Itch? I thought.
The phone rang, and Gina went into the bedroom to get it, and everybody else adjourned to the kitchen.
There was a shriek from the kitchen, and everybody went in to enhance esteem. I picked up Romantic Bride Barbie and looked at the pink net rosebuds and white satin flounces, marveling. Barbie’s a fad that should have lasted, at the most, for two seasons. Even the Shirley Temple doll had only been a fad for three.
Instead, Barbie’s well into her thirties and more of a fad than ever, even in these days of feminism and non-gender-biased child-rearing. She’d be the perfect thing to study for what causes fads, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Barbie’s one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.
Gina came out of the bedroom. “It’s for you,” she said, looking speculatively at me. “You can take it in the bedroom.”
I put down Romantic Bride Barbie and stood up.
“It’s my birthday!” Brittany shrieked.
“My, Peyton,” Lindsay’s mother said, “what a creative thing to do with your frozen yogurt.”
Gina hurried into the kitchen, and I went into the bedroom.
It was done in violets, with a purple cordless phone. I picked it up.
“Howdy,” Billy Ray said. “Guess where I’m calling from?”
“How did you find out I was here?”
“I called HiTek, and your assistant told me.”
“Flip gave you the number?” I said. “Correctly?”
“I don’t know what her name was. Raspy voice. Coughed a lot.”
Shirl. She must be putting some more of Alicia’s data on my computer.
“Well, so, listen, I’m on my way through the Rockies right now and—hang on. Tunnel coming up. Call you back as soon as I’m through it.” There was a hum, and a click.
I hung up the phone and sat there on Gina’s violet-covered bed, wondering how Billy Ray ever got any ranching done when he was never at the ranch, and pondering the appeal of Barbie.
Part of it must be that she’s been able to incorporate other fads over the years. In the mid-sixties, Barbie had ironed hair and Carnaby Street clothes, in the seventies granny dresses, in the eighties leotards and leg warmers.
Nowadays there are astronaut Barbies and management Barbies, and even a doctor, though it’s hard to imagine Barbie making it through junior high, let alone medical school.
Billy Ray had apparently forgotten all about me, and so had Peyton’s mother. She opened the door, said, “…and I want you to stay in timeout until you’ve decided to relate to your peers,” and ushered in a frozen yogurt-covered Peyton.
Neither of them saw me, especially not Peyton, who flung herself against the door, red-faced and whimpering, and then, when it was apparent that wasn’t going to work, dropped to her hands and knees next to the bed and pulled out a tablet and crayons.
She sat down cross-legged in the middle of the floor, opened the box of crayons, selected a pink one, and began to draw.
“Hi,” I said, and was happy to see her jump a foot. “What are you doing?”
“You’re not supposed to talk in a time-out,” she said righteously.
You’re not supposed to color either, I thought, wishing Billy Ray would remember he was calling me back.
She selected a green crayon and bent over the tablet, drawing earnestly. I moved the phone around to the other side of the bed so I could see the picture.
“What are you drawing?” I asked. “A butterfly?”
She rolled her eyes. “No-o-o,” she said. “It’s a story.”
“A story?” I said, tilting my head around to see it better. “About what?”
“About Barbie.” She sighed, a dead ringer for Flip, and chose a bright blue crayon.
Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?
I looked more closely at the picture. It looked more like a Mandelbrot diagram than a story. It appeared to be some sort of map, or maybe a diagram, with many lines of tiny lavender stars and pink zigzag symbols intersecting across the paper. Peyton had obviously been working on it during a number of time-outs.
“What’s this?” I said, pointing at a row of purple zigzags.
“See,” she said, bringing the tablet and the crayons up onto my lap, “Barbie went to her Malibu Beach House.” She drew a scalloped blue line above the zigzags. “It’s very far. They had to go in her Jaguar.”
“And that’s this line?” I said, pointing at the blue scallops.
“No-o-o,” she said, irritated at all these interruptions. “That’s to show what she was wearing. See, when she goes to the Malibu Beach House she wears her blue hat. So they all got to the Malibu Beach House,” she said, walking her crayon like a doll across the paper, “and Barbie said, ‘Let’s go swimming,’ and I said, ‘Okay, let’s,’ and…” There was a pause while Peyton found an orange crayon. “And Barbie said, ‘Let’s go!’ and we went swimming.” She began drawing a row of rapid sideways zigzags.
“Is that her swimming suit?” I asked.
“No-o-o,” she said. “That’s Barbie.”
Barbie? I thought, wondering what the symbolism of the zigzags was. Of course. Barbie’s high heels.
“So the next day,” Peyton said, selecting yellow orange and drawing spiky suns, “Barbie said, ‘Let’s go shopping,’ and I said, ‘Okay, let’s,’ and she said, ‘Let’s ride our mopeds,’ and I said—”
Billy Ray came out of his tunnel, and I got the phone switched on almost before it rang. “So you’re on your way to Denver?” I said.
“Nope. Other direction. Durango. Conference on teleconferences. I got to thinking about you and thought I’d call. Do you ever get to hankering for something besides what you’re doing?”
“Yes,” I said fervently, reading the names of the crayons Peyton had discarded. Periwinkle. Screamin’ green. Cerulean blue.
“—so Barbie said, ‘Hi, Ken,’ and Ken said, ‘Hi, Barbie, want to go on a date?’ ” Peyton said, busily drawing lines.
“Me too,” Billy Ray said. “I’ve been thinking, is this really what I want?”
“Didn’t the sheep work out?”
“The Targhees? No, they’re doing fine. It’s this whole ranching thing. It’s so isolated.”
Except for the fax and the net and the cell phone, I thought.
“…so Barbie said, ‘I don’t want to be in time-out,’ ” Peyton said, wielding a black crayon. “ ‘Okay,’ Barbie’s mom said, ‘you don’t have to.’ ”
“Do you ever get to feeling…,” Billy Ray said, “…kinda… I don’t know what to call it…”
I do, I thought. Itch. And does that mean this unsettled, dissatisfied feeling is some sort of fad, too, like tattoos and violets? And if so, how did it get started?
I sat up straighter on the bed. “When exactly did you start having this feeling?” I asked him, but there was already an ominous hum from the cell phone.
“Another tunnel,” Billy Ray said. “We’ll talk about it some more when I get back. I’ve got something I want to—” and the phone went dead.
Lindsay’s mother had talked about feeling itch, and so had Flip, that day in the coffeehouse, and I had felt so vaguely longing I’d gone out with Billy Ray. Had I spread the feeling on to him, like some kind of virus, and was that how fads spread, by infection?
“Your turn,” Peyton said, holding out a neon-red crayon. Radical red.
“Okay,” I said, taking the crayon. “So Barbie decided to go to…” I drew a line of radical red high heels across the blue scallops. “…the barbershop. ‘I want my hair bobbed,’ she said to the barber.” I started a line of aquamarine scissors. “And the barber said, ‘Why?’ And Barbie said, ‘Because everybody else is doing it.’ So the barber chopped off Barbie’s hair and—”