‘Are you out of your mind? Miranda won’t like ninety percent of the stuff people send. Some of it is downright insulting, things I won’t even show her. Like this,’ she said, picking up a small box. It was a Bang and Olufsen portable phone in their signature sleek silver with all rounded edges and the capability to remain clear for something like 2,000 miles. I had been in the store just a couple weeks earlier, watching Alex salivate over their stereo systems, and I knew the phone cost upward of five hundred dollars and could do everything short of holding a conversation for you. ‘A phone? Do you believe someone had the nerve to send Miranda Priestly a phone?’ She tossed it to me. ‘Keep it if you want it: I would never even let her see this. She’d be annoyed that someone sent something electronic.’ She pronounced the word ‘electronic’ as though it were synonymous with ‘covered in bodily fluids.’
I tucked the phone box under my desk and tried to keep the smile off my face. It was too perfect! A portable phone was on my list of stuff that I still needed for my new room, and I’d just gotten a five-hundred-dollar one for free.
‘Actually,’ she continued, flopping down again on the floor of Miranda’s office, Indian-style, ‘let’s put in a few hours wrapping some more of these wine bottles, and then you can open the presents that came in today. They’re over there.’ She pointed behind her desk to a smaller mountain of boxes and bags and baskets in a multitude of colors.
‘So, these are gifts that we’re sending out from Miranda, right?’ I asked her as I picked up a box and began wrapping it in the thick white paper.
‘Yep. Every year, it’s the same deal. Top-tier people get bottles of Dom. This would include Elias execs, and the big designers who aren’t also personal friends. Her lawyer and accountant. Midlevel people get Veuve, and this is just about everyone – the twins’ teachers, the hair stylists, Uri, et cetera. The nobodies get a bottle of the Ruffino Chianti – usually they go to the PR people who send small, general gifts that aren’t personalized for her. She’ll have us send Chianti to the vet, some of the babysitters who fill in for Cara, the people who wait on her in stores she goes to often, and all the caretakers associated with the summer house in Connecticut. Anyway, I order about twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of this stuff at the beginning of November, Sherry-Lehman delivers it, and it usually takes nearly a month to do all the wrapping. It’s good she’s out of the office now or we’d be taking this stuff home with us to wrap. Pretty good deal, because Elias picks up the tab.’
‘I guess it would cost double that to have the Sherry-Lehman place wrap them, huh?’ I wondered, still trying to process the hierarchy of the gift-giving.
‘What the hell do we care?’ she snorted. ‘Trust me, you’ll learn quickly that cost is no issue around here. It’s just that Miranda doesn’t like the wrapping paper they use. I gave them this white paper last year, but they just didn’t look as nice as when we do it.’ She looked proud.
We wrapped like that until close to six, with Emily telling me how things worked as I tried to wrap my mind around this strange and exciting world. Just as she was describing exactly how Miranda likes her coffee (tall latte with two raw sugars), a breathless blond girl I remembered as one of the many fashion assistants walked in carrying a wicker basket the size of a baby carriage. She hovered just outside Miranda’s office, looking as though she thought the soft gray carpeting might turn to quicksand under her Jimmy Choos if she dared to cross the threshold.
‘Hi, Em. I’ve got the skirts right here. Sorry that took so long, but no one’s around since it’s that weird time right before Thanksgiving. Anyway, hopefully you’ll find something she’ll like.’ She looked down at her basket full of folded skirts.
Emily looked up at her with barely disguised scorn. ‘Just leave them on my desk. I’ll return the ones that won’t work. Which I imagine will be most of them, considering your 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 what would 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 Oscar de la Renta. 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 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