Bellwether (7 page)

Which was incidentally the last time women had cut their hair short until the 1920s, and it was a snap to trace that fad to its source. Aristocrats had had their hair chopped off to make it easier on the guillotine, and after the Empire was reinstated, relatives and friends had worn their hair short in sympathetic tribute. They’d also tied narrow red ribbons around their necks, but I doubted if that was what the dreadlocks person had had in mind. Or maybe it was.

Backpacks were out, and tiny, dangling wallets-on-a-string were in. Also Ugg boots, and kneeless jeans, and plaid flannel shirts. There wasn’t an inch of corduroy anywhere. Inline skating with no regard for human life was very much in, as was walking slowly and obliviously four abreast. Sunflowers were out and violets were in. Ditto the Sinéad O’Connor look, and hair wraps. The long, thin strands of hair wrapped in brightly colored thread were everywhere.

Crystals and aromatherapy were out, replaced apparently by recreational ethnicity. The New Age shops were advertising Iroquois sweat lodges, Russian banya therapy, and Peruvian vision quests, $249 double occupancy, meals included. There were two Ethiopian restaurants, a Filipino deli, and a cart selling Navajo fry bread.

And half a dozen coffeehouses, which had apparently sprung up like mushrooms overnight: the Jumpstart, the Espresso Espress, the Caffe Lottie, the Cup o’ Joe, and the Caffe Java.

After a while I got tired of dodging mimes and in-line skaters and went into the Mother Earth, which was now calling itself the Caffe Krakatoa (east of Java). It was as crowded inside as it had been out on the mall. A waitress with a swag haircut was taking names. “Do you want to sit at the communal table?” she was asking the guy in front of me, pointing to a long table with two people at it, one at each end.

That’s a trend that’s moved over here from England, where strangers have to share tables in order to keep up with the gossip on Prince Charles and Camilla. It hasn’t caught on particularly over here, where strangers are more apt to want to talk about Rush Limbaugh or their hair implants.

I had sat at communal tables a few times when they were first introduced, thinking it was a good way to get exposure to trends in language and thought, but a taste was more than enough. Just because people are experiencing things doesn’t mean they have any insight into them, a fact the talk shows (a trend that has reached the cancerous uncontrolled growth stage and should shortly exhaust its food supply) should have figured out by now.

The guy was asking, “If I don’t sit at the communal table, how long a wait?”

The waitress sighed. “I don’t know. Forty minutes?” and I certainly hoped that wasn’t going to be a trend.

“How
many?”
she said to me.

“Two,” I said, so I wouldn’t have to sit at the communal table. “Foster.”

“It has to be your first name.”

“Why?” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “So I can
call
you.”

“Sandra,” I said.

“How do you spell that?”

No, I thought, please tell me Flip isn’t becoming a trend. Please.

I spelled
Sandra
for her, grabbed up the alternative newspapers, and settled into a corner for the duration. There was no point in trying to do the personals till I was at a table, but the articles were almost as good. There was a new laser technology for removing tattoos, Berkeley had outlawed smoking outdoors, the must-have color for spring was postmodern pink, and marriage was coming back in style. “Living together is passe,” assorted Hollywood actresses were quoted as saying. “The cool thing now is diamond rings, weddings, commitment, the whole bit.”

“Susie,” the waitress called.

No one answered.

“Susie, party of two,” she said, flipping her rattail. “
Susie.”

I decided it was either me or somebody who’d given up and left. “Here,” I said, and let a waiter with a Three Stooges haircut lead me to a knee-mashing table by the window. “I’m ready to order,” I said before he could leave.

“I thought there were two in your party,” he said.

“The other person will be here soon. I’ll have a double tall caffe latte with skim milk and semisweet chocolate on top,” I said brightly.

The waiter sighed and looked expectant.

“With brown sugar on the side,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “Sumatra, Yergacheffe, or Sulawesi?” he said.

I looked to the menu for help, but there was nothing there but a quote from Kahlil Gibran. “Sumatra,” I said, since I knew where it was.

He sighed. “Seattle- or California-style?”

“Seattle,” I said.

“With?”

“A spoon?” I said hopefully.

He rolled his eyes.

“What flavor
syrup?”

Maple? I thought, even though that seemed unlikely. “Raspberry?” I said.

That was apparently one of the choices. He slouched off, and I attacked the personals. There was no point in circling the NSs. They were in virtually every ad. Two had it in their headline, and one, placed by a very intelligent, strikingly handsome athlete, had it listed twice.

Friends
was out, and soul work was in. There were two references to fairies, and yet another abbreviation: GC. “JSDM seeks WSNSF. Must be GC. South of Baseline. West of Twenty-eighth.” I circled it and turned back to the code book. Geographically compatible.

There weren’t any other GCs, but there was a “Boulder mall area preferred,” and one that specified, “Valmont or Pearl, 2500 block only.”

Yes, in an eight-and-a-half narrow, and I’d like that delivered Federal Express to my door. It made me think fondly of Billy Ray, who was willing to drive all the way down from Laramie to take me out.

“This place is so
ridiculous,”
Flip said, sitting down across from me. She was wearing a babydoll dress, thigh-high pink stockings, and a pair of clunky Mary Janes, all of which she had on more or less right side up. “There’s a forty-minute line.”

Yes, I thought, and you should be in it. “There’s a communal table,” I said.

“Nobody sits together except swarbs and boofs,” she said. “Brine made us sit at the communal table once.” She bent over to pull up her thigh-highs.

There was no duct tape in evidence. Flip motioned the waiter over and ordered. “LattemarchianoskimtallJazula and not too much foam.” She turned to look at me. “Brine ordered a latte with Su
ma
tra.” She picked up my sack from the bookstore. “What’s this?”

“A birthday present for Dr. Damati’s little girl.”

She had already pulled it out and was examining it curiously.

“It’s a book,” I said.

“Didn’t they have the video?” She stuck it back in the sack. “I would’ve bought her a Barbie.” She tossed her swath of hair, and I could see that she had a strip of duct tape across her forehead. There was a cut-out circle in the middle with what looked like a lowercase
i
tattooed right between her eyes.

“What’s your tattoo?”

“It’s not a tattoo,” she said, brushing her hair back so I could see it better. It
was
a lowercase i. “Nobody wears tattoos anymore.”

I started to draw her attention to her snowy owl and noticed that she was wearing duct tape there, too, a small circular patch right where the snowy owl had been.

“Tattoos are
artificial.
Sticking all those chemicals and cancerinogens under your skin,” she said. “It’s a brand.”

“A brand,” I said, wishing, as usual, that I hadn’t started this.

“Brands are organic. You’re not injecting something
into
your body. You’re bringing out something that’s already there in your natural body. Fire’s one of the four elements, you know.”

Sarah, over in Chem, would love to hear that. “I’ve never seen one before,” I said. “What does the
i
stand for?”

She looked confused. “Stand for? It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s I. You know, me. Who I am. It’s a personal statement.”

I decided not to ask her why her brand was lowercase, or if it had occurred to her that anyone seeing her with it would immediately assume it stood for
incompetent.

“It’s ‘I,’” she said. “A person who doesn’t need anybody else, especially not a
swarb
who would sit at the communal table and order Sumatra.” She sighed deeply.

The waiter brought our lattes in Alice-in-Wonderland-sized cups, which might be a trend but was probably just a practical adjustment. Pouring steaming liquids into clear glass can have disastrous results.

Flip sighed again, a huge sigh, and licked the foam despondently off the back of her long-handled spoon.

“Do you ever feel com
plete
ly itch?”

Since I had no idea what
itch
was, I licked the back of my own spoon and hoped the question was rhetorical.

It was. “I mean, like take today. Here it is, the weekend, and I’m stuck sitting here with you.” Here she rolled her eyes and sighed again. “Guys suck, you know.”

By which I took it she meant Brine, of the bovver boots and assorted studs.

“Life
sucks. You say to yourself, What am I doing in my job?”

Not much, I thought.

“So, everything sucks. You’re not going anywhere, you’re not accomplishing anything. I’m
twenty-two!”
She ate a spoonful of foam. “Like, why can’t I ever meet a guy who isn’t a swarb?”

It might be the forehead tattoo, I thought, and then remembered I wasn’t any better off than Flip.

“It’s just like Groupthink says.” She looked at me expectantly, and then expelled so much air I thought she was going to deflate. “How can you not know about Groupthink? They’re the most in band in Seattle. It’s like their song says, ‘Spinning my wheels on the launchpad, spitting I dunno and itch.’ This is too bumming,” she said, glaring at me like it was my fault. “I gotta get out of here.”

She snatched up her check and slouched off through the crowd toward our waiter.

After a minute he came over and handed the check to me. “Your friend said you’d pay this,” he said. “She said to tip me twenty percent.”

alice blue—–(1902—4)—–
Color fad inspired by President Teddy Roosevelt’s pretty and vivacious teenage daughter, of whom her father once said, “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” Alice Roosevelt was one of the first “media stars”; her every move, comment, and outfit was copied by an eager public. When a dress was designed for her to match her gray-blue eyes, reporters dubbed it Alice blue, and the color became instantly popular. The musical comedy
Irene
featured a song called “Alice Blue Gown,” shops marketed gray-blue fabric, hats, and hair ribbons, and hundreds of babies were named Alice and dressed not in the traditional pink but in Alice blue.

After Flip left I went back to the personals, but they seemed sad and a little desperate: “Lonely SWF seeks someone who really understands.”

I wandered down the mall, looking at fairy T-shirts, fairy pillows, fairy soaps, and a cologne in a flower-shaped bottle called Elfmaiden. The Paper Doll had fairy greeting cards, fairy calendars, and fairy wrapping paper. The Peppercorn had a fairy teapot The Quilted Unicorn, combining several trends, featured a caffe latte cup painted with a fairy dressed as a violet

The sun had disappeared, and the day had turned gray and chilly. It looked as if it might even start to snow. I walked down past the Latte Lenya to the Fashion Front and went in to get warm and to see what color postmodern pink was.

Color fads are usually the result of a technological breakthrough. Mauve and turquoise,
the
colors of the 1870s, were brought about by a scientific breakthrough in the manufacture of dyes. So were the Day-Glo colors of the 1960s. And the new jewel-tone maroon and emerald car colors.

The fact that new colors are few and far between has never stopped fashion designers, though. They just give a new name to an old color. Like Schiaparelli’s “shocking” pink in the 1920s, and Chanel’s “beige” for what had previously been a nondescript tan. Or name a color after somebody, whether they wore it or not, like Victoria blue, Victoria green, Victoria red, and the ever-popular, and a lot more logical, Victoria black.

The clerk in the Fashion Front was talking on the phone to her boyfriend and examining her split ends. “Do you have postmodern pink?” I said.

“Yeah,”
she said belligerently, and turned back to the phone. “I have to go wait on this
woman,”
she said, slammed the phone down, and slouched over to the racks.

It is a fad, I thought, following her. Flip is a fad.

She shoved past a counter full of angel sweatshirts marked seventy-five percent off, and gestured at the rack. “And it’s po-mo pink,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Not postmodern.”

“It’s supposed to be the hot color for fall,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said, and slouched back to the phone while I examined “the hottest new color to hit since the sixties.”

It wasn’t new. It had been called ashes-of-roses the first time around in 1928 and dove pink the second in 1954.

Both times it had been a grim, grayish pink that washed out skin and hair, which hadn’t stopped it from being hugely popular. It no doubt would be again in its present incarnation as po-mo pink.

It wasn’t as good a name as ashes-of-roses, but names don’t have to be enticing to be faddish. Witness flea, the winning color of 1776. And the hit of Louis XVI’s court had been, I’m not kidding, puce. And not just plain puce. It had been so popular it’d come in a whole variety of appetizing shades: young puce, old puce, puce-belly, puce-thigh, and puce-with-milk-fever.

I bought a three-foot-long piece of po-mo pink ribbon to take back to the lab, which meant the clerk had to get off the phone
again.
“This is for hair wraps,” she said, looking disapprovingly at my short hair, and gave me the wrong change.