The Leading Indicators (16 page)

The bells and whistles on the new place, Margo had to admit, were entertaining. When someone left a bathroom, the lights turned themselves off; if someone stepped in, the lights turned themselves on. The dishwasher was hidden in the kitchen island, the toaster and coffeemaker recessed behind a panel. The furnaces monitored their filters. When a filter needed to be changed, the furnace-control chip used the Internet to order a replacement, which arrived from Amazon in two days.

The countertops were “engineered quartz”—even more expensive than Roman granite. Seeming to hang without support on a wall, the very thin HD LCD TV could be pulled out, swiveled, then pushed back flush when not in use. All wireless equipment was inside a disguised closet so as not to be unsightly, and there was space for expansion—for electronic devices not yet invented. The master bedroom, with a clear view of the eastern sky, had a broad window with an optical screen that would descend on servos, so those in the California-king-sized master bed could watch the sunrise without their eyes being dazzled. To close the deal, the builder threw in a grand piano for the living room, a touch Margo had always wanted in a home.

The girls viewed the technology of the new house as the order of things—of course the furnace talks to the Internet.

For the past year Caroline and Megan had their own rooms again, a status address again, a great school again—one of
Newsweek
's top-rated public schools. Caroline, a junior, had already made friends in one of the positive-influence peer groups, was on varsity field hockey, got cast as Bloody Mary in
South Pacific,
was taking the Advanced Placement course in government studies. Megan, a freshman, was on the JV basketball team, a fledgling reporter for the school newspaper and in honors in her core courses. She was tracking toward Advanced Placement as a junior, maybe even an AP course as a sophomore. The girls had changed in manifold ways from the period when they seemed headed for juvenile delinquency. Money does not buy happiness, but sure can fix problems.

The sign at the entrance to the development, a sign lighted and bordered with gold-painted filigree, read
SUMMIT HAVEN WOODS
. The sign felt to Margo as if it glowed with approval when owners of houses in the development returned home.

By the sign were saplings that had been planted during construction of the development. There were no “woods” anywhere in sight, just the saplings and ornamental shrubs. Old neighborhoods draw their character partly from trees: in modern high-efficiency construction, land first is leveled, then houses built, then trees replanted. Doing it that way speeds construction and lowers cost, though results in impressive new homes that appear planted in a fallow field.

By the time saplings were grown into mature trees, the girls would be adults with children of their own, and that would be the sign to leave this place. Then this house would be sold, and the next family to move in would observe the old, full trees and think of Summit Haven Woods as a long-established neighborhood in an arboretum. The spirits of those here first would have dissipated from the place and would mean nothing to those who came next.

Already Margo could see herself twenty years in the future, gazing wistfully on the mature trees and reminiscing about her daughters' youth. She knew she had but to snap her fingers and “Pomp and Circumstance” would be playing at their college graduations. She'd snap her fingers again and see an old woman, asking the mirror, “So soon?”

Margo and Lillian were having wine in the living room, near the piano. Margo was in the early stages of lessons, determined to learn to play.

Initially Margo thought she shouldn't try piano with the girls around because their boyfriends would hear her practice errors over the cell phones. Nothing embarrasses teens more than parents attempting to act young, and learning instruments is supposed to be done during one's school years.

Then Caroline explained to her mother that teens rarely speak on the phone, only text. When cell devices became common, companies that sold them assumed people would yak, yak, yak: pricing focused on the minutes, with texting as a throw-in. Teens and college kids rapidly realized texting is more efficient than talking. No need for salutations and chitchat, no awkward pauses or questions about tone, just the info. Plus every text was like receiving a letter, if a very succinct, coded letter of low import. Everyone likes to open the mailbox and find letters.

The women had been conversing about events in France, where, the previous day, nearly a million people rioted over a government plan to raise the national retirement threshold to the shocking age of sixty-two. France is easy to make fun of. But the French take six weeks' paid vacation annually, produce more GDP per capita than the Japanese while spending far less time on the job and live longer than Americans. Is their approach to social organization really so off-base?

The conversation shifted to a faculty event Lillian had attended: “So then I caused this huge flap at the dinner for the department heads. I accidentally insulted a leading postmodernist.”

“How?”

“I called one of his theories ‘true.'”

Margo felt pleased that she stayed in enough touch with the intellectual world that she got the joke. At least Lillian had not accused an academic of a really serious offense, like believing in something. Margo felt equally good that she had her own reference to the subject.

“The other day I ate in this chic place downtown that bills itself a ‘postmodern restaurant,'” she said. “Expensive, snobby, strange dishes. ‘Postmodern' was the right word. None of the food could be said with assurance to taste either good or bad.”

“Was it the kind of place where they grill cotton candy with heritage kale and free-range bison?”

“Yes.”

Lillian said, “Oh, I love restaurants like that! They certainly keep one from overeating. At the height of the Asian-French fusion fad, I thought every possible combination of ingredients had already been used by celebrity chefs. Now I realize that was close-the-patent-office thinking. There will never be an end to ridiculous dishes, so long as people are willing to pay too much.”

“I'll give you the name of this place,” Margo said. “It's very hard to get in. When you phone for a reservation, you get an answering machine that says in a foreign accent, ‘How dare you call us!'”

“Brilliant marketing.”

“Tom says he won't eat anywhere that does not advertise steak and whiskey.”

“In twenty years, it will be illegal to advertise steak and whiskey. Probably already is in California.”

The house was too quiet, because the girls had gone to a sleepover: gone together happily, without hysterics or pouting, another recent uptick in their behavior. The new house, with its sense of steady affluence, was the psychotropic they needed.

In the quiet, Margo heard some mechanism click on and whir. The new home included an extra refrigerator in the garage, for the overflow of suburban living—beer, Gatorade, diet soda. Margo kept a selection of Carvel ice-cream cakes on standby in the garage freezer, in case teens dropped by unexpectedly.

The extra refrigerator, the builder explained, is a specially engineered garage unit. Because a garage gets cold in winter, the cooling elements in a regular fridge shut down, allowing the contents to warm even as it is cold around the box. Solution? The garage refrigerator has a heated cooling element. When it's cold, one part of the machine makes heat in order to warm another part that makes cold. Thus a device drawing energy from the burning of fossil fuels keeps things artificially cold when it's already naturally cold. Isn't this a great country!

Margo told Lillian, “Megan removed the stud from her tongue. She went through our photo albums, taking away any picture where you could see it.”

“Save one to blackmail her with when she's older.”

“When we were young, in order to gross out our parents the boys wore long hair and the girls refused to wear dresses,” Margo said. “Today's kids pierce their eyebrows in order to gross out their parents. Once today's kids have children, what will be left for their kids to do in order to gross them out?”

“Perhaps they'll shave their heads and tattoo things onto their skulls.”

“Please don't suggest that around Caroline's boyfriend,” Margo said quickly.

With satisfaction, Margo changed to a topic she could not talk about too much: “I'm already thinking ahead to Caroline's college visits over spring break. Her first choice is Cornell—that's pretty ambitious, needless to say. But the college counselor thinks she has a chance at a top school. Caroline's done an admissions-essay draft, about what she learned when her father was a delivery driver and her mom worked at Hooters.”

Mention of her final waitressing job made Margo chuckle.

“I'm glad you can laugh about that now,” Lillian said.

“At least they wanted me! Anyway, the college counselor thinks her essay will be a hit.”

“Brace yourself about the visits. Spring break is Mercedes gridlock at any top college campus.”

“I'm the last person to begrudge a mom her driving a child to college in a fancy car,” Margo said. “But half of the people in the Mercedes demographic spend their office hours awarding themselves bonuses while cutting benefits for single parents. Tom says the modern CEO considers a corporate jet for himself more important than a living wage for his workers.”

Above the fireplace was a magnificent portrait of Tom as a young man: walking along a beach against a stiff wind, squinting off into a sunset. The picture was taken by a friend of Margo's who was an amateur photographer—taken sufficiently long ago that the camera used was the kind that had film inside.

The three of them had gone to the beach at the foot of East Division Street to take a photo of Tom and Margo for their engagement announcement. The day wore on, the wind kicked up. After they were finished and preparing to leave, the photographer turned for a “grab” shot of Tom—a picture the subject does not expect to be taken. Margo loved the image, which was not just a good photograph of her husband but a good photograph, period. And she loved that he was staring in contemplation at the same lake she had contemplated as a child.

“But what can we do about it?” Lillian asked, on the topic of luxury at the top. “Back in the age of the robber baron there were only a few of the disgustingly rich; they were rare and easy to hate. Now there are entire zip codes of people who have more money than they need, and they keep getting better off while the rest of the country stagnates. Those at the top are just playing the angles of the system—who can blame them? Until the system is reformed, they'll keep raking it in. Anyway, there are far too many of them to hate.”

The American economy had become like a casino where a small number of people start with most of the chips, then laud themselves for winning. Granted a second chance at affluence, Margo wanted to make a difference. She'd read an essay that said it is unrealistic to expect an individual to change the world, but all are obligated to try to change what is directly around them. That made sense. So Margo had signed up with a group of young activists who were starting an advocacy campaign for a county-level living-wage statute.

Tom said charity and government programs were well and good but what average people needed was money, then they could decide for themselves how to use it. That a person could work a forty-hour week in the United States and still be impoverished by the federal definition—that just wasn't right. Higher wages, not more government giveaways, were the solution.

Margo couldn't be sure her involvement with a poorly organized advocacy group would accomplish anything beyond making her feel better about herself. So far she'd mainly had a lot of twentysomethings over and fed them dinner while they discussed extremely grand plans. As the voice of maturity, she told them to demand the sun, moon and sky and settle for whatever they could get. Regardless, she was done with sitting around complaining about why others fail to act.

“What I don't understand,” Margo said, to Lillian's point, “is why the people with a lot of money don't give it away in order to have fun.”

The amounts the well-off lavish on themselves, if spent in Africa, would save human lives in large numbers. One would think the greatest satisfaction attainable on Earth would be the saving of lives. One would think this would motivate the wealthy to give money away not to achieve a better world—a better world would be the bonus—but rather to make themselves feel good. That is to say, the rich should give their money away for selfish reasons.

“Some hand over a small fraction of their net worth in order to achieve social acclaim, that's all,” Lillian said.

“Yet by hoarding money they harm themselves, missing their own chance to experience joy. I mean, who is the happiest character in all of literature? Scrooge, because becoming generous allows him to achieve a feeling akin to bliss. Why don't people with a lot of money realize that generosity would be more fun than anything they could purchase?”

“It wasn't so much that Scrooge became generous,” Lillian countered. “What happened is that he became aware of the humanity of those around him. Most of the very well off can't conceptualize this. They believe they were chosen for wealth, and others chosen to struggle—that the whole notion of egalitarianism goes against the order of things. It's a three-thousand-year-old Hindu concept but Christianity has done its share of promoting this bullshit too.” Lillian rarely used strong language.

The same economic and technological forces causing living standards to rise across most of the globe also were causing wealth to concentrate at the top. The bitter comes with the sweet: rising living standards are sweet, so perhaps some wealth concentration is unobjectionable. But if markets remained free and borders remained open, inevitably the top few percent would keep accelerating away from the rest. The social system was making those at the top wealthy—why shouldn't they show gratitude by returning more of what they possessed as taxes and philanthropy? Surely the rich are better off in circumstances of high income plus taxation than they would be without income or taxation.