Connie Willis - Bellwether

“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 there beside you, wherever you go,” was what Angels, Angels Everywhere had said. And it was true. She was everywhere, like some awful anti-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 mah-jongg 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.”