Filthy Rich by Dorothy Samuels

successfully to fend off the sad feelings starting to wash over me, along with an overpowering, and not altogether pleasant, sense of déjà vu. For the second time in my life, I was entering thedicey economic and emotional terrain I call “Gap Country”: a period of professional uncertainty and turmoil that finds you clinging for comfort to the notion that if your career doesn’t start looking up, and soon, you could always find work at a nearby Gap clothing store. Indeed, the very ubiquity of the Gap’s outlets for vending its strangely appealing generic preppy wear, which just yesterday you condemned as urban blight, suddenly becomes your major source of security and hope.
    My first experience in this scary realm dates back nearly eight years. I had just left Santa Monica Spaces, and it wasn’t yet clear whether I’d succeed in building a sufficiently large roster of well-paying clients to make a successful transition from closet consulting to my newly chosen profession of Personal Life Coach. The one thing that was certain from my standpoint was that I wasn’t going to go back to closets, or back to Brooklyn to take up the giant bug sprayer my sweet dad kept calling to say he had all filled and waiting for me. Becoming a Gap employee, or “Gapster,” as I prefer to call this exclusive club, was at least something different. On the bright side, moreover, it wasn’t lost on me that directing inquiring Gap customers to the location of the store’s sales racks can be considered a helping profession , in its way.
    There were nearly two months when practically every waking hour I wasn’t seeing my few existing clients, or massaging the contacts I hoped would lead to new ones, was spent skulking amid the meticulously stacked piles of new clothing displayed on the selling floor of the Gap store nearest my home, boning up just in case. Originally I worried that my mediocre folding skills, which I never found to be a real impediment in redesigning people’s closets, might disqualify me for a job whose central responsibility involves arranging garments into incredibly neat stacks. But that was before I learned the secret behind the Gap’s superhuman stacking. That secret is the utilization of ingenious plastic forms, which make precision folding pretty foolproof even for people like me whose attempts to master hospital corners have always ended in humiliation. The feeling of relief when I spotted a young female employee casually using such a form to straighten a pile of children’s sweaters one night just before closing is indescribable.
    Recalling that sweet moment of revelation somehow supplied me with the courage to confront what needed doing if I were to have any chance of preserving my hardwon Life Coaching career. Yes, Marcy, I thought, in a pinch there’s always the Gap.
    At precisely 9 A.M. , still wearing Rosie’s sweatsuit and munching one of the talk-show queen’s Twinkies for breakfast, I began dialing my clients, including Dolores, to cancel all appointments for the next few weeks. By then, I figured, wiping away a tiny dollop of white Twinkie cream that had fallen onto the pink sweatshirt, either something good would happen to put my life back on track again, or my clients, who have a notably short attention span when it comes to other folks’ problems, would forget that their Life Coach was such a well-known mess.
     
    I was waiting for the message tape to rewind, wondering how I was going to finance my self-imposed layoff, when my doorman Frank arrived with yet more floral and candy bribes from Leeza, Queen Latifah, and the gang. Easily the day’s most unusual offering came from Marcia Clark, the exassistant Los Angeles district attorney who parlayed her bungling of O. J. Simpson’s prosecution into a $4.2 million book deal, an image-enhancing beauty makeover, and a glitzy new career as a TV legal commentator and talk-show host: a pair of fine leather gloves from Bergdorf’s that recalled the