The Devil Wears Prada (10 page)
Read The Devil Wears Prada Online
Authors: Lauren Weisberger
Tags: #Fashion editors, #Women editors, #Humorous, #Periodicals, #New York (N.Y.), #Women editors - Fiction, #General, #Fiction, #Supervisors, #Periodicals - Publishing, #Humorous fiction, #New York (State)
“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 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 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-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 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? “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 fromSliver.
“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 think 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.
After
peeking down the hall and confirming that Emily was nowhere in sight, I
literally ran to the reception area and pushed the down button twenty times.
Sophy, the gorgeous Asian receptionist, raised her eyebrows and looked away,
and I wasn’t sure if it was my impatience or her knowledge that
Miranda’s office was abandoned that made her look at me that way. No time
to figure it out. The elevator finally arrived, and I was able to throw myself
onboard even as a sneering, heroin-thin guy with spiky hair and lime green
Pumas was pushing “Door Close.” No one moved aside to give me room
even though there was plenty of space. And while this would’ve normally
driven me crazy, all I could concentrate on was getting food and getting back,
ASAP.