Bellwether (10 page)

It occurred to me the next day while ransacking my lab for the clippings I’d given Flip to copy that Bennett’s remark about having already met her new assistant must mean she’d been assigned to Bio. But in the afternoon Gina, looking hunted, came in to say, “I don’t care what they say. I did the right thing hiring her. Shirl just printed out and collated twenty copies of an article I wrote. Correctly. I don’t care if I am breathing in second-secondhand smoke.

“Second-secondhand smoke?”

“That’s what Flip calls the air smokers breathe out But I don’t care. It’s worm it.”

“Shirl’s been assigned to you?” I said.

She nodded. “This morning she delivered my mail.
My
mail. You should get her assigned to you.”

“I will,” I said, but that was easier said than done. Now that Flip had an assistant, she (and my clippings) had disappeared off the face of the earth. I searched the entire building twice, including the cafeteria, where large NO SMOKING signs had been put on all the tables, and Supply, where Desiderata was trying to figure out what printer cartridges were, and found Flip finally in my lab, sitting at my computer and typing something in.

She deleted it before I could see what it was and leaped up. If she’d been capable of it, I would have said she looked guilty.

“You
weren’t using it,” she said. “You weren’t even
here”
“Did you make copies of those clippings I gave you Monday?” I said.

She looked blank.

“There was a copy of the personal ads on top of them.”

She tossed her swag of hair. “Would you use the word
elegant
to describe me?”

She had added a hair wrap to her hank, a long thin strand of hair bound in bilious blue embroidery thread, and a band of duct tape across her forehead cut out to frame the
i.

“No,” I said.

“Well, nobody expects you to be all of them,” she said, apropos of nothing. “Anyway, I don’t know why you’re so hooked on the personals. You’ve got that cowboy guy.”

“What?”

“Billy Boy Somebody,” she said, waving her hand at the phone. “He called and said he’s in town for some seminar and you’re supposed to meet him for dinner someplace. Tonight, I think. At the Nebraska Daisy or something. At seven o’clock.”

I went over to my phone message pad. It was blank. “Didn’t you write the message down?”

She sighed. “I can’t do
everything.
That’s why I was supposed to get an assistant, remember? So I wouldn’t have to work so hard, only since she’s a
smoker
, half the people I assigned her to don’t want her in their labs, so I still have to copy all this stuff and go all the way down to Bio and stuff. I think smokers should be
forced
to give up cigarettes.”

“Who all did you assign to her?”

“Bio and Product Development and Chem and Physics and Personnel and Payroll, and all the people who yell at me and make me do a lot of stuff. Or put in a camp or something where they couldn’t expose the rest of us to all that smoke.”

“Why don’t you assign her to me? I don’t mind that she smokes.”

She put her hands on the hips of her blue leather skirt. “It causes cancer, you know,” she said disapprovingly. “Besides, I’d never assign her to
you.
You’re the only one who’s halfway
nice
to me around here.”

angel food cake (1880—90)—–
Food fad named to suggest the heavenly lightness and whiteness of the cake. Originated either at a restaurant in St. Louis, along the Hudson River, or in India. The secret of the cake was a dozen (or eleven, or fifteen) egg whites beaten into stiff glossy peaks. Difficult to bake, it inspired an entire folklore: The pan had to be ungreased, and no one could walk across the kitchen floor while it was baking. Supplanted by, of course, devil’s food cake.

It was the Kansas Rose at five-thirty. “You got my message okay,” Billy Ray said, coming out to meet me in the parking lot. He was wearing black jeans, a black-and-white cowboy shirt, and a white Stetson. His hair was longer than the last time I’d seen him. Long hair must be coming back in.

“Sort of,” I said. “I’m here.”

“Sorry it had to be so early,” he said. “There’s an evening workshop on Irrigation on the Internet’ I don’t want to miss.” He took my arm. “This is supposed to be the trendiest place in town.”

He was right. There was a half-hour wait, even with reservations, and every woman in line was wearing po-mo pink.

“Did you get your Targhees?” I asked him, leaning back against an ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING sign.

“Yep, and they’re great. Low maintenance, high tolerance for cold, and fifteen pounds of wool in a season.”

“Wool?” I said. “I thought Targhees were cows.”

“Nobody’s raising cows anymore,” he said, frowning as if I should know that. “The whole cholesterol thing. Lamb’s got a lower cholesterol count, and shearling’s supposed to be the hot new fashion fabric for winter.”

“Bobby Jay,” the hostess, who was wearing a red gingham pinafore and hair wraps, called out.

“That’s us,” I said.

“We don’t want to sit anywhere close to where the smoking section used to be,” Billy Ray said, and we followed her to the table.

The sunflower fad had apparently come here to die. They were entwined in the white picket fence around our table, framed on the wall, painted on the bathroom doors, embroidered on the napkins. A large artificial bunch was stuck in a Mason jar in the middle of our sunflowered tablecloth.

“Cool, huh?” Billy Ray said, opening his sunflower-shaped menu. “Everybody says prairie’s going to be the next big fad.”

“I thought shearling was,” I muttered, picking up the menu. Prairie cuisine wasn’t so much hot as substantial—chicken-fried steak, cream gravy, corn on the cob, all served family-style.

“Something to drink?” a waiter in buckskin and a knotted sunflower bandanna asked.

I looked at the menu. They had espresso, cappuccino, and caffè latte, also very big in prairie days. No iced tea.

“Iced tea’s the Kansas state beverage,” I told the waiter. “How can you not have it?”

He’d apparently been taking lessons from Flip. He rolled his eyes, sighed expertly, and said, “Iced tea is outré.”

A word never uttered on the prairie, I thought, but Billy Ray was already ordering meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and cappuccino for both of us.

“So, tell me about this thing you’re researching that’s got you working weekends.”

I did. “The problem is I’ve got causes coming out my ears,” I said, after I’d explained what I’d been doing. “Female equality, bicycling, a French fashion designer named Poiret, World War One, and Coco Chanel, who singed her hair off when a heater exploded. Unfortunately, none of them seems to be the main source.”

Our dinner arrived, on brown earthenware platters decorated with sunflowers. The coleslaw was garnished with fresh basil, which I didn’t remember as being big on the prairie either, and the meat loaf was garnished with lemon slices.

Billy Ray told me about the merits of sheep-raising while we ate. Sheep were healthy, profitable, no trouble to herd, and you could graze them anywhere, all of which I would have been more inclined to believe if he hadn’t told me the same thing about raising longhorns six months ago.

“Dessert?” the waiter said, and brought over the pastry cart.

I figured a prairie dessert would probably be gooseberry pie or maybe canned peaches, but it was the usual suspects: crème brûlée, tiramisu, “and our newest dessert, bread pudding.”

Well, that sounded like a Kansas dessert, all right, the sort of thing you were reduced to eating after the cow died and the grasshoppers ate up the crops.

“I’ll have the tiramisu,” I said.

“Me too,” Billy Ray said. “I’ve always hated bread pudding. It’s like eating leftovers.”

“Everybody
raves
about our bread pudding,” the waiter said reproachfully. “It’s our most popular dessert.”

The bad thing about studying trends is that you can’t ever turn it off. You sit there across from your date eating tiramisu, and instead of thinking what a nice guy he is, you find yourself thinking about trends in desserts and how they always seem to be gooey and calorie-laden in direct proportion to the obsession with dieting.

Take tiramisu, which has chocolate and whipped cream and two kinds of cheese. And burnt-sugar cake, which was big in the forties, in spite of wartime rationing.

Pineapple upside-down cake was a fad in the twenties, a dessert I hope doesn’t make a comeback anytime soon; chiffon cake in the fifties; chocolate fondue in the sixties.

I wondered if Bennett was immune to food trends, too, and what his ideas on bread pudding and chocolate cheesecake were.

“You thinking about hair-bobbing again?” Billy Ray said. “Maybe you’re looking at too many things. This conference I’m at says you’ve got to ruff.”

“Niff?”

“NYF. Narrow Your Focus. Eliminate all the peripherals and focus in on the core variables. This hair-bobbing thing can only have one cause, right? You’ve got to narrow your focus to the likeliest possibilities and concentrate on those. It works, too. I tried it on a case of sheep mange. You’re sure you won’t come to my workshop with me?”

“I have to go to the library,” I said.

“You should get the book.
Five Steps to Focusing on Success.”

After dinner Billy Ray went off to niff, and I went over to the library to see about Browning. Lorraine wasn’t there. A girl wearing duct tape, hair wraps, and a sullen expression was. “It’s three weeks overdue,” she said.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “I only checked it out last week. And I checked it in. On Monday.” After I’d tried Pippa on Flip and decided Browning didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d checked in Browning and checked out
Othello
, that other story about undue influences.

She sighed. “Our computer shows it as still checked out. Have you looked around at home?”

“Is Lorraine here?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “No-0-0-0.”

I decided it was the better part of valor to wait until she was and went over to the stacks to look for Browning myself.

The Complete Works
wasn’t there, and I couldn’t remember the name of the book Billy Ray had suggested. I pulled out two books by Willa Cather, who knew what prairie cooking had actually been like, and
Far from the Madding Crowd
, which I remembered as having sheep in it, and then wandered around, trying to remember the name of Billy Ray’s book and hoping for inspiration.

Libraries have been responsible for a lot of significant scientific breakthroughs. Darwin was reading Malthus for recreation (which should tell you something about Darwin), and Alfred Wegener was wandering around the Marburg University library, idly spinning the globe and browsing through scientific papers, when he got the idea of continental drift. But nothing came to me, not even the name of Billy Ray’s book. I went over to the business section to see if I would remember the name of the book when I saw it.

Something about narrowing the focus, eliminating all the peripherals. “It can only have one cause, right?” Billy Ray had said.

Wrong. In a linear system it might, but hair-bobbing wasn’t like sheep mange. It was like one of Bennett’s chaotic systems. There were dozens of variables, and all of them were important. They fed into each other, iterating and reiterating, crossing and colliding, affecting each other in ways no one would expect. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I had too many causes, but that I didn’t have enough. I went over to the nine hundreds and checked out
Those Crazy Twenties; Flappers, Flivvers, and Flagpole-Sitters;
and
The 1920’s: A Sociological Study
, and as many other books on the twenties as I could carry, and took them up to the desk.

“I show an overdue book for you,” the girl said. “It’s four weeks overdue.”

I went home, excited for the first time that I was on the right track, and started work on the new variables.

The twenties had been awash in fads: jazz, hip flasks, rolled-down stockings, dance crazes, raccoon coats, mahjongg, running marathons, dance marathons, kissing marathons, Stutz Bearcats, flagpole-sitting, tree-sitting, crossword puzzles. And somewhere in all those rouged knees and rain slickers and rocking-chair derbies was the trigger that had set off the hair-bobbing craze.

I worked until very late and then went to bed with
Far from the Madding Crowd.
I was right. It was about sheep. And fads. In Chapter Five one of the sheep fell over a cliff, and the others followed, plummeting one after the other onto the rocks below.

“Please your honors,” said he, “I’m able,

By means of a secret charm, to draw

All creatures living beneath the sun,