Connie Willis - Bellwether

Wearing clothing some other way than was intended is an ever-popular variety of fad—untied shoelaces, backward baseball caps, ties for belts, slips for dresses—and one that can’t be put down to merchandising because it doesn’t cost anything. It’s not new, either. High school girls in 1955 took to wearing their cardigan sweaters backward, and their mothers had worn unbuckled galoshes with short skirts and raccoon coats in the 1920s. The metal buckles had jangled and flapped, which is how the name flapper came about. Or, since there doesn’t seem to be agreement on the source of anything where fads are concerned, they were named for the chickenlike flapping of their arms when they did the Charleston. But the Charleston didn’t hit till 1923, and the word flapper had been used as early as 1920.

“Well,” Flip said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

It was no wonder Pippa had just gone singing past her clients’ windows. If she’d had to put up with them, she wouldn’t have been half as cheerful. I forced an interested expression. “Who else is on the committee?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t have time to go to these things.”

“But don’t you want to make sure you get a good assistant?”

“Not if I have to stay after work,” she said, irritably pulling clippings out from under her. “Your office is a mess. Don’t you ever clean it?”

“ ‘The lark’s on the wing;/The snail’s on the thorn,’ ” I said.

“What?”

So Browning was wrong. “I’d love to talk,” I said, “but I’d better get started on this funding form.”

She didn’t show any signs of moving. She was looking aimlessly through the clippings.

“I need you to make a copy of each of those. Now. Before you go to your search committee meeting.”

Still nothing. I got a pencil, stuck the extra pages into the application, and tried to focus on the simplified funding form.

I never worry much about getting funding. It’s true there are fads in both science and industry, but greed is always in style. HiTek would like nothing more than to know what causes fads so they could invent the next one. And stats projects are cheap. The only funding I was requesting was for a computer with more memory capacity. Which didn’t mean I could forget about the funding form. It wouldn’t matter if your project was a sure-fire method for turning lead into gold, if you don’t have the forms filled out and turned in on time, Management will cancel you like a shot.

Project goals, experimental method, projected results, matrix analysis ranking. Matrix analysis ranking?

I flipped the page over to see if there were instructions, and the page came out altogether. There weren’t any instructions, there or at the end of the application. “Were there instructions included with the form?” I asked Flip.

“How would I know?” she said, getting up. “What’s this?” She stuck one of the clippings under my nose, an ad of a bobbed blonde standing next to a Hupmobile.

“The car?”

“No-o-o,” she said, letting her breath out in a big sigh. “Her hair.”

“A bob,” I said, and leaned closer to see if the hair was cut in an Eton bob or a shingle. It was crimped in even rows down the sides of her head. “A marcel wave,” I said. “It was a permanent wave done with a special electrical metal-and-wires apparatus that was about as much fun as going to the dentist,” but Flip had already lost interest.

“I think if they’re going to make you stay after work or make you do extra jobs they should pay you overtime. Like stapling all these funding forms and delivering them to everybody. Some of them were supposed to go all the way down to Bio.”

“Did you deliver one to Dr. O’Reilly?” I said, remembering her habit of dumping packages on closer offices.

“Of course. He didn’t even thank me. What a swarb!”

“Swarb?” I said. Fads in language are impossible to keep up with, and I don’t even try from a research standpoint, but I know most of the slang because that’s how fads are described. But I’d never heard this one.

“You don’t know what swarb means?” she said, in a tone that made me wish Pippa had gone around Italy slapping people. “No hots. No cutes. Cyber-ugg. Swarb.” She flailed her duct-taped arms, trying to think of the word. “ Completely fashion-impaired,” she said, and flounced out in her duct tape and upside-down down. Without the clippings.

Coffeehouse [1450–1554]

Middle Eastern fad that originated in Aden, then spread to Mecca and throughout Persia and Turkey. Men sat cross-legged on rugs and sipped thick, black, bitter coffee from tiny cups while listening to poets. The coffeehouses eventually became more popular than mosques and were banned by the religious authorities, who claimed they were frequented by people “of low costume and very little industry.” Spread to London (1652), Paris (1669), Boston (1675), Seattle (1985).

Saturday morning the library called and told me my name had come up on the reserve list for Led On by Fate, so I went to Boulder to pick it up and buy a birthday present for Brittany.

“You can have Angels, Angels Everywhere, too, if you want,” Lorraine told me at the library. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a dalmatian on it and red fireplug earrings. “We finally got two more copies now that nobody wants them.”

I leafed through it while she swiped Led On by Fate with the light pen.

“Your guardian angel goes with you everywhere,” it said. “It’s always there, right beside you, wherever you go.” There was a line drawing of an angel with large wings looming over a woman in a grocery checkout line. “You can ignore them, you can even pretend they don’t exist, but that won’t make them go away.”

Until the fad’s over, I thought.

I checked out Led On by Fate and a book on chaos theory and Mandelbrot diagrams so I’d have a pretext for going down to Bio to see what Dr. O’Reilly was wearing, and went over to the Pearl Street Mall.

Lorraine was right. The bookstore had Angel in My Condo and The Cherubim Cookbook on a sale rack, and The Angel Calendar was marked fifty percent off. There was a big display up front for Faerie Encounters of the Fourth Kind.

I went upstairs to the kids’ section and more fairies: The Flower Fairies (which had been a fad once before, back in the 1910s); Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; More Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; and The Land of Faerie Fun. Also Batman books, Lion King books, Power Rangers books, and Barbie books.

I finally managed to find a hardback copy of Toads and Diamonds, which I’d loved as a kid. It had a fairy in it, but not like those in Fairies, Fairies, Etc., with lavender wings and bluebells for hats. It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances. My kind of moral.

I bought it and went out into the mall. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, balmy and blue-skied. The Pearl Street Mall on a Saturday’s a great place to analyze trends, since, one, there are hordes of people, and two, Boulder’s almost terminally hip. The rest of the state calls it the People’s Republic of Boulder, and it’s got every possible kind of New Ager and falafel stand and street musician.

There are even fads in street music. Guitars were out and bongos were in again. (The first time was in 1958, at the height of the Beat movement. Very low ability threshold.) Flip’s buzzcut-and-swag was very in, and so was the buzzcut-and-message. And duct tape. I saw two people with strips around their sleeves and one with dreadlocks and a bowler had a wide band of duct tape wrapped around his neck like the ones the French had worn during the à la victime fad after the Revolution.