Free Bellwether by Connie Willis Page A

relationships.”
    Ted, I thought. We’re talking about Ted, who doesn’t want to get married.
    “And this weekend, I got to thinking, What’s the point? I’m following an intimacy path and he’s into off-road detachment.”
    “Itch,” I said.
    “What?”
    “What you’re feeling,” I said. “Like you’re spinning your wheels on the launchpad. You didn’t run into Flip this weekend, did you?”
    “I saw her this morning,” she said. “She brought me Dr. Applegate’s mail.”
    An antiangel, wandering through the world spreading gloom and destruction.
    “Well, anyway,” Sarah said, “I’d better go see if I can find somebody in Management who can tell me what an expense gradation index is,” and left.
    I went back to my hair-bobbing data. I ran a geographical distribution for 1923 and then for 1922. They showed clusters in New York City and Hollywood, which were no surprise, and St. Paul, Minnesota, and Marydale, Ohio, which were. On a hunch, I asked for a breakdown of Montgomery, Alabama. It showed a cluster too small to be statistically significant but enough to explain the St. Paul one. Montgomery was where F. Scott Fitzgerald had met Zelda, and St. Paul was his hometown. The locals obviously were trying to live up to “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” It didn’t explain Marydale, Ohio. I ran a geographical distribution for 1921. It was still there.
    “Here ,” Flip said, sticking my mail under my nose. Apparently nobody had told her po-mo pink was the in color for fall. She was wearing a brilliant bilious blue tunic and leggings and an assortment of duct tape.
    “I’m glad you’re here,” I said, grabbing a stack of clippings. “You owe me two-fifty for your caffe latte and I need you to copy these for me. Oh, and wait.” I went and got the personals I’d gone through Saturday, and two articles about angels. I handed them to Flip. “One copy of each.”
    “I don’t believe in angels,” she said.
    Right on the cutting edge, as usual.
    “I used to believe in them,” she said, “but I don’t any-more, not since Brine. I mean, if you really had a guardian angel, she’d cheer you up when you were bummed and get you out of committee meetings and stuff.”
    “What about fairies?” I asked.
    “You mean like fairy godmothers?” she said. “Of course. Duh.”
    Of course.
    I went back to my hair-bobbing. Marydale, Ohio. What could it have had to make it a hot spot of hair-bobbing? Hot, I thought. How about unusually hot weather in Ohio during the summer of 1921? So hot long hair would have clung sweatily to the back of the neck, and women would have said, “I can’t take this anymore”?
    I called up weather data for the state of Ohio for June through September and began looking for Marydale.
    “Do you have a minute?” said a voice from the door. It was Elaine from Personnel. She was wearing a sweatband and a sour expression. “Do you have any idea what hiral implementation format rations are?” she asked.
    “Not a clue. Did you try Management?”
    “I’ve been up there twice and couldn’t get in. There’s a huge crowd.” She took a deep breath. “I’m getting totally stressed. Do you want to go work out?”
    “Stair-climbing?” I said dubiously.
    She shook her head firmly. “Stair-climbing doesn’t give a large-muscle workout. Wall-walking. Gym over on Twenty-eighth. They’ve got pitons and everything.”
    “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve got walls here.”
    She looked disapprovingly at them and went out, and I went back to my hair-bobbing. 1921 temps for Marydale had been slightly lower than normal, and it wasn’t the hometown of either Irene Castle or Isadora Duncan.
    I abandoned it for the moment and did a Pareto chart and then ran some more regressions. There was a weak correlation between church attendance and bobs, a strong correlation between bobs and Hupmobile sales, but not Packards or Model T Fords, and a very strong correlation between bobs and women in nursing