Bellwether

by Connie Willis

  Ben raised his head, his mouth grazing my hair, and looked at me. His gray eyes, behind his thick glasses, were serious.

  “I—” I said, and jerked out of his embrace.

  “Where are you going?” Ben said.

  “I have to—I just thought of something that ties into my hair-bobbing theory,” I said desperately. “I’ve got to put it on the computer before I forget About marathon dancing.”

  “Wait,” he said, and grabbed my hand. “I thought marathon dancing wasn’t until the thirties.”

  “It started in 1927,” I said, and wrenched out of his grasp.

  “But wasn’t that still after the hair-bobbing craze?” he said, but I was already out the door and halfway up the stairs.

  hair wreaths (1870—90)—–Ghoulish Victorian handicraft fad in which the hair of a deceased loved one (or assortment of loved ones, preferably with different-colored hair) was made into flowers. The hair (obtained somehow or other) was braided and woven into bouquets and wreaths, and placed under a glass dome, or framed and hung on the wall. Supplanted by the suffrage movement, croquet, and Elinor Glyn. The hair wreath fad may have been a contributing factor in the hair-bobbing fad of the 1920s.

  Significant breakthroughs have been triggered by all sorts of things—apples, frog legs, photographic plates, finches—but mine must be the only one ever triggered by one of Management’s idiotic sensitivity exercises.

  I didn’t stop till I was inside the stats lab. I hugged my arms to my chest and leaned against the door, panting and murmuring, over and over again, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  I was supposed to be such an expert at spotting trends, but it had taken me weeks to see where this one was leading. And all that time I’d thought it was his immunity to fads I was interested in. I’d taken notes on his cloth sneakers and ties. I’d even seriously considered Billy Ray’s proposal. And all that time—

  There was somebody coming down the hall. I hastily sat down in front of the computer, pulled up a program, and sat there, staring blindly at it.

  “Busy?” Gina said, coming in.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Oh,” and her expression plainly said, “You don’t look busy.” “I couldn’t find you after the meeting. I took a bathroom break right before they started the sensitivity exercise, and when I got back, you were gone. I just wanted to bring you the list of toy stores I’ve already tried so you don’t waste your time on them.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll go this weekend.”

  “Oh, no hurry. Bethany’s birthday isn’t for another two weeks, but it makes me kind of nervous that Toys “R” Us was out of it. That’s where Chelsea’s mother found the one for Brittany, and she said it was the only place she could find one.” She frowned. “Are you okay? You look like somebody who got sent to her room for a time-out.”

  A time-out. You’ll just have to sit here quietly until you can get control of your feelings, young lady.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I should have listened to your advice and taken a bathroom break, that’s all.”

  She nodded. “Those sensitivity exercises’ll do you in. Well, I’ll let you get back to work. Or whatever.” She patted me on the shoulder.

  “And I’ll deliver Romantic Bride Barbie. You don’t have to worry. I’ll find it,” I said, and started sorting blindly through a stack of clippings.

  As soon as she was gone I shut the door, and then went back and sat down at the computer and stared at the screen.

  The file I’d called up was my hair-bobbing model. It sat there, with its crisscrossing colored lines and that anomalous cluster in Marydale, Ohio, like a reproach.

  How could I hope to understand what had motivated women to cut their hair seventy years ago when I didn’t even understand what motivated me?

  I hadn’t even had a clue. Until Ben put his arms around me and pulled me close, I’d honestly thought I was trying to salvage his project because I couldn’t stand Flip. I’d even thought the reason I was irritated with Alicia was because she was trying to produce science-on-demand. And all the time—

  I heard a noise in the hall and put my hands on the keyboard. I needed to look busy so no one else would come talk to me.

  I stared at the model, with its intersecting patterns, its crisscrossing curves, every event impacting on every other, iterating and reiterating and leading inevitably to an outcome.

  Like my downfall. And maybe what I should be doing was drawing that, graphing the events and interactions that had led me to this pass. I called up the paintbox and an empty file and started trying to reconstruct the whole debacle.

  I had borrowed Billy Ray’s sheep. No, it had started before that, with Management and GRIM. Management had ordered a new funding form, and Ben’s had gotten lost, and I had suggested we work together. And Management had said yes because they wanted one of HiTek’s scientists to win the Niebnitz Grant.

  I started drawing in the connecting lines, from Management’s meetings to the funding forms to Shirl, the new assistant, who had brought me extra copies of the missing pages, which I’d taken down to Ben, to Alicia, who wanted to collaborate with Bennett to win the Niebnitz Grant, And back to Management and GRIM. And Flip.

  “You left the meeting early,” Flip said reprovingly, opening the door. She still had on the pulled-down hat, but she’d abandoned the SHAM T-shirt and was wearing a see-through dress over a bodysuit that appeared to be made of Cerenkhov blue duct tape.

  “You didn’t get your streamlined supply procurement processing form,” she said, and handed me a binder. “And I wanted to ask you a question.”

  “I’m busy, Flip,” I said.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” she said. “I know you’re still mad about my answering the personal ad, but you’re the only one I can ask. Desiderata and Shirl are both really nevved at me.”

  I wonder why, I thought. “I am really busy, Flip.”

  “It’ll only take a minute.” She pulled a stool over next to the computer and perched on it. “How far should somebody go when they’re really unbalanced about somebody?”

  This was just what I needed, to discuss the sex life of a person with a pierced nose and duct tape underwear.

  “I mean, if you thought you’d never see him again, do you think it’s stupid to do something really swarb?”

  I had talked Ben into combining our projects. I had borrowed a flock of sheep. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “It’s about my hair,” she said, and pulled off her hat. “I cut it off.”

  She certainly had. Her hair was chopped to within an inch of her blue scalp. For a second I thought she’d had the same problem with the duct tape as Desiderata, but her flipping hank had been hacked off, too. She looked like a very cold plucked chicken.

  I felt a sudden pang of empathy for her, in love with a dentist, of all people, who didn’t know she existed, who was probably already engaged.

  “So what I wondered,” she said, “was whether it looks okay like this or whether I should add another brand.” She pointed to her right temple, just below the scalped area.

  “Of what?” I said faintly.

  She sighed. “Of a strip of duct tape, of course.”

  Of course.

  “I think it depends on how you’re going to let your hair grow out,” I said, hoping she was going to.

  Apparently she was, because she put her hat back on again and said, “So you don’t, then? Think it would be stupid?”

  She apparently didn’t expect an answer because she was already halfway out the door.

  “Flip,” I said, “would you do me a favor? Would you go down to Bio and tell Dr. O’Reilly I’m leaving early, and I’ll talk to him tomorrow?”

  “Bio is clear on the other side of the building,” she said, outraged. “Anyway, I doubt if he’s down there. When I left the meeting, he was talking to Dr. Turnbull. Like always. I bet he wishes he’d had her for a partner for that hug thing.”

  “I’m really busy, Flip,”
I said, and started typing to prove it. Flip. This was all Flip’s fault. She had lost Bennett’s funding forms and stolen my personal ads, which is why I’d been in the copy room when Bennett came in.

  “Did you know Dr. Patton got engaged?” Flip said conversationally. “To that guy who didn’t want to get married?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’ll bet Dr. O’Reilly and Dr. Turnbull get married pretty soon.”

  I continued to type doggedly, and after a while Flip got bored and slouched off, but I didn’t stop. I hadn’t been kidding when I said this mess was all Flip’s fault. She hadn’t just lost the funding forms and stolen the personals. She had started the whole thing. If she hadn’t delivered Dr. Turnbull’s package to me in the first place, I would never even have met Ben. I never even got down to Bio, and at that first meeting he’d been clear on the other side of the room.

  I kept adding lines, tracing the interconnecting events. She had thrown away six weeks’ worth of research and stolen my stapler. And she’d left pages out of the funding forms. I’d had to take the missing pages to Ben. The prints of her Mary Janes and backless clogs were all over the place, making mischief.

  She was like some Iago. Or some evil guardian angel. “Always there, right mere beside you, wherever you go,” was what Angels, Angels Everywhere had said. And it was true. She was everywhere, like some awful anri-Pippa, wandering past unsuspecting windows and wreaking havoc wherever she went.

  I added more lines. Flip raising her hand and getting an assistant, Flip spearheading the antismoking campaign that had made me suggest the paddock to Shirl, who had told us about the bellwether. Flip getting me depressed that day in Boulder. If it hadn’t been for her talking about feeling itch, I would never have gone out with Billy Ray, I would never have known Targhees were sheep, and I would never have come up with the idea of borrowing them.

  And Ben would be off somewhere in France, studying chaos theory, I thought bleakly. I knew none of this was Flip’s fault. I was the one who’d made up excuses to see Ben, to talk to him, from that very first day when I’d followed him out on the porch.

  Flip wasn’t the source. She might have precipitated things, but the outcome was my fault. I had been following the oldest trend of all. Right over the cliff.

  Flip was back, standing and looking interestedly over my shoulder.

  “I’m still busy, Flip,” I said.

  She tossed her nonexistent hank. “Dr. O’Reilly left. I bet he went out on a date with Dr. Turnbull.”

  A ghastly unlosable guardian angel. “Don’t you have someplace you need to go?” I said.

  “That’s what I came to tell you,” she said. “Bye.”

  And left. I pondered the screen, wondering how to graph that little encounter, but she was already back.

  “Are there hats in Texas?” she said.

  “Ten-gallon ones,” I said.

  She left again, this time apparently for good. I added a few more lines to my graph, and then just sat there and stared at the crisscrossing curves, the neatly plotted regressions.

  “Seven o’clock,” Gina said, sticking her head in the door. She had her coat on. “You can come out of time-out now.”

  I smiled. “Thanks, Mom,” I said, but I didn’t leave. I waited till I was sure everybody was gone and then went down and hung over the gate, watching the sheep as they moved and grazed and moved again, occasionally bleating, occasionally lost, impelled by bellwethers they didn’t recognize, by instincts they didn’t know they had.

  kewpies (1909—15)—–Doll fad derived from illustrated poems in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Kewpie dolls looked like rosy-cheeked cherubs, with round tummies and a yellow curl on top of their heads. Wildly popular with adults and little girls, kewpies appeared as paper dolls, salt shakers, greeting cards, wedding cake decorations, and prizes at county fairs.

  For the next two days I kept clear of the lab and Ben, straightening up my lab and entering miles of data about mahjongg and Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic.

  This is ridiculous, I told myself on Thursday. You’re not Peyton. You have to see him sometime. Grow up.

  But when I got down to the lab, Alicia was there, leaning over the gate. Ben had the bellwether by her po-mo pink bow and was explaining the principle of attention structure. He was wearing his blue tie.

  “This has real possibilities,” Alicia was saying. “Thirty-one percent of all projects the Niebnitz Grant recipients were working on at the time of the award were cross-discipline collaborations. The thing is getting the right collaboration. The committee is obviously going for gender balance, which you’re okay on, but chaos theory and statistics are both math-based disciplines. You need a biologist.”

  “Do you need me?” I said.

  They both looked up.

  “If not, I have some research I need to do at the library.”

  “No, go ahead,” Ben said. “The bellwether’s not in the mood to learn anything this morning.” He rubbed his knee. “She’s already butted me twice. While you’re at the library, see if they’ve got anything on how to get a leader to follow.”

  “I will,” I said, and started down the hall.

  “Wait,” Ben said, sprinting to catch up with me. “I wanted to talk to you. Did you have a breakthrough? With the dance marathon thing?”

  Yes, I thought, looking at him forlornly. A breakthrough. “No,” I said. “I thought there was a connection, but there wasn’t,” and I went to Boulder to look for Romantic Bride Barbie.

  Gina had given me a list of toy stores, with the ones she’d already tried crossed off, which didn’t leave all that many. I started at the top, determined to work my way down.

  I had only thought I understood the Barbie fad. Not even Brittany’s birthday party had prepared me for what I actually found.

  There were Fashion Bright Barbies, Costume Ball Barbies, Bubble Angel Barbies, Sunflower Barbies, and even a Locket Surprise Barbie, whose plastic chest opened up to dispense lip gloss and rouge. There were multicultural Barbies, Barbies that lit up, remote-control Barbies, Barbies whose hair you could bob.

  Barbie had a Porsche, a Jaguar, a Corvette, a Mustang, a speedboat, an RV, and a horse. Also a beauty bath, a Fun Fridge, a health spa, and a McDonald’s. Not to mention the Barbie jewelry boxes, lunchboxes, workout tapes, audiotapes, videotapes, and pink nail polish.

  But no Romantic Bride Barbie. The Toy Palace had Country Bride Barbie, with a pink-checked gingham sash and a bouquet of daisies. Toys “R” Us had a Dream Wedding Barbie and Barbie’s Wedding Fantasy, both of which I seriously considered in spite of Gina’s injunctions.

  The Cabbage Patch had four full aisles of Barbies and a clerk with an i stamped on her forehead. “We have Troll Barbie,” she said, when I asked her about Romantic Bride. “And Pocahontas.”

  I made it through four toy stores and three discount stores and then drove over to the Caffe Krakatoa to see if there were any Barbies listed in the personals.

  It was now calling itself Kepler’s Quark, a bad sign.

  “Don’t tell me. You don’t have latte anymore,” I said to the waiter, who was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, and sunglasses.

  “Caffeine’s bad for you,” he said, handing me the menu, which had grown to ten pages. “I’d suggest a smart drink.”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I said. “Believing a beverage can increase your IQ?”

  He tossed his head, revealing an i on his forehead.

  Of course.

  “Smart drinks are nonalcoholic beverages with neurotransmitters to enhance memory and alertness and increase brain function,” he said. “I’d suggest the Brain Blast, which increases your math skills, or the Get Up and Van Gogh, which enhances your artistic ability.”

  “I’ll have the Reality Check,” I said, hoping it would enhance my ability to face facts.

  I tried reading the personals, but they were too depressing: “To the blonde who eats lunch every day at Jane’s Java Joint,
you don’t know me but I’m hopelessly in love with you. Please reply.”

  I switched to the articles.

  A “harmonic bonding” therapist was offering duct tape soul alignments.

  Two men in New York City had been arrested for operating the hot new fad, a “smoking speakeasy.”

  Po-mo pink had fizzled as a fad. A fashion designer was quoted as saying, “There’s no accounting for the public’s taste.”

  Truer words, I thought, and it was time I faced that, too. I was never going to discover the source of the hair-bobbing fad, no matter how much data I fed into my computer model. No matter how many different colored lines I drew.

  Because it didn’t have anything to do with suffrage or World War I or the weather. And even if I could ask Bernice and Irene and the rest of them why they’d done it, it still wouldn’t help. Because they wouldn’t know.

  They were as benighted and blind as I had been, moved by feelings they weren’t aware of, by forces they didn’t understand. Right straight into the river.

  My smart drink came. It was chartreuse, a color that had been a fad in the late twenties. “What’s in it?” I said.

  He sighed, a heavy sigh like someone out of Dostoyevsky. “Tyrosine, L-phenylalanine, and synergistic cofactors,” he said. “And pineapple juice.”

  I took a sip of it. I didn’t feel any smarter. “Why did you get your forehead branded?” I said.

  Apparently he hadn’t finished his smart drink. He stared at me blankly.

  “Your i brand?” I said, pointing at it. “Why did you decide to have it done?”

  “Everybody has them,” he said, and slouched off.

  I wondered if he had gotten the brand to please his girlfriend or if he was rebelling against anti-intellectualism or his parents, or in love with somebody who didn’t know he was alive.

  I sipped my drink and kept reading. I didn’t feel any smarter. Bantam Books had paid an eight-figure advance for Getting in Touch with Your Inner Fairy Godmother. Cerenkhov blue was the “cool/hot” color for winter, and men and women were smoking cigars in L.A., inspired by Rush Limbaugh or David Letterman or forces they didn’t understand. Like sheep. Like rats.