The Devil Wears Prada (13 page)

 “Hey
guys, that’s great. It’s about time I get to be an aunt.
When’s the little one due?”

 They
both looked dumbfounded, and for a moment I worried that we’d gotten it
all wrong, that their “good” news was that they were building a
newer, bigger home in that swamp they lived in, or that Kyle had finally
decided to leave his father’s law firm and was going to join my sister in
opening the gallery she’d always dreamed of. Maybe we’d jumped the
gun on this one, been just a little too eager to hear that a future niece or
grandson was on the way. It was all my parents could talk about lately,
incessantly hashing and rehashing the reasons why my sister and
Kyle—already in their thirties and with four years of marriage behind
them—had yet to reproduce. In the past six months, the subject had
progressed from time-consuming family obsession to perceived crisis.

 My
sister looked worried. Kyle frowned. My parents looked as though they might
both pass out from the silence. The tension was palpable.

 Jill got
out of her chair and walked over to Kyle, where she plopped herself in his lap.
She wrapped her arm behind the back of his neck and leaned her face next to
his, whispering in his ear. I glanced at my mother, who looked about ten
seconds away from unconsciousness, the worry causing the small lines near her
eyes to grow as deep as trenches.

 Finally,
finally, they giggled, and turned toward the table, and announced unanimously,
“We’re going to have a baby.” And then there was light. And
shrieking. And hugging. My mother flew out of her seat so fast that she knocked
it over and, in turn, tipped over a potted cactus that rested by the
sliding-glass door. My dad grabbed Jill and kissed her on both cheeks and the
top of her head, and for the first time I could remember since their wedding
day, he kissed Kyle, too.

 I rapped
my Dr. Brown’s black cherry can with a plastic fork and announced that we
needed a toast. “Please raise your glasses, everyone, raise your glasses
to the brand-new Sachs baby that will be joining our family.” Kyle and
Jill looked at me pointedly. “OK, I guess technically it’s a
Harrison baby, but it will be a Sachs at heart. To Kyle and Jill, future
perfect parents to the world’s most perfect child.” We all clinked
soda cans and coffee mugs and toasted the grinning couple and my sister’s
twenty-four-inch waist. I cleaned up by throwing the entire contents of the
table directly into a garbage bag while my mom tried to pressure Jill to name
the baby after various dead relatives. Kyle sipped coffee and looked pleased
with himself, and just before midnight my dad and I sneaked off to his study
for a game.

 He
turned up the white-noise machine he used when he had patients during the day,
both to block out the sounds of the household from them and to keep anyone else
in the house from hearing what was discussed in his office. Like any good
shrink, my dad had placed a gray leather couch in the far corner, so soft I
liked to rest my head on the armrest, and three chairs that angled forward and
held a person in a kind of fabric sling. Womblike, he assured me. His desk was
sleek and black and topped with a flat-screen monitor, and the matching black
leather chair was high-backed and very plush. A wall of psychology books
encased in glass, a collection of bamboo stalks in a very tall crystal vase on
the floor, and some framed colorblock prints—the only real color in the
room—completed the futuristic look. I flopped on the floor between the
couch and his desk, and he did the same.

 “So,
tell me what’s really going on, Andy,” he said as he handed me a
little wooden tile holder. “I’m sure you’re feeling really
overwhelmed right now.”

 I picked
my seven tiles and carefully arranged them in front of me. “Yeah,
it’s been a pretty crazy couple weeks. First moving, then starting.
It’s a weird place, hard to explain. It’s like, everyone’s
beautiful and thin and wearing gorgeous clothes. And they really do seem nice
enough—everybody’s been really friendly. Almost like they’re
all on serious prescription drugs. I don’t know…”

 “What?
What were you going to say?”

 “I
can’t put my finger on it. There’s just this feeling that
it’s all a house of cards that’s going to come crashing down around
me. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s ridiculous to be working
for afashion magazine, you know? The work’s been a little mindless so
far, but I don’t even care. It’s challenging enough because
it’s all new, you know?”

 He
nodded.

 “I
know it’s a ‘cool’ job, but I keep wondering how it’s
preparing me forThe New Yorker . I must just be looking for something to go
wrong, because so far it seems too good to be true. Hopefully, I’m just
crazy.”

 “I
don’t think you’re crazy, sweetie. I think you’re sensitive.
But I have to agree, I think you lucked out with this one. People go their
entire lives and don’t see the things you’ll see this year. Just
think! Your first job out of college, and you’re working for the most
important woman at the most profitable magazine at the biggest magazine
publishing company in the entire world. You’ll get to watch it all
happen, from the top down. If you just keep your eyes open and your priorities
in order, you’ll learn more in one year than most people in the industry
will see in their entire careers.” He placed his first word in the middle
of the board, JOLT.

 “Not
bad for an opening move,” I said and counted its worth, doubled it
because the first word always went on a pink star, and started a scorecard.
Dad: 22 points, Andy: 0. My letters weren’t showing much promise. I added
an A, M, and E to the L and accepted my paltry six points.

 “I
just want to make sure you give it a fair shake,” he said, switching his
tiles around on his holder. “The more I think about it, the more
I’m convinced this is going to mean big things for you.”

 “Well,
I sure hope you’re right, because I have enough paper cuts from wrapping
to last a long, long time. There better be more to the whole thing than
that.”

 “There
will be, sweetie, there will be. You’ll see. It might feel like
you’re doing silly stuff, but trust me, you’re not. This is the
start of something fantastic, I can feel it. And I’ve studied up on your
boss. This Miranda sounds like a tough woman, no doubt about it, but I think
you’re going to like her. And I think she’s going to like you, too.”

 He
placed the word TOWEL down using my E and looked satisfied.

 “I
hope you’re right, Dad. I really hope you’re right.”

 “She’s
the editor in chief ofRunway —you know, the fashion magazine?” I
whispered urgently into the phone, trying valiantly not to get frustrated.

 “Oh,
I know which one you mean!” said Julia, a publicity assistant for
Scholastic Books. “Great magazine. I love all those letters where girls
write in their embarrassing period stories. Are those for real? Do you remember
reading the one where—”

 “No,
no, not the one for teenagers. It’s most definitely for grown
women.” In theory, at least. “Have you really never seenRunway
?”Is it humanly possible that she hasn’t? I wondered.
“Anyway, it’s spelled P-R-I-E-S-T-L-Y. Miranda, yes,” I said
with infinite patience. I wondered how she’d react if she knew I actually
had someone on the line who’d never heard of her. Probably not well.

 “Well,
if you could get back to me as soon as possible, I’dreally appreciate
it,” I told Julia. “And if a senior publicist gets in anytime
soon,please have her call me.”

 It was a
Friday morning in the middle of December and the sweet, sweet freedom of the
weekend was only ten hours away. I had been trying to convince a
fashion-oblivious Julia at Scholastic that Miranda Priestly really was someone
important, someone worth bending rules and suspending logic for. This proved
significantly more difficult than I had anticipated. How could I have known
that I’d have to explain the weight of Miranda’s position to influence
someone who’d never even heard of the most prestigious fashion magazine
on earth—or its famous editor? In my four short weeks as Miranda’s
assistant, I’d already figured out that such weight-throwing and
favor-currying was merely part of my job, but usually the person I was
attempting to persuade, intimidate, or otherwise pressure yielded completely at
the mere mention of my infamous boss’s name.

 Unfortunately
for me, Julia worked for an educational publishing house where someone like
Nora Ephron or Wendy Wasserstein was much likelier to get VIP treatment than
someone known for her impeccable taste in fur. I inherently understood this. I
tried to remember all the way back to a time before I had ever heard of Miranda
Priestly—five weeks earlier—and couldn’t. But I knew that
such a magical time had existed. I envied Julia’s indifference, but I had
a job to do, and she wasn’t helping.

 The
fourth book in that wretched Harry Potter series was due to be released the
next day, a Saturday, and Miranda’s ten-year-old twin daughters each
wanted one. The first copies wouldn’t arrive in stores until Monday, but
I had to have them in my hands on Saturday morning—mere minutes after
they were released from the warehouse. After all, Harry and the crew had to catch
a private flight to Paris.

 My
thoughts were interrupted by the phone. I picked it up as I always did now that
Emily trusted me enough to speak to Miranda. And boy, did we
speak—probably in the vicinity of two dozen times a day. Even from afar,
Miranda had managed to creep into my life and completely take over, barking
orders and requests and demands at a rapid-fire pace from sevenA .M. until I
was finally allowed to leave at nineP .M.

 “Ahn-dre-ah?
Hello? Is anyone there? Ahn-dre-ah!” I jumped out of my seat the moment I
heard her pronounce my name. It took a moment to remember and accept that she
was not, in fact, in the office—or even in the country, and for the time
being, at least, I was safe. Emily had assured me that Miranda was completely
unaware that Allison had been promoted or I had been hired, that these were
insignificant details lost on her. As long as someone answered the phone and
got her what she needed, that person’s actual identity was irrelevent.

 “I
simply do not understand what takes you so long to speak after you pick up the
phone,” she stated. From any other person on earth that would have
sounded whiny, but from Miranda it sounded appropriately cold and firm. Just
like her. “In case you haven’t been here long enough to notice,
when I call, you respond. It’s actually simple. See? I call. You respond.
Do you think you can handle that, Ahn-dre-ah?”

 I nodded
like a six-year-old who’d just been reprimanded for throwing spaghetti on
the ceiling, even though she couldn’t see me. I concentrated on not
calling her “ma’am,” a mistake I’d made a week earlier
that had almost gotten me fired. “Yes, Miranda. I’m sorry,” I
said softly, head bowed. And for that moment Iwas sorry, sorry that her words
hadn’t registered in my brain three-tenths of a second faster than they
had, sorry that my tardiness in saying “Miranda Priestly’s
office” had taken a fraction of a second longer than absolutely
necessary. Her time was, as I was constantly reminded, much more important than
my own.

 “All
right then. Now, after wasting all that time, may we begin? Did you confirm Mr.
Tomlinson’s reservation?” she asked.

 “Yes,
Miranda, I made a reservation for Mr. Tomlinson at the Four Seasons at one
o’clock.”

 I could
see it coming a mile away. A mere ten minutes earlier she’d called and
ordered me to make a reservation at the Four Seasons and call Mr. Tomlinson and
her driver and the nanny to inform them of the plans, and now she’d want
to rearrange them.

 “Well,
I’ve changed my mind. The Four Seasons is not the appropriate venue for
his lunch with Irv. Reserve a table for two at Le Cirque, and remember to
remind the maître d‘ that they will want to sit in theback of the
restaurant. Not on display in the front.The back . That’s all.”

 I had
convinced myself when I first spoke with Miranda on the phone, that by uttering
“that’s all,” she really intended those words to mean
“thank you.” By the second week I’d rethought that.

 “Of
course, Miranda.Thank you, ” I said with a smile. I could sense her
pausing on the other end of the line, wondering how to respond. Did she know I
was calling attention to her refusal to say thank you? Did it seem odd to her
that I was thanking her for ordering me around? I had recently begun thanking
her after every one of her sarcastic comments or nasty phone-in commands, and
the tactic was oddly comforting. She knew I was mocking her somehow, but what
could she say?Ahn-dre-ah, I never want to hear you thank me again. I forbid you
to express your gratitude in such a manner! Come to think of it, that might not
be that much of a stretch.