The Leading Indicators (3 page)

A regular habit was lunchtime Loop strolls. When the winter gusts blew, she would go a short distance among the tall buildings that accelerated the wind. In warm weather, she would walk to the Chicago River, which had progressed from the filthy flammable sewer of Upton Sinclair's day to its current status of favored locale for dinner-boat cruises. When Margo worked there, Loop Chicago still had independent coffee shops on every block—the old urban kind that meant a counter serving cheeseburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches, a takeout line for coffee, the place passed down by a family. This was just before Starbucks invaded, with its diabolical marketing formula of double the price for twice the wait.

One day Margo collided in a coffee shop with a young man, spilling her coffee on his shirt. Better his shirt than her dress, all things considered. The collision felt nice. They joked a bit. As she was about to walk back to work, Margo stalled, wondering if he would ask for her phone number. He asked for her phone number, meaning the number at her apartment, of a desk phone attached to an answering machine with reel-to-reel magnetic tape. This being before even children carried global communication consoles.

Tom Helot, a business-school graduate, was charming, even-tempered and motivated. He was born in Cooperstown, New York, a town that sits at the foot of a lake that is the source of the Susquehanna. Thus he shared with Margo a childhood fascination with distant waters, though not her illusions about them, since from any point along Otsego Lake, one can see the opposite shore. When school is out, Cooperstown and its environs bustle with tourists: the Finger Lakes area is in summer a cool, inviting fairyland. During winter the town clears and those who reside year-round struggle with snow and closed businesses. Tom felt grateful to have been a boy there, but wanted a bigger stage.

Margo liked hearing him talk of his ambitions—they would become well-to-do, they would use wealth responsibly, they would build a summer house on Keuka, the prettiest of the Finger Lakes, and make campfires with their children at the water's edge.

Margo believed there are three basic types of romances: the kind where passion rules, the kind that people fall into as the path of least resistance and the kind where people are made for each other. Passion-rules is a nice archetype. There was a boy in high school Margo could not keep her hands off. She couldn't have kept her hands off him if he had been on fire. But she could hardly stand him. Passion is a relief from reality, pushing out other thoughts. Romances based on passion have a poor track record, except in cinema.

Path-of-least-resistance causes the majority of human pairings, and after all, what did you expect? More or less falling into a relationship is better than loneliness, though has never inspired an epic poem. Margo's favorite band of her college years, Inane Pabulum, recorded a song that made her laugh, “More of Same,” about the path-of-least-resistance relationship. The lyrics included:

That night when I first saw your face

I thought we'd met in some previous place

Was it because of your fair beauty

Or because life is all a blur to me?

More of same, more of same

“It's been done” is the modern refrain

I'm not new and neither are you

Life is just more of same.

When I asked you to dance you were unsurprised

I drunk deep of that jaded look in your eyes

You barely seemed to notice my charms

At least you stayed conscious in my arms.

More of same, more of same

Everyone rides on a scheduled train

I'm not new and neither are you

Our love is just more of same.

Had it come to that, Margo would have settled for more of same. But she believed the least likely type of romance—meant-to-be—is possible, and Tom was her proof.

As they began to date, Margo was able to imagine herself moving with him into one of the townhomes across West Belden. Tom's confidence, his optimism, that he never, ever complained—all seemed the right match. Margo and Tom both lost their fathers young, Tom's mother went early into dementia and Margo's mother had already been diagnosed with the cancer that would take her before she could see her grandchildren. In that way too, Margo felt they were right for each other. The only family they would have in the future would be the one they made, and they would have only themselves to fall back on. After a courtship, they were married at a country club that rented space for weddings. They began life together.

Having reset the cappuccino machine half a dozen times, finally confident the settings were correct, Margo initiated an impressive sequence of grinding, steam, hissing and heat. When she set the cup under the spout, the new part flew skyward under pressure as the entire device did a passable imitation of a typical day at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station.

“No problem,” Margo said as she and Lillian laughed. “I bought this American Express. They'll ship a replacement by next day.”

 

Chapter 3

October 2007

Dow Jones Index: 14,000.

Unemployment: 4.6 percent.

National debt: $9.5 trillion.

T
he Helot children, Caroline and Megan, perceived the world in no small part through the windows of automobiles. Endless driving: to school, home, then back to school for extracurriculars; to oboe lessons, piano lessons and fencing lessons; to rock-climbing on synthetic materials manufactured to appear to be actual rocks; to orthodontists; many, many times to clothing stores, including to exchange items that had gone out of fashion before the girls could wear them to school; to tutors and to doctors' appointments; to soccer and to basketball.

Fencing lessons might have seemed a bit much, but Margo read somewhere that Ivy League colleges have trouble recruiting for fencing. For the team sports, invariably the girls had games on opposite ends of the county at the same time.

Margo made color-coded day planners to ensure Caroline and Megan would be in the right place, and toyed with the idea of shrinking the day planners into ones that moms could wear on their wrists, the way quarterbacks wear the plays. There might be a market for suburban-mom wrist-worn day organizers. A mom could flip one open, check the code numbers and colors and quickly call out, “Church bake sale on two. Hike!”

Things only seemed worthwhile if you had to drive to them. Every weekend at least one of the girls was invited to a birthday party, sometimes two, as if modern children were celebrating their birthdays biannually. Nobody held a party at the house anymore—birthday parties needed to be “events,” which meant driving to a water park or laser tag or a magic show. Plus driving beforehand to get the presents. Margo wanted to start the year buying gift cards in bulk to wrap as presents when needed. Her girls were shocked by that; gifts had to be chosen person-by-person the day before a party, notwithstanding they almost always ended up buying gift cards. Every birthday party invitation represented at least two hours of driving.

“When we have our retirement home and ask each other, ‘Where did the years go,'” Margo told Tom, “the answer will be that we spent them in the car.”

She was pleased to drive a Lexus, though Margo never would have confessed that. Having a fancy car is nice: desiring one is shallow. Margo's was Blue Onyx Pearl with hand-stitched leather, though of course she had no way to know whether the stitching was done by well-paid workers with union protection in a modern factory or subcontracted to a developing-world sweatshop. Margo didn't want the gold badges, but the dealer threw them in.

Did driving-to-this, driving-to-that represent fun for the girls or would they rather have been left to their own accords to play in the woods, as was the case with previous generations?

This question was irrelevant for many contemporary families, because the spontaneous passage of youth, especially of summer, had given way to structure. Finding old clothes and declaring them the costumes of castle-games had been supplanted by parties with purchased costumes bearing trademarks. Spur-of-the-moment contests had been supplanted by organized leagues with start times and rulebooks. The monkey bars at the park playgrounds had been removed so there was nothing to fall off. Margo never would have considered allowing her daughters to frolic alone at the lakeshore, as she did in girlhood. Caroline and Megan inhabited a world in which the extemporaneous had been supplanted by the planned, and traditional risk had been reduced to the lowest possible level. Though innovative new risks were thriving quite nicely.

It was Friday; Margo was having a few people over—Lillian; Tom's business partner, Ken Afreet; and his wife, Nicole. Margo had always been uncomfortable with Ken, who was too open about his affection for money. Stress about money defines our age: but if you have enough, then stop complaining. Margo felt dismay that those she knew who had plenty in the bank nonetheless talked almost continuously about ways to get more. The best part about having money, Margo supposed, would be no longer thinking or caring about money. The people who had it did not respond that way.

Ken sure could run a business, though. Corsair Assets was on its fourth consecutive record year. Ken taught Tom much of what he knew about the private-equity field. He chose Tom to be the one who went around to the firms Corsair was acquiring, to assure the employees their jobs wouldn't vanish. Often the jobs vanished anyway, but that came later, and was due to market forces. Nicole had amusement value; she was trying hard to carry herself as a trophy wife so that she did not get replaced by an actual trophy wife. Nicole and Lillian were not a good mix, though. Lillian thought Nicole an airhead; Nicole thought Lillian an egghead. Both were right, but that wasn't the point. Men who clash can release the tension by insulting each other's sports teams. With women who clash, sooner or later it becomes personal.

Margo loved having people over, the sound of the front door opening and closing, cold air falling off the coats of friends who had just come in. Her neighborhood was of the kind that neighbors did not just wander by; people always called first, and drove even if they lived within a block.

Soon the girls would be teens, shuttling in and out with a floating cast of friends. Margo couldn't wait. For tonight, the children were in the finished basement watching movie rentals with a sitter, a high-school junior who charged twenty dollars an hour. Margo hustled to book the girl a week in advance, and felt lucky to have her. Most teens from the area didn't need walking-around cash, feeling no incentive to babysit or work the counter at Baskin-Robbins after school. Their parents simply fulfilled their every need, conferring on them more money and material things than seemed wise. Margo fought the urge to think the words “These kids today.”

Perhaps being spoiled in youth is good, as long as the system that creates the spoiling will always function. Besides, if kids worked in ice-cream parlors or as baggers after school, they'd be taking wages from adults trying to support families. Immigrants and the unemployed formed lines for jobs at Burger King. Forty hours per week at the federal minimum wage left a head of household below the poverty line. Margo and her friends talked about the Oscars, celebrity sex scandals and foreign-policy blunders—they didn't talk about one American in eight being in poverty. There was upside: lots of adults seeking low-wage positions meant pizza delivery would be fast and yardwork cheap.

Awaiting her guests, Margo was on the phone talking to a friend and also intently inspecting her laptop. This is what you would have overheard if you were the nosy sort.

“Okay, January is out. There's so much picking up from the holidays anyway. You spend a month preparing for something that's over in thirty minutes, then the kids say, ‘Is that all?' Let's look at February. Can't do the first weekend. The next weekend we're skiing in Utah depending on depth. Not that weekend either; I'm in San Francisco, then Tom is in London. During the week? Monday nights are my kickboxing class, the teacher is an ex-Marine with ripped abs. Sure you could come along!”

She paused to listen, then resumed: “Tuesday, Tom plays basketball. Wednesday night is PTA. Can't miss it.” If asked, Margo would have explained that at-home moms needed to be present in force at the PTA to outvote the professional moms. That way the at-homes could deliberately schedule school events in the afternoon, forcing the professional moms to leave work early. The at-home mothers considered it essential to generate guilt in the professional mothers, if only to have a point on which to feel self-righteous. Margo was uneasy with this, but determined to maintain her influence with the PTA. That meant putting up with the bitchy moms—a substantial faction in any affluent community—who spent their days trying to think of something to complain about.

Back to her call: “Thursdays are out, peak homework night. Parents were saying academics weren't strict enough, teachers took their revenge by assigning more homework because they know the parents are really doing it. Friday nights Tom just collapses. I mix him his martini and he can barely lift it. Microwave martinis? I hadn't heard. March is tricky, spring sports leagues start. Let's look at April. No, can't do that day. I'm meeting with the college admission consultant. Megan is eleven, can't start too early. May is—damn, can you hold a minute?”

The friend said something. “I hate call-waiting too,” Margo replied. “The only benefit of call-waiting is that you can be rude to two people simultaneously. But that's productivity, right?”

She took the new call, asking, “Is there a problem?” Margo began to speak very slowly, as if verbally capitalizing words. “On the Alaskan-southwestern pizza, half an order of grilled halibut and one order of twice-marinated grilled carne asada steak.” Everyone said “grilled carne asada steak” though “
carne asada
” means grilled steak. “No. Not a double order of halibut and two orders of steak, that comes to four orders. Half an order of fish and one order of meat. No, not a double half order of each. Half an—” Switching to a language similar to Spanish, she said, placing emphasis on “supervisor”: “
¿May excuzzo, puedo hablar por favor votre supervisor?
”