“And you’re going to tape it, right?” I asked.
“Right.”
I was too excited to be very hungry, but my father said I had a long and busy morning ahead of me so I’d better “chow down.”
“Will I be on television the whole time?” I asked.
“Just when the float gets to Herald Square in front of Macy’s,” my mother explained. “You’ll know when you get there. First you’ll see the big store. And across the street from Macy’s you’ll see lots of lights and cameras. If you stay close to Cinderella you’re bound to be on television because the TV cameras will want to get some good shots of her.”
“I’m going to smile and wave the whole time, though,” I told them. “For all the people along the parade route.”
I was learning a lot about the Thanksgiving Day parade. But I had a whole lot more to learn. For instance, if your mother tells you to wear your coat, do it. Even on an unseasonably warm day it can be windy and chilly when you’re outdoors for hours just standing around waiting for the parade to begin. I was glad I had my coat on.
The float was beautiful. It was designed to look like the fancy coach that takes Cinderella to the ball, and was drawn by four white horses. Cinderella wasn’t there yet. Just me, five other girls who were older than me, and a woman from Macy’s who was responsible for taking care of us. After standing there for the longest time she had us climb up on the float so we’d be ready when they drove it into the parade. My dad said he was going to a diner to drink coffee and read the paper until the parade started. He hadn’t worn a coat.
When he called good-bye to me he said, “Have fun, Stacey! See you after the parade. Remember, when you come down from the float stay with your group leader. I don’t want you to get lost.”
Yikes. I could already see how crowded the area was getting. There were dozens of bands that were gathering and warming up their instruments in Central Park. All of the floats were lining up on Central Park West and hordes of clowns were milling around everywhere. From where I sat on the float I had a bird’s-eye view of the big balloons on the street next to the Museum of Natural History. They keep them from blowing away by throwing huge nets over them that were held down by weights. If you were in a helicopter looking down on Central Park West around the Museum of Natural History just before the parade started you’d think it was a big, complicated board game. I felt really small and really alone. At that moment I wished with all my heart that Laine was on the float with me.
Fortunately, in the following moment the woman from Macy’s gave me a cup of hot chocolate and a big smile. “How are you doing?” she asked.
“Okay.” Then before she could leave I asked, “Where’s Cinderella?”
“She’ll be here,” she said. “The stars usually arrive at the last minute. That way I get to be nervous. But don’t you be.”
I was nervous, though. I just couldn’t wait for the parade to begin. Everyone was getting jittery with excitement. I went over in my head what I would say to Cinderella. I’d tell her my name and ask her how she liked being a star.
At a little before nine o’clock a man with a bullhorn started a ten-second countdown. Cinderella still wasn’t there. What if she didn’t come? “Three, two, one.” The first band stepped off and the parade began. The Spiderman balloon turned the corner onto Central Park West and everyone cheered. Everyone but me. Where was Cinderella?
Then suddenly she was coming up the steps of the float. I didn’t see how she had arrived. If she came in a car it wasn’t anywhere that I could see. She was like magic, standing in the middle of us girls. We all looked at one another and laughed and smiled and said things like, “She’s here.” “I was really worried.” “She’s beautiful.” It was as if we were no longer a bunch of strangers on a float, but princesses at court. Our queen had arrived.
Cinderella was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. Her gown went all the way to the ground in billowing clouds of blue and white satin. On her wavy red hair she wore a gold crown dotted with multicolored gems. Cinderella!
Suddenly our float was moving. The woman from Macy’s who was walking alongside it called to us, “Smile and wave, girls.” I looked up at Cinderella to see that she was already doing that.
It was awesome to be on a float in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Everyone along the parade route was in a happy and festive mood. Some of them were on stepladders so they could see over the tops of the heads of the people in front of them. But on the float we were higher than even the stepladder people. The music for the Cinderella float rose up around us. And Cinderella just kept on smiling and waving. My only disappointment was that I hadn’t gotten to speak to her. Well, I thought, at least we’ll be on television together.
When we got to Herald Square it was like a big stage. People were sitting on bleachers as if they were at a ball game. And Macy’s was all lit up with Christmas lights. Right away I saw the television cameras and lights. We brightened our smiles and waved our arms even harder.
But something was wrong. Cinderella wasn’t waving. Both of her hands were on her head, holding onto her hair. Her crown had blown off and was about to fall to the ground. I leaned out over the edge of the float. By raising to my tiptoes I was able to grab it. As I handed the crown to Cinderella I saw that our float had moved past Macy’s.
Cinderella said, “Thanks,” and quickly put the crown back on her head. As she did, I could see wisps of black hair on her neck and I realized she was wearing a wig. A wig that had almost blown off during the Thanksgiving Day parade.
Our float turned the corner onto Thirty-fourth Street, and Cinderella and I went back to waving and smiling.
A few minutes later we were on Seventh Avenue where the parade breaks up. “Okay, kids,” the woman from Macy’s said. “You can get down now.”
I looked at Cinderella. Even though I’d been on the float for over two hours I didn’t want the parade to be over. Cinderella said, “You’re the one who saved my crown, aren’t you?”
I had wanted so badly to talk to her and now all I could do was nod. She took off the crown and handed it to me. “Have a nice Thanksgiving,” she said. As she hopped off the float I replied, “Thank you. Have a nice Thanksgiving.” But she was gone. I couldn’t spot her in the crowd. She disappeared as magically as she appeared. But I had the crown.
As Dad and I walked into the apartment, the warm sweet-spicy aroma of turkey and stuffing engulfed us.
“Wow,” my dad said. “Does that ever smell good.” My mom, aunt Beverly, uncle Lou, Jonathan, and Kirsten came to meet us. Everyone was talking at once.
“Did you see me? Did you see me?” I called above the din of greetings. “How’d I look? I can’t wait to tell you what happened.”
“How come you weren’t on TV?” Kirsten said. “We watched and watched for you.”
My mother was squatting down in front of me. “Are you okay?” she said. “When I didn’t see you on television I was worried.”
Not on television? How could that be? “I was right next to Cinderella,” I said. “The whole time.”
“Well we looked at that part of the tape over and over. We saw Cinderella and five little girls, but not you.”
I wanted to cry. I knew I should be happy that I got to be in the parade and that Cinderella gave me her crown. But I was suddenly tired and hungry and feeling weepy.
We all went right into the living room and my mom put on the tape of the parade at the moment when the Cinderella float comes into view. At first the float was so far away that you could barely see Cinderella. You certainly wouldn’t know that one of those dots around her was Stacey McGill. Next, the screen was filled with close-ups of the hosts who were talking about the band from Louisiana that was just before our float. Then they announced that our float was coming into the square. That’s when there was a good shot of Cinderella and five adorable little girls waving and smiling. Cinderella was waving with one hand and holding onto her hair with the other. My father played
the sequence forward and backward slowly.
“See,” Kristen said. “You’re not there, Stacey. Where were you?”
But I could see me. “There I am,” I said.
“Where?” Jonathan asked.
“Play it back again,” I said to my mom. I went over to the TV. The image of Cinderella holding onto her hair while the girls waved played in slow motion. I pointed to the sleeve of a navy blue coat on the edge of the screen. “That’s me,” I said.
I told them how I had saved Cinderella’s crown, and I showed it to them. My mother said I had a very special souvenir and that I should take good care of it. I felt happy again as I placed it carefully over the corner of my bureau mirror.
The rest of vacation was fun. Laine was at her grandmother’s in Pennsylvania for vacation so I couldn’t play with her. But my mother and I went Christmas shopping on Friday. And Mom and Dad and I saw a movie on Saturday. Every once in awhile I’d remember that the kids at school had said they’d watch for me on TV, and I wasn’t even on TV. I was worried that they wouldn’t believe I had been in the Thanksgiving Day parade. That they would think I had made the whole thing up.
Sure enough. On Monday morning I hadn’t even taken my coat off when Laine yelled from across the room, “Stacey, I didn’t see you on TV.” A bunch of other kids said the same thing. Everyone was calling out, “Where were you?” “I didn’t see you.” “How come you said you were going to be in the parade?”
Just then Miss Moss called us to order and we gathered around her for morning songs. Then it was time for Show and Share. “Who’d like to begin?” she asked.
Before I could raise my hand and say “Me. I want to be first,” Petey was standing in the middle of the circle holding up a wishbone. “I had the biggest turkey of the world,” he said. “And I ate the whole thing.”
All the kids were amazed by this, but Miss Moss turned the discussion into the size of other turkeys. No one had eaten a hundred-pound turkey like Petey (not even Petey), but the talk about turkey sizes went on for a very long time.
Finally Miss Moss said, “All right, you may sit down now, Petey. Who’s next?”
I stood up and shouted, “Me,” before anyone else. I went to the middle of the circle, took the crown out of my backpack, and told the story about how I saved Cinderella’s crown. I didn’t tell the kids that her hair was a wig because some of them probably still believed that it was the real Cinderella, just like some of them still believed in the Tooth Fairy.
Everyone was very impressed with the crown and wanted to hold it. Miss Moss asked me how I felt about handing it around the circle. I said, “Okay, if everyone’s hands are clean.” I was looking right at Petey holding that old wishbone when I said it.
Miss Moss suggested that Petey wash his hands. Then we passed my crown around the circle. I didn’t mind anymore that I hadn’t been on television. And finally my Cinderella story had a happy ending. That’s why I said that sometimes when you think a story has an unhappy ending it’s just that it isn’t over yet.
By then we were X-tra best friends. We would say to one another, “You’re my best friend.” Or, “I won’t go to that sleepover unless you’re invited, too.” And we both liked going to school. Mostly because it meant we were together all day. We were both pretty good at schoolwork, too, so being in classes didn’t make us miserable like it does some kids.
Laine and I also played with one another on the weekends. The bummer was that since we weren’t allowed to travel around the city alone we couldn’t go the six blocks between our apartment buildings by ourselves.
In Stoneybrook even little kids are allowed to walk over to a friend’s house on their own or to go for a ride on their bikes. In New York City that doesn’t happen, at least not in the crowded neighborhoods of Manhattan. Most parents don’t let their kids leave the apartment building without an adult until they’re in about the seventh grade.
So on weekends our parents would accompany Laine or me to one another’s apartments. Sometimes, if our parents were in a hurry, they’d let us take the elevator up by ourselves.
Here’s a typical Saturday afternoon for Laine and me when we were eight years old. I remember this day particularly well.
It was after lunch and the doorman called on the intercom to tell me that Laine was coming up. I went out into the hall and waited in front of the elevator door for her. While I was waiting I turned my eyelids inside out. When the elevator doors opened and Laine saw me she shrieked with delight. It was the first time I’d done that. The boys in our class were always doing it, but I’d been too afraid to until I heard the elevator coming and wanted to surprise Laine.
“How’d it look?” I asked her when she finished cracking up.
“Very weird,” she said. “Very neat.”
I saw that her mother wasn’t with her so I asked, “Did your dad drop you off?”
“Yeah. On his way to the theater. I wanted to ride my bike over but he said he had to bring me. It’s ridiculous.”
I said, “I know what you mean.” As I checked in the hall mirror to see that my eyelids weren’t all baggy from being stretched inside out, I said, “Parents are so overprotective. It’s such a pain.”
“It’s like we have bodyguards,” Laine said. “Who needs it?”
“Oh, well.” I led the way into my apartment. “Let’s go watch music videos on MTV.”
We went to my room, punched on the TV, and played with my toys. Our favorite toy that year was this amazing ten-room Victorian dollhouse that my grandmother had given me for Christmas when I was six. It was the very best of my toys. I smile to myself when I remember playing with my dollhouse to a background of hard rock videos on MTV.
If a song we especially loved came on we’d stop playing with the dolls and get up to dance. Or we might lip-sync the lyrics for one another. Laine did a wild Madonna. I liked to be Sting, which cracked her up. When the song was over we would return to playing with the dollhouse.
After a long while of playing this way we were suffering from a hunger that only ice cream could satisfy. We knew the only exception to the “you-must-have-an-adult-with-you” rule was that we could go alone to the ice-cream store that was around the corner from my building.
We found my mother in the kitchen eating a snack. Good, I thought, she won’t want to come with us. I said, “We want to go get ice cream. Okay?”
My mother looked at us thoughtfully. Even though she and Mrs. Cummings had agreed weeks before that we could go for ice cream alone, my mother always made us feel like it was the biggest deal in the world. “Well,” she said reluctantly, “I guess it’s all right. But don’t dawdle,” she added. “Come right back.”
Laine asked, “Is it okay if we eat there, Mrs. McGill?” She gave my mother her most winning, innocent smile. “That way we’ll be more alert when we’re walking back.”
“That’s very good thinking, Laine,” she said.
I said, “That ice cream store’s been awful crowded lately. Hasn’t it, Laine?”
Laine agreed. “We had to wait in a long line last time, so don’t get worried if we’re not back right away.”
My mother handed us each a dollar. “Come home as quickly as you can. I’ll worry until I see the whites of your eyes again.”
Laine and I went down on the elevator and through the lobby. We said, “Hello, Mike,” to the doorman and stepped out onto the sunny street.
One of my favorite New York City feelings is when I’ve been cooped up in the apartment all day and I go outside. The energy of the city charges through me like a surge of electricity. I feel taller and lighter and faster than I ever do indoors. That’s the feeling I had that day when Laine and I held hands and happily ran all the way to the ice cream store.
There was no line so we got our cones right away and went back outside with them. Laine had her usual Swiss almond chocolate with chocolate sprinkles and I had vanilla with multicolored sprinkles. These were my sweet pre-diabetes days. If I’d known the
n that in four years I’d be told I couldn’t eat sugar again, I’d have had double sprinkles! But that Saturday I was just a carefree eight-year-old who thought she’d be eating sprinkles for the rest of her life.
We were standing outside the store, leaning on the window and eating our cones, when I told Laine, “There are some neat things in a store on the next block.”
“Show me,” Laine answered.
Neither of us acknowledged that the store was in “you-may-not-go-alone” territory. We just walked and walked until we got to the store. It was a variety store that had a lot of playful stuff in the window. There was a shower curtain with a map of the world on it and slippers that looked like stuffed animals.
“I like the gumball machine best,” I told Laine.
She pointed her ice-cream cone at a plastic crayon that was taller than us and said, “My favorite is the big red crayon. And,” she added with a grin, “I want a coloring book to go with it.” We giggled because we knew there was no such thing. (It would have to be as big as that store window!)
As we talked and laughed like this, I watched our reflection in the window and thought we looked pretty grown-up.
Walking back to my apartment a few minutes later I said, “Let’s pretend we live in our own apartment. Not with our parents.”
“Let’s,” Laine agreed.
We talked about it all the way home. Opening the door to the apartment I still lived in with my parents, I called out, “Mom, we’re back.” When she came into the hall to greet us, Laine and I both had our eyelids inside out.
My mother said, “That’s disgusting. I didn’t know kids still did that.”
Laine and I tried to tell her, “You said you wanted to see the whites of our eyes,” but we were laughing so hard I don’t think my mother heard us.
We ran to my room to talk some more about getting our own apartment. We decided that it would be a studio apartment. (A studio apartment is only one room, but has kitchen equipment and a bathroom.) There were three good reasons for getting a studio. One, it wouldn’t be too expensive. Two, we wouldn’t need a lot of furniture. And three, it would be easier to keep clean.