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. I liked 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!’
‘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 four A.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, Ralph Lauren? Chanel? Frederic Marteau’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 to The 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 Runway girl 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 seven A.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 from Sliver.
