My heart was really thumping. I should have stayed and popped one of those Xanax. But I couldn’t stand to be in that compound pharmacy anymore, trapped with the icy portent. I blame you, Dale Chihuly!
I fled. I had no idea which way I was pointed, where I was even headed. But I must have gone up Fourth Avenue, because the next thing I knew, I was standing outside the Rem Koolhaas public library.
I had stopped, apparently. Because a guy approached me. A graduate student, he looked like. Completely nice, nothing mean or threatening about him.
But he recognized me.
Manjula, I have no idea how. The only photograph of me floating around was one taken twenty years ago, right before the Huge Hideous Thing. I am beautiful, my face radiating with confidence, my smile bursting with the future of my choosing.
“Bernadette Fox,” I blurted.
I am fifty, slowly going mad.
This can’t make sense to you, Manjula. It doesn’t have to. But you see what happens when I come into contact with people. It doesn’t bode well for the whole Antarctica thing.
Later that day, Mom picked me up. Maybe she was a little quiet, but sometimes that happens, because on the way to school she listens to “The World” on PRI, which is usually a downer, and that day was no exception. I got into the car. A terrible report was on about the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and how rape was being used as a weapon. All the females were getting raped, from baby girls, six months old, all the way to eighty-year-old grandmothers, and every age in between. More than one thousand women and girls were getting raped each month. It had been going on for twelve years and nobody was doing anything about it. Hillary Clinton had gone there and promised to help, which gave everyone hope, but then all she did was give money to the corrupt government.
“I can’t listen to this!” I smacked the radio off.
“I know it’s horrific,” Mom said. “But you’re old enough. We live a life of privilege in Seattle. That doesn’t mean we can literally switch off these women, whose only fault was being born in the Congo during a civil war. We need to bear witness.” She turned the radio back on.
I crumpled in my seat and fumed.
“The war in Congo rages on with no end in sight,” the announcer said. “And now comes word of a new campaign by the soldiers, to find the women they have already raped and re-rape them.”
“Holy Christ on a cross!” Mom said. “I draw the line at re-raping.” And she turned off NPR.
We sat in silence. Then, at ten of four, we had to turn the radio back on because Fridays at ten of four is when we listen to our favorite person ever, Cliff Mass. If you don’t know who Cliff Mass is, well, he’s this thing me and Mom have, this awesome weather geek who loves weather so much you have no choice but to love him in return.
Once, I think I was ten, and I was home with a babysitter while Mom and Dad went to Town Hall for some lecture. The next morning, Mom showed me a picture on her digital camera. “Me and guess who?” I had no idea. “You’re going to be so jealous when you find out.” I made a mean face at her. Mom and Dad call it my Kubrick face, and it was a glowering face I made when I was a little baby. Mom finally screamed, “Cliff Mass!”
Oh my God, can someone please stop me before I write more about Cliff Mass?
Here’s my point: first, because of the re-raping, and second, because Mom and I were so in love with Cliff Mass, of course we didn’t talk much on the way home that day, so I couldn’t have known she was traumatized. We pulled in the driveway. There were a bunch of giant trucks on the side street, and one was parked on our loop to keep the gate open. Workmen were coming and going. It was hard to make out what exactly was going on through the rain-smeared windshield.
“Don’t ask,” Mom said. “Audrey Griffin demanded we get rid of the blackberries.”
When I was little, Mom brought me to see The Sleeping Beauty at the Pacific Northwest Ballet. In it, an evil witch puts a curse on the princess, which makes her fall asleep for one hundred years. A gentle fairy protects the sleeping princess by enveloping her in a forest of briars. During the ballet, the princess is sleeping as thorny branches grow thicker around her. That’s what I felt like in my bedroom. I knew our blackberry vines were buckling the library floor and causing weird lumps in the carpet and shattering basement windows. But I had a smile on my face, because while I slept, there was a force protecting me.
“Not all of them!” I cried. “How could you?”
“Don’t get all peevish on me,” she said. “I’m the one taking you to the South Pole.”
“Mom,” I said, “we’re not going to the South Pole.”
“Wait, we’re not?”
“The only place tourists go is the Antarctic Peninsula, which is like the Florida Keys of Antarctica.” It’s shocking, but Mom genuinely didn’t seem to know this. “It’s still zero degrees,” I continued. “But it’s a teeny-tiny part of Antarctica. It’s like someone saying they’re going to Colorado for Christmas, and then you ask them, How was New York? Sure, it’s the United States. But it’s just totally ignorant. Please tell me you knew that, Mom, but you forgot because you’re tired.”
“Tired and ignorant,” she said.
From: Soo-Lin Lee-Segal
To: Audrey Griffin
Before you write me off as the Girl Who Cried Real-Time Flash! listen to this.
As I told you, Elgin, Pablo, and I had a lunch meeting downtown. Elgin insisted we take the 888 Shuttle. (Which, it turns out, is no different from the Connector. All these years I’d imagined the doors opening and it looking like the inside of a genie’s bottle or something.) There was construction downtown, so when we got to the corner of Fifth and Seneca, traffic had completely stopped. Elgin said it would be faster to walk. It was pouring buckets, but it wasn’t my place to argue so I followed them off the shuttle.
Now, Audrey, you’re always talking about God’s plan. For the first time, I understand what you mean. I would have thought God was forsaking me when he made me walk three blocks in the pouring rain. But it turns out there was something on that third block that God intended me to see.
Elgin, Pablo, and I were scurrying along Fourth Avenue, heads down, clutching closed our hoods over our faces. I happened to glance up, and what do I see? Bernadette Fox asleep in a pharmacy.
I repeat, Bernadette Fox just lying on a couch with her eyes closed in the middle of a compound pharmacy. She might as well have been in the window at Nordstrom for all of Seattle to see. She wore dark glasses, trousers and loafers, a men’s shirt with silver cuff links, and some kind of vest underneath her raincoat. Also, she was clutching a fancy purse with one of her silk scarves tied to it.
Pablo and Elgin were up ahead on the corner, turning in circles, wondering where I had gone. Elgin spotted me and marched over, looking irate.
“I—” I stammered, “I’m sorry—” It was my first day on the job. Whatever was going on with Bernadette, I wanted no part of it. I ran to catch up, but it was too late. Elgin had already looked in the window. His face went white. He pulled open the door and went inside.
By this time, Pablo had come over. “Elgin’s wife is asleep in there,” I explained.
“It’s really coming down,” Pablo said. He smiled and refused to turn his head toward the pharmacy.
“I already know what I’m going to order for lunch,” I said. “The salt-and-pepper calamari. It’s not on the menu, but they make it for you if you ask.”