I’d arranged the stiff orange boxes on the ready-to-distribute shelf of the closet, where they never remained for very long. Every third or fourth day, she’d prepare to leave for lunch and sigh, ‘Ahn-dre-ah, hand me a scarf.’ I comforted myself with the thought that I’d be long gone by the time she ran out of them completely. Whoever was unlucky enough to be around would have to tell her that there were no more white Hermès scarves, and that none could be made, shipped, created, formed, mailed, ordered, or mandated. The mere thought was terrifying.
Just as I got the closet and office opened, Uri called.
‘Andrea? Hello, hello. It is Uri. Could you come downstairs please? I am on Fifty-eighth Street, closer to Park Avenue, right in front of the New York Sports Club. I have things for you.’
This call was a good although imperfect way of telling me that Miranda would be arriving somewhat soon. Maybe. Most mornings she sent Uri ahead to the office with her things, an assortment of dirty clothes that needed dry cleaning, any copy she’d taken home to read, magazines, shoes or bags that needed to be fixed, and the Book. This way, she could have me meet the car and carry up all of these rather mundane things ahead of schedule and deal with them before she stepped into the office. She tended to follow her stuff by about a half hour, since Uri would drop off her things and then go pick her up from wherever she might be hiding that morning.
She herself could be anywhere, since, according to Emily, she never slept. I didn’t believe it until I started getting to the office ahead of Emily and would be the first to listen to the voice mail. Every night, without exception, Miranda would leave eight to ten ambiguous messages for us between the hours of one and six in the morning. Things like, ‘Cassidy wants one of those nylon bags all the little girls are carrying. Order her one in the medium size and a color she’d like,’ and ‘I’ll be needing the address and phone number of that antique store in the seventies, the one where I saw the vintage dresser.’ As though we knew which nylon bags were all the rage among ten-year-olds or at which one of four hundred antique stores in the seventies – east or west, by the way? – she happened to spot something she liked at some point in the past fifteen years. But each morning I faithfully listened to and transcribed those messages, hitting ‘replay’ over and over and over again, trying to make sense of the accent and interpret the clues in order to avoid asking Miranda directly for more information.
Once, I made the mistake of suggesting that we actually ask Miranda to provide a few more details, only to be met with one of Emily’s withering looks. Questioning Miranda was apparently off-limits. Better to muddle through and wait to be told how off the mark our results were. To locate the vintage dresser that had caught Miranda’s eye, I had spent two and a half days in a limo, cruising around Manhattan, through the seventies on both sides of the park. I ruled out York Avenue (too residential) and proceeded up First, down Second, up Third, down Lex. I skipped Park (again, too residential) but continued up Madison, and then repeated a similar process on the West Side. Pen poised, eyes peeled, phone book open in my lap, ready to jump out at the first sight of a store that sold antiques. I graced every single antique store – and not a few regular furniture stores – with a personal visit. By store number four, I had it down to an art form.
‘Hi, do you sell any vintage dressers?’ I’d practically scream the second they buzzed me inside. By the sixth store I wasn’t even bothering to move in from the doorway. Some snotty salesperson inevitably looked me up and down – I couldn’t escape it! – sizing me up to decide if I was someone to be bothered with. Most would notice the waiting Town Car at this point and grudgingly provide me with a yes or no answer, although some wanted detailed descriptions of the dresser I was looking for.
If they admitted to selling something that fit my two-word requirement, I would immediately follow up with a curt ‘Has Miranda Priestly been here recently?’ If they hadn’t thought I was crazy at this point, they now looked ready to call security. A few had never heard her name, which was fantastic both because it was rejuvenating to see firsthand that there were still normally functioning human beings whose lives weren’t dominated by her, and also because I could promptly leave without further discussion. The pathetic majority who recognized the name became instantly curious. Some wondered which gossip column I wrote for. But regardless of whatever story I made up, no one had seen her in their shop (with the exception of three stores who hadn’t ‘seen Ms Priestly in months, and oh, how we miss her! Please do tell her that Franck/Charlotte/Sarabeth sends his/her love!’).
When I hadn’t located the shop by noon of the third day, Emily finally gave me the green light to come to the office and ask Miranda for clarification. I started sweating when the car pulled in front of the building. I threatened to climb over the turnstile if Eduardo didn’t let me pass without a performance. By the time I reached our floor, the sweat had soaked through my shirt. Hands started shaking the moment I entered the office suite, and the perfectly prepared speech (Hello, Miranda. I’m fine, thanks so much for asking. How are you? Listen, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been trying very hard to locate the antique store you described, but I haven’t had much luck. Perhaps you could tell me whether it’s on the east or west side of Manhattan? Or maybe you even recall the name?) simply vanished into the fickle regions of my very nervous brain. Against all protocol, I didn’t post my question on the Bulletin; I requested permission to approach her at her desk and – probably because she was so shocked I’d had the nerve to speak without being spoken to – she granted it. To make a long story short, Miranda sighed and patronized and condescended and insulted in every delightful way of hers but finally opened her black leather Hermès planner (tied shut inconveniently but chicly with a white Hermès scarf) and produced … the business card for the store.
‘I left this information on the recording for you, Ahn-dre-ah. I suppose it would have been too much trouble to write it down?’ And even though the yearning to make decorative paper-cut designs all over her face with the aforementioned business card filled my entire being, I simply nodded and agreed. It wasn’t until I looked down at the card that I noticed the address: 244 East 68th Street. Naturally. East or west or Second Avenue or Amsterdam wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference, because the store I’d just dedicated the past thirty-three working hours to locating wasn’t even in the seventies.
I thought of this as I wrote down the last of Miranda’s late-night requests before racing downstairs to meet Uri at our designated area. Every morning he described where he parked in great detail so I could theoretically meet him at the car. But every morning, no matter how fast I made it downstairs, he’d bring everything inside himself so I wouldn’t have to race up and down the streets searching for him. I was delighted to see that today was no exception: he was leaning against a lobby turnstile, holding bags and clothes and books in his arms like a benevolent, generous grandfather.
‘Don’t you run to me, you hear?’ he said in his thick Russian accent. ‘All day long, you run, run, run. She makes you work very, very hard. This is why I bring the tings to you,’ he said, helping me get a grip on the overflowing bags and boxes. ‘You be a good girl, you hear, and have a nice day.’
I shot him a grateful look, glared at Eduardo semijokingly – my way of saying, ‘I will fucking kill you if you even think of asking me to strike a pose right now’ – and softened a bit when he buzzed me through the turnstiles, comment-free. I miraculously remembered to stop by the lobby newsstand, where Ahmed piled all of Miranda’s requested morning papers into my arms. Although the mailroom delivered each to Miranda’s desk by nine each day, I was still to purchase a full second set every morning to help minimize the risk that she would spend a single second in her office without her papers. Same with the weekly magazines. No one seemed to mind that we charged nine newspapers a day and seven magazines a week for someone who read only the gossip and fashion pages.
I dumped all her stuff on the floor under my desk. I
t was time for the first round of ordering. I dialed the number I’d memorized long ago for Mangia, a gourmet takeout place in midtown, and, as usual, Jorge answered.
‘Hi, pumpkin, it’s me,’ I’d say, propping the phone against my shoulder so I could start logging into Hotmail. ‘Let’s get this day started.’ Jorge and I were friends. Talking three, four, five times a morning had a funny way of bonding two people rather quickly.
‘Hey, baby, I’ll send one of the boys over right away. Is she there yet?’ he asked, understanding that ‘she’ was my lunatic boss and that she worked for Runway, but not quite understanding who exactly would be consuming the breakfast I had just ordered. Jorge was one of my morning men, as I liked to call them. Eduardo, Uri, Jorge, and Ahmed gave a decent as possible start to my day. They were deliciously unaffiliated with Runway, even though their separate existences in my life were solely meant to make its editor’s life more perfect. Not a single one of them truly understood Miranda’s power and prestige.
Breakfast number one would be on its way to 640 Madison in seconds, and the chances were good I’d have to throw it out. Miranda ate four slices of greasy, fatty bacon, two sausage links, and a soft cheese Danish every morning, and washed it down with a tall latte from Starbucks (two raw sugars, remember!). As far as I could tell, the office was divided on whether she was permanently on the Atkins diet or just lucky enough to have a superhuman metabolism, the result of some pretty fantastic genes. Either way, she thought nothing of devouring the fattiest, most sickeningly unhealthy foods – even though the rest of us weren’t exactly afforded the same luxury. Since nothing stayed hot for more than ten minutes after it arrived, I’d keep reordering and tossing until she showed up. I could get away with microwaving each meal one time, but that bought me only an extra five minutes, and she could usually tell. (‘Ahn-dre-ah, this is vile. Get me a fresh breakfast at once.’) I would order and reorder every twenty minutes or so until she called from her cell phone and told me to order her breakfast (‘Ahn-dre-ah, I’ll be at the office shortly. Order my breakfast’). Of course, this was usually only a two- or three-minute warning, so the pre-ordering was necessary both because of the short warning and in the rather common event that she didn’t bother to call at all. If I’d done my job, by the time her actual call for breakfast had come, I’d already have two or three on the way.
The phone rang. It had to be her, too early to be anyone else.
‘Miranda Priestly’s office,’ I chirped, bracing myself for the iciness.
‘Emily, I’ll be there in ten minutes and I’d like my breakfast to be ready.’
She had taken to calling both Emily and me ‘Emily,’ suggesting, quite rightly, that we were indistinguishable from each other and completely interchangeable. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was offended, but I’d grown accustomed to it at this point. And besides, I was too tired to really care about something as incidental as my name.
‘Yes, Miranda, right away.’ But she had already hung up. The real Emily walked into the office.
‘Hey, is she here?’ she whispered, looking furtively toward Miranda’s office as she always did, without a hello or a good morning, just like her mentor.
‘Nope, but she just called and she’ll be here in ten. I’ll be back.’
I quickly transferred my cell phone and cigarettes to my coat pocket and ran. I had only a few minutes to get downstairs, cross Madison, and jump the line at Starbucks – and suck down my first precious cigarette of the day while in transit. Stamping out the last embers, I stumbled into the Starbucks at 57th and Lex and surveyed the line. If it was fewer than eight or so people, I preferred to wait like a normal person. Like most days, however, the line today was twenty or more poor professional souls, wearily waiting in line for their expensive caffeine fix, and I had to jump in front of them. It was not something I relished, but Miranda didn’t seem to understand that the latte I presented to her each morning could not only not be delivered but could easily take a half hour at prime time to purchase. A couple weeks of shrill, angry phone calls on my cell phone (‘Ahn-dre-ah, I simply do not understand. I called you a full twenty-five minutes ago to tell you I’d be in, and my breakfast is not ready. This is unacceptable.’), and I had spoken to the franchise manager.
‘Um, hi. Thanks for taking a minute to talk with me,’ I said to the petite black woman who was in charge. ‘I know this sounds absolutely crazy, but I was wondering if we could work something out in terms of me having to wait in line.’ I went on to explain, as best I could, that I work for a rather important, unreasonable person who doesn’t like to wait for her morning coffee, and was there any way I could walk ahead of the line, subtly, of course, and have someone prepare my order immediately? By some stroke of dumb luck, Marion, the manager, was going to FIT at night for a degree in fashion merchandising.
‘Ohmigod, are you kidding? You work for Miranda Priestly? And she drinks our lattes? A tall? Every morning? Unbelievable. Oh, yes, yes, of course! I’ll tell everyone to help you right away. Don’t worry about a thing. She is, like, the most powerful person in fashion,’ Marion gushed as I forced myself to nod enthusiastically.
And so it came that I could, at will, bypass a long line of tired, aggressive, self-righteous New Yorkers and order before those who had been waiting for many, many minutes. It didn’t make me feel good or important or even cool, and I always dreaded the days I had to do it. When the lines were hellishly long like the one today – snaking around the entire counter and pushing its way outside – I felt even worse and knew I’d be walking out with a full load. My head was pounding at this point, and my eyes already felt heavy and dry. I tried to forget that this was my life, the reason I’d spent four long years memorizing poems and examining prose, the result of good grades and lots of kissing up. Instead, I ordered Miranda’s tall latte from one of the new baristas and added a few drinks of my own. A grande Amaretto Cappuccino, a Mocha Frappuccino, and a Caramel Macchiato landed in my four-cup carrier, along with a half-dozen muffins and croissants. The grand total came to $28.83, and I made sure to tuck my receipt into the already bulging, specially designated receipt section of my wallet, all of which would be reimbursed by the always reliable Elias-Clark.
I had to hurry now, as it was already twelve minutes since Miranda had called and I knew she’d probably be sitting there, seething, wondering exactly where I disappeared to every morning – the Starbucks logo on the side of the cup didn’t ever clue her in. But before I could pick up all the stuff from the counter, my phone rang. And as usual, my heart lurched. I knew it was her, absolutely, positively knew it, but it scared me nonetheless. The caller ID confirmed my suspicion, and I was surprised to hear that it was Emily, calling from Miranda’s line.
‘She’s here and she’s pissed,’ Emily whispered. ‘You’ve got to get back here.’
‘I’m doing everything I can,’ I growled, trying to balance the carrying tray and the bag of baked goods on one arm and hold the phone with the other.
And thus the basic root of the hatred that existed between Emily and me. Since she was in the ‘senior’ assistant position, I was more of Miranda’s personal assistant, there to fetch those coffees and meals, help her kids with their homework, and run all over the city to retrieve the perfect dishes for her dinner parties. Emily did her expenses, made her travel arrangements, and – the biggest job of all – put through her personal clothing order every few months. So when I was out gathering the goodies each morning, Emily was left alone to handle all of the ringing phone lines and an alert, early-morning Miranda and all of her demands. I hated her for being able to wear sleeveless shirts to work, where she wouldn’t ever have to leave the warm office six times a day to race around New York fetching, searching, hunting, gathering. She hated me for having excuses to leave the office, where she knew I always took longer than necessary to talk on my cell phone and smoke cigarettes.
The walk back to the building usually took longer than the walk to Starbucks, since I had to distr
ibute my coffees and snacks. I preferred to hand them out to the homeless, a small band of regulars who hung out on stoops and slept in doorways on 57th Street, thumbing the city’s attempts to ‘clean them up.’ The police always hustled them away before rush hour kicked into high gear, but they were still hanging out when I was doing the day’s first coffee run. There was something so fantastic – invigorating, really – in making sure that these overpriced, Elias-sponsored coffee faves made it into the hands of the city’s most undesirable people.
The urine-soaked man who slept outside the Chase Bank got a daily Mocha Frappuccino. He never actually woke up to accept it, but I left it (with a straw, of course) next to his left elbow each morning, and it was often gone – along with him – when I returned for my next coffee run a few hours later.
The old lady who propped herself up on her cart and set out a cardboard sign that read NO HOME/CAN CLEAN/NEED FOOD got the Caramel Macchiato. I soon found her name was Theresa, and I used to buy her a tall latte, like Miranda’s. She always said thank you, but she never made a move to taste it while it was still hot. When I finally asked her if she wanted me to stop bringing them, she vigorously shook her head and mumbled that she hates to be picky, but she’d actually like something sweeter, that the coffee was too strong. The next day I had her coffee flavored with vanilla and topped with whipped cream. Was this better? Oh yes, it was much, much better, but maybe now it was a touch too sweet. One more day and I finally got it right: it turns out Theresa liked her coffee unflavored, topped with whipped cream and some caramel syrup. She flashed a near-toothless smile and began guzzling it each and every day, the moment I handed it to her.
The third coffee went to Rio, the Nigerian who sold CDs off a blanket. He didn’t appear to be homeless, but he walked over to me one morning when I was handing Theresa her daily fix and said, or, rather, sang, ‘Yo, yo, yo, you like the Starbucks fairy or what? Where’s mine?’ I handed him a grande Amaretto Cappuccino the next day, and we’d been friends ever since.