Bellwether

by Connie Willis

  The sun had disappeared, and the day had turned gray and chilly. It looked as if it might even start to snow. I walked down past the Latte Lenya to the Fashion Front and went in to get warm and to see what color postmodern pink was.

  Color fads are usually the result of a technological breakthrough. Mauve and turquoise, the colors of the 1870s, were brought about by a scientific breakthrough in the manufacture of dyes. So were the Day-Glo colors of the 1960s. And the new jewel-tone maroon and emerald car colors.

  The fact that new colors are few and far between has never stopped fashion designers, though. They just give a new name to an old color. Like Schiaparelli’s “shocking” pink in the 1920s, and Chanel’s “beige” for what had previously been a nondescript tan. Or name a color after somebody, whether they wore it or not, like Victoria blue, Victoria green, Victoria red, and the ever-popular, and a lot more logical, Victoria black.

  The clerk in the Fashion Front was talking on the phone to her boyfriend and examining her split ends. “Do you have postmodern pink?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said belligerently, and turned back to the phone. “I have to go wait on this woman,” she said, slammed the phone down, and slouched over to the racks.

  It is a fad, I thought, following her. Flip is a fad.

  She shoved past a counter full of angel sweatshirts marked seventy-five percent off, and gestured at the rack. “And it’s po-mo pink,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Not postmodern.”

  “It’s supposed to be the hot color for fall,” I said.

  “Whatever,” she said, and slouched back to the phone while I examined “the hottest new color to hit since the sixties.”

  It wasn’t new. It had been called ashes-of-roses the first time around in 1928 and dove pink the second in 1954.

  Both times it had been a grim, grayish pink that washed out skin and hair, which hadn’t stopped it from being hugely popular. It no doubt would be again in its present incarnation as po-mo pink.

  It wasn’t as good a name as ashes-of-roses, but names don’t have to be enticing to be faddish. Witness flea, the winning color of 1776. And the hit of Louis XVI’s court had been, I’m not kidding, puce. And not just plain puce. It had been so popular it’d come in a whole variety of appetizing shades: young puce, old puce, puce-belly, puce-thigh, and puce-with-milk-fever.

  I bought a three-foot-long piece of po-mo pink ribbon to take back to the lab, which meant the clerk had to get off the phone again. “This is for hair wraps,” she said, looking disapprovingly at my short hair, and gave me the wrong change.

  “Do you like po-mo pink?” I asked her.

  She sighed. “It’s the boss color for fall.”

  Of course. And therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct.

  I put my incorrect change and my ribbon in my shoulder bag (very passe) and went back out onto the mall. It had started to spit snow and the street musicians were shivering in their Birkenstocks and Ecuador shirts. I put on my mittens (completely swarb) and walked back down toward the library, looking at yuppie shops and bagel stands and getting more and more depressed. I had no idea where any of these fads came from, even po-mo pink, which some fashion designer had come up with. But the fashion designer couldn’t make people buy po-mo pink, couldn’t make them wear it and make jokes about it and write editorials on the subject of “What is fashion coming to?”

  The fashion designers could make it popular this season, especially since nobody would be able to find anything else in the stores, but they couldn’t make it a fad. In 1971, they’d tried to introduce the long midiskirt and failed utterly, and they’d been predicting the “comeback of the hat” for years to no avail. It took more than merchandising to make a fad, and I didn’t have any idea what that something more was.

  And the more I fed in my data, the more convinced I was the answer wasn’t in it, that increased independence and lice and bicycling were nothing more than excuses, reasons thought up afterward to explain what no one understood. Especially me.

  I wondered if I was even in the right field. I was feeling so dissatisfied, as if everything I was doing was pointless, so … itch.

  Flip, I thought. She did this to me with her talk about Brine and Groupthink. She’s some kind of anti-guardian angel, following me everywhere, hindering rather than helping and putting me in a bad mood. And I’m not going to let her ruin my weekend. It’s bad enough she ruins the rest of the week.

  I bought a piece of chocolate cheesecake and went back to the library and checked out The Red Badge of Courage, How Green Was My Valley, and The Color Purple, but the mood persisted throughout the steely afternoon, and all the icy way home, making it impossible for me to work.

  I tried reading the chaos theory book I’d checked out, but it just made me more depressed. Chaotic systems had so many variables it would have been nearly impossible to predict the systems’ behavior if they acted in logical, straightforward ways. But they didn’t.

  Every variable interacted with every other, colliding and connecting in unexpected ways, setting up iteration loops that fed into the system again and again, crisscrossing and connecting the variables so many ways it wasn’t surprising a butterfly could have a devastating effect. Or none at all.

  I could see why Dr. O’Reilly had wanted to study a system with limited variables, but what was limited? According to the book, anything and everything was a variable: entropy, gravity, the quantum effects of an electron, or a star on the other side of the universe.

  So even if Dr. O’Reilly was right and there weren’t any outside X factors operating on the system, there was no way to compute all the variables or even decide what they were.

  It all bore an uncomfortable resemblance to fads and made me wonder which variables I wasn’t taking into account, so that when Billy Ray called, I clutched at him like a drowning man. “I’m so glad you called,” I said. “My research went faster than I thought it would, so I’m free after all. Where are you?”

  “On my way to Bozeman,” he said. “When you said you were busy, I decided to skip the seminar and go pick up those Targhees I was looking at.” He paused, and I could hear the warning hum of his cell phone. “I’ll be back on Monday. How about dinner sometime next week?”

  I wanted dinner tonight, I thought crabbily. “Great,” I said. “Call me when you get back.”

  The hum crescendoed. “Sorry we missed each oth—” he said and went out of range.

  I went and looked out the window at the sleet and then got into bed and read Led On by Fate cover to cover, which wasn’t much of a feat. It was only ninety-four pages long, and so obviously wretchedly written it was destined to become a huge fad.

  Its premise was that everything was ordained and organized by guardian angels, and the heroine was given to saying things like “Everything happens for a reason, Derek! You broke off our engagement and slept with Edwina and were implicated in her death, and I turned to Paolo for comfort and went to Nepal with him so that we’d learn the meaning of suffering and despair, without which true love is meaningless. All of it—the train wreck, Lilith’s suicide, Halvard’s drug addiction, the stock market crash—it was all so we could be together. Oh, Derek, there’s a reason behind everything!”

  Except, apparently, hair-bobbing. I woke up at three with Irene Castle and golf clubs dancing in my head. That happened to Henri Poincaré. He’d been working on mathematical functions for days and days, and one night he drank too much coffee (which probably had had the same effect as bad literature) and couldn’t sleep, and mathematical ideas “rose in crowds.”

  And Friedrich Kekulé. He’d fallen into a reverie on top of a bus and seen chains of carbon atoms dancing wildly around. One of the chains had suddenly taken its tail in its mouth and formed a ring, and Kekulé had
ended up discovering the benzene ring and revolutionizing organic chemistry.

  All Irene Castle did with the golf clubs was the hesitation waltz, and after a while I turned on the light and opened Browning.

  It turned out he had known Flip after all. He’d written a poem, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” about her. “G-r-r, you swine,” he’d written, obviously after she crumpled up all his poems, and “There go, my heart’s abhorrence.” I decided to say it to Flip the next time she stuck me with the check.

  hot pants (1971)—–Fashion fad worn by everyone that only looked good on the very young and shapely. A successor to the miniskirt of the sixties, hot pants were a reaction to fashion designers’ attempts to introduce the midcalf-length midiskirt. Hot pants were made out of satin or velvet, often with suspenders, and were worn with patent leather boots. Women wore them to the office, and they were even allowed in the Miss America pageant.

  I spent the rest of the weekend ironing clippings and trying to decipher the simplified funding allocation form. What were Thrust Overlay Parameters? And my Efficiency Prioritization Ranking? And what did they mean by “List proprietary site bracket restrictions”? It made looking for the cause of hair-bobbing (or the source of the Nile) seem like a breeze in comparison.

  Nobody else knew what EDI endorsements were either. When I went to work Monday, everybody I knew came up to the stats lab to ask about it.

  “Do you have any idea how to fill this stupid funding form out?” Sarah asked, sticking her head in the door at mid-morning.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “What do you suppose an expense gradation index is?” She leaned against the door. “Do you ever feel like you should just give up and start over?”

  Yes, I thought, looking at my computer screen. I had spent most of the morning reading clippings, extracting what I hoped was the relevant information from them, typing it onto a disk, and designing statistical programs to interpret it. Or what Billy Ray had referred to as “sticking it on the computer and pushing a button.”

  I’d pushed the button, and surprise, surprise, there were no surprises. There was a correlation between the number of women in the workforce and the number of outraged references to hair-bobbing in the newspapers, an even stronger one between bobs and cigarette sales, and no correlation between the length of hair and the length of skirts, which I could have predicted. Skirts had dipped back to midcalf in 1926, while hair had gone steadily shorter all the way to the crash of ’29, with the boyish shingle in 1925 and the even shorter Eton crop in 1926.

  The strongest correlation of all was to the cloche hat, thus giving support to the cart-before-the-horse theory and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that statistics isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

  “Lately I’ve been feeling depressed about the whole thing,” Sarah was saying. “I’ve always believed it was just a question of his having a higher relationship threshold than I do, but I’ve been thinking maybe this is just part of the denial structure that goes with codependent relationships.”

  Ted, I thought. We’re talking about Ted, who doesn’t want to get married.

  “And this weekend, I got to thinking, What’s the point? I’m following an intimacy path and he’s into off-road detachment.”

  “Itch,” I said.

  “What?”

  “What you’re feeling,” I said. “Like you’re spinning your wheels on the launchpad. You didn’t run into Flip this weekend, did you?”

  “I saw her this morning,” she said. “She brought me Dr. Applegate’s mail.”

  An antiangel, wandering through the world spreading gloom and destruction.

  “Well, anyway,” Sarah said, “I’d better go see if I can find somebody in Management who can tell me what an expense gradation index is,” and left.

  I went back to my hair-bobbing data. I ran a geographical distribution for 1923 and then for 1922. They showed clusters in New York City and Hollywood, which were no surprise, and St. Paul, Minnesota, and Marydale, Ohio, which were. On a hunch, I asked for a breakdown of Montgomery, Alabama. It showed a cluster too small to be statistically significant but enough to explain the St. Paul one. Montgomery was where F. Scott Fitzgerald had met Zelda, and St. Paul was his hometown. The locals obviously were trying to live up to “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” It didn’t explain Marydale, Ohio. I ran a geographical distribution for 1921. It was still there.

  “Here,” Flip said, sticking my mail under my nose. Apparently nobody had told her po-mo pink was the in color for fall. She was wearing a brilliant bilious blue tunic and leggings and an assortment of duct tape.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said, grabbing a stack of clippings. “You owe me two-fifty for your caffe latte and I need you to copy these for me. Oh, and wait.” I went and got the personals I’d gone through Saturday, and two articles about angels. I handed them to Flip. “One copy of each.”

  “I don’t believe in angels,” she said.

  Right on the cutting edge, as usual.

  “I used to believe in them,” she said, “but I don’t any-more, not since Brine. I mean, if you really had a guardian angel, she’d cheer you up when you were bummed and get you out of committee meetings and stuff.”

  “What about fairies?” I asked.

  “You mean like fairy godmothers?” she said. “Of course. Duh.”

  Of course.

  I went back to my hair-bobbing. Marydale, Ohio. What could it have had to make it a hot spot of hair-bobbing? Hot, I thought. How about unusually hot weather in Ohio during the summer of 1921? So hot long hair would have clung sweatily to the back of the neck, and women would have said, “I can’t take this anymore”?

  I called up weather data for the state of Ohio for June through September and began looking for Marydale.

  “Do you have a minute?” said a voice from the door. It was Elaine from Personnel. She was wearing a sweatband and a sour expression. “Do you have any idea what hiral implementation format rations are?” she asked.

  “Not a clue. Did you try Management?”

  “I’ve been up there twice and couldn’t get in. There’s a huge crowd.” She took a deep breath. “I’m getting totally stressed. Do you want to go work out?”

  “Stair-climbing?” I said dubiously.

  She shook her head firmly. “Stair-climbing doesn’t give a large-muscle workout. Wall-walking. Gym over on Twenty-eighth. They’ve got pitons and everything.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve got walls here.”

  She looked disapprovingly at them and went out, and I went back to my hair-bobbing. 1921 temps for Marydale had been slightly lower than normal, and it wasn’t the hometown of either Irene Castle or Isadora Duncan.

  I abandoned it for the moment and did a Pareto chart and then ran some more regressions. There was a weak correlation between church attendance and bobs, a strong correlation between bobs and Hupmobile sales, but not Packards or Model T Fords, and a very strong correlation between bobs and women in nursing careers. I called up a list of American hospitals in 1921. There wasn’t one within a hundred miles of Marydale.

  Gina came in, looking harassed.

  “No, I don’t know how to fill out the funding form,” I said before she could ask, “and neither does anybody else.”

  “Really?” she said vaguely. “I haven’t even looked at it yet. I’ve been spending all my time on the stupid search committee for Flip’s assistant. What do you consider the most important quality in an assistant?”

  “Being the opposite of Flip,” I said, and then, when she didn’t laugh, “Competence, cheerfulness, willingness to work?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And if a person had those qualities, you’d hire them immediately, wouldn’t you? And if they were as overqualified for the job as she is, you’d snap them right up. You wouldn’t turn her down because of one little drawback and expect them to interview dozens of other people, especially when you’ve got other things to do. Fill out this ridiculous fu
nding form, for one, and plan a birthday party. Do you know what Brittany picked, when I said she couldn’t have the Power Rangers? Barney. And it isn’t as if she isn’t competent and cheerful and willing to work. Right?”

  I was unclear as to whether she was talking about Brittany or the assistant applicant. “Barney is pretty awful,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Gina said, as if I’d proved her point, whatever it was. “I’m hiring her,” and she flounced out.

  I went back and sat down in front of the computer. Cloche hats, Hupmobiles, and Marydale, Ohio. None of them seemed likely to be the trigger. What was? What had suddenly set the fad in motion?

  Flip came in, carrying the stack of clippings and personals I’d just given her. “What did you want me to do with these again?”

  mesmerism (1778—84)—–Scientific fad resulting from new discoveries about magnetism, speculation about its medical possibilities, and greed. Paris society flocked to Dr. Mesmer to have “animal magnetism” treatments involving tubs of “magnetized water,” iron rods, and Dr. Mesmer’s lavender-robed assistants, who massaged the patients and looked deep into their eyes. The patients screamed, sobbed, sank into a deep trance, and paid Dr. Mesmer on leaving. Actually hypnotism, animal magnetism claimed to cure everything from tumors to consumption. Died out when a scientific investigation headed by Ben Franklin proved it did no such thing.

  Tuesday Management called another meeting. “To explain the simplified funding forms,” I said to Gina, walking down to the cafeteria.

  “I hope so,” she said, looking even more harassed than she had yesterday. “It would be nice to see somebody else on the defensive for a change.”

  I was going to ask her what she meant by that, but just then I spotted Dr. O’Reilly on the far side of the room talking to Dr. Turnbull. She was wearing a po-mo pink suit (sans shoulder pads), and he had on one of those print polyester shirts from the seventies. By the time I’d taken all that in, Gina was at our table with Sarah, Elaine, and a bunch of other people.