in my journal

The 3rd power of
x
is called cube of
x
—negative numbers have no sq root

Notes from G & T

Lilly—I can’t stand this. When is she going to go back to the teachers’ lounge?

Maybe never. I heard they were shampooing the carpet today. God, he is so CUTE.

Who’s cute?

BORIS!

He isn’t cute. He’s gross. Look what he did to his sweater. Why does he DO that?

You’re so narrow-minded.

I am NOT narrow-minded. But someone should tell him that in America we don’t tuck in our sweaters.

Well, maybe in Russia they do.

But this isn’t Russia. Also, someone should tell him to learn a new song. If I have to hear that requiem for dead King Whoever one more time . . . 

You’re just jealous because Boris is a musical genius and you’re flunking Algebra.

Lilly, just because I am flunking Algebra does NOT mean I’m stupid.

OK, OK. What is wrong with you today?

NOTHING!!!!!

slope: slope of a line denoted
m
is

Find equation of line with slope = 2

Find the degree of slope to Mr. G’s nostrils

Thursday, October 2,
Ladies’ Room at the Plaza Hotel

Well.

I guess now I know why my dad is so concerned about not being able to have more kids.

BECAUSE HE’S A PRINCE!!!

Geez! How long did they think they could keep something like
that
from me?

Although, come to think of it, they managed for a pretty long time. I mean, I’ve BEEN to Genovia. Miragnac, where I go every summer, and also most Christmases, is the name of my grandmother’s house in France. It is actually on the border of France, right near Genovia, which is between France and Italy. I’ve been going to Miragnac ever since I was born. Never with my mother, though. Only with my dad. My mom and dad have never lived together. Unlike a lot of kids I know, who sit around wishing their parents would get back together after they get divorced, I’m perfectly happy with this arrangement. My parents broke up before I was ever born, although they have always been pretty friendly to one another. Except when my dad is being moody, that is, or my mom is being a flake, which she can be sometimes. Things would majorly suck, I think, if they lived together.

Anyway, Genovia is where my grandmother takes me to shop for clothes at the end of every summer, when she’s sick of looking at my overalls. But nobody there ever mentioned anything about my dad’s being a PRINCE.

Come to think of it, I did that fact sheet on Genovia two years ago, and I copied down the name of the royal family, which is Renaldo. But even then I didn’t connect it with my
dad.
I mean, I know his name is Phillipe Renaldo. But the name of the prince of Genovia was listed in the encyclopedia I used as Artur Christoff Phillipe Gerard Grimaldi Renaldo.

And that picture of him must have been totally old. Dad hasn’t had any hair since before I was born (so when he had chemo, you couldn’t even tell, since he was practically bald anyway). The picture of the prince of Genovia showed someone with A LOT of hair, sideburns, and a mustache, too.

I guess I can see now how Mom might have gone for him, back when she was in college. He was something of a Baldwin.

But a PRINCE? Of a whole COUNTRY? I mean, I knew he was in politics, and of course I knew he had money—how many kids at my school have summer homes in France? Martha’s Vineyard, maybe, but not
France
—but a PRINCE?

So what I want to know is, if my dad’s a prince, how come I have to learn Algebra?

I mean, seriously.

I don’t think it was such a good idea for Dad to tell me he was a prince in the Palm Court at the Plaza. First of all, we almost had a repeat performance of the shorts incident: The doorman wouldn’t even let me in at first. He said, "No minors unaccompanied by an adult," which totally blows that whole
Home Alone II
movie, right?

And I was all, "But I’m supposed to meet my dad—"

"No minors," the doorman said again, "unaccompanied by an adult."

This seemed totally unfair. I wasn’t even wearing shorts. I was wearing my uniform from Albert Einstein. I mean, pleated skirt, kneesocks, the whole thing. Okay, maybe I was wearing Doc Martens, but come on! I practically WAS that kid Eloise, and she supposedly ruled the Plaza.

Finally, after standing there for like half an hour, saying, "But my dad . . .  but my dad . . .  but my dad . . . " the concierge came over and asked, "Just who
is
your father, young lady?"

As soon as I said his name they let me in. I realize now that’s because even THEY knew he was a prince. But his own daughter, his own daughter nobody tells!

Dad was waiting at a table. High tea at the Plaza is supposed to be this very big deal. You should
see
all the German tourists snapping pictures of themselves eating chocolate chip scones. Anyway, I used to get a kick out of it when I was a little girl, and since my dad refuses to believe fourteen is not little anymore, we still meet there when he’s in town. Oh, we go other places, too. Like we always go to see
Beauty and the Beast,
my all-time favorite Broadway musical, I don’t care what Lilly says about Walt Disney and his misogynistic undertones. I’ve seen it seven times.

So has my dad. His favorite part is when the dancing forks come out.

Anyway, we’re sitting there drinking tea and he starts telling me in this very serious voice that he’s the prince of Genovia, and then this terrible thing happens:

I get the hiccups.

This only happens when I drink something hot and then eat bread. I don’t know why. It had never happened at the Plaza before, but all of a sudden my dad is like, "Mia, I want you to know the truth. I think you’re old enough now, and the fact is, now that I can’t have any more children, this will have a tremendous impact on your life, and it’s only fair I tell you. I am the prince of Genovia."