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.
“Do you like po-mo pink?” I asked her.
She sighed. “It’s the boss color for fall.”
Of course. And therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct.
I put my incorrect change and my ribbon in my shoulder bag (very passé) and went back out onto the mall. It had started to spit snow and the street musicians were shivering in their Birkenstocks and Ecuador shirts. I put on my mittens (completely swarb) and walked back down toward the library, looking at yuppie shops and bagel stands and getting more and more depressed. I had no idea where any of these fads came from, even po-mo pink, which some fashion designer had come up with. But the fashion designer couldn’t make people buy po-mo pink, couldn’t make them wear it and make jokes about it and write editorials on the subject of “What is fashion coming to?”
The fashion designers could make it popular this season, especially since nobody would be able to find anything else in the stores, but they couldn’t make it a fad. In 1971, they’d tried to introduce the long midi-skirt and failed utterly, and they’d been predicting the “comeback of the hat” for years to no avail. It took more than merchandising to make a fad, and I didn’t have any idea what that something more was.
And the more I fed in my data, the more convinced I was the answer wasn’t in it, that increased independence and lice and bicycling were nothing more than excuses, reasons thought up afterward to explain what no one understood. Especially me.
I wondered if I was even in the right field. I was feeling so dissatisfied, as if everything I was doing was pointless, so… itch.
Flip, I thought. She did this to me with her talk about Brine and Groupthink. She’s some kind of anti-guardian angel, following me everywhere, hindering rather than helping and putting me in a bad mood. And I’m not going to let her ruin my weekend. It’s bad enough she ruins the rest of the week.
I bought a piece of chocolate cheesecake and went back to the library and checked out The Red Badge of Courage, How Green Was My Valley, and The Color Purple, but the mood persisted throughout the steely afternoon, and all the icy way home, making it impossible for me to work.
I tried reading the chaos theory book I’d checked out, but it just made me more depressed. Chaotic systems had so many variables it would have been nearly impossible to predict the systems’ behavior if they acted in logical, straightforward ways. But they didn’t.
Every variable interacted with every other, colliding and connecting in unexpected ways, setting up iteration loops that fed into the system again and again, crisscrossing and connecting the variables so many ways it wasn’t surprising a butterfly could have a devastating effect. Or none at all.
I could see why Dr. O’Reilly had wanted to study a system with limited variables, but what was limited? According to the book, anything and everything was a variable: entropy, gravity, the quantum effects of an electron, or a star on the other side of the universe.
So even if Dr. O’Reilly was right and there weren’t any outside X factors operating on the system, there was no way to compute all the variables or even decide what they were.
It all bore an uncomfortable resemblance to fads and made me wonder which variables I wasn’t taking into account, so that when Billy Ray called, I clutched at him like a drowning man. “I’m so glad you called,” I said. “My research went faster than I thought it would, so I’m free after all. Where are you?”
“On my way to Bozeman,” he said. “When you said you were busy, I decided to skip the seminar and go pick up those Targhees I was looking at.” He paused, and I could hear the warning hum of his cell phone. “I’ll be back on Monday. How about dinner sometime next week?”
I wanted dinner tonight, I thought crabbily. “Great,” I said. “Call me when you get back.”
The hum crescendoed. “Sorry we missed each oth—” he said and went out of range.
I went and looked out the window at the sleet and then got into bed and read Led On by Fate cover to cover, which wasn’t much of a feat. It was only ninety-four pages long, and so obviously wretchedly written it was destined to become a huge fad.
Its premise was that everything was ordained and organized by guardian angels, and the heroine was given to saying things like “Everything happens for a reason, Derek! You broke off our engagement and slept with Edwina and were implicated in her death, and I turned to Paolo for comfort and went to Nepal with him so that we’d learn the meaning of suffering and despair, without which true love is meaningless. All of it—the train wreck, Lilith’s suicide, Halvard’s drug addiction, the stock market crash—it was all so we could be together. Oh, Derek, there’s a reason behind everything!”
Except, apparently, hair-bobbing. I woke up at three with Irene Castle and golf clubs dancing in my head. That happened to Henri Poincaré. He’d been working on mathematical functions for days and days, and one night he drank too much coffee (which probably had had the same effect as bad literature) and couldn’t sleep, and mathematical ideas “rose in crowds.”
And Friedrich Kekulé. He’d fallen into a reverie on top of a bus and seen chains of carbon atoms dancing wildly around. One of the chains had suddenly taken its tail in its mouth and formed a ring, and Kekulé had ended up discovering the benzene ring and revolutionizing organic chemistry.
All Irene Castle did with the golf clubs was the hesitation waltz, and after a while I turned on the light and opened Browning.
It turned out he had known Flip after all. He’d written a poem, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” about her. “G-r-r, you swine,” he’d written, obviously after she crumpled up all his poems, and “There go, my heart’s abhorrence.” I decided to say it to Flip the next time she stuck me with the check.
Hot pants [1971]
Fashion fad worn by everyone that only looked good on the very young and shapely. A successor to the miniskirt of the sixties, hot pants were a reaction to fashion designers’ attempts to introduce the midcalf-length midiskirt. Hot pants were made out of satin or velvet, often with suspenders, and were worn with patent leather boots. Women wore them to the office, and they were even allowed in the Miss America pageant.