Diana and Me

Diana and Me

It was the sort of tedious day that had been packed with every single boring and low-grade unpleasant errand you could imagine, and in order to carve myself out a little sunshine among the gloom, I had ducked into a bookstore, where I treated myself to an unread Anne Tyler, a Raymond Carver collection, and a food magazine that was running a special issue on Oaxacan cuisine.

Photo by Radek Homola

“What have we here?” said the perky sales assistant when she rang me up. “My, oh, my, two books and a magazine, you are having a good day, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” I said, casting my mind to endless traffic lights, the broken ATM at the bank, and the reliably infuriating young man at the pharmacy counter. “I think it depends on your definition of good, really.”

Hearing my accent, she perked up still further.

“You’ll be excited,” she informed me confidently. “For Wills.”

Wills, I thought. Mr. Los Angeles and I have already made ours; and my occasional and shamefully vivid fantasy of the timely and painless death of a long-lost and abominably rich distant cousin in Papua, New Guinea, has yet to manifest itself in real life. Why on earth would I be excited about wills?

“43 on Saturday,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

43 wills, I thought, on Saturday. Maybe there was something in the Raymond Carver.

“He’s the cutest guy,” she said. “To talk to him, you’d never think he was Prince of Wales, would you?”

Oh, I thought. Prince William. To be clear, I wish the British royal family not an ounce more ill than I wish to any other fellow being. But my interest in their birthdays, or any other aspect of their personal lives, is roughly on a par with my interest in collecting used bubblegum wrappers.

“Ha,” I agreed.

“The cutest guy,” she repeated. She leaned over the counter confidentially. “And wouldn’t his Mom be proud of him if she was still around?”

Oh, God, I thought. Princess Diana.

“Huh,” I affirmed.

She smiled, mistily.

“Diana was something else, wasn’t she?” she said. “She made everyone feel special, no matter who they were.”

Unexpectedly, this hit me. It occurred to me that I had been doing particularly little during this exchange to make this perfectly good-natured woman feel special herself; and that whatever my personal feelings about the majority of the British aristocracy, I could do well to strive to be like someone who made people feel good about themselves.

“It’s something we could all pay more attention to, isn’t it?” I offered. “You know, I sometimes wonder …”

“There was a thing about him on TV the other day,” she said. “For his birthday. Did you see it?”

“Good God no!” I said. Then, oh, dear, I thought. That didn’t sound very Diana-like at all.

“I mean,” I said, “hahaha. You know? Hahaha. No.”

“You can still look it up on YouTube,” she said, helpfully.

“Oh, good,” I said, politely, because the least Diana-like thing I could do was try to be polite. “Thanks.”

“It should still be there,” she said. She furrowed her brow in thought. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s still there,” she concluded. “It’s Wills, isn’t it, of course it’ll be there. YouTube. Just type in Prince William and it’ll take you straight there.”

“Thank you,” I said. And feeling we had now exhausted every single reasonable angle of the topic, “Here’s my credit card.”

“Did you ever meet Diana?” she said.

“Uhm,” I said. When I left Britain, there were 56.31 million people living there, and one way and another Diana’s and my social circles had failed to overlap. “Not really, no.”

“Too bad,” she said. “She was something else. There was the cutest picture of her on the TV thing, wearing a red top. So cute! But don’t worry, you can still find it on YouTube.”

“Good,” I said. Then because I did, after all, have a whole other world to inhabit outside the bookstore, “Is my credit card going through OK? It seems to be taking a while.”

Briefly distracted from her topic, she looked down at her machine and frowned.

“Your card’s OK,” she said. “But it looks like your store membership's lapsed. Do you want to renew it now?”

Now, here was a portion of the conversation to which I could contribute in a fully Diana-like fashion.

“I would love to renew it!” I cried, dizzy with wild abandon. Suddenly taller, slimmer, and frozen in my glamorous mid-30s, I tossed my blonde, bobbed head and fetchingly batted my enormous blue eyes. “I love my bookstore membership! Discounts on books! Hahaha! It’s the best $39.99 I spend all year! The more books I buy, the happier I am, so yes, please, sign me up again, with all speed! Hahaha!”

“It’s too bad about the brothers,” she said.

I whimpered softly.

“You’d think they could make it up,” she said. “Just for her memory. But I guess they can’t, isn’t it sad?”

“Very sad,” I affirmed, and nodded empathically: Diana, I remembered, had been a great one for empathy.“Am I renewed now?”

“Harry’s book didn’t help,” she said. “Spare. I guess you must have read it, right?”

“No,” I said. I decided to refrain from confiding that my friend Vanessa, who really is a fan of the royals, refers to it, crisply, as Whine.

She nodded approvingly.

“You don’t think it would be right, do you?” she said. “You know, every time someone buys a copy here, I want to say to them, ‘Well, thanks for the custom, but do you ever wonder how Harry’s Mom would have felt if she’d been around to read that?’”

“It does make you think,” I said: it was the sort of thing, I thought, that Diana might have said. “You know, is my receipt ready please? Because …”

“I’ll tell you something though,” she said. “Kate’s the best thing that’s ever happened to that family.”

I drew the line at Kate Middleton.

“I’m sure she is,” I said. “Can I please have …”

“Diana would have loved her,” she said. “I can just see them, getting their nails done together and talking about the family. Can’t you just see it? Hahaha!”

“Ha,” I concurred. “You know …”

“Getting their nails done and talking!” she said. “Just like women do! Hahaha! What d’you think they’d be talking about?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “Could I please …”

“I’d have a few guesses,” she said. “How about …”

There comes a time when only good American forthrightness will do.

“I want to go home now,” I said. “Can I have my receipt please?”

“Oh.” The salesperson’s face fell. She stopped talking and finished the transaction in hurt silence.

My blonde bob vanished, my big blue eyes shrank to muddy brown buttons. Disgracefully un-Dianaesque, I took my books and my receipt and slunk guiltily towards the door.

“What have we here?” I heard her saying to the next customer. “My, oh, my, John Grisham! You are having a good day, aren’t you?”