“Well,” Flip said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
It was no wonder Pippa had just gone singing past her clients’ windows. If she’d had to put up with them, she wouldn’t have been half as cheerful. I forced an interested expression. “Who else is on the committee?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t have time to go to these things.”
“But don’t you want to make sure you get a good assistant?”
“Not if I have to stay after work,” she said, irritably pulling clippings out from under her. “Your office is a mess. Don’t you ever clean it?”
“‘The lark’s on the wing;/The snail’s on the thorn,’” I said.
“What?”
So Browning was wrong. “I’d love to talk,” I said, “but I’d better get started on this funding form.”
She didn’t show any signs of moving. She was looking aimlessly through the clippings.
“I need you to make a copy of each of those. Now. Before you go to your search committee meeting.”
Still nothing. I got a pencil, stuck the extra pages into the application, and tried to focus on the simplified funding form.
I never worry much about getting funding. It’s true there are fads in both science and industry, but greed is always in style. HiTek would like nothing more than to know what causes fads so they could invent the next one. And stats projects are cheap. The only funding I was requesting was for a computer with more memory capacity. Which didn’t mean I could forget about the funding form. It wouldn’t matter if your project was a sure-fire method for turning lead into gold, if you don’t have the forms filled out and turned in on time, Management will cancel you like a shot.
Project goals, experimental method, projected results, matrix analysis ranking. Matrix analysis ranking?
I flipped the page over to see if there were instructions, and the page came out altogether. There weren’t any instructions, there or at the end of the application. “Were there instructions included with the form?” I asked Flip.
“How would I know?” she said, getting up. “What’s this?” She stuck one of the clippings under my nose, an ad of a bobbed blonde standing next to a Hupmobile.
“The car?”
“No-o-o,” she said, letting her breath out in a big sigh. “Her hair.”
“A bob,” I said, and leaned closer to see if the hair was cut in an Eton bob or a shingle. It was crimped in even rows down the sides of her head. “A marcel wave,” I said. “It was a permanent wave done with a special electrical metal-and-wires apparatus that was about as much fun as going to the dentist,” but Flip had already lost interest.
“I think if they’re going to make you stay after work or make you do extra jobs they should pay you overtime. Like stapling all these funding forms and delivering them to everybody. Some of them were supposed to go all the way down to Bio.”
“Did you deliver one to Dr. O’Reilly?” I said, remembering her habit of dumping packages on closer offices.
“Of course. He didn’t even thank me. What a swarb!”
“Swarb?” I said. Fads in language are impossible to keep up with, and I don’t even try from a research standpoint, but I know most of the slang because that’s how fads are described. But I’d never heard this one.
“You don’t know what swarb means?” she said, in a tone that made me wish Pippa had gone around Italy slapping people. “No hots. No cutes. Cyber-ugg. Swarb.” She flailed her duct-taped arms, trying to think of the word. “Completely fashion-impaired,” she said, and flounced out in her duct tape and upside-down down. Without the clippings.
coffeehouse (1450—1554)—–Middle Eastern fad that originated in Aden, then spread to Mecca and throughout Persia and Turkey. Men sat cross-legged on rugs and sipped thick, black, bitter coffee from tiny cups while listening to poets. The coffeehouses eventually became more popular than mosques and were banned by the religious authorities, who claimed they were frequented by people “of low costume and very little industry.” Spread to London (1652), Paris (1669), Boston (1675), Seattle (1985).
Saturday morning the library called and told me my name had come up on the reserve list for Led On by Fate, so I went to Boulder to pick it up and buy a birthday present for Brittany.
“You can have Angels, Angels Everywhere, too, if you want,” Lorraine told me at the library. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a dalmatian on it and red fireplug earrings. “We finally got two more copies now that nobody wants them.”
I leafed through it while she swiped Led On by Fate with the light pen.
“Your guardian angel goes with you everywhere,” it said. “It’s always there, right beside you, wherever you go.” There was a line drawing of an angel with large wings looming over a woman in a grocery checkout line. “You can ignore them, you can even pretend they don’t exist, but that won’t make them go away.”
Until the fad’s over, I thought.
I checked out Led On by Fate and a book on chaos theory and Mandelbrot diagrams so I’d have a pretext for going down to Bio to see what Dr. O’Reilly was wearing, and went over to the Pearl Street Mall.
Lorraine was right. The bookstore had Angel in My Condo and The Cherubim Cookbook on a sale rack, and The Angel Calendar was marked fifty percent off. There was a big display up front for Faerie Encounters of the Fourth Kind.
I went upstairs to the kids’ section and more fairies: The Flower Fairies (which had been a fad once before, back in the 1910s); Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; More Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; and The Land of Faerie Fun. Also Batman books, Lion King books, Power Rangers books, and Barbie books.
I finally managed to find a hardback copy of Toads and Diamonds, which I’d loved as a kid. It had a fairy in it, but not like those in Fairies, Fairies, Etc., with lavender wings and bluebells for hats. It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances. My kind of moral.
I bought it and went out into the mall. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, balmy and blue-skied. The Pearl Street Mall on a Saturday’s a great place to analyze trends, since, one, there are hordes of people, and two, Boulder’s almost terminally hip. The rest of the state calls it the People’s Republic of Boulder, and it’s got every possible kind of New Ager and falafel stand and street musician.
There are even fads in street music. Guitars were out and bongos were in again. (The first time was in 1958, at the height of the Beat movement. Very low ability threshold.) Flip’s buzzcut-and-swag was very in, and so was the buzzcut-and-message. And duct tape. I saw two people with strips around their sleeves and one with dreadlocks and a bowler had a wide band of duct tape wrapped around his neck like the ones the French had worn during the à la victime fad after the Revolution.
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 Sumatra.” 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 completely 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, yo
u’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