Bellwether (3 page)

The source of the Thames doesn’t look like it. It looks like a pasture, and not even a soggy pasture. Not a single water plant grows there. If it weren’t for an old well, filled up with stones, it would be impossible to even locate the spot. Cows, not being interested in stones, wander lazily across and around the source, munching buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace, unaware that anything significant is beginning beneath their feet.

Science is even less obvious. It starts with an apple falling, a teakettle boiling. Alex Fleming, taking a last glance around his lab as he left for a long weekend, wouldn’t have seen anything significant in the window left half open, in the sooty air from Paddington Station drifting in. Getting ready to gather up his notes, to tell his assistant to leave everything alone, to lock the door, he wouldn’t have noticed that one of the petri dishes’ lids had slid a fraction of an inch to the side. His mind would have already been on his vacation, on the errands he had to run, on going home.

So was mine. The only thing I was aware of was that Flip had thoughtfully crumpled each clipping into a wad before stuffing them into the trash can, and that there was no way I could get them all smoothed out tonight, and, as a result, I was not only oblivious to the first event in a chain of events that was going to lead to a scientific discovery, but I was about to miss the second one, too. And the third.

I set the trash can on the lab table on top of my jitterbug research, sealed the top with duct tape, stuck on a sign that said
“Do not
touch. This means you, Flip,” and went out to my car. Halfway out of the parking lot I thought about Flip’s ability to read, turned around, and went back to my office to get the trash can.

The phone was ringing when I opened the door. “Howdy,” Billy Ray said when I picked it up. “Guess where I am.”

“In Wyoming?” I said. Billy Ray was a rancher from Laramie I’d gone out with a while back when I was researching line dancing.

“In Montana,” he said. “Halfway between Lodge Grass and Billings.” Which meant he was calling me on his cellular phone. “I’m on my way to look at some Targhees,” he said. “They’re the hottest thing going.”

I assumed they were also cows. During my line dancing phase, the hottest thing going had been Aberdeen Longhorns. Billy Ray is a very nice guy and a walking compendium of country-western fads. Two birds with one stone.

“I’m going to be in Denver this Saturday,” he said through the stutter that meant his cellular phone was starting to get out of range. “For a seminar on computerized ranching.” I wondered idly what its acronym would be. Computerized Operational Wrangling?

“So I wondered if we could grab us some dinner. There’s a new prairie place in Boulder.”

And prairie was the latest thing in cuisine. “Sorry,” I said, looking at the trash can on my lab table. “I’ve had a setback. I’m going to have to work this weekend.”

“You should just feed everything onto your computer and let it do the work. I’ve got my whole ranch on my PC.”

“I know,” I said, wishing it were that simple.

“You need to get yourself one of those text scanners,” Billy Ray said, the hum becoming more insistent. “That way you don’t even have to type it in.”

I wondered if a text scanner could read crumpled.

The hum was becoming a crackle. “Well, maybe next time,” he sort of said, and passed into cellular oblivion.

I put down my noncellular phone and picked up the trash can. Under it, half buried in my jitterbug research, were the library books I should have taken back two days ago. I piled them on top of the stretched duct tape, which held, and carried them and the trash can out to the car and drove to the library.

Since I spend my working days studying trends, many of which are downright disgusting, I feel it’s my duty after work to encourage the trends I’d like to see catch on, like signaling before you change lanes, and chocolate cheesecake. And reading.

Also, libraries are great places to observe trends in bestsellers, and library management. And librarian attire.

“What’s on the reserve list this week, Lorraine?” I asked the librarian at the desk. She was wearing a black-and-white-mottled sweatshirt with the logo UDDERLY FANTASTIC on it, and a pair of black-and-white Holstein cow earrings.

“Led On by Fate,”
she said. “Still. The reserve list’s a foot long. You are”—she counted down her computer screen—“fifth in line. You were sixth, but Mrs. Roxbury canceled.”

“Really?” I said, interested. Book fads don’t usually die out until the sequel comes out, at which point the readers realize they’ve been had. Witness
Oliver’s Story
and
Slow Waltz at Cedar Bend.
Which is why the
Gone with the Wind
trend managed to last nearly six years, resulting in thousands of unhappy little boys having to live down the name of Rhett, or even worse, Ashley. If Margaret Mitchell’d come out with
Slow Waltz at Tara Bend
it would have been all over. Which reminded me, I should check to see if there’d been any drop-off in
Gone with the Wind’s
popularity since the publication of
Scarlett.

“Don’t get your hopes up about
Fate,”
Lorraine said. “Mrs. Roxbury only canceled because she said she couldn’t bear to wait for it and bought her own copy.” She shook her head, and her cows swung back and forth. “What
do
people see in it?”

Yes, well, and what did they see in
Little Lord Fauntleroy
back in the 1890s, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s sickly sweet tale of a little boy with long curls who inherited an English castle? Whatever it was, it made the novel into a best-seller and then a hit play and a movie starring Mary Pickford (she already had the long curls), started a style of velvet suits, and became the bane of an earlier generation of little boys whose mothers inflicted lace collars, curlers, and the name Cedric on them and who would have been delighted to have only been named Ashley.

“What else is on the reserve list?”

“The new John Grisham, the new Stephen King,
Angels
from Above, Brushed by an Angel’s Wing, Heavenly Encounters of the Third Kind, Angels Beside You, Angels, Angels Everywhere, Putting Your Guardian Angel to Work for You
, and
Angels in the Boardroom.”

None of those counted. The Grisham and the Stephen King were only best-sellers, and the angel fad had been around for over a year.

“Do you want me to put you on the list for any of those?” Lorraine asked.
“Angels in the Boardroom
is great.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Nothing new, huh?”

She frowned. “I thought there was something …” She checked her computer screen. “The novelization of
Little Women,”
she said, “but that wasn’t it.”

I thanked her and went over to the stacks. I picked out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and a couple of mysteries, which always have simple, solvable problems like “How did the murderer get into the locked room?” instead of hard ones like “What causes trends?” and “What did I do to deserve Flip?” and then went over to the eight hundreds.

One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be “responsive to their patrons.” This means having dozens of copies of
The Bridges of Madison County
and Danielle Steel, and a consequent shortage of shelf space, to cope with which librarians have taken to purging books that haven’t been checked out lately.

“Why are you throwing out Dickens?” I’d asked Lorraine last year at the library book sale, brandishing a copy of
Bleak House
at her. “You can’t throw out Dickens.”

“Nobody checked it out,” she’d said. “If no one checks a book out for a year, it gets taken off the shelves.” She had been wearing a sweatshirt that said A TEDDY BEAR IS FOREVER, and a pair of plush teddy bear earrings. “Obviously nobody read it.”

“And nobody ever will because it won’t be there for them to check out,” I’d said.
“Bleak House
is a wonderful book.”

“Then this is your chance to buy it,” she’d said.

Well, and this was a trend like any other, and as a sociologist I should note it with interest and try to determine its origins. I didn’t. Instead, I started checking out books. All my favorites, which I’d never checked out because I had copies at home, and all the classics, and everything with an old cloth binding that somebody might want to read someday when the current trends of sentimentality and schlock are over.

Today I checked out
The Wrong Box
, in honor of the day’s events, and since I’d first seen Dr. O’Reilly with his legs sticking out from under a large object,
The Wizard of Oz
, and then went over to the Bs to look for Bennett.
The Old Wives’ Tale
wasn’t there (it had probably ended up in the book sale already), but right next to Beckett was Butler’s
The Way of All Flesh
, which meant
The Old Wives’ Tale
might just be misshelved.

I started down the shelves, looking for something chubby, clothbound, and untouched. Borges;
Wuthering Heights
, which I had already checked out this year; Rupert Brooke. And Robert Browning.
The Complete Works.
It wasn’t Arnold Bennett, but it was both clothbound and fat, and it still had an old-fashioned pocket and checkout card in it. I grabbed it and the Borges and took them to the checkout desk.

“I remembered what else was on the reserve list,” Lorraine said. “New book.
Guide to the Fairies.”

“What is it, a children’s book?”

“No.” She took it off the reserve shelf. “It’s about the presence of fairies in our daily lives.”

She handed it to me. It had a picture of a fairy peeking out from behind a computer on the cover, and it fit one of the criteria for a book fad: It was only 80 pages long.
The Bridges of Madison County
was
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
was 93, and
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
, a huge fad back in 1934, was only 84.

It was also drivel. The chapter titles were “How to Get in Touch with Your Inner Fairy,” “How Fairies Can Help Us Get Ahead in the Corporate World,” and “Why You Shouldn’t Pay Attention to Unbelievers.”

“You’d better put me on the list,” I said. I handed her the Browning.

“This hasn’t been checked out in nearly a year,” she said.

“Really?” I said. “Well, it is now.” And took my Borges, Browning, and Baum and went to get some dinner at the Earth Mother.

poulaines (1350—1480)—–
Soft leather or cloth shoes with elongated points. Originating in Poland (hence
poulaine;
the English called them
crackowes
after Cracow), or more logically brought back from the Middle East by Crusaders, they became the craze at all the European courts. The pointed toes became more elaborate, stuffed with moss and shaped into lions’ claws or eagles’ beaks, and progressively longer, to the point that it was impossible to walk without tripping over them and completely impossible to kneel, and gold and silver chains had to be attached to the knees to hold up the ends. Translated into armor, the poulaine fad became downright dangerous: Austrian knights at the battle of Sempach in 1386 were riveted to the spot by their elongated iron shoes and were forced to strike off the points with their swords or be caught flat-footed, so to speak. Supplanted by the square-toed, ankle-strapped duck’s-bill shoe, which promptly became ridiculously wide.

The Earth Mother has okay food and iced tea so good I order it all year round. Plus, it’s a great place to study fads. Not only is its menu trendy (currently free-range vegetarian), but so are its waiters. Also, there’s a stand outside with all the alternative newspapers.

I gathered them up and went inside. The door and entry-way were jammed with people waiting to get in. Their iced tea must be becoming a trend. I presented myself to the waitress, who had a prison-style haircut, jogging shorts, and Tevas.

That’s another trend, waitresses dressed to look as little as possible like waitresses, probably so you can’t find them when you want your check. “Name and number in your party?” the waitress said. She was holding a tablet with at least twenty names.

“One, Foster,” I said. “I’ll take smoking or nonsmoking, whichever’s quicker.”

She looked outraged. “We don’t
have
a smoking section,” she said. “Don’t you know what smoking can do to you?”

Usually get you seated quicker, I thought, but since she looked ready to cross out my name, I said, “
I
don’t smoke. I was just willing to sit with people who do.”

“Secondhand smoke is just as deadly,” she said, and put an
X
next to my name that probably meant I would be seated right after hell froze over. “I’ll call you,” she said, rolling her eyes, and I certainly hoped
that
wasn’t a trend.

I sat down on the bench next to the door and started through the papers. They were full of animal rights articles and tattoo removal ads. I turned to the personals. The personals aren’t a fad. They were, in the late eighties, and then, like a lot of fads, instead of dying out, they settled into a small but permanent niche in society.

That happens to lots of fads: CBs were so popular for a few months that “Breaker, breaker” became a catchphrase and everyone had handles like “Red Hot Mama,” and then went back to being used by truckers and speeding motorists. Bicycles, Monopoly, crossword puzzles, all were crazes that have settled into the mainstream. The personals took up residence in the alternative newspapers.

There can be trends within trends, though, and the personals go through fads of their own. Unusual varieties of sex was big for a while. Now it’s outdoor activities.

The waitress, looking vastly disapproving, said, “Foster party of one,” and led me to a table right in front of the kitchen. “We banned smoking two
years
ago,” she said, and slapped down a menu.