The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  Nate steadied me by the elbow as I climbed onto STEWie’s platform with the armful of supplies. “I’ll get on the phone and get some official inquiries going. I’ve sent Officer Van Underberg to find Dr. Mooney. We need some answers.”

  “Send us a note through STEWie if you find out anything.”

  One of the larger mirrors blocked Dr. B’s view of us and I wondered if we might sneak a kiss, but Nate looked a touch uncomfortable, so I gave him a platonic peck on the cheek instead. “For luck.”

  “Julia?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful. I’m not sure I like the way this sounds, this book club outing with the mysterious Udo Leland at the helm.”

  13

  Dr. B had sent me again to 1976 as swiftly as possible, but it was already evening back in November 1, 1976. A blast of cold air and lightly falling snowflakes greeted me at the Open Book sculpture. I radioed Abigail and Dr. Little, who radioed back that they were in Xave’s room and that I should meet them there.

  I slipped into St. Olaf’s dorm past the hall monitor, who was busy flirting with another student, and made my way up to Xave’s room on the fifth floor. All three of them were there. Xave was reclined on his bed, looking like his normal self again. (I remembered college, when all it took to bounce back from an all-night party or study session was a nap and a lot of coffee.) He waved a friendly greeting at me.

  I learned that Abigail and Dr. Little had talked to Udo’s roommate while I was gone. The roommate, Sam, was an electrical engineer. “I got the impression that he and Udo don’t talk much. Udo only likes people who do art,” Abigail quoted the roommate. She was perched on the windowsill again.

  This brought back college memories as well. Either you got on great with your roommate for the year, or you didn’t.

  “No one seems to know where the book club has gone. No one,” Abigail continued. “It’s almost as if Udo didn’t want people to know.”

  “Well, he appears to have succeeded if that was his goal,” Dr. Little commented from the desk chair.

  “Too bad there’s no electronic trail for us to follow,” I said. “Tweets and such.”

  I swear I could see Xave’s ears perk up. “What are tweets? Are tweeters trained birds—or perhaps programmable robotic ones?—and do they track people’s whereabouts and report their location to the authorities?”

  “Yeah, no,” Abigail said.

  “Which is it, yes or no?”

  “People are all too eager to report their whereabouts themselves,” I explained. “Everyone likes to share details of their lives, it turns out.”

  Dr. Little had mentioned that the seventies were considered the me decade, but I rather thought we had them beat. There really was no way to adequately explain the early years of the twenty-first century without living through them. And Xave Mooney would, of course, in due time. I hoped all the information we were letting slip wouldn’t corrupt him into buying early stock in smartphone and social media companies.

  “Hey, are those sandwiches from the future? I’m famished.”

  I had set the two backpacks I had brought with me on the bed next to him, and the sandwiches, too. “Help yourself. These two are ham, those two are peanut butter and jelly.”

  Xave waited politely as Dr. Little sprayed his hands with hand sanitizer, a proceeding he watched with interest. Abigail and Dr. Little took a sandwich each. Xave carefully reached for a peanut butter one. The vending machine fare consisted of pre-sliced white bread with a thin film of jam and an even thinner film of peanut butter. My guess was that he was going to be mightily disappointed.

  He carefully unwrapped the sandwich and took a test bite. “Hmm. It’s a little…bland, if you don’t mind my saying so. Is it prefabricated somehow, created from some common source of nourishment?”

  “It might as well be.”

  “Hey, where do I end up teaching?” he asked between bites. “MIT? Berkeley? Caltech? I know, you can’t tell me that either.”

  “Julia, we’ve come up with a plan,” Abigail said, having already downed her sandwich. She reached for the leftover ham one. “Anybody want this?”

  Dr. Little shook his head at her. Xave said, “No, thanks. I’m still, uh, enjoying this one.”

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Some spying is in order. We need to find out when the book club last met,” Abigail said. “You said on Friday evenings, Xave. Is it each Friday?”

  Xave, having finished the peanut butter sandwich clearly more out of a desire not to offend us than anything else, wiped his hands on his pants. “There’s a flyer downstairs by the front door.”

  In the present, he would have reached for his cell phone to check the book club webpage, blog, Facebook group, et cetera, but the norm was different in 1976. While we waited for him to return, I quickly explained that Nate was on the case in the present and that there were no search hits on Sabina’s name, which hopefully meant we would be successful in our mission to catch up with the book club.

  Xave popped back into the room as if he had taken the four flights of stairs two steps at a time (making me miss my college years, with their seemingly endless store of energy, yet again) and waved a flyer at us. In large block letters, it informed the public that SERIOUS STUDENTS OF LITERATURE were invited to congregate every Friday evening at 8.30 p.m. in the rec room of St. Olaf’s Hall. Below that were two handwritten lists separated by a line down the middle. The one on the left chronicled the books the club had been reading month by month (a mix of modern authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Erica Jong, and classic ones like Tolstoy and Chekhov). The other list appeared to be a record of the book club regulars. First was Udo’s own name, written down with an almost illegible flourish, as if Udo had practiced his signature until it looked satisfactorily author-like. It was followed by eight other names, each in a different handwriting style, starting with Gilberte Dubois’s name. My eyes went further down and stopped: Missy Donovan, my mother, and Soren Olsen, my father.

  “Julia, what is it?” Abigail asked, clearly noticing my surprise.

  I tapped the list. “Small world. Missy is my mom and Soren my dad.” My parents are avid readers—our house had always been littered with books—so I guessed it wasn’t that much of a surprise when I thought about it.

  “Interesting,” Dr. Little said in a tone that suggested the opposite, and proceeded to wash down his sandwich with a swig from his water bottle.

  During her college years my mother had lived with her parents in town, I knew, while Dad had taken up residence in a dorm on campus—“one of the old dorms” was how he’d described it to me. St. Olaf’s? I had never heard anything about a book club. I turned to Xave. “Do you know them? Missy Donovan and Soren Olsen?”

  “Nope, but it’s a big dorm. And not everybody in the book club is from this dorm—Udo tends to attract them.”

  Hold on. If my parents were in the book club, and Sabina was with the book club, then why hadn’t they recognized her when they came over to my house over the summer? On the other hand, it was three and a half decades later, and she seemingly wouldn’t have aged a bit. Upon meeting Sabina, Mom had said, “I feel as if I’ve known you all my life,” which now took on a whole different meaning. At the time I had not given it a second thought. Now it seemed as though Mom and Dad had known Sabina, not for their whole lives exactly but for a long time—longer than any of us had realized. I’d have to ask them about it when I got back.

  Some spying is in order, Abigail had said. I understood the plan without needing an explanation. I was well versed in organizing campus events and knew how much discussion it took to get any group to agree on anything, no matter how small the group or the matter. The timing of the trip, the destination, and the other associated details would all have been hashed out in advance by the book club. All we needed to do was to jump back to the last meeting and eavesdrop.

  The place where the club met each week, the recreation room of St. Olaf’s, was on t
he ground floor at the end of the hallway, Xave explained. “There’s a Ping-Pong table and some chairs and a couch. I don’t go there much.”

  “Their last meeting would have been Friday the twenty-ninth,” Dr. Little said, and reached for his duffel bag to get the equipment out and calculate coordinates. “Mooney—”

  “You’re kicking me out again? Well, I suppose I do need to show my face at the lab, or my advisor will think I’m slacking off.”

  I had reset my watch yet again. “It’s past 9:00 p.m.,” I protested, unwilling to see him leave and quite certain that I wouldn’t see him again until we got back to 2012. (From his point of view, the next time he would see me would be on my first day of work in the science dean’s office. It was an odd thought.) “How will your advisor even know if you’re in the lab this late or not?”

  “Oh, he’ll know. Dr. Eatchel already thinks my time-travel idea is an embarrassment to the department and would probably be happier if I just…left. I wish I could introduce you to him. Oh, how I would love to see his face after you showed him that little smart phone.”

  “I bet,” Dr. Little said.

  “Will I see you three again?” Xave asked from the doorway.

  “Yes,” I answered for all of us.

  “Thanks for the sandwich.”

  Once the door had closed behind him, Dr. Little briskly unzipped his duffel bag. “I’ll run the necessary calculations for the Slingshot—I’ll send us to the Open Book, and we can walk over from there.”

  For the first time since we’d stepped into 1976, I was optimistic that everything was going to work out just fine.

  14

  A jump of three days back got us to October 29, the day that Dr. Little had originally planned for his run and the very day when Sabina had arrived on campus. We found the ground by the Open Book muddy from a light drizzle. The green area on which the sculpture sat was empty except for a few students crossing it, their forms shadowy under the sparse streetlights. Sabina was presumably inside the warm, well-lit cafeteria, but we had no way of getting to her—this day was already in her past and could not be changed.

  Still, I tossed out the idea of one of us trying to sneak up on Sabina to slip a note into her pocket for her to find later, with instructions not to do anything foolish such as stow away on a transatlantic liner, but the plan was waved away. Neither of my companions thought it would work.

  Abigail pulled her coat closer around her thin frame as we strode across the plaza to St. Olaf’s Hall. Assuming there had not been any unexpected minor adjustments by History, it was just about eight thirty, and the book club meeting had already started. Dr. Little reminded us that bold was occasionally the way to go, and we strode up the brick path of St. Olaf’s Hall and toward its front steps as if we belonged.

  It didn’t work. We hit an invisible wall about halfway up the path.

  “Oof. I wish there was some kind of warning about these things,” I complained, rubbing my shoulder where I had smacked it against History’s wall.

  We regrouped behind the shrubbery in the dorm’s courtyard. After a few minutes’ discussion, we decided that trying to march in as a group had drawn too much attention and it would be better to send in a single person.

  Dr. Little tried first. Having set his duffel bag on the ground, he left the shelter of the shrubbery and, still sticking to his theory that bold trumped stealthy, gave striding up the path another go. He came back in defeat, his hair matted from the light drizzle.

  Abigail tried the opposite approach, stealth. Petite as she was, she made herself smaller by hunching her shoulders in and turning the collar of her coat up over her ears. She headed up the path, softly stepping on the worn bricks glistening in the rain.

  “Well, that didn’t work at all,” she said, having stomped back without any further attempt at stealth.

  “My turn.” I remembered a rule that had been drilled into us before the Pompeii run—Blend in. We were trying to crash a book club meeting and needed to look the part. “Do either of you have a book, textbook, anything of that sort?”

  There was nothing that would work in the two backpacks I had brought with me. Dr. Little retrieved a pencil flashlight from one of his pockets and rummaged briefly in his duffel bag. “Yes…here.” It was the 1976 Old Farmer’s Almanac (the Bicentennial issue, with a yellow cover and an Uncle Sam–featuring ad on the back that proclaimed EVERYBODY AND HIS UNCLE LOVES SNOW’S CHOWDER). I saw that Dr. Little had printed out the actual weather data for fall of 1976 and taped up the tables inside the pages. “Handy for checking the weather forecast on the go,” he explained with a straight face.

  It wasn’t ideal as far as literary club reading material went, but it would have to do. Leaving the cover of the shrubbery, I tucked the almanac in one coat pocket so only the top of it was showing and set a course up the path and toward the front steps of the dorm. As far as I could tell, there was no one watching from any of the windows—it was too early for Friday night parties, and the only signs of activity inside were silhouettes in lighted windows and the sound of a door shutting somewhere. I guessed that the bottleneck was someone in the common area just inside the dorm door.

  I successfully passed the halfway point of the brick path, where Dr. Little and Abigail had been stopped, and, turning up the collar on my coat like Abigail had, brainstormed wildly about what my next move should be. Would it be best to keep my head down? Plaster what I hoped was an erudite, literary look on my face? Take the book out of my pocket and hold it in my hands?

  Before I could decide I had pulled the front door open.

  The hall monitor, a lanky and pimple-ridden student, glanced up briefly from one of the easy chairs. The TV was on, blaring fast-paced dialogue. “Close the door, it’s cold.”

  I did and tapped the almanac in my pocket. “I’m here for the book club.”

  “Rec room. At the end of the hallway.” He gestured with his head and went back to watching TV above the textbook in his lap.

  “What’s on?” I asked.

  The student gave me the same look I might have given if asked what American Idol was by a contemporary. “Hawaii Five-O.”

  “Right, right.” As I continued past, I thought I heard him mutter under his breath, “Udo attracts them like flies.”

  The door to the rec room was open. The cigarette smoke (of both the regular and the less legal variety) was so prevalent that a fine fog engulfed the space. I stepped inside. A dozen or so students were sprawled on the room’s couches and chairs or cross-legged on the floor. The Ping-Pong table had been pushed aside and under the window, leaving room for the speaker, who was standing in the middle of the cleared space. Fighting my twenty-first-century reflex to open a window to clear the air, I took a seat against the back wall, where there were several empty wooden chairs.

  Udo Leland—for it could be no one else—was gesticulating with passion as he spoke. He was dressed all in black: a black turtleneck hugged his thin body over slim black pants and black shoes. His blond hair streamed over his shoulders, and he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses—black ones, of course. He looked so much like the artistic sort as to be a walking cliché, except that what was considered cliché in 2012 was probably fresh and exciting in 1976.

  All of the female students—and some of the male ones, too—certainly appeared to think so. They were hanging on Udo’s every word. For his bit, he was delivering his speech without making eye contact with his audience, as if humanizing his crowd distracted him from the topic at hand, which seemed to be Writing with a capital W.

  “Forget the television sets in your parents’ living rooms, the fancy cars in their yards. Forget their expensive clothes and watches. What the true writer needs is connections with his roots, with his community and friends…not the empty luxuries of the bourgeois life.”

  There were murmurs of agreement, though I thought he was laying it on a bit thick. It seemed to me that Udo was perhaps talking about his own family when he disdained fancy cars a
nd clothes, like a trust-fund kid turning his nose up at his parents’ wealth. Most undergrads at St. Sunniva are from within the state, both back then and in the present, and if there’s one thing Minnesotans tend to be, it’s thrifty. Though they were perhaps too embarrassed to say so, the students he was addressing probably came from hardworking families who had reached deep into their pockets to send their kids to college. This was certainly the case with my own mother and her family. She was at the foot of the couch, in a super-short blue dress and knee-high boots, her legs curled underneath her to one side. Like the others, she looked riveted by Udo’s speech.

  “The writers who matter…You know them—Vonnegut and others…Do they worry about being liked? No. Is their goal a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, a TV set in the living room, and a station wagon in the driveway? No.”

  More murmurs of agreement. A patch of cigarette smoke cleared temporarily, and an odd, unexpected detail popped out at me. Udo’s hair showed tinges of brown at the roots. So he had dyed it blond. It certainly stood out against his brown eyes and eyebrows and the all-black outfit. A lot of people in the state and on campus sported blond hair, courtesy of Minnesota’s Scandinavian immigrant community. I was not one of them, and apparently neither was Udo.

  “They wanted to write prose that would stand the test of time, words that would transcend time…”

  My mind wandered a bit as he continued in this vein for a while. I was impatient for him to get talking about the important part, the tree he held in such high regard—and its location.

  I couldn’t help but stare at my mother. She seemed caught up in the moment, bedazzled by Udo and what he had to say. Was there a baby bump under her blue dress, or was the soft curve of her cheeks and arms just youthful pudginess? I wasn’t sure how early that sort of thing showed. Once again there was a cigarette between her fingers, and this time there was also a beer bottle by her side. If she knew she was pregnant, was she…ignoring it? Is that why History had allowed me to come to 1976, because my influence, barely affecting even one person, had yet to be felt?