CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I show up for work in a sleeveless purple blouse with tuxedo ruffles down the front and a silk skirt that floats around my knees, both chosen from my new wardrobe. I stop by a Duane Reade on the way to work and buy vampy purple lipstick to complete the look.
I’ve got my second house-sitting gig thanks to Dan’s connections, and after I catch up on email at the office, I take a cab to the Upper East Side where Greta Carr lives.
I’m prepared this time. I Google her first and find out she’s the daughter of a seafood processing magnate. While Daddy is selling frozen shrimp, she’s on the party circuit attached to various Hollywood B-list actors.
Goody, goody. I can hardly wait to snoop through the tabloid princess’s drawers.
Greta’s supposed to be gone for a couple of weeks and my duties are light—clean up and restock her place, get her cleaning and deliveries, and feed her fish.
From Google, I know she has a purse-dog, but apparently that poor creature travels with her everywhere.
I fill out a sign-in sheet and fork over my ID and Dan’s business card—my cards are still being printed, and Dan’s changed my title from “Assistant” to “Short-Term Property Manager.” I like it better than just plain “manager” of the coffee bar.
The doorman takes a photo of both cards with his phone, makes a few notes in a logbook and then hands me a key.
Greta’s apartment makes Gavin’s look tiny. It feels like the inside of a seashell, decorated in blush and pink and coral with stark white carpet and blond wood furniture. An enormous fish tank divides the main living space and now I see why its care instructions were so precise.
I gawk at the tropical beauties on display and then imagine Greta’s father’s machines stamping multicolored fish sticks out of them.
Yuck.
I open Greta’s refrigerator and see diet soda, slim-down drinks, a few dessert-flavored yogurt cups and some sad-looking baby carrots. Even her condiments look hungry, nothing but a few low-fat salad dressings.
I guess this is what skinny rich girls eat. I snoop and her pantry is equally barren, with portion-controlled snacks, fat-free this and low-carb that. The only guilty pleasures I can find are a bag of pretzels—good God, carbs!—and a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
I have no idea how she’d prepare it. There’s no butter, margarine, or milk in her fridge.
I go to Greta’s bedroom and it’s a riot of pink, made even more extreme by the mirrors hanging on the walls. Her wide dressing table has a fat, tufted stool upholstered in deep pink velvet. Dozens of perfumes, creams, and lotions are spread across the table.
I pick up the clothes strewn around her bedroom floor and toss them in a bag for the cleaners. A coppery sequined slip-dress slithers like a snake in my hands.
Greta’s closet is arresting, with row upon row of shoe racks lining both sides of the walk-in. It’s large enough for a full-length mirror and a zebra-striped chaise lounge, and I debate whether to re-hang the clothes draped over the chaise or stuff them in the laundry basket.
No way am I giving them the sniff-test. I play it safe and toss them in the laundry.
Greta’s regular housekeeper is due for a visit in a few days, so I ignore the towels on the bathroom floor and just grab the clothes left there. I wonder how she managed to strew several weeks’ worth of clothes everywhere, or if she simply doesn’t pick up after herself—ever.
Maybe that’s how this rich girl was raised.
I can’t resist peeking in Greta’s bathroom drawers but what I find there horrifies me. It’s a tableau to self-loathing, with every kind of cosmetic treatment on record, many of which I’ve never seen. One whole drawer is devoted to lipstick, and in another I find more wrinkle creams than Central Park has pedicabs.
I don’t think this woman is much over thirty, but from the staggering amount of cosmetics she owns, she hates her face.
I retrace my steps to the front door, piling two bags of laundry for my trip down to the cleaners. But before I leave, I have to know what really makes her tick.
Is she really just a spoiled rich girl?
My answer is not in her living room, where everything is ready for company or a magazine photographer to drop by. There’s a bookshelf full of classics that look like they’ve never been cracked. The books are arranged among objets d’art that might have all come from the same designer catalog.
This space is too perfectly impersonal to betray her secrets.
I snoop around the rest of the apartment and find a little reading nook tucked in a guest room—a ratty old afghan blanket is thrown over a super-sized chair that looks totally out of place among the rest of Greta’s designer duds.
This space feels real. It’s the place I can tell she goes when she’s not trying to show off. I find a bookshelf full of what she really reads—supermarket romances, chick lit, and some steamier titles.
I find binders full of torn magazine pages featuring celebrity galas. She’s cataloged them carefully, with sections for weddings, charity fund-raisers, society events, and big-ticket Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. I see color swatches and notes on which flowers are in season during certain months.
This girl is obsessed with parties.
In a large basket next to the chair, there’s a massive pile of fashion bibles and celebrity gossip rags. I wonder if she’s looking for pictures of herself in them? From what Google revealed, she’s photographed often enough.
The magazines are dog-eared and torn, with sticky notes popping out of some of them. I flip open the top magazine and see Jessica Alba staring at me in an advertisement for skin-smoothing makeup.
A fat black marker has circled her nose. A note to the side says, thinner. I flip to another page and another nose is circled. A few pages later, Scarlett Johansson’s boobs warrant a black marker note: C cup or D?
I can’t help myself. I drop into Greta’s chair and rifle through her magazine collection, each page revealing what Greta would look like if a plastic surgeon could just pinch, squeeze, plump, or slice her body into submission.
I saw her on Google—she’s gorgeous. And yet, she hates her body and her face. It makes me sad.
Suddenly I’m not so keen to want to know what really makes her tick.
I finally wrest myself away from this little shop of horrors and head down the elevator bearing two bags of clothes that probably cost several years’ worth of my salary. I walk a couple of blocks to the cleaners and make the exchange—dirty clothes for clean ones—and struggle under the weight of the fresh clothes on my way back to Greta’s apartment.
I am thankful again for my flats.
I tear off the protective plastic coverings and figure out where to hang each garment in her massive closet, a process that seems to take forever. I see that each one of the pink-and-chrome hangers bears a monogram: G.A.C.
Greta Amelia Carr.
Amelia? I wonder if her dad has a thing for flying.
My drycleaner gives out cheap wire hangers with flimsy cardboard tubes. Her drycleaner hangs laundry on Greta’s custom hangers. Chalk up one more thing about rich people that I didn’t even know was possible.
And chalk up one more thing for me to do. I set aside a fat pile of monogrammed hangers to drop off at the cleaners for when her next load of clothes is ready.
Finally, I wrap up my list of chores with a precise feeding of the tropical fish. I don’t want to commit ichthyomicide in my first week as a house sitter.
I close the door to Greta’s home, knowing my job’s done for a few days. But I wish I could do something better for her than just feeding her fish and shuttling her laundry to the cleaners.
She needs perspective. Cocooned in her rich-girl life, I imagine she’s had far too long to wallow in this weird self-judgment. Her idea of “problems” most of us would count as blessings.
I wish I could get her to stop looking in the mirror and start looking out the window.