“Rich tax” is the price you pay for being rich in the first place. If there’s one thing that most people don’t understand about the rich it’s that there’s nothing they like more than fleecing other rich people. It’s why the richer the rich get, the more expensive everything they need to buy to prove they’re part of the richy-rich club—the yachts, the Hamptons homes, the clothes—goes up in price as well.
And so, given the rich tax, I guessed the dress would be eight thousand dollars.
Wrong. “Twenty thousand dollars,” said the saleswoman.
I gasped. That made the rich tax about twelve thousand dollars. It also made the dress out of reach for all but the richest of the rich. The point zero, zero 1 percent.
“Twenty thousand dollars,” I exhaled. “That’s the price of a small car. Who on earth can afford that?”
The salesperson looked around to make sure we weren’t being overheard. “You’d be surprised who can afford it.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say,” she whispered. “Hey, do you want to try it on?”
I shook my head.
“No. Because I’d never be able to afford it. Plus, I don’t have anything to wear it to.”
“You never know,” the salesperson said.
And there it was. The mantra of the eternally hopeful. Buy this dress, take it home. Maybe this time the charm will work. Maybe this time it really will transform your life.
How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?
For weeks, I’d been limping along in an old pair of patent leather pumps that, while painful, weren’t quite as painful as any of my other old shoes. I could last about two hours before I felt like my eyes were rolling into the back of my head from the agony.
“I can’t,” I finally said. “I can’t walk.”
It was time to buy a new pair of shoes. And since I didn’t have a lot of money to throw around, I’d have to view the shoes as an investment.
Which meant the shoe would have to be a staple. A shoe that could go from day to night. From pants to a cocktail dress. It would be a shoe that fit. A shoe that I could walk in.
I thought I knew the very shoes.
They were black suede platforms with hand-stitched lacing. There was a rosette on top. Despite the rosette, there was something very solid, almost militaresque about the shoes.
This being Madison World, however, I couldn’t just walk in, try them on, and buy them. As per the Ralph Lauren incident there was a protocol involved. Shoe salespeople are much nicer if you’re already wearing an expensive pair of shoes, the idea being that if you already own a pair of expensive shoes, you can probably afford many, many others. And so I dug out a pair of flat-heeled designer booties I’d purchased just before I left the city. The boots weren’t really my type of shoe, but I remembered that I was feeling confused about my life when I bought them. I’d just gotten sectionorced and wasn’t sure how to proceed. The salesperson, a young man with pretty curling hair and excited puppy dog eyes, mentioned that Nicole Kidman had worn the same boots in an ad. He pointed to a poster on the wall as proof.
In the photograph, Nicole Kidman looked like a woman who knew where she was going and what she was doing. She was not a woman who was sad. She was not a woman who was alone, depressed, and felt like a failure. She was in control of her mind and her destiny.
I bought the shoes and tried to walk in them. But the proportions were all wrong. The boots made my legs look shorter and my feet bigger. They were long, narrow, nasty things that pinched terribly. I wore them twice and retired them.
Until now.
Sure enough, those suckers still hurt.
I winced into the store with a rictus grin. The shoe section was all the way in the back. A fifty-foot walk past the clothes I couldn’t afford, past the fortysomething newly rich couple from Silicon Valley who could, and past the saleswomen who were trying to decide whether to help me or not. I said, “Erm, I’d like to see those shoes in the window?”
As usual, the salesperson asked which shoes, as if by forcing me back to the window and therefore the entrance, I might
wander out of the store on my own—which I sometimes did.
But the shoes weren’t there.
In fact, those shoes were so popular, another woman was trying on the only pair of eight and a halves left.
That was my size.