The Leading Indicators

by Gregg Easterbrook

  Margo was splattered with blood, as if she were auditioning for a slasher film. “Thanks for getting here fast,” she said. “He was starting to look a little cyanotic.”

  An EMT asked Margo if she was a doctor, and the compliment made her day. Then he advised her, “Strip immediately. Get into the shower and turn the water as hot as you can bear. Bleach your clothes on extended hot cycle. You know nothing about this guy.”

  There was something faintly titillating about being ordered to strip by a handsome stranger. A police car, a fire engine, a fire captain’s car, then a second police car arrived to join the ambulance. There were numerous crackling radios, people in uniform reporting information in clipped codes. It seemed as though the military had come to occupy the street.

  Neighbors stayed inside, watching from their windows, when the accident had just occurred and their help was needed. Now that the neighbors clearly were not needed, they came out to ask if there was anything they could do.

  The ambulance departed with the driver: he was sitting up, his bleeding controlled, and smiling after a hypo of morphine. Margo completed paperwork for a policeman, who seemed shockingly young for a position of such authority. She stood in the driveway with fresh blood dripping down her breasts, casually talking to him.

  The two women entered the house. “He had a gun,” Lillian said, as though this were a news flash regarding a police officer. It occurred to Margo that her friend had never seen a real firearm. As instructed, Margo went directly to the shower, and fairly scorched herself.

  Being inside lent a sensation of abundance. The many rooms, more than Margo’s family of four needed, by their number testified to the ability to pay for such things. There was expensive furniture, paint chosen by a color consultant, the open-plan kitchen endorsed by architecture magazines. And perfect cleanliness. Margo had the house cleaned twice a week, paying the Guatemalan woman fifteen dollars an hour. Some of her well-to-do neighbors paid half that and shouted over the slightest error, knowing the cleaning women were illegals who would never dare talk back. Margo wrote down the names of her cleaning woman’s children and always asked after them. Of course, she’d paid the color consultant two hundred dollars an hour. That role was a skilled position. Nobody’s born knowing what goes with mocha.

  Occasionally Margo caught herself feeling smug that she treated the Guatemalan woman generously. Paying an unskilled illegal a decent amount was better than nickel-and-diming but was not going to change the course of society. Margo knew that if she was called before her Maker and asked to account for her life, leading with “I gave my cleaning woman more than my neighbors gave theirs” would be unlikely to open doors.

  “Do you want a cappuccino? The machine does those, too,” Margo said. She’d put on a tracksuit after her shower, and looked athletic. Setting about to install the new part in the machine in hopes of producing a cappuccino, she seemed the picture of competence. In a moment Margo began swearing like a sailor as steam blasted in the wrong direction—she had set one of the dials improperly.

  Margo once passed an agreeable morning counting the controls and dials on her technological possessions. There were sixty-two switches with more than a hundred possible settings in the Lexus, and that wasn’t including the hundreds of stations on the satellite radio. There were twenty-eight switches on the Bosch dishwasher. Her laptop, driven by software, could be set in essentially unlimited ways—and the moment she finally grasped current systems, upgrades forced her to start over. Margo tried to disable upgrades so the laptop would stay the same. But if she forgot and left the laptop on, the machine upgraded itself, mischievously, in the middle of the night. Too bad the laptop didn’t make shoes while she was sleeping and leave them on the garage workbench.

  Lillian watched, fascinated, as Margo confronted the cappuccino machine. This was something Lillian would never consider attempting herself, yet took on faith that a total stranger, earning minimum wage, would do correctly for her in a restaurant. Lillian lived alone, and made herself nothing more challenging than toast. Within walking distance of her downtown condo there were, after all, a profusion of interesting eating places, from quick American to elegant Northern Italian, plus every Asian, Central American and African subcuisine. Tea and a slice of toast with jam were all Lillian Epperson needed to start her day. Something better always came along later.

  Margo had been born in Winnetka, Illinois, and raised in the kind of hopeful household that was drawing on two energies—the industrious hum of Chicago to the south and the peaceful murmur of Lake Michigan to the east. The sense of unlimited promise is trusted to all who come from the American Midwest, a place that was strong enough to resist an ice age. As a girl, Margo played on Tower Road Beach and liked gazing off into the distance, trying to spy where the lake ended. She assumed the water went on forever. In a sense this was true, since the water that now appeared to her as a lake had existed since shortly after the cosmos began and would continue to exist long after people were extinct or had evolved to some higher form.

  Children born into circumstances where there is food and play but no war think the world was created to receive them personally. Margo as a girl thought this. For all we know, she was right.

  Becoming a woman, Margo spent a few years on her own in the city, living in Lincoln Park, going to the music clubs and to watch experimental theater groups perform in converted auto-repair shops. She took lakeside walks with a succession of young men who collectively were somewhat above average in appeal. Lincoln Park was a comforting place—gentrified, with most residents headed upward in life, yet sufficiently urban and funky as to feel uncompromised. It was a privilege to have spent young adulthood there.

  As for the apartment, she told her mother the building had been recommended by a good friend who knew the owner. Actually she’d found it by walking through neighborhoods until she passed a blocky tan structure with an APARTMENTS FOR RENT INQUIRE WITHIN sign by the entrance. Standing on the far side of the street for an hour, she observed the comings and goings of young men and women who seemed at approximately her station in life, which told her this was the spot. Margo worried about being conspicuous, that she would draw attention by lingering at the same location on an urban street for an hour. Instead not a single person looked twice at her, nor would have even if she’d been stealing tires or assembling a sniper rifle. But she was then only a few years removed from home—still at the point of assuming her every action was noticed.

  Years later she would sometimes dream of her bachelorette apartment on West Belden Avenue. In her dreams, Margo saw not the boys who’d been her guests but the view through the window across West Belden to townhouses, the kind lived in by young couples who had gotten married and begun to make decent money.

  Margo found a job as a trader’s aide in the controlled chaos that is the Chicago Board Options Exchange—buying and selling not just the stocks of companies, which was comprehensible, but indices, swaps and spiders based on the stocks of companies. After a while she stopped thinking about what the indices and exchange-traded funds represented and cared only whether they went up or down: the attitude taken by the traders who were making the most money. Our distant forebears cultivated grasses into wheat; our nearer ancestors hewed land for farms; nearer still built factories, canals and bridges. The best-paid people of Margo’s generation manipulated decimal points. Maybe this was a necessary stage in evolution to a higher form.

  A regular habit was lunchtime Loop strolls. When the winter gusts blew, she would go a short distance among the tall buildings that accelerated the wind. In warm weather, she would walk to the Chicago River, which had progressed from the filthy flammable sewer of Upton Sinclair’s day to its current status of favored locale for dinner-boat cruises. When Margo worked there, Loop Chicago still had independent coffee shops on every block—the old urban kind that meant a counter serving cheeseburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches, a takeout line for coffee, the place passed down by a family. This was just befor
e Starbucks invaded, with its diabolical marketing formula of double the price for twice the wait.

  One day Margo collided in a coffee shop with a young man, spilling her coffee on his shirt. Better his shirt than her dress, all things considered. The collision felt nice. They joked a bit. As she was about to walk back to work, Margo stalled, wondering if he would ask for her phone number. He asked for her phone number, meaning the number at her apartment, of a desk phone attached to an answering machine with reel-to-reel magnetic tape. This being before even children carried global communication consoles.

  Tom Helot, a business-school graduate, was charming, even-tempered and motivated. He was born in Cooperstown, New York, a town that sits at the foot of a lake that is the source of the Susquehanna. Thus he shared with Margo a childhood fascination with distant waters, though not her illusions about them, since from any point along Otsego Lake, one can see the opposite shore. When school is out, Cooperstown and its environs bustle with tourists: the Finger Lakes area is in summer a cool, inviting fairyland. During winter the town clears and those who reside year-round struggle with snow and closed businesses. Tom felt grateful to have been a boy there, but wanted a bigger stage.

  Margo liked hearing him talk of his ambitions—they would become well-to-do, they would use wealth responsibly, they would build a summer house on Keuka, the prettiest of the Finger Lakes, and make campfires with their children at the water’s edge.

  Margo believed there are three basic types of romances: the kind where passion rules, the kind that people fall into as the path of least resistance and the kind where people are made for each other. Passion-rules is a nice archetype. There was a boy in high school Margo could not keep her hands off. She couldn’t have kept her hands off him if he had been on fire. But she could hardly stand him. Passion is a relief from reality, pushing out other thoughts. Romances based on passion have a poor track record, except in cinema.

  Path-of-least-resistance causes the majority of human pairings, and after all, what did you expect? More or less falling into a relationship is better than loneliness, though has never inspired an epic poem. Margo’s favorite band of her college years, Inane Pabulum, recorded a song that made her laugh, “More of Same,” about the path-of-least-resistance relationship. The lyrics included:

  That night when I first saw your face

  I thought we’d met in some previous place

  Was it because of your fair beauty

  Or because life is all a blur to me?

  More of same, more of same

  “It’s been done” is the modern refrain

  I’m not new and neither are you

  Life is just more of same.

  When I asked you to dance you were unsurprised

  I drunk deep of that jaded look in your eyes

  You barely seemed to notice my charms

  At least you stayed conscious in my arms.

  More of same, more of same

  Everyone rides on a scheduled train

  I’m not new and neither are you

  Our love is just more of same.

  Had it come to that, Margo would have settled for more of same. But she believed the least likely type of romance—meant-to-be—is possible, and Tom was her proof.

  As they began to date, Margo was able to imagine herself moving with him into one of the townhomes across West Belden. Tom’s confidence, his optimism, that he never, ever complained—all seemed the right match. Margo and Tom both lost their fathers young, Tom’s mother went early into dementia and Margo’s mother had already been diagnosed with the cancer that would take her before she could see her grandchildren. In that way too, Margo felt they were right for each other. The only family they would have in the future would be the one they made, and they would have only themselves to fall back on. After a courtship, they were married at a country club that rented space for weddings. They began life together.

  Having reset the cappuccino machine half a dozen times, finally confident the settings were correct, Margo initiated an impressive sequence of grinding, steam, hissing and heat. When she set the cup under the spout, the new part flew skyward under pressure as the entire device did a passable imitation of a typical day at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station.

  “No problem,” Margo said as she and Lillian laughed. “I bought this American Express. They’ll ship a replacement by next day.”

  Chapter 3

  October 2007

  Dow Jones Index: 14,000.

  Unemployment: 4.6 percent.

  National debt: $9.5 trillion.

  The Helot children, Caroline and Megan, perceived the world in no small part through the windows of automobiles. Endless driving: to school, home, then back to school for extracurriculars; to oboe lessons, piano lessons and fencing lessons; to rock-climbing on synthetic materials manufactured to appear to be actual rocks; to orthodontists; many, many times to clothing stores, including to exchange items that had gone out of fashion before the girls could wear them to school; to tutors and to doctors’ appointments; to soccer and to basketball.

  Fencing lessons might have seemed a bit much, but Margo read somewhere that Ivy League colleges have trouble recruiting for fencing. For the team sports, invariably the girls had games on opposite ends of the county at the same time.

  Margo made color-coded day planners to ensure Caroline and Megan would be in the right place, and toyed with the idea of shrinking the day planners into ones that moms could wear on their wrists, the way quarterbacks wear the plays. There might be a market for suburban-mom wrist-worn day organizers. A mom could flip one open, check the code numbers and colors and quickly call out, “Church bake sale on two. Hike!”

  Things only seemed worthwhile if you had to drive to them. Every weekend at least one of the girls was invited to a birthday party, sometimes two, as if modern children were celebrating their birthdays biannually. Nobody held a party at the house anymore—birthday parties needed to be “events,” which meant driving to a water park or laser tag or a magic show. Plus driving beforehand to get the presents. Margo wanted to start the year buying gift cards in bulk to wrap as presents when needed. Her girls were shocked by that; gifts had to be chosen person-by-person the day before a party, notwithstanding they almost always ended up buying gift cards. Every birthday party invitation represented at least two hours of driving.

  “When we have our retirement home and ask each other, ‘Where did the years go,’” Margo told Tom, “the answer will be that we spent them in the car.”

  She was pleased to drive a Lexus, though Margo never would have confessed that. Having a fancy car is nice: desiring one is shallow. Margo’s was Blue Onyx Pearl with hand-stitched leather, though of course she had no way to know whether the stitching was done by well-paid workers with union protection in a modern factory or subcontracted to a developing-world sweatshop. Margo didn’t want the gold badges, but the dealer threw them in.

  Did driving-to-this, driving-to-that represent fun for the girls or would they rather have been left to their own accords to play in the woods, as was the case with previous generations?

  This question was irrelevant for many contemporary families, because the spontaneous passage of youth, especially of summer, had given way to structure. Finding old clothes and declaring them the costumes of castle-games had been supplanted by parties with purchased costumes bearing trademarks. Spur-of-the-moment contests had been supplanted by organized leagues with start times and rulebooks. The monkey bars at the park playgrounds had been removed so there was nothing to fall off. Margo never would have considered allowing her daughters to frolic alone at the lakeshore, as she did in girlhood. Caroline and Megan inhabited a world in which the extemporaneous had been supplanted by the planned, and traditional risk had been reduced to the lowest possible level. Though innovative new risks were thriving quite nicely.

  It was Friday; Margo was having a few people over—Lillian; Tom’s business partner, Ken Afreet; and his wife, Nicole. Margo had a
lways been uncomfortable with Ken, who was too open about his affection for money. Stress about money defines our age: but if you have enough, then stop complaining. Margo felt dismay that those she knew who had plenty in the bank nonetheless talked almost continuously about ways to get more. The best part about having money, Margo supposed, would be no longer thinking or caring about money. The people who had it did not respond that way.

  Ken sure could run a business, though. Corsair Assets was on its fourth consecutive record year. Ken taught Tom much of what he knew about the private-equity field. He chose Tom to be the one who went around to the firms Corsair was acquiring, to assure the employees their jobs wouldn’t vanish. Often the jobs vanished anyway, but that came later, and was due to market forces. Nicole had amusement value; she was trying hard to carry herself as a trophy wife so that she did not get replaced by an actual trophy wife. Nicole and Lillian were not a good mix, though. Lillian thought Nicole an airhead; Nicole thought Lillian an egghead. Both were right, but that wasn’t the point. Men who clash can release the tension by insulting each other’s sports teams. With women who clash, sooner or later it becomes personal.

  Margo loved having people over, the sound of the front door opening and closing, cold air falling off the coats of friends who had just come in. Her neighborhood was of the kind that neighbors did not just wander by; people always called first, and drove even if they lived within a block.

  Soon the girls would be teens, shuttling in and out with a floating cast of friends. Margo couldn’t wait. For tonight, the children were in the finished basement watching movie rentals with a sitter, a high-school junior who charged twenty dollars an hour. Margo hustled to book the girl a week in advance, and felt lucky to have her. Most teens from the area didn’t need walking-around cash, feeling no incentive to babysit or work the counter at Baskin-Robbins after school. Their parents simply fulfilled their every need, conferring on them more money and material things than seemed wise. Margo fought the urge to think the words “These kids today.”