Where'd You Go, Bernadette

by Maria Semple

  Oh, Audrey, please keep me, Alexandra, and Lincoln in your prayers. I don’t know what I’d do if I got managed out. The benefits here are gold-plated. If I still have a job after the holidays, I’ll be happy to cover some of the food costs for the prospective parent brunch.

  Soo-Lin

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18

  Note from Audrey Griffin to the blackberry abatement specialist

  Tom,

  You’d think nobody lives in that big old haunted house above us, judging by the state of their yard. In fact, someone does. Their daughter, Bee, is in Kyle’s class at Galer Street. I’d be thrilled to raise the subject of her blackberry bushes with the mother at pickup today.

  Pigs? No pigs. Do take some chard, though.

  Audrey

  *

  From: Bernadette Fox

  To: Manjula Kapoor

  I’m ecstatic you said yes!!! I’ve signed and scanned everything. Here’s the deal with Antarctica. It will be three of us, so get two rooms. Elgie has a ton of miles on American, so let’s try for three tickets that way. Our winter break dates are December 23 through January 5. If we have to miss a little school, that’s fine. And the dog! We must find someplace willing to board a 130-pound, perpetually damp dog. Ooh—I’m late picking up Bee at school. Again, THANK YOU.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19

  Note from Ms. Goodyear sent home in our weekend folders

  Dear Parents,

  Word has spread about the incident at pickup yesterday. Luckily, nobody was hurt. But it gives us the opportunity to pause and revisit the rules outlined in the Galer Street handbook. (Italics mine.)

  Section 2A. Article ii. There are two ways to pick up students.

  By Car: Drive your vehicle to the school entrance. Please be mindful not to block the loading dock for Sound Seafood International.

  On Foot: Please park in the north lot and meet your children on the canal path. In the spirit of safety and efficiency, we ask that parents on foot do not approach the drive-up area.

  It always inspires me that we have such a wonderful community of parents who are so engaged with one another. However, the safety of our students is always top priority. So let’s use what happened to Audrey Griffin as a teachable moment, and remember to save our conversations for coffee, not the driveway.

  Kindly,

  Gwen Goodyear

  Head of School

  *

  Emergency-room bill Audrey Griffin gave to me to give to Mom

  Patient name: Audrey Griffin

  Attending Physician: C. Cassella

  Emergency Room Visitation Fee 900.00

  X Ray (Elective, NOT COVERED) 425.83

  Rx: Vicodin 10MG (15 tablets, 0 refills) 95.70

  Crutch Rental (Elective, NOT COVERED) 173.00

  Crutch Deposit: 75.00

  TOTAL 1,669.53

  Notes: Visual inspection and basic neurological examination revealed no injury. Patient in acute emotional distress, demanded X ray, Vicodin, and crutches.

  *

  From: Soo-Lin Lee-Segal

  To: Audrey Griffin

  I heard Bernadette tried to run you over at pickup! Are you OK? Should I come by with dinner? WHAT HAPPENED?

  *

  From: Audrey Griffin

  To: Soo-Lin Lee-Segal

  It’s all true. I needed to talk to Bernadette about her blackberry bushes, which are growing down her hill, under my fence, and invading my garden. I was forced to hire a specialist, who said Bernadette’s blackberries are going to destroy the foundation of my home.

  Naturally, I wanted to have a friendly chat with Bernadette. So I walked up to her car while she was in the pickup line. Mea culpa! But how else are you ever going to get a word with that woman? She’s like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You see her only from the waist up, driving past. I don’t think she has once gotten out of her car to walk Bee into school.

  I tried talking to her, but her windows were rolled up and she pretended not to see me. You’d think she was the first lady of France, with her silk scarf flung just so and huge dark glasses. I knocked on her windshield, but she drove off.

  Over my foot! I went to the emergency room and got an incompetent doctor, who refused to accept that there was anything wrong with me.

  Honestly, I don’t know who I’m more furious at, Bernadette Fox or Gwen Goodyear, for calling me out in the Friday Folder. You’d think I did something wrong! And mentioning me, but not Bernadette, by name! I created the Diversity Council. I invented Donuts for Dads. I wrote Galer Street’s mission statement, which that fancy company in Portland was going to charge us ten thousand dollars for.

  Maybe Galer Street is happy renting in an industrial park. Maybe Galer Street doesn’t want the stability of owning its new campus. Maybe Gwen Goodyear would like me to cancel the Prospective Parent Brunch. I have a call in to her now. I’m not the least bit happy.

  The phone is ringing. It’s her.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22

  Note from Ms. Goodyear sent home in the Monday Messenger

  Dear Parents,

  This is to clarify that Bernadette Fox, Bee Branch’s mother, was driving the vehicle that ran over the other parent’s foot. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend despite the rain.

  Kindly,

  Gwen Goodyear

  Head of School

  *

  If someone had asked me, I could have told them what happened at pickup. It took me awhile to get in the car because Mom always brings Ice Cream and lets her sit in the front. Once that dog gets the front seat, she does not like to give it up. So Ice Cream was doing the thing she does when she wants to get her way, which is to go completely rigid and stare straight ahead.

  “Mom!” I said. “You shouldn’t let her get in the front—”

  “She just jumped in.” Mom pulled Ice Cream’s collar and I shoved her butt and after a lot of grunting, Ice Cream finally got in the back. But she didn’t sit on the seat like a normal dog. She stood on the floor squished behind the front seat, with this miserable look on her face, like, See what you guys make me do?

  “Oh, stop being such a drama queen,” Mom said to her.

  I got buckled in. Suddenly Audrey Griffin started running toward the car all stiff and out of rhythm. You could just tell she hadn’t run in about ten years.

  “Oh, boy,” Mom said. “What is it now?”

  Audrey Griffin’s eyes were wild, and she had a big smile as usual, and she was shaking a piece of paper at us. Her gray hair was coming out of its ponytail, and she was wearing clogs, and under her down vest you could see the pleats on her jeans bulging out. It was hard not to watch.

  Señora Flores, who was on traffic duty, gave us the signal to keep it moving because there was a huge line of cars and the Sound Seafood guy was videotaping the traffic jam. Audrey motioned for us to pull over.

  Mom was wearing dark glasses like she always does, even when it rains. “For all that gnat knows,” Mom muttered, “I don’t see her.”

  We drove off and that was that. I know for a fact we didn’t run over anybody’s foot. I love Mom’s car, but riding in that thing is like “The Princess and the Pea.” If Mom had run over something as big as a human foot, it would have set off the air bags.

  *

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23

  From: Bernadette Fox

  To: Manjula Kapoor

  Attached please find a scan of an emergency room bill I suppose I should pay. One of the gnats at Galer Street claims I ran over her foot at pickup. I would laugh at the whole thing, but I’m too bored. See, that’s why I call the mothers there “gnats.” Because they’re annoying, but not so annoying that you actually want to spend valuable energy on them. These gnats have done everything to provoke me into a fight over the past nine years—the stories I could tell! Now that Bee is graduating and I can smell the barn, it’s not worth waging a gnat battle over. Could you check our various insurance policies to see if something covers it? On second thought, let’s just stra
ight-up pay the bill. Elgie wouldn’t want our rates rising over something so trifling. He’s never understood my antipathy toward the gnats.

  All this Antarctica stuff is fantastic! Get us two Class B Queen rooms. I’m scanning our passports, where you’ll find our birthdates, exact spelling of names, and all that other good stuff. I’ve thrown in driver’s licenses and SS numbers just to be safe. You’ll see on Bee’s passport that her given name is Balakrishna Branch. (Let’s just say I was under a lot of stress, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.) I realize that her plane ticket has to read “Balakrishna.” But when it comes to the boat—nametag, passenger list, etc.—please move heaven and earth to make sure the divine child is listed as “Bee.”

  I see there’s a packing list. Why don’t you get us three of everything. I’m a women’s medium, Elgie a men’s XL, not for his girth but because he’s six foot three without an ounce of flab, God bless him. Bee is small for her age, so why don’t you get her whatever would fit a ten-year-old. If you have questions about size and style, send us several to try on, as long as returns require no more from me than leaving a box outside for the UPS guy. Also, get all suggested books, which Elgie and Bee will devour, and which I will intend to devour.

  I’d also like a fishing vest, one replete with zippered pockets. Back when I actually enjoyed leaving the house, I sat on a plane next to an environmentalist who spent his life zigzagging the globe. He had on a fishing vest, which contained his passport, money, glasses, and film canisters—yes, film, it was that long ago. The genius part: everything’s in one place, it’s handy, it’s zipped in, plus you can whip it off and plop it down on the X-ray belt. I always said to myself: next time I travel, I’m going to get me one of those. My time has come. You’d better get two.

  Have it all shipped to the manse. You’re the best!

  *

  From: Manjula Kapoor

  To: Bernadette Fox

  Dear Ms. Fox,

  I have received your instructions regarding the packing list and will proceed accordingly. What is manse? I do not find it in any of my records.

  Warm regards,

  Manjula

  *

  From: Bernadette Fox

  To: Manjula Kapoor

  You know what it’s like when you go to Ikea and you can’t believe how cheap everything is, and even though you may not need a hundred tea lights, my God, they’re only ninety-nine cents for the whole bag? Or: Sure, the throw pillows are filled with a squishy ball of no-doubt toxic whatnot, but they’re so bright and three-for-five-dollars that before you know it you’ve dropped five hundred bucks, not because you needed any of this crap, but because it was so damn cheap?

  Of course you don’t. But if you did, you’d know what Seattle real estate was like for me.

  I came up here on a whim, pretty much. We’d been living in L.A. when Elgie’s animation company was bought by Big Brother. Whoops, did I say Big Brother? I meant Microsoft. Around the same time, I’d had a Huge Hideous Thing happen to me (which we definitely do not need to get into). Let’s just say that it was so huge and so hideous that it made me want to flee L.A. and never return.

  Even though Elgie didn’t need to relocate to Seattle, Big Brother strongly recommended it. I was more than happy to use it as an excuse to hightail it out of La-La Land.

  My first trip up here, to Seattle, the realtor picked me up at the airport to look at houses. The morning batch were all Craftsman, which is all they have here, if you don’t count the rash of view-busting apartment buildings that appear in inexplicable clumps, as if the zoning chief was asleep at his desk during the sixties and seventies and turned architectural design over to the Soviets.

  Everything else is Craftsman. Turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman. It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.

  The main thing about this cornucopia of Craftsmans: compared to L.A., they were Ikea-cheap!

  Ryan, the realtor, took me to lunch downtown at a Tom Douglas restaurant. Tom Douglas is a local chef who has a dozen restaurants, each one better than the last. Eating at Lola—that coconut cream pie! that garlic spread!—made me believe I could actually be happy making a life for myself in this Canada-close sinkhole they call the Emerald City. I blame you, Tom Douglas!

  After lunch, we headed to the realtor’s car for the afternoon rounds. Looming over downtown was a hill crammed with, say what, Craftsman houses. At the top of the hill, on the left, I could discern a brick building with a huge yard overlooking Elliott Bay.

  “What’s that?” I asked Ryan.

  “Straight Gate,” he said. “It was a Catholic school for wayward girls built at the turn of the century.”

  “What is it now?” I said.

  “Oh, it hasn’t been anything for years. Every so often some developer tries to convert it to condos.”

  “So it’s for sale?”

  “It was supposed to be converted into eight condos,” he said. Then, his eyes began to pirouette, sensing a sale. “The property is three whole acres, mostly flat. Plus, you own the entire hillside, which you can’t build on, but it does ensure privacy. Gatehouse—which is what the developers renamed it because Straight Gate seemed antigay—is about twelve thousand square feet, loaded with charm. There is some deferred maintenance, but we’re talking crown jewel.”

  “How much are they asking?”

  Ryan gave a dramatic pause. “Four hundred thousand.” He watched with satisfaction as my jaw dropped. The other houses we’d seen were the same price, and they were on tiny lots.

  Turns out the huge yard had been deeded to open space for tax purposes, and the Queen Anne Neighborhood Association had designated Straight Gate a historic site, which made it impossible to touch the exterior or interior walls. So the Straight Gate School for Girls was stuck in building-code limbo.

  “But the area is zoned for single-family residences,” I said.

  “Let’s take a look-see.” Ryan shoved me into his car.

  In terms of layout, it was kind of brilliant. The basement—where the girls were penned, it appeared, from the dungeon door that locked from the outside—was certainly creepy and depressing. But it was five thousand square feet, which left seven thousand feet above-grade, a swell size for a house. On the ground floor was a kitchen opening onto a dining room—pretty fabulous—a huge receiving area that could be our living room, and a couple of small offices. On the second floor was a chapel with stained-glass windows and a row of confessionals. Perfect for a master bedroom and closet! The other rooms could be a kid’s room and a guest room. All that was required was cosmetic: weatherproofing, refinishing, paint. A cinch.

  Standing on the back portico, facing west, I noticed ferry boats gliding like snails along the water.

  “Where are they going?” I asked.

  “Bainbridge Island.” Ryan answered. No dummy, he added, “Lots of people have second homes out there.”

  I stayed an extra day and grabbed a beach house, too.

  *

  From: Manjula Kapoor

  To: Bernadette Fox

  Dear Ms. Fox,

  The items on the packing list will be shipped to the Gate Avenue address.

  Warm regards,

  Manjula

  *

  From: Bernadette Fox

  To: Manjula Kapoor

  Oh! Could you make dinner reservations for us on Thanksgiving? You can call up the Washington Athletic Club and get us something for 7 PM for three. You are able to place calls, aren’t you? Of course, what am I thinking? That’s all you people do now.

  I recognize it’s slightly odd to ask you to call from India to make a re
servation for a place I can see out my window, but here’s the thing: there’s always this one guy who answers the phone, “Washington Athletic Club, how may I direct your call?”

  And he always says it in this friendly, flat… Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don’t like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they’re interchangeable because they’re both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn’t be more mistaken.

  Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass—anything and everything—the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such.

  Yes, I’m done.

  If the WAC can’t take us, which may be the case, because Thanksgiving is only two days away, you can find someplace else on the magical Internet.

  *

  I was wondering how we ended up at Daniel’s Broiler for Thanksgiving dinner. That morning, I slept late and came downstairs in my pajamas. I knew it was going to rain because on my way to the kitchen I passed a patchwork of plastic bags and towels. It was a system Mom had invented for when the house leaks.

  First we lay out plastic bags under the leaks and cover them with towels or moving blankets. Then we put a spaghetti pot in the middle to catch the water. The trash bags are necessary because it might leak for hours in one place, then move over two inches. Mom’s pièce de résistance is putting an old T-shirt inside the spaghetti pot to muffle the drip-drip-drip. Because that can drive you crazy when you’re trying to sleep.