“Yes, yes, of course, but I can’t—”
“Because that’s where they would be if we’d done one. I can’t keep track of every word
that goes in the paper, you know.”
I took a deep breath myself and tried to stay calm. “Your charming receptionist
connected me to you since you work in the archives department. So it does in fact appear
that it’s your job to keep track of every word.”
“Listen, if I had to try to track down every vague description that everyone called me
with every day, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else. You really need to check online.”
She sighed twice more, and I began to worry that she might hyperventilate.
“No, no,you just listen for a minute,” I started, feeling primed and ready to lay into this
lazy girl who had a far better job than my own. “I’m calling from Miranda Priestly’s
office, and it just so happens that—”
“I’m sorry, did you say you were calling from Miranda Priestly’s office?” she asked, and
I could feel her ears perk up across the phone line. “Miranda Priestly . . . fromRunway
magazine?”
“The one and only. Why? Heard of her?”
It was here that she transformed from highly put-upon editorial assistant to gushing
fashion slave. “Heard of her? Of course! Is anybody not familiar with Miranda Priestly?
She is, like, the ultimate woman in fashion. What was it you said she was looking for?”
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
“A review. Yesterday’s paper. Asian fusion restaurant. I didn’t see it online, but I’m not
sure I checked properly.” That was a bit of a lie. I had checked online and was quite sure
there hadn’t been any reviews of Asian fusion restaurants in theNew York Times any day
in the past week, but I wasn’t telling her that. Maybe Schizophrenic Editorial Girl here
would work a miracle.
So far I’d called theTimes, thePost, and theDaily News, but nothing had turned up. I’d
plugged in her corporate card number to access theWall Street Journal ’s paid archives
and had actually found a blurb on a new Thai restaurant in the Village, but I had to
immediately discount it when I noticed that the average entrée price was only seven
dollars andcitysearch.com listed only a single dollar sign next to it.
“Well, sure, hold on just a second here. I’m going to check that right out for you.” And
all of a sudden, Little Miss “I Can’t Be Expected to Remember Every Word That Goes in
the Paper” was tapping away on a keyboard and humming excitedly to both of us.
My head ached from the debacle the night before. It had been fun to surprise Alex and
amazingly relaxing to just laze around his apartment, but for the first time in many, many
months, I couldn’t fall asleep. Over and over and over again, I had pangs of guilt,
flashbacks of Christian kissing my neck and my then jumping in a car to see Alex but tell
him nothing. Even though I tried to push it all out of my mind, they kept returning, each
one more intense than the last one. When I finally did manage to fall asleep, I dreamed
that Alex was hired to be Miranda’s nanny and—even though in reality hers didn’t live
in—he was to move in with the family. Whenever I wanted to see Alex in my dream, I
would have to share a car home with Miranda and visit him in her apartment. She would
insist on calling me Emily and send me out on inane errands even though I told her
repeatedly that I was just there to visit my boyfriend. By the time morning had finally
rolled around, Alex had fallen under Miranda’s spell and couldn’t understand why I
thought she was so evil and, even worse, Miranda had started dating Christian. Blessedly,
my hell ended when I woke in a start after dreaming that Miranda, Christian, and Alex all
sat around in Frette robes together each Sunday morning and read theTimes and laughed
while I prepared breakfast, served everyone, and cleaned up afterward. Sleep last night
was about as relaxing as a solo stroll down Avenue D at four in the morning, and now
this restaurant review was wrecking whatever hope I had of having an easy Friday.
“Hmm, no, we really haven’t run anything lately on Asian fusion. I’m trying to think,
just personally, you know, if there are any new hot Asian fusion places. You know,
places that Miranda would actually consider going?” she said, sounding like she’d do
anything to prolong the conversation.
I ignored her transition into first-name familiarity with Miranda and worked on getting
her off the phone. “OK, well, that’s what I thought. Thanks anyway, though. I appreciate
it. ’Bye.”
“Wait!” she cried out, and even though the phone was already halfway to the base, her
urgency made me listen again. “Yes?”
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
“Oh, well, I, uh, I just wanted to let you know that if there’s, like, anything else I can
do—or any of us here—feel free to call, you know? We love Miranda here, and we’d,
like, uh, want to help with anything we could?”
You would’ve thought that the First Lady of the United States of America had just asked
Schizophrenic Editorial Girl if she might be able to locate an article for the president, an
article that included information crucial to an imminent war, and not an unnamed review
on an unnamed restaurant in an unnamed newspaper. The saddest part of all was that I
wasn’t surprised: I knew she’d come around.
“OK, I’ll be sure to pass that along. Thanks so much.”
Emily looked up from preparing yet another expense account and said, “No luck there
either?”
“Nope. I have no idea what she’s talking about, and apparently, neither does anyone else
in this city. I’ve spoken to someone at every Manhattan paper she reads, checked online,
talked to archivists, food writers, chefs. Not a single person can think of a suitable Asian
fusion place that has so much as been open in the past week, never even mind one that’s
been reviewed in the past twenty-four hours. She’s clearly lost her mind. So what now?”
I flopped back into my chair and pulled my hair into a ponytail. It still wasn’t yet nine in
the morning, and already the headache had spread to my neck and shoulders.
“I guess,” she said slowly, regrettably, “you have no choice but to ask her to clarify.”
“Oh, no, not that! However will she react?”
Emily, as usual, didn’t appreciate my sarcasm. “She’ll be in at noon. If I were you, I’d
figure out what you are going to say ahead of time, because she is not going to be happy
if you don’t have that review. Especially since she asked for it last night,” she pointed out
with a barely suppressed smile. She was clearly delighted that I was about to get abused.
There was little left to do but wait. It was my luck that Miranda was at her monthly
marathon shrink session (“She just doesn’t have time to go all the way over there once a
week,” Emily had explained when I asked why she went for three straight hours), the
only chunk of time during the entire day or night when she wouldn’t call us and, of
course, the only time I needed her to. A mountain of mail that I’d neglected to open for
the past two days threatened to topple off the desk, and another two full days’ worth of
dirty dry cleaning was heaped under it, around my feet. Huge sigh to let the world know
just how unhappy I was, and I dialed the cleaners.
“Hi, Mario. It’s me. Yeah, I know—two whole days, no talk. Can I get a pickup, please?
Great. Thanks.” I hung up the phone and forced myself to pull some of the clothes onto
my lap, where I would sort through them and record them on the computerized list I kept
of her outgoing clothes. When Miranda called the office at 9:45P .M. and demanded to
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
know where her new Chanel suit was, all I had to do was open up the document and tell
her that they’d gone out the day before and were due to be delivered the following day. I
logged today’s clothes in (one Missoni blouse, two identical pairs of Alberta Ferretti
pants, two Jil Sander sweaters, two white Hermès scarves, and one Burberry trench coat),
threw them in a shopping bag emblazoned withRunway, and called for a messenger to
take them downstairs to the area where the cleaners would pick them up.
I was on a roll! Cleaning was one of the more dreaded tasks, because no matter how
many times I had to do it, I was still repulsed to be sorting through someone else’s dirty
clothes. After I finished sorting and bagging every day, I had to wash my hands: the
lingering smell of Miranda was all-pervasive, and even though it consisted of a mixture
of Bulgari perfume and moisturizer and occasionally a whiff of B-DAD’s cigarette smoke
and was not at all unpleasant, it made me feel physically ill. British accents, Bulgari
perfume, white silk scarves—just a few of life’s simpler pleasures that were forever
ruined for me.
The mail was the usual, ninety-nine percent garbage that Miranda would never see.
Everything that was just labeled “Editor in Chief” went directly to the people who edited
the Letters pages, but many of the readers had gotten more savvy and now addressed their
correspondence directly to Miranda. It took me about four seconds to skim one and see
that it was a letter to the editor and not a charity ball invitation or a quick note from a
long-lost friend, and those I just threw aside. Today there were tons. Breathless notes
from teenage girls and housewives and even a few gay men (or, in all fairness, maybe
straight and just very fashion-conscious): “Miranda Priestly, you’re not only the darling
of the fashion world, you’re the Queen of my world!” one gushed. “I couldn’t agree more
with your choice to run the article about red being the new black in the April issue—it
was ballsy, but genius!” another exclaimed. A few letters ranted about a Gucci ad being
too sexual since it depicted two women in stilettos and garters who lay together on a
rumpled bed and pressed their bodies together, and a few more decried the sunken-eyed,
starvation-wracked, heroine-chic models thatRunway had used in its “Health First: How
to Feel Better” article. One was a standard-issue post office postcard that was addressed
in flowery script to Miranda Priestly on one side and read, quite simply, on the other:
“Why? Why do you print such a boring, stupid magazine?” I laughed out loud and tucked
that one in my bag for later—my collection of critical letters and postcards was growing,
and soon there wasn’t going to be any fridge space left. Lily thought it was bad karma to
bring home other people’s negative thoughts and hostility, and she shook her head when I
insisted that any bad karma originally intended toward Miranda could only make me
happy.
The last letter of the massive pile before I’d begin tackling the two dozen invitations
Miranda received each day was addressed in the loopy, girly writing of a teenager,
complete withi ’s dotted with hearts and smiley faces next to happy thoughts. I planned to
only skim it, but it wouldn’t allow itself to be skimmed: it was too immediately sad and
honest—it was bleeding and pleading and begging all over the page. The initial four-
second period came and went and I was still reading.
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
Dear Miranda,
My name is Anita and I am seventeen years old and I am a senior at Barringer H.S. in
Newark, NJ. I am so ashamed of my body even though everyone tells me I’m not fat. I
want to look like the models you have in your magazine. Every month I wait for Runway
to come in the mail even though my mama says it’s stupid to pay all my allowance for a
fashion magazine. But she doesn’t understand that I have a dream, but you do, dontcha?
It has been my dream since I was a little girl, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Why,
you ask? My boobs are very flat and my behind is bigger than the ones your models have
and this makes me very embarased. I ask myself if this is the way I wanna live my life
and I answer NO!!! because I wanna change and I wanna look and feel better and so I’m
asking for your help. I wanna make a positive change and look in the mirror and love my
breasts and my behind because they look just like the ones in the best magazine on
earth!!!
Miranda, I know you’re a wonderful person and fashion editor and you could transform
me into a new person, and trust me, I would be forever grateful. But if you can’t make me
a new person, maybe you can get me a really, really, really nice dress for special
occasions? I don’t ever have dates, but my mama says it’s OK for girls to go out alone so
I will. I have one old dress but its not a designer dress or anything you would show in
Runway. My favorite designers are Prada (#1), Versace (#2), John Paul Gotier (#3). I
have many faves, but those are my first three I love. I do not own any of their clothes and
I haven’t even seen them in a store (I’m not sure if anywhere in Newark sells these
designers, but if you know of one, please tell me so I can go look at them and see what
they look like up close), but I’ve seen there clothes in Runway and I have to say that I
really, really love them.
I’m gonna stop bothering you now, but I want you to know that even if you throw this
letter in the garbage, I will still be a big fan of your magazine because I love the models
and the clothes and everything, and of course I love you too.
Sincerely,
Anita Alvarez
P.S. My phone number is 973-555-3948. You can write or call but please do so before
the week of July 4 because I really need a nice dress before then. I LOVE YOU!! Thank
you!!!!!
The letter smelled like Jean Naté, that acrid-smelling toilet water– spray preferred by
preteen girls the country over. But that wasn’t what was causing the tightness in my
chest, the constriction in my throat. How many Anitas were there out there? Young girls
with so little else in their lives that they measured their worth, their confidence, their
entire existence around the clothes and the models they saw inRunway ? How many more
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
had decided to unconditionally love the woman who put it all together each month—the
orchestrator of such a seductive fantasy—even though she wasn’t worth one single
