Connie Willis - Bellweather

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Bellwether
Connie Willis
To John
From Abigail
"Yours—yours—yours—"
acknowledgment
Special thanks to the girls at Margie's Java Joint, who make the best caffè latte and conversation in the world, and
without whom I wouldn't have made it through the last months of this novel!
1.
beginning
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step by step they followed dancing.
robert browning
hula hoop [march 1958-june 1959]
The prototype for all merchandising fads and one whose phenomenal success has never been repeated. Originally a
wooden exercise hoop used in Australian gym classes, the Hula Hoop was redesigned in gaudy plastic by Wham-O and sold
for $1.98 to adults and kids alike. Nuns, Red Skelton, geishas, Jane Russell, and the Queen of Jordan rotated them on their
hips, and lesser beings dislocated hips, sprained necks, and slipped disks. Russia and China banned them as "capitalist," a
team of Belgian explorers took twenty of them along to the South Pole (to give the penguins?), and over fifty million were
sold worldwide. Died out as quickly as it had spread.
It's almost impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a fad. By the time it starts to look like one, its origins are far in the
past, and trying to trace them back is exponentially harder than, say, looking for the source of the Nile.
In the first place, there's probably more than one source, and in the second, you're dealing with human behavior. All
Speke and Burton had to deal with were crocodiles, rapids, and the tsetse fly. In the third, we know something about how
rivers work, like, they flow downhill. Fads seem to spring full-blown out of nowhere and for no good reason. Witness
bungee-jumping. And Lava lamps.
Scientific discoveries are the same way. People like to think of science as rational and reasonable, following step by
step from hypothesis to experiment to conclusion. Dr. Chin, last year's winner of the Niebnitz Grant, wrote, "The process of
scientific discovery is the logical extension of observation by experimentation."
Nothing could be further from the truth. The process is exactly like any other human endeavor—messy, haphazard,
misdirected, and heavily influenced by chance. Look at Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin when a spore drifted in
the window of his lab and contaminated one of his cultures.
Or Roentgen. He was working with a cathode-ray tube surrounded by sheets of black cardboard when he caught a
glimpse of light from the other side of his lab. A sheet of paper coated with barium platinocyanide was fluorescing, even
though it was shut off from the tube. Curious, he stuck his hand between the tube and the screen. And saw the shadow of the
bones of his hand.
Look at Galvani, who was studying the nervous systems of frogs when he discovered electrical currents. Or Messier.
He wasn't looking for galaxies when he discovered them. He was looking for comets. He only mapped them because he was
trying to get rid of a nuisance.
None of which makes Dr. Chin any the less deserving of the Niebnitz Grant's million-dollar endowment. It isn't
necessary to understand how something works to do it. Take driving. And starting fads. And falling in love.
What was I talking about? Oh, yes, how scientific discoveries come about. Usually the chain of events leading up to
them, like that leading up to a fad, follows a course too convoluted and chaotic to follow. But I know exactly where one
started and who started it.
It was in October. Monday the second. Nine o'clock in the morning. I was in the stats lab at HiTek, struggling with a
box of clippings on hair-bobbing. I'm Sandra Foster, by the way, and I work in R&D at HiTek. I had spent all weekend
going through yellowed newspapers and 1920s copies of The Saturday Evening Post and The Delineator, trudging
upstream to the beginnings of the fad of hair-bobbing, looking for what had caused every woman in America to suddenly
chop off her "crowning glory," despite social pressure, threatening sermons, and four thousand years of long hair.
I had clipped endless news items; highlighted references, magazine articles, and advertisements; dated them; and
organized them into categories. Flip had stolen my stapler, I had run out of paper clips, and Desiderata hadn't been able to
find any more, so I had had to settle for stacking them, in order, in the box, which I was now trying to maneuver into my lab.
The box was heavy and had been made by the same people who manufacture paper sacks for the supermarket, so
when I'd dumped it just outside the lab so I could unlock the door, it had developed a major rip down one side. I was
half-wrestling, half-dragging it over next to one of the lab tables so I could lift the stacks of clippings out when the whole side
started to give way.
An avalanche of magazine pages and newspaper stories began to spill out through the side before I could get it pushed
back in place, and I grabbed for them and the box as Flip opened the door and slouched in, looking disgusted. She was
wearing black lipstick, a black halter, and a black leather micro-skirt and was carrying a box about the size of mine.
"I'm not supposed to have to deliver packages," she said. "You're supposed to pick them up in the mail room."
"I didn't know I had a package," I said, trying to hold the box together with one hand and reach a roll of duct tape in
the middle of the lab table with the other. "Just set it down anywhere."
She rolled her eyes. "You're supposed to get a notice saying you have a package."
Yes, well, and you were probably supposed to deliver it, I thought, which explains why I never got it. "Could you reach
me that duct tape?" I said.
"Employees aren't supposed to ask interdepartmental assistants to run personal errands or make coffee," Flip said.
"Handing me a roll of tape is not a personal errand," I said.
Flip sighed. "I'm supposed to be delivering the interdepartmental mail." She tossed her hair. She had shaved her head
the week before but had left a long hank along the front and down one side expressly for flipping when she feels put-upon.
Flip is my punishment for having tried to get her predecessor, Desiderata, fired. Desiderata was mindless, clueless, and
completely without initiative. She misdelivered the mail, wrote down messages wrong, and spent all her free time examining
her split ends. After two months and a wrong phone call that cost me a government grant, I went to Management and
demanded she be fired and somebody, anybody else be hired, on the grounds that nobody could possibly be worse than
Desiderata. I was wrong.
Management moved Desiderata to Supply (nobody ever gets fired at HiTek except scientists and even we don't get
pink slips. Our projects just get canceled for lack of funding) and hired Flip, who has a nose ring, a tattoo of a snowy owl,
and the habit of sighing and rolling her eyes when you ask her to do anything at all. I am afraid to get her fired. There is no
telling who they might hire next.
Flip sighed loudly. "This package is really heavy."
"Then set it down," I said, stretching to reach the tape. It was just out of reach. I inched the hand holding the side of the
box shut higher and leaned farther across the lab table. My fingertips just touched the tape.
"It's breakable," Flip said, coming over to me, and dropped the box. I grabbed to catch it with both hands. It thunked
down on the table, the side gave way on my box, and the clippings poured out of the box and across the floor.
"Next time you're going to have to pick it up yourself," Flip said, walking on the clippings toward the door.
I shook the box, listening for broken sounds. There weren't any, and when I looked at the top, it didn't say FRAGILE
anywhere. It said PERISHABLE. It also said DR. ALICIA TURNBULL.
"This isn't mine," I said, but Flip was already out the door. I waded through a sea of clippings and called to her. "This
isn't my package. It's for Dr. Turnbull in Bio."
She sighed.
"You need to take this to Dr. Turnbull."
She rolled her eyes. "I have to deliver the rest of the interdepartmental mail first," she said, tossing her hank of hair.
She slouched on down the hall, dropping two pieces of said departmental mail as she went.
"Make sure you come back and get it as soon as you're done with the mail," I shouted after her down the hall. "It's
perishable," I shouted, and then, remembering that illiteracy is a hot trend these days and perishable is a four-syllable word,
"That means it'll spoil."
Her shaved head didn't even turn, but one of the doors halfway down the hall opened, and Gina leaned out. "What did
she do now?" she asked.
"Duct tape now qualifies as a personal errand," I said.
Gina came down the hall. "Did you get one of these?" she said, handing me a blue flyer. It was a meeting
announcement. Wednesday. Cafeteria. All HiTek staff, including R&D. "Flip was supposed to deliver one to every office,"
she said.
"What's the meeting about?"
"Management went to another seminar," she said. "Which means a sensitivity exercise, a new acronym, and more
paperwork for us. I think I'll call in sick. Brittany's birthday's in two weeks, and I need to get the party decorations. What's in
these days in birthday parties? Circus? Wild West?"
"Power Rangers," I said. "Do you think they might reorganize the departments?" The last seminar Management had
gone to, they'd created Flip's job as part of CRAM (Communications Reform Activation Management). Maybe this time
they'd eliminate interdepartmental assistants, and I could go back to making my own copies, delivering my own messages,
and fetching my own mail. All of which I was doing now.
"I hate the Power Rangers," Gina said. "Explain to me how they ever got to be so popular."
She went back to her lab, and I went back to work on my bobbed hair. It was easy to see how it had become
popular. No long hair to put up with combs and pins and pompadour puffs, no having to wash it and wait a week for it to
dry. The nurses who'd served in World War I had had to cut their hair off because of lice, and had liked the freedom and the
lightness short hair gave them. And there were obvious advantages when it came to the other fads of the day: bicycling and
lawn tennis.
So why hadn't it become a fad in 1918? Why had it waited another four years and then suddenly, for no apparent
reason, hit so big that barber shops were swamped and hairpin companies went bankrupt overnight? In 1921, hair-bobbing
was still unusual enough to make front-page news and get women fired. By 1925, it was so common every graduation picture
and advertisement and magazine illustration showed short hair, and the only hats being sold were bell-shaped cloches, which
were too snug to fit over long hair. What had happened in the interim? What was the trigger?
I spent the rest of the day re-sorting the clippings. You'd think magazine pages from the 1920s would have turned
yellowish and rough, but they hadn't. They'd slid like eels out onto the tile floor, fanning out across and under each other,
mixing with the newspaper clippings and obliterating their categories. Some of the paper clips had even come off.
I did the re-sorting on the floor. One of the lab tables was full of clippings about pogs that Flip was supposed to have
taken to be copied and hadn't, and the other one had all my jitterbug data on it. And neither one was big enough for the
number of piles I needed, some of which overlapped: entire article devoted to hair-bobbing, reference within article devoted
to flappers, pointed reference, casual reference, disapproving reference, humorous reference, shocked and horrified
reference, illustration in advertisement, adoption by middle-aged women, adoption by children, adoption by the elderly, news
items by date, news items by state, urban reference, rural reference, disparaging reference, reference indicating complete
acceptance, first signs of waning of fad, fad declared over.
By 4:55 the floor of my whole lab was covered with piles and Flip still wasn't back. Stepping carefully among the piles,
I went over and looked at the box again. Biology was clear on the other side of the complex, but there was nothing for it. The
box said PERISHABLE, and even though irresponsibility is the hottest trend of the nineties, it hasn't worked its way through
the whole society yet. I picked up the box and took it down to Dr. Turnbull.
It weighed a ton. By the time I'd maneuvered it down two flights and along four corridors, the reasons why
irresponsibility had caught on had become very clear to me. At least I was getting to see a part of the building I ordinarily was
never in. I wasn't even exactly sure where Bio was except that it was down on the ground floor. But I must be heading in the
right direction. There was moisture in the air and a faint sound of zoo. I followed the sound down yet another staircase and
into a long corridor. Dr. Turnbull's office was, of course, at the very end of it.
The door was shut. I shifted the box in my arms, knocked and waited. No answer. I shifted the box again, propping it
against the wall with my hip, and tried the knob. The door was locked.
The last thing I wanted to do was lug this box all the way back up to my office and then try to find a refrigerator. I
looked down the hall at the line of doors. They were all closed, and, presumably, locked, but there was a line of light under
the middle one on the left.
I repositioned the box, which was getting heavier by the minute, lugged it down to the light, and knocked on the door.
No answer, but when I tried the knob, the door opened onto a jungle of video cameras, computer equipment, opened boxes,
and trailing wires.
"Hello," I said. "Anybody here?"
There was a muffled grunt, which I hoped wasn't from an inmate of the zoo. I glanced at the nameplate on the door.
"Dr. O'Reilly?" I said.
"Yeah?" a man's voice from under what looked like a furnace said.
I walked around to the side of it and could see two brown corduroy legs sticking out from under it, surrounded by a
litter of tools. "I've got a box here for Dr. Turnbull," I said to the legs. "She's not in her office. Could you take it for her?"
"Just set it down," the voice said impatiently.
I looked around for somewhere to set it that wasn't covered with video equipment and coils of chicken wire.
"Not on the equipment," the legs said sharply. "On the floor. Carefully."
I pushed aside a rope and two modems and set the box down. I squatted down next to the legs and said, "It's marked
'perishable.' You need to put it in the refrigerator."
"All right," he snapped. A freckled arm in a wrinkled white sleeve appeared, patting the floor around the base of the
box.
There was a roll of duct tape lying just out of his reach. "Duct tape?" I said, putting it in his hand.
His hand closed around it and then just stayed there.
"You didn't want the duct tape?" I looked around to see what else he might have wanted. "Pliers? Phillips
screwdriver?"
The legs and arm disappeared under the furnace and a head emerged from behind it. "Sorry," he said. His face was
freckled, too, and he was wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses. "I thought you were that mail person."
"Flip," I said. "No. She delivered the box to my office by mistake."
"Figures." He pulled himself out from under the furnace and stood up. "I really am sorry," he said, dusting himself off. "I
don't usually act that rude to people who are trying to deliver things. It's just that Flip..."
"I know," I said, nodding sympathetically.
He pushed his hand through his sandy hair. "The last time she delivered a box to me she set it on top of one of the
monitors, and it fell off and broke a video camera."
"That sounds like Flip," I said, but I wasn't really listening. I was looking at him.
When you spend as much time as I do analyzing fads and fashions, you get so you can spot them at first sight:
ecohippie, jogger, Wall Street M.B.A., urban terrorist. Dr. O'Reilly wasn't any of them. He was about my age and about my
height. He was wearing a lab coat and corduroy pants that had been washed so often the wale was completely worn off on
the knees. They'd shrunk, too, halfway up his ankles, and there was a pale line where they'd been let down.
The effect, especially with the Coke-bottle glasses, should have been science geek, but it wasn't. For one thing, there
were the freckles. For another, he was wearing a pair of once-white canvas sneakers with holes in the toes and frayed
seams. Science geeks wear black shoes and white socks. He wasn't even wearing a pocket protector, though he should have
been. There were two splotches of ballpoint ink and a puddle of Magic Marker on the breast pocket of the lab coat, and one
of the patch pockets was out at the bottom. And there was something else, something I couldn't put my finger on, that made
it impossible for me to categorize him.
I squinted at him, trying to figure out exactly what it was, so long he looked at me curiously. "I took the box to Dr.
Turnbull's office," I said hastily, "but she's gone home."
"She had a grant meeting today," he said. "She's very good at getting grants."
"The most important quality for a scientist these days," I said.
"Yeah," he said, smiling wryly. "Wish I had it."
"I'm Sandra Foster," I said, sticking out my hand. "Sociology."
He wiped his hand on his corduroys and shook my hand. "Bennett O'Reilly."
And that was odd, too. He was my age. His name should be Matt or Mike or, God forbid, Troy. Bennett.
I was staring again. I said, "And you're a biologist?"
"Chaos theory."
"Isn't that an oxymoron?" I said.
He grinned. "The way I did it, yes. Which is why my project lost its funding and I had to come to work for HiTek."
Maybe that accounted for the oddness, and corduroys and canvas sneakers were what chaos theorists were wearing
these days. No, Dr. Applegate, over in Chem, had been in chaos, and he dressed like everybody else in R&D: flannel shirt,
baseball cap, jeans, Nikes.
And nearly everybody at HiTek's working out of their field. Science has its fads and crazes, like anything else: string
theory, eugenics, mesmerism. Chaos theory had been big for a couple of years, in spite of Utah and cold fusion, or maybe
because of it, but both of them had been replaced by genetic engineering. If Dr. O'Reilly wanted grant money, he needed to
give up chaos and build a better mouse.
He was stooping over the box. "I don't have a refrigerator. I'll have to set it outside on the porch." He picked it up,
grunting a little. "Jeez, it's heavy. Flip probably delivered it to you on purpose so she wouldn't have to carry it all the way
down here." He boosted it up with his corduroy knee. "Well, on behalf of Dr. Turnbull and all of Flip's other victims, thanks,"
he said, and headed into the tangle of equipment.
A clear exit line, and, speaking of grants, I still had half those hair-bobbing clippings to sort into piles before I went
home. But I was still trying to put my finger on what it was that was so unusual about him. I followed him through the maze of
stuff.
"Is Flip responsible for this?" I said, squeezing between two stacks of boxes.
"No," he said. "I'm setting up my new project." He stepped over a tangle of cords.
"Which is?" I brushed aside a hanging plastic net.
"Information diffusion." He opened a door and stepped outside onto a porch. "It should keep cold enough out here," he
said, setting it down.
"Definitely," I said, hugging my arms against a chilly October wind. The porch faced a large, enclosed paddock, fenced
in on all sides by high walls and overhead with wire netting. There was a gate at the back.
"It's used for large-animal experiments," Dr. O'Reilly said. "I'd hoped I'd have the monkeys by July so they could be
outside, but the paperwork's taken longer than I expected."
"Monkeys?"
"The project's studying information diffusion patterns in a troop of macaques. You teach a new skill to one of the
macaques and then document its spread through the troop. I'm working with the rate of utilitarian versus nonutilitarian skills. I
teach one of the macaques a nonutilitarian skill with a low ability threshold and multiple skill levels—"
"Like the Hula Hoop," I said.
He set the box down just outside the door and stood up. "The Hula Hoop?"
"The Hula Hoop, miniature golf, the twist. All fads have a low ability threshold. That's why you never see speed chess
becoming a fad. Or fencing."
He pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up on his nose.
"I'm working on a project on fads. What causes them and where they come from," I said.
"Where do they come from?"
"I have no idea. And if I don't get back to work, I never will." I stuck out my hand again. "Nice to have met you, Dr.
O'Reilly." I started back through the maze.
He followed me, saying thoughtfully, "I never thought of teaching them to do a Hula Hoop."
I was going to say I didn't think there'd be room in here, but it was almost six, and I at least had to get my piles up off
the floor and into file folders before I went home.
I told Dr. O'Reilly goodbye and went back up to Sociology. Flip was standing in the hall, her hands on the hips of her
leather skirt.
"I came back and you'd left," she said, making it sound like I'd left her sinking in quicksand.
"I was down in Bio," I said.
"I had to come all the way back from Personnel," she said, tossing her hair. "You said to come back."
"I gave up on you and delivered the package myself," I said, waiting for her to protest and say delivering the mail was
her job. I should have known better. That would have meant admitting she was actually responsible for something.
"I looked all over your office for it," she said virtuously. "While I was waiting for you, I picked up all that stuff you left
on the floor and threw it in the trash."
the old curiosity shop [1840-41]
Book fad caused by serialization of Dickens's story about a little girl and her hapless grandfather, who are thrown out
of their shop and forced to wander through England. Interest in the book was so great that people in America thronged the
pier waiting for the ship from England to bring the next installment and, unable to wait for the ship to dock, shouted to the
passengers aboard, "Did Little Nell die?" She did, and her death reduced readers of all ages, sexes, and degrees of
toughness to agonies of grief. Cowboys and miners in the West sobbed openly over the last pages and an Irish member of
Parliament threw the book out of a train and burst into tears.
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 best-sellers, 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 dropoff 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 192 pages, 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 entryway 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
摘要：

BellwetherConnieWillisToJohnFromAbigail"Yours—yours—yours—"acknowledgmentSpecialthankstothegirlsatMargie'sJavaJoint,whomakethebestcaffèlatteandconversationintheworld,andwithoutwhomIwouldn'thavemadeitthroughthelastmonthsofthisnovel!1.beginningBrothers,sisters,husbands,wives—FollowedthePiperfortheirli...

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