Lucky Stars by Jane Heller

is just a guess, but I’ll bet there are more nannies in Brentwood than anyplace on earth. More SUVs, too (the Mercedes ones). It’s a place where the wives are blonder, the husbands are tanner, and the kids—well, when you’re six and your parents have already run out of ways to spoil you, it’s a problem.
    I called the shop and spoke to the manager, a woman who introduced herself as Cameron Slade and asked me to come in for an interview, which I did the very next morning.
    “Nice to meet you,” said Cameron, who clearly didn’t think it was nice to meet me, just a dreary necessity. She was as cold as an ice sculpture and just as chiseled. Her dark brown hair fell smoothly around a face that had been whittled and carved and planed so as to render her one of those women with virtually no lines or spots, no imperfections, no character. She was in her early forties, I figured, but seemed older, despite the cosmetic surgery, probably because she looked so joyless.
    “It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said. We sat in her office in the back of the store, which, by the way, reminded me of a stage set, because it felt so manufactured. Cornucopia! specialized in imported accessories for the home—from furniture, linens, and tableware to custom stationery and an entire children’s department—and every piece of merchandise was romanced, displayed beautifully, displayed artfully. The store symbolized wretched excess at its most subversive—not the kind you see on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills but the kind you see in upscale suburbia. It had an aura of pre ciousness, of We-know-what’s-best-for-you, of Shop-here-if-y ou’re-the-third-wife-of-a-movie- mogul-and-you-don’t-have-a-clue-which-fork-to-use-for-which-course. “Do you have any sales experience?” asked Cameron.
    “I worked in the hosiery department at Macy’s when I lived in Cleveland,” I said. “But that was years ago. I’ve been working as an actress since I moved to L.A.”
    “Interesting. I’ve always wanted to be an actress.”
    I tried not to roll my eyes. The woman who cleaned my teeth always wanted to be an actress. So did the woman who taught my yoga class and the woman who owned the apartment I rented and the woman who sold me my health insurance policy. Los Angeles has almost as many aspiring actresses as it does cars.
    “Would I have seen you in anything?” she asked.
    “Probably. I’ve done a lot of television. And I was in Pet Peeve, the last Jim Carrey movie.”
    Cameron nodded in recognition. But not because she’d seen me. “Jim Carrey has been a customer of ours,” she said. “Which prompts me to tell you about Rule Number One here at Cornucopia!: No member of the sales staff must ever be a gushing fan around a celebrity. In other words, there will be no discussion of their films or television programs, no attempts to make a connection for personal gain, no pestering them for autographs.”
    “Understood.” I assumed that if there was a Rule Number One, there must be other rules. I braced myself.
    “So you’d like to work part-time, between auditions. Is that it?”
    “Yes. I could give you all day on Saturday and Sunday, plus I could fill in on weekdays if my agent doesn’t have anything for me.”
    “You’d be paid a commission on any item you sell.”
    “I’m all for that.”
    “Good. Are you a careful person?”
    “Careful?” No, I’m a bull in a china shop. “Sure. I’d treat the merchandise as if it were my own.”
    “That’s Rule Number Two: If a member of the sales staff breaks, scratches, or soils an item, he or she must repair or replace it out of his or her paycheck.”
    “As he or she should.”
    “Now, are you familiar with the type of merchandise we stock? Our inventory embodies the best of France, Italy, and England. We have exquisite table settings, for example, decorated with French faience such as Quimper or the more subtle colors of Vietri’s cucina fresco. We carry the distinctive D.