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.