by Maria Semple
My breath kind of stopped then. I was standing there, but it was like Audrey Griffin had knocked the wind out of me. I reached for the car to steady myself.
“That’s it, Audrey.” Mom took about five steps toward her. “Fuck you.”
“Fine,” Audrey said. “Drop the f-bomb in front of a child. I hope that makes you feel powerful.”
“I’ll say it again,” Mom said. “Fuck you for bringing Bee into this.”
“We love Bee,” Audrey Griffin said. “Bee is a terrific student and a wonderful girl. It just goes to show how resilient children are because she’s turned out so well in spite of it all. If Bee were my daughter, and I know I’m speaking for every mother at Whidbey Island, we’d never ship her off to boarding school.”
I finally caught enough of my breath to say, “I want to go to boarding school!”
“Of course you do,” Audrey said to me, all full of pity.
“It was my idea!” I screamed, just so furious. “I already told you that!”
“No, Bee,” Mom said. She wasn’t even looking at me. She just held up her hand in my direction. “It’s not worth it.”
“Of course it was your idea,” Audrey Griffin said to me, poking her head around Mom, and boinging her eyes. “Of course you want to go away. Who can blame you?”
“You don’t talk to me that way!” I screamed. “You don’t know me!” I was soaking wet and the car was running this whole time, which is a waste of gas, and both doors were open so the rain was pouring in and ruining the leather, plus we were parked on the loop so the gate kept trying to shut but then opening again, and I was worried the motor would burn out, and Ice Cream was just stupidly watching from the back with her mouth open and tongue hanging out, like she didn’t even sense we needed protecting, plus Abbey Road was playing “Here Comes the Sun,” which was the song Mom said reminded her of me, and I knew I’d never listen to Abbey Road again.
“Oh, God, Bee, what’s wrong?” Mom had turned and seen that something was the matter with me. “Talk to me, Buzz. Is it your heart?”
I pushed Mom off me and slapped Audrey across her wet face. I know! But I was just so mad.
“I pray for you,” Audrey said.
“Pray for yourself,” I said. “My mother’s too good for you and those other mothers. You’re the one everyone hates. Kyle is a juvie who doesn’t do sports or any extracurriculars. The only friends he has are because he gives them drugs and because he’s funny when he’s making fun of you. And your husband is a drunk who has three DUIs but he gets off because he knows the judge, and all you care about is that nobody finds out, but it’s too late because Kyle tells the whole school everything.”
Audrey said quickly, “I am a Christian woman so I will forgive that.”
“Give me a break,” I said. “Christians don’t talk the way you talked to my mother.”
I got into the car, shut the door, turned off Abbey Road, and just started whimpering. I was sitting in an inch of water, but I didn’t care. The reason I was so scared had nothing to do with a sign or a stupid mudslide or because Mom and I didn’t get invited to stupid Whidbey Island, like we’d ever want to go anywhere with those jerks in a million years, but because I knew, I just knew, that now everything was going to be different.
Mom got in and shut the door. “You’re supercool,” she said. “You know that?”
“I hate her,” I said.
What I didn’t say, because I didn’t need to, because it was implied, and really, I can’t tell you why, because we’d never kept secrets from him before, but me and Mom both just understood: we weren’t going to tell Dad.
Mom wasn’t the same after that. It wasn’t the day in the compound pharmacy. Mom had bounced back. I was there in the car with her singing to Abbey Road. And I don’t care what Dad or the doctors or the police or anybody says, it was Audrey Griffin screaming at Mom that made her never the same again. And if you don’t believe me:
*
Email sent five minutes later
From: Bernadette Fox
To: Manjula Kapoor
Nobody can say I didn’t give it the college try. But I just can’t go through with it. I can’t go to Antarctica. How I’ll ever extract myself, I’m not sure. But I have faith in us, Manjula. Together we can do anything.
*
From Dad to Dr. Janelle Kurtz,
a shrink at Madrona Hill
Dear Dr. Kurtz,
My friend Hannah Dillard sang your praises regarding her husband, Frank’s, stay at Madrona Hill. From what I understand, Frank was struggling with depression. His inpatient treatment at Madrona Hill, under your supervision, did him wonders.
I write you because I too am deeply concerned about my spouse. Her name is Bernadette Fox, and I fear she is very sick.
(Forgive my shambolic penmanship. I’m on an airplane, and my laptop battery is dead so I’ve taken up a pen for the first time in years. I’ll press on, as I think it’s important to get everything down while it’s fresh in the memory.)
I’ll begin with some background. Bernadette and I met about twenty-five years ago in Los Angeles, when the architecture firm for which she worked redesigned the animation house for which I worked. We were both from the East Coast and had gone to prep school. Bernadette was a rising star. I was taken by her beauty, gregariousness, and insouciant charm. We married. I was working on an idea I had for computer animation. My company was bought by Microsoft. Bernadette ran into trouble with a house she was building and abruptly declared herself through with the L.A. architecture scene. To my surprise, she was the engine behind our move to Seattle.
Bernadette flew up to look at houses. She called to say she had found the perfect place, the Straight Gate School for Girls, in Queen Anne. To anyone else, a crumbling reform school might seem an odd place to call home. But this was Bernadette, and she was enthusiastic. Bernadette and her enthusiasm were like a hippo and water: get between them and you’ll be trampled to death.
We moved to Seattle. I was swallowed whole by Microsoft. Bernadette became pregnant and had the first of a series of miscarriages. After three years, she passed the first term. At the beginning of her second term, she was put on bed rest. The house, which was a blank canvas on which Bernadette was to work her magic, understandably languished. There were leaks, strange drafts, and the occasional weed pushing up through a floorboard. My concern was for Bernadette’s health—she didn’t need the stress of a remodel, she needed to stay put—so we wore parkas inside, rotated spaghetti pots when it rained, and kept a pair of pruning shears in a vase in the living room. It felt romantic.
Our daughter, Bee, was born prematurely. She came out blue. She was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. I imagine that having a sick child can knit a husband and wife together, or rip them apart. In our case, it did neither. Bernadette immersed herself so thoroughly in Bee’s recovery that it became her every fiber. I worked even longer hours and called it a partnership: Bernadette would call the shots; I’d pay for them.
By the time Bee entered kindergarten, she was healthy, if unusually small for her age. I always assumed this was when Bernadette would return to her architecture practice or, at the very least, fix up our house. Leaks had become holes in the roof; windows with small cracks had become cardboard-and-duct-tape panels. Once a week, the gardener weed-whacked under the rugs.
Our home was literally returning to the earth. When Bee was five, I was in her room playing restaurant. She took my order, and after lots of furious activity in her miniature kitchen, she brought me my “lunch.” It was damp and brown. It smelled like dirt, but fluffier. “I dug it up,” she remarked proudly, and pointed to the wood floor. It was so damp from the years of rain, Bee could literally dig into it with a spoon.
Once Bee was settled into kindergarten, Bernadette showed no interest in fixing up the house, or in any kind of work. All the energy she had once channeled so fearlessly into architecture, she turned toward fulminating about Seattle, in the form of
wild rants that required no less than an hour to fully express.
Take five-way intersections. The first time Bernadette commented on the abundance of five-way intersections in Seattle, it seemed perfectly relevant. I hadn’t noticed it myself, but indeed there were many intersections with an extra street jutting out, and which required you to wait through an extra traffic light cycle. Certainly worthy of a conversation between a husband and wife. But the second time Bernadette went off on the same topic, I wondered, Is there something new she wishes to add? But no. She was just complaining with renewed vehemence. She asked me to ask Bill Gates why he’d still live in a city with so many ridiculous intersections. I came home and she asked if I’d asked him yet. One day she got a map of old Seattle and explained that there were once six separate grid systems, which, over time, bled together without a master plan. One night, on the way to a restaurant, she drove miles out of our way to show me where three of the grids met, and there was an intersection with seven streets coming out. Then she timed it while we waited at the stoplight. The helter-skelter layout of Seattle streets was just one of Bernadette’s greatest hits.
Some nights I’d be asleep in bed. “Elgie,” she’d say, “are you awake?”
“I am now.”
“Doesn’t Bill Gates know Warren Buffett?” she’d say. “And doesn’t Warren Buffett own See’s Candy?”
“I guess.”
“Great. Because he needs to know what’s happening at the Westlake Plaza. You know how See’s Candy has a policy where they hand out free samples? Well, all those horrible runaways have caught on. So today I had to wait thirty minutes, in a line out the door, behind bums and drug addicts who didn’t buy anything but demanded their free sample, and then went to the end of the line for another.”
“So don’t go to See’s Candy anymore.”
“Believe me, I won’t. But if you see Warren Buffett around Microsoft, you should tell him. Or tell me, and I can tell him.”
I tried engaging her, tuning her out, asking her to stop. Nothing worked, especially asking her to stop, which would only tack ten minutes onto that particular rant. I began to feel like a hunted animal, cornered and defenseless.
Remember, for the first several years of living in Seattle, Bernadette was pregnant, or had recently miscarried. As far as I knew, these moods were hormonal swings, or a way of processing grief.
I encouraged Bernadette to make friends, but that would only trigger a diatribe about how she had tried, but nobody liked her.
People say Seattle is one of the toughest cities in which to make friends. They even have a name for it, the “Seattle freeze.” I’ve never experienced it myself, but coworkers claim it’s real and has to do with all the Scandinavian blood up here. Maybe it was difficult at first for Bernadette to fit in. But eighteen years later, to still harbor an irrational hatred of an entire city?
I have a very stressful job, Dr. Kurtz. Some mornings, I’d arrive at my desk utterly depleted by having to endure Bernadette and her frothing. I finally started taking the Microsoft Connector to work. It was an excuse to leave the house an hour earlier to avoid the morning broadsides.
I really did not intend for this letter to go on so long, but looking out airplane windows makes me sentimental. Let me jump to the incidents of yesterday which have prompted me to write.
I was walking to lunch with some colleagues when one pointed to Bernadette, asleep on a couch in a pharmacy. For some reason she was wearing a fishing vest. This was especially strange because Bernadette insists on wearing stylish clothes, in protest against everyone else’s terrible taste in fashion. (I’ll spare you the specifics of that delightful rant.) I hurried inside. When I finally roused Bernadette, she said quite matter-of-factly that she was waiting for a Haldol prescription.
Dr. Kurtz, I don’t have to tell you. Haldol is an antipsychotic. Is my wife under the care of a psychiatrist who’s prescribing Haldol? Is she obtaining it illegally? I haven’t the faintest clue.
I was so alarmed that I rescheduled my business trip so we could have dinner, just the two of us. We met at a Mexican restaurant. We ordered, and I immediately broached the subject of Haldol. “I was surprised to see you at the pharmacy today,” I said.
“Shhh!” She was eavesdropping on the table behind us. “They don’t know the difference between a burrito and an enchilada!” Bernadette’s face tightened as she strained to listen. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “They’ve never heard of mole. What do they look like? I don’t want to turn around.”
“Just… people.”
“What do you mean? What kind of—” She couldn’t contain herself. She quickly turned. “They’re covered in tattoos! What, you’re so cool that you ink yourself head-to-toe, but you don’t know the difference between an enchilada and a burrito?”
“About today—” I started.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Was that one of the gnats you were with? From Galer Street?”
“Soo-Lin is my new admin,” I said. “She has a son in Bee’s class.”
“Oh, boy,” Bernadette said. “It’s all over for me.”
“What’s all over?” I asked.
“Those gnats have always hated me. She’s going to turn you against me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Nobody hates you—”
“Shh!” she said. “The waiter. He’s about to take their order.” She leaned back and to her left, closer, closer, closer, her body like a giraffe’s neck, until her chair shot out from under her and she landed on the floor. The whole restaurant turned to look. I jumped up to help. She stood up, righted the chair, and started in again. “Did you see the tattoo one of them had on the inside of his arm? It looked like a roll of tape.”
I took a gulp of margarita and settled into my fallback option, which was to wait her out.
“Know what one of the guys at the drive-through Starbucks has on his forearm?” Bernadette said. “A paper clip! It used to be so daring to get a tattoo. And now people are tattooing office supplies on their bodies. You know what I say?” Of course this was rhetorical. “I say, dare not to get a tattoo.” She turned around again, and gasped. “Oh my God. It’s not just any roll of tape. It’s literally Scotch tape, with the green-and-black plaid. This is too hilarious. If you’re going to tattoo tape on your arm, at least make it a generic old-fashioned tape dispenser! What do you think happened? Did the Staples catalogue get delivered to the tattoo parlor that day?” She stuck a chip into the guacamole and it broke under the weight. “God, I hate the chips here.” She dug into the guacamole with a fork and took a bite. “What were you saying?”
“I’m curious about the medicine they wouldn’t fill for you at the pharmacy.”
“I know!” she said. “A doctor wrote me a prescription, and it turned out to be Haldol.”
“Is it your insomnia?” I asked. “Haven’t you been sleeping?”
“Sleep?” she asked. “What’s that?”
“What was the prescription for?”
“Anxiety,” she said.
“Are you seeing a psychiatrist?” I asked.
“No!”
“Do you want to see a psychiatrist?”
“God, no!” she said. “I’m just anxious about the trip.”
“What specifically are you so anxious about?”
“The Drake Passage, people. You know how it is.”
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t.”
“There’s going to be a lot of people. I’m not good when exposed to people.”
“I think we need to find someone you can talk to.”
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
“A professional,” I said.
“I tried that once. It was a complete waste.” She leaned in and whispered. “OK, there’s a guy in a suit standing at the window. This is the fourth time I’ve seen him in three days. And I will promise you one thing. If you look now, he won’t be there.”
I turned around. A man in a suit disappeared down the sidewal
k.
“What did I say?” she said.
“Are you telling me you’re being followed?”
“It’s unclear.”
Fishing vests, sleeping in public, antipsychotic medication, and now men following her?
When Bee was two, she developed a strange attachment to a novelty book Bernadette and I had bought years ago from a street vendor in Rome.
ROME Past and Present
A Guide
To the Monumental Centre of Ancient Rome
With Reconstructions of the Monuments
It has photographs of present-day ruins, with overlays of how they looked in their heyday. Bee would sit in her hospital bed, hooked up to her monitors, and flip back and forth among the images. The book had a puffy red plastic cover that she’d chew on.
I realized I was now looking at Bernadette Past and Present. There was a terrifying chasm between the woman I fell in love with and the ungovernable one sitting across from me.
We returned home. While Bernadette slept, I opened her medicine cabinet. It was crammed with prescription bottles written by an array of doctors for Xanax, Klonopin, Ambien, Halcion, trazodone, and others. All the bottles were empty.
Dr. Kurtz, I don’t pretend to understand what’s wrong with Bernadette. Is she depressed? Manic? Hooked on pills? Paranoid? I don’t know what constitutes a mental breakdown. Whatever you want to call it, I think it’s fair to say my wife is in need of serious attention.
Hannah Dillard spoke so highly of you specifically, Dr. Kurtz, and all you did to help Frank though his rough patch. If I remember correctly, at the outset Frank was resistant to treatment, but he soon embraced your program. Hannah was so impressed that she’s now a member of your board.
Bernadette, Bee, and I are scheduled to go to Antarctica in two weeks. Bernadette obviously does not want to go. I now think it might be a better idea if Bee and I go to Antarctica, just the two of us, while Bernadette checks into Madrona Hill. I can’t imagine Bernadette will be too keen on the idea, but it’s clear to me she needs some supervised R&R. I am anxious to hear your thoughts.
