Even the mayor gets in on the action. There was a comic-book store in my neighborhood that demonstrated great courage by putting a sign in the window indicating that nobody with pants pulled below their buttocks would be allowed in. And the mayor said he wanted to get to the root of why kids sag their pants. The fucking mayor.
And don’t get me started on Canadians. It’s a whole thing.
Remember when the feds busted in on that Mormon polygamist cult in Texas a few years back? And the dozens of wives were paraded in front of the camera? And they all had this long mouse-colored hair with strands of gray, no hairstyle to speak of, no makeup, ashy skin, Frida Kahlo facial hair, and unflattering clothes? And on cue, the Oprah audience was shocked and horrified? Well, they’ve never been to Seattle.
There are two hairstyles here: short gray hair and long gray hair. You go into a salon asking for hair color, and they flap their elbows and cluck, “Oh, goody, we never get to do color!”
But what really happened was I came up here and had four miscarriages. Try as I might, it’s hard to blame that one on Nigel Mills-Murray.
Oh, Paul. That last year in L.A. was just so horrible. I am so ashamed of my behavior. I’ve carried it with me to this day, the revulsion at how vile I became, all for a stupid house. I’ve never stopped obsessing about it. But just before I completely self-immolate, I think about Nigel Mills-Murray. Was I really so bad that I deserved to have three years of my life destroyed for some rich prick’s practical joke? So I had some cars towed, yes. I made a gate out of trash doorknobs. I’m an artist. I won a MacArthur grant, for fuck’s sake. Don’t I get a break? I’ll be watching TV and see Nigel Mills-Murray’s name at the end. I’ll go nuts inside. He gets to keep creating, and I’m the one who’s still in pieces?
Let’s inventory the toy chest: shame, anger, envy, childishness, self-reproach, self-pity.
The AIA gave me that nice honor years back, there’s this 20 × 20 × 20 thing, an Artforum reporter tried to talk to me about some article. Those things just make it worse, you see. They’re booby prizes because everyone knows I am an artist who couldn’t overcome failure.
Just last night, I woke up to pee. I was half asleep, with no concept of myself, a blank, and then the data started reloading—Bernadette Fox — Twenty Mile House destroyed — I deserved it — I’m a failure. Failure has got its teeth in me, and it won’t stop shaking.
Ask me about the Twenty Mile House now, I’m a twister of nonchalance. That old thing? Who cares? It’s my false front, and I’m sticking to it.
When the miscarriages started, Elgie was there for me, leaning in.
“It’s all my fault,” I’d say.
“No, Bernadette,” he’d say. “It’s not your fault.”
“I deserve this,” I’d say.
“Nobody deserves this.”
“I can’t make anything without destroying it,” I’d say.
“Please, Bernadette, that’s not true.”
“I’m a monster,” I’d say. “How can you possibly love me?”
“Because I know you.”
What Elgie didn’t know was that I was using his words to help me heal from an even deeper grief than the miscarriages, a grief I couldn’t admit to: grief over the Twenty Mile House. Elgie still doesn’t know. Which just adds to my bottomless, churning shame, that I have become so demented and dishonest, a stranger to the most brilliant and honorable man I’ve ever met.
The only thing you can blame Elgie for is he makes life look so damn simple: do what you love. In his case, that means working, spending time with his family, and reading presidential biographies.
Yes, I’ve hauled my sorry ass to a shrink. I went to some guy here, the best in Seattle. It took me about three sessions to fully chew the poor fucker up and spit him out. He felt terrible about failing me. “Sorry,” he said, “but the psychiatrists up here aren’t very good.”
I bought a house when we got here. This crazy reform school for girls with every building restriction conceivable attached. To make something of it would require Harry Houdini ingenuity. This, of course, appealed to me. I truly intended to recover from the body blow of the Twenty Mile House by making a home for me and Elgie and the baby I was always pregnant with. Then I’d sit on the toilet and look down, my upper body a capital C, and there it was, blood on my underpants, and I’d weep to Elgie all over again.
When I finally stayed pregnant, our daughter’s heart hadn’t developed completely, so it had to be rebuilt in a series of operations. Her chances for survival were minuscule, especially back then. The moment she was born, my squirming blue guppy was whisked off to the OR before I could touch her.
Five hours later, the nurse came around and gave me the shot to dry up my milk. The surgery had been botched. Our baby wasn’t strong enough to endure another one.
Here’s what inconsolable looks like: me sitting in my car in the parking lot of Children’s Hospital, all the windows rolled up, wearing my hospital gown, twelve inches of pads between my legs and Elgie’s parka over my shoulders, Elgie standing outside in the dark, trying to make me out through fogged windows. I was all torture and adrenaline. I had no thoughts, no emotions. Inside me roiled something so terrible that God knew he had to keep my baby alive, or this torrent within me would be unleashed on the universe.
Ten in the morning, a knock on the windshield. “We can see her now,” Elgie said. That’s when I met Bee. She was sleeping peacefully in her incubator, a little blue loaf with a yellow cap on, the sheets perfectly stretched across her chest. There were wires and tubes stuck on and in every piece of her. Beside her towered a rack of thirteen monitors. She was plugged into every one. “Your daughter,” the nurse said. “She’s been through a lot.”
I understood then that Bee was other and that she had been entrusted to me. You know those posters of baby Krishna, “Balakrishna,” as he’s known, the incarnation of Vishnu, the creator and destroyer, and he’s fat and happy and blue? That’s what Bee was, the creator and the destroyer. It was just so obvious.
“She’s not going to die,” I said to the nurses, like they were the stupidest people on earth. “She’s Balakrishna.” The name was put on her birth certificate. The only reason Elgie played along was because he knew the grief counselor was scheduled to meet with us in an hour.
I asked to be left alone with my daughter. Elgie once gave me a locket of Saint Bernadette, who had eighteen visions. He said Beeber Bifocal and Twenty Mile were my first two visions. I dropped to my knees at Bee’s incubator and grabbed my locket. “I will never build again,” I said to God. “I will renounce my other sixteen visions if you’ll keep my baby alive.” It worked.
Nobody in Seattle likes me. The day I got here, I went to Macy’s to buy a mattress. I asked if someone could help me. “You’re not from around here, are you?” the lady said. “I can tell from your energy.” What kind of energy was that? That I asked to be helped by a mattress saleslady in a mattress department?
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been in the middle of a perfunctory conversation, and someone will say, “Tell us what you really think.” Or “Maybe you should switch to decaf.” I blame the proximity to Canada. Let’s leave it at that; otherwise I’ll get onto the subject of Canadians, and that’s something you seriously don’t have time for.