I was about to find out. Emily carried the wicker basket to Miranda’s office and carefully, reverentially, placed it on the plush carpeting beside me. She sat down and began removing the skirts one by one and laying them in a circle around us. There was a beautiful crocheted skirt in shocking fuchsia by Celine, a pearl gray wraparound by Calvin Klein, and a black suede one with black beads along the bottom by Mr. de la Renta himself. There were skirts in red and ecru and lavender, some with lace and others in cashmere. A few were long enough to sweep gracefully along the ankles, and others were so short they looked more like tube tops. I picked up a midcalf, brown silk beauty and held it up to my waist, but the material covered only one of my legs. The next one in the pile reached to the floor in a swirl of tulle and chiffon and looked as though it would feel most at home at a Charleston garden party. One of the jean skirts was prefaded and came with a gigantic brown leather belt already looped around it, and another had a crinkly, silver-material overlay on top of a slightly more opaque silver liner. Where on earth were we going here?
“Wow, looks like Miranda has a thing for skirts, huh?” I said, simply because I had nothing better to say.
“Actually, no. Miranda has a slight obsession with scarves.” Emily refused to make eye contact with me, as though she’d just revealed that she herself had herpes. “It’s just one of those cute, quirky things about her you should know.”
“Oh, really?” I asked, trying to sound amused and not horrified. An obsession with scarves? I like clothes and bags and shoes as much as the next girl, but I wouldn’t exactly declare any of them an “obsession.” And something about the way Emily was saying it wasn’t so casual.
“Yes, well, she must need a skirt for something specific, but it’s scarves that’s she’s really into. You know, like her signature scarves?” She looked at me. My face must have betrayed my complete lack of a clue. “You do remember meeting her during the interview, do you not?”
“Of course,” I said quickly, sensing it’d probably not be the best idea to let this girl know that I couldn’t so much as remember Miranda’s name during my interview, never mind remember what she was wearing. “But I’m not sure I noticed a scarf.”
“She always, always, always wears a single white Hermès scarf somewhere on her outfit. Mostly around her neck, but sometimes she’ll have her hairdresser tie one in a chignon, or occasionally she’ll use them as a belt. They’re like, her signature. Everyone knows that Miranda Priestly wears a white Hermès scarf, no matter what. How cool is that?”
It was at that exact moment that I noticed Emily had a lime green scarf woven through the belt loops on her cargo pants, just peeking out from underneath the white T-shirt.
“She likes to mix it up sometimes, and I’m guessing that this is one of those times. Anyway, those idiots in fashion never know what she’ll like. Look at some of these, they’re hideous!” She held up an absolutely gorgeous flowy skirt, slightly dressier than the rest with its little flecks of gold shimmering from the deep tan background.
“Yep,” I agreed, in what was to become the first of thousands, if not millions, of times I agreed with whatever she said simply to make her stop talking. “It’s horrendous-looking.” It was so beautiful I thought I’d be happy to wear it to my own wedding.
Emily continued prattling on about patterns and fabrics and Miranda’s needs and wants, occasionally interjecting a scathing insult about a coworker. She finally chose three radically different skirts and set them aside to send to Miranda, talking, talking, talking the whole time. I tried to listen, but it was almost seven, and I was trying to decide whether I was ravenously hungry, utterly nauseated, or just plain exhausted. I think it was all three. I didn’t even notice when the tallest human being I’d ever seen swooped into the office.
“YOU!” I heard from somewhere behind me. “STAND UP SO I CAN GET A LOOK AT YOU!”
I turned just in time to see the man, who was at least seven feet tall, with tanned skin and black hair, pointing directly at me. He had 250 pounds stretched over his incredibly tall frame and was so muscular, so positively ripped, that it looked as though he might just explode out of his denim . . . catsuit? Ohmigod! He was wearing a catsuit. Yes, yes, a denim, one-piece catsuit with tight pants and a belted waist and rolled-up sleeves. And a cape. There was actually a blanket-size fur cape tied twice around his thick neck, and shiny black combat boots the size of tennis rackets adorned his mammoth feet. He looked around thirty-five years old, although all the muscles and the deep tan and the positively chiseled jawbone could have been hiding ten years or adding five. He was flapping his hands at me and motioning for me to get up off the floor. I stood, unable to take my eyes off him, and he turned to examine me immediately.
“WELL! WHO DO WE HAVE HEEEEERE?” he bellowed, as best as one can in a falsetto voice. “YOU’RE PRETTY, BUT TOO WHOLESOME. AND THE OUTFIT DOES NOTHING FOR YOU!”
“My name’s Andrea. I’m Miranda’s new assistant.”
He moved his eyes up and down over my body, inspecting every inch. Emily was watching the spectacle with a sneer on her face. The silence was unbearable.
“KNEE-HIGH BOOTS? WITH A KNEE-LENGTH SKIRT? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? BABY GIRL, IN CASE YOU’RE UNAWARE—IN CASE YOU MISSED THE BIG, BLACK SIGN BY THE DOOR—THIS IS RUNWAY MAGAZINE, THE FUCKING HIIPPEST MAGAZINE ON EARTH. ON EARTH! BUT NO WORRIES, HONEY, NIGEL WILL GET RID OF THAT JERSEY MALL-RAT LOOK YOU’VE GOT GOING SOON ENOUGH.”
He put both his massive hands on my hips and twirled me around. I could feel his eyes looking at my legs and tush.
“SOON ENOUGH, SWEETIE, I PROMISE YOU, BECAUSE YOU’RE GOOD RAW MATERIAL. NICE LEGS, GREAT HAIR, AND NOT FAT. I CAN WORK WITH NOT FAT. SOON ENOUGH, SWEETIE.”
I wanted to be offended, to pull myself away from the grip he had on my lower body, to take a few minutes and mull over the fact that a complete stranger—and a coworker, no less—had just provided an unsolicited and unflinchingly honest account of my outfit and my figure, but I wasn’t. I liked his kind green eyes that seemed to laugh instead of taunt, but more than that, I liked that I had passed. This was Nigel— single name, like Madonna or Prince—the fashion authority whom even I recognized from TV, magazines, the society pages, everywhere, and he had called me pretty. And said I had nice legs! I let the mall-rat comment slide. I liked this guy.
I heard Emily tell him to leave me alone from somewhere in the background, but I didn’t want him to go. Too late, he was already heading for the door, his fur cape flapping behind him. I wanted to call out, tell him it had been nice to meet him, that I wasn’t offended by what he said and was excited that he wanted to redo me. But before I could say a thing, Nigel whipped around and covered the space between us in two strides, each the length of a long jump. He planted himself directly in front of me, wrapped my entire body with his massive, rippling arms, and pressed me to him. My head rested just below his chest, and I smelled the unmistakable scent of Johnson’s Baby Lotion. And just as I had the presence of mind to hug him back, he flung me backward, engulfed both of my hands in his, and screeched:
“WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, BABY!”
5
“He said what?” Lily asked as she licked a spoonful of green tea ice cream. She and I had met at Sushi Samba at nine so I could update her on my first day. My parents had grudgingly forked over the emergencies-only credit card again until I got my first paycheck. Spicy tuna rolls and seaweed salads certainly felt like an emergency, and so I silently thanked Mom and Dad for treating Lily and me so well.
“He said, ‘Welcome to the dollhouse, baby.’ I swear. How cool is that?”
She looked at me, mouth hung open, spoon suspended in midair.
“You have the coolest job I’ve ever heard of,” said Lily, who always talked about how she should’ve worked for a year before going back to school.
“It does seem pretty cool, doesn’t it? Definitely weird, but cool, too. Whatever,” I said, digging in to my oozing chocolate brownie. “It’s not like
I wouldn’t rather be a student again than doing any of this.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’d just love to work part-time to finance your obscenely expensive and utterly useless Ph.D. You would, wouldn’t you? You’re jealous that I get to bartend in an undergrad pub, get hit on by freshmen until four A.M. every night, and then head to class all day, aren’t you? All of it knowing that if—and that’s a big, fat if—you manage to finish at some point in the next seventeen years, you’ll never get a job. Anywhere.” She plastered on a big, fake smile and took a swig of her Sapporo. Lily was studying for her Ph.D. in Russian Literature at Columbia and working odd jobs every free second she wasn’t studying. Her grandmother barely had enough money to support herself, and Lily wouldn’t qualify for grants until she’d finished her master’s, so it was remarkable she’d even come out that night.
I took the bait, as I always did when she bitched about her life. “So why do you do it, Lil?” I asked, even though I’d heard the answer a million times.
Lily snorted and rolled her eyes again. “Because I love it!” she sang sarcastically. And even though she’d never admit it because it was so much more fun to complain, she did love it. She’d developed a thing for Russian culture ever since her eighth-grade teacher told her that Lily looked how he had always pictured Lolita, with her round face and curly black hair. She went directly home and read Nabokov’s masterpiece of lechery, never allowing the whole teacher-Lolita reference to bother her, and then read everything else Nabokov wrote. And Tolstoy. And Gogol. And Chekhov. By the time college rolled around, she was applying to Brown to work with a specific Russian lit professor who, upon interviewing seventeen-year-old Lily, had declared her one of the most well read and passionate students of Russian literature he’d ever met—undergrad, graduate, or otherwise. She still loved it, still studied Russian grammar and could read anything in its original, but she enjoyed whining about it more.
“Yeah, well, I definitely agree that I have the best gig around. I mean, Tommy Hilfiger? Chanel? Oscar de la Renta’s apartment? Quite a first day. I have to say, I’m not quite sure how all of this is going to get me any closer to The New Yorker, but maybe it’s just too early to tell. It’s just not seeming like reality, you know?”
“Well, anytime you feel like getting back in touch with reality, you know where to find me,” Lily said, taking her MetroCard out of her purse. “If you get a craving for a little ghetto, if you’re just dying to keep it real in Harlem, well, my luxurious two-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot studio is all yours.”
I paid the check and we hugged good-bye, and she tried to give me specific instructions on how to get from Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street to my own sublet all the way uptown. I swore up and down that I understood exactly where to find the L-train and then the 6, and how to walk from the 96th Street stop to my apartment, but as soon as she left, I jumped in a cab.
Just this once, I thought to myself, sinking into the warm backseat and trying not to breathe in the driver’s body odor. I’m a Runway girl now.
I was pleased to discover that the rest of that first week wasn’t much different than the first day. On Friday, Emily and I met in the stark white lobby again at seven A.M., and this time she handed me my own ID card, complete with a picture that I didn’t remember taking.
“From the security camera,” she said when I stared at it. “They’re everywhere around here, just so you know. They’ve had some major problems with people stealing stuff, the clothes and jewelry called in for shoots; it seems the messengers and sometimes even the editors just help themselves. So now they track everyone.” She slid her card down the slot and the thick glass door clicked open.
“Track? What exactly do you mean by ‘track’?”
She moved quickly down the hallway toward our offices, her hips swishing back and forth, back and forth in the skintight tan Seven cords she was wearing. She’d told me the day before that I should seriously consider getting a pair or ten, as these were among the only jeans or corduroys that Miranda would permit people to wear in the office. Those and the MJ’s were OK, but only on Friday, and only if worn with high heels. MJ’s? “Marc Jacobs,” she had said, exasperated.
“Well, between the cameras and the cards, they kind of know what everyone’s doing,” she said as she dropped her Gucci logo tote on her desk. She began unbuttoning her very fitted leather blazer, a coat that looked supremely inadequate for the late-November weather. “I don’t think they actually look at the cameras unless something’s missing, but the cards tell everything. Like, every time you swipe it downstairs to get past the security counter or on the floor to get in the door, they know where you are. That’s how they tell if people are at work, so if you have to be out—and you never will, but just in case something really awful happens—you’ll just give me your card and I’ll swipe it. That way you’ll still get paid for all the days you miss, even if you go over. You’ll do the same for me—everyone does it.”
I was still reeling from the “and you never will” part, but she continued her briefing.
“And that’s how you’ll get food in the dining room also. It’s a debit card: just put on some money and it gets deducted at the register. Of course, that’s how they can tell what you’re eating,” she said, unlocking Miranda’s office door and plopping herself on the floor. She immediately reached for a boxed bottle of wine and began wrapping.
“Do they care what you eat?” I asked, feeling as though I’d just stepped directly into a scene from Sliver.
“Um, I’m not sure. Maybe? I just know they can tell. And the gym, too. You have to use it there, and at the newsstand to buy books or magazines. I think it just helps them stay organized.”
Stay organized? I was working for a company who defined good “organization” as knowing which floor each employee visited, whether they preferred onion soup or Caesar salad for lunch, and just how many minutes they could tolerate the elliptical machine? I was a lucky, lucky girl.
Exhausted from my fourth morning of waking up at five-thirty, it took me another five full minutes to work up the energy to climb out of my coat and settle down at my desk. I thought about putting my head down to rest for just a moment, but Emily cleared her throat. Loudly.
“Um, you want to get in here and help me?” she asked, although it was clearly no question. “Here, wrap something.” She thrust a pile of white paper my way and resumed her task. Jewel blasted from the extra speakers attached to her iMac.
Cut, place, fold, tape: Emily and I worked steadily through the morning, stopping only to call the downstairs messenger center each time we’d finished with twenty-five boxes. They’d hold them until we gave the green light for them to be fanned out all over Manhattan in mid-December. We’d already completed all of the out-of-town bottles during my first two days, and those were piled in the Closet waiting for DHL to pick them up. Considering each and every one was set to be sent first-day priority, arriving at their locations at the earliest possible time the very next morning, I wasn’t sure what the rush was—considering it was only the end of November—but I’d already learned it was better not to ask questions. We would be FedExing about 150 bottles all over the world. The Priestly bottles would make it to Paris, Cannes, Bordeaux, Milan, Rome, Florence, Barcelona, Geneva, Brugges, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and London. Dozens to London! FedEx would jet them to Beijing and Hong Kong and Capetown and Tel Aviv and Dubai (Dubai!). They would be toasting Miranda Priestly in Los Angeles, Honolulu, New Orleans, Charleston, Houston, Bridgehampton, and Nantucket. And those all before any went out in New York—the city that contained all of Miranda’s friends, doctors, maids, hair stylists, nannies, makeup artists, shrinks, yoga instructors, personal trainers, drivers, and personal shoppers. Of course, this was where most of the fashion-industry people were, too: the designers, models, actors, editors, advertisers, PR folks, and all-around style mavens would each receive a level-appropriate bottle lovingly delivered by an Elias-Clark messenger.
“How much do you thi
nk all of this costs?” I asked Emily, while snipping what felt like the millionth piece of thick white paper.
“I told you, I ordered twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of booze.”
“No, no—how much do you think it costs altogether? I mean, to overnight all these packages all over the world, well, I bet that in some cases the shipping costs more than the bottle itself, especially if they’re getting a nobody bottle.”
She looked intrigued. It was the first time I’d seen her look at me with anything other than disgust, exasperation, or indifference. “Well, let’s see. If you figure that all the domestic FedExes are somewhere in the twenty-dollar range, and all the international are about $60, then that equals $9,000 for FedEx. I think I heard somewhere that the messengers charge eleven bucks a package, so sending out 250 of those would be $2,750. And our time, well, if it takes us a full week to wrap everything, then added together, that’s two full weeks of both our salaries, which is another four grand—”
It was here I flinched inwardly, realizing that both of our salaries together for an entire week’s work was by far the most insignificant expense.
“Yeah, it comes to around $16,000 in total. Crazy, huh? But what choice is there? She is Miranda Priestly, you know.”
At about one Emily announced she was hungry and was heading downstairs to get some lunch with a few of the girls in accessories. I assumed she meant she would pick up her lunch, since that’s what we’d been doing all week, so I waited for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty, but she never reappeared with her food. Neither of us had actually eaten in the dining room since I’d started in case Miranda called, but this was ridiculous. Two o’clock came and then two-thirty and then three, and all I could think about was how hungry I was. I tried calling Emily’s cell phone, but it went directly to voice mail. Could she have died in the dining room? I wondered. Choked on some plain lettuce, or simply slumped over after downing a smoothie? I thought about asking someone to pick something up for me, but it seemed too prima donna–ish to ask a perfect stranger to fetch me lunch. After all, I was supposed to be the lunch-fetcher: Oh, yes, darling, I’m simply too important to abandon my post here wrapping presents, so I was wondering if you might pick me up a turkey and brie croissant? Lovely. I just couldn’t do it. So when four o’clock rolled around and there was still no sign of Emily and no call from Miranda, I did the unthinkable: I left the office unattended.