taste .” The last part was under her breath, just loud enough for me to hear.
The blond girl looked bewildered. Definitely not the brightest star in the sky, but she
seemed nice enough. I wondered why Emily so obviously hated her. It’d been a long day
already, what with the running commentary and errands all over the city and hundreds of
names and faces to try to remember, so I didn’t even ask.
Emily placed the large basket on her desk and looked down on it, hands on her hips.
From what I could see from Miranda’s office floor, there were perhaps twenty-five
different skirts in an incredible assortment of fabrics, colors, and sizes. Had she really not
specified what she wanted at all? Did she really not bother to inform Emily whether she’d
be needing something appropriate for a black-tie dinner or a mixed-doubles match or
perhaps to use as a bathing suit cover-up? Did she want denim, or would something
chiffon work better? How exactly were we supposed to predict whatmight please her?
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
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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
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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 ISRUNWAY MAGAZINE, THE
FUCKINGHIIPPEST 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. Iliked 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!”
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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 fourA .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
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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 toThe 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-hundredand-
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 Runwaygirl 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 sevenA .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?
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“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
