Read Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel Online
Authors: Maria Semple
Tags: #Fiction / Humorous, #Contemporary Women, #Humorous, #Family Life, #Fiction, #Fiction / Family Life, #Fiction / Contemporary Women
“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 sidewalk.
“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.
Sincerely,
Elgin Branch
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation announce:
20 × 20 × 20: The Twenty Mile House
Twenty Years Later
Twenty Years in the Future
SDeadline for submission: February 1
Bernadette Fox’s Twenty Mile House no longer stands. There are few photos of it, and Ms. Fox is purported to have destroyed all plans. Still, its relevance grows with each passing year. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Twenty Mile House, the Green Builders of America, in conjunction with the Turner Foundation, invite architects, students, and builders to submit designs to reenvision and rebuild the Twenty Mile House and, in doing so, open a dialogue for what it means to “build green” in the next twenty years.
The challenge: Submit plans for a 3-bedroom, 4,200-sf single-family residence at 6528 Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles.
The only restriction is the one Ms. Fox placed on herself:
Every material used must come from within twenty miles of the building site
.The winner: Will be announced at the GBA/AIA gala at the Getty Center and be awarded a $40,000 prize.
Jacob,
Because you’ve taken an interest in Bernadette Fox, here’s a bit of a hagiography from the not-yet-published February issue of
Artforum
. They asked me to vet it for glaring mistakes. In case you have an impulse to contact the writer with news of your Bernadette Fox sighting, please don’t. Bernadette has obviously made a choice to get lost, and it seems to me we should respect it.
Paul
*
“Saint Bernadette: The Most Influential Architect You’ve Never Heard Of”
The Architects and Builders Association of America recently polled three hundred architectural graduate students and asked them which architects they admire most. The list is what you’d expect—Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Richard Neutra, Rudolf Schindler—with one
exception. Tucked among the great men is a woman who is virtually unknown.
Bernadette Fox is extraordinary for many reasons. She was a young woman practicing solo in a male-dominated profession; she received a MacArthur grant at thirty-two; her handmade furniture stands in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum; she is considered a pioneer of the green building movement; the only house she ever built no longer stands; she dropped out of architecture twenty years ago and has designed nothing since.
Alone, any of these attributes would make an architect noteworthy. Taken together, an icon was born. But who was Bernadette Fox? Was she forging the way for young women architects to come? Was she a genius? Was she green before there was green? Where is she now?
Artforum
spoke with the handful of people who worked closely with Bernadette Fox. What follows is our attempt to unlock one of architecture’s true enigmas.
Princeton in the mideighties was the front line in the battle for the future of architecture. The modernist school was firmly established, its acolytes lauded and influential. The postmodernists, led by Princeton faculty member Michael Graves, were mounting a serious challenge. Graves had just built his Portland Public Service Building, its wit, ornamentation, and eclecticism a bold rejection of the austere, minimalist formality of the modernists. Meanwhile, deconstructivists, a more confrontational faction, were banding together. Led by former Princeton professor Peter Eisenman, deconstructivism rejected both modernism
and
postmodernism in favor of fragmentation and geometric unpredictability. Students at Princeton were firmly expected to pick sides, take up arms, and shed blood.
Ellie Saito was in Bernadette Fox’s class at Princeton.
ELLIE SAITO:
For my thesis I designed a teahouse for the visitors center at Mount Fuji. It was essentially a pulled-apart cherry blossom made of exploding pink sails. I was defending my design during review. I was taking it from all sides. And Bernadette looked up from her knitting and asked, “Where are they going to put their shoes?” We all just looked at her. “Aren’t people supposed to take off their shoes in teahouses?” Bernadette said. “Where will they put them?”
Fox’s preoccupation with the prosaic caught the attention of Professor Michael Graves, who hired her to work in his New York office.
ELLIE SAITO:
Bernadette was the only one in the whole class he hired. It was a big blow.
MICHAEL GRAVES:
I’m not looking to hire an architect with a huge ego and huge ideas. I’m the one with a huge ego and huge ideas. I want someone who has the ability to carry out my ideas and solve the problems I throw at them. What struck me about Bernadette was the joy she took in tasks that most students would find beneath them. Architecture isn’t a profession usually chosen by egoless worker bees. So when you’re looking to hire, and you see a talented one, you grab her.
Fox was the most junior member of a group assigned to the Team Disney Building in Burbank. Her first job was typical grunt work, laying out bathrooms in the executive wing.
MICHAEL GRAVES:
Bernadette was driving everyone insane. She wanted to know how much time the executives spent in their offices, how often they’d be in meetings, at what time of day, how many people would be in attendance, the ratio of men to women. I picked up the phone and asked her what the hell she was doing.
She explained, “I need to know what problems I’m solving with my design.”
I told her, “Michael Eisner needs to take a piss, and he doesn’t want everyone watching.”
I’d like to say I kept her around because I recognized the talent that would emerge. But really, I liked the sweaters. She knitted me four, and I still have them. My kids keep trying to steal them. My wife wants to give them to Goodwill. But I won’t part with them.
The Team Disney Building was repeatedly delayed because of the permitting process. During an all-firm meeting, Fox presented a flowchart on how to game the building department. Graves sent her to Los Angeles to work on-site.
MICHAEL GRAVES:
I was the only one sad to see her go.
In six months, the Team Disney job ended. Graves offered Fox a job back in New York, but she liked the freedom of the Los Angeles architecture scene. On a recommendation from Graves, Fox was hired by the firm of Richard Meier, already at work on the Getty Center. She was one of a half-dozen young architects charged with sourcing, importing, and quality-checking the sixteen thousand tons of travertine from Italy which would sheathe the museum.
In 1988,
Fox met Elgin Branch, a computer animator. They married the next year. Fox wanted to build a house. Judy Toll was their realtor.
JUDY TOLL:
They were a darling young couple. Both very smart and attractive. I kept trying to put them in a house in Santa Monica, or the Palisades. But Bernadette was fixated on getting a piece of land where she could design something herself. I showed them an abandoned factory in Venice Beach that was being sold for land value.
She looked around and said it was perfect. To my shock, she was talking about the building itself. The only one more surprised than I was the husband. But he trusted her. The wives always make these decisions anyway.
Fox and Branch bought the former Beeber Bifocal Factory. Soon thereafter, they went to a dinner party and met the two most influential people in Fox’s professional life: Paul Jellinek and David Walker. Jellinek was an architect and professor at SCI-Arc.
PAUL JELLINEK:
It was the day she and Elgie closed on Beeber Bifocal. Her enthusiasm for it lit up the whole party. She said the factory was still filled with boxes of old bifocals and machinery that she wanted to “do something with.” The way she was talking, all wild and fuzzy, I had no idea she was a trained architect, let alone a darling of Graves.
David Walker was a contractor.
DAVID WALKER:
Over dessert, Bernadette asked me to be her contractor. I said I’d give her some references. She said, “No, I
just like you,” and she told me to come by that Saturday and bring some guys.
PAUL JELLINEK:
When Bernadette said she was working on the Getty travertine, I totally got it. A friend of mine was on travertine duty, too. They had these talented architects reduced to being Inspector 44 on an assembly line. It was soul-destroying work. Beeber was Bernadette’s way of reconnecting to what she loved about architecture, which was building stuff.
The Beeber Bifocal Factory was a three-thousand-square-foot cinder-block box with eleven-foot ceilings topped by a clerestory. The roof was a series of skylights. Transforming this industrial space into a home consumed the next two years of Fox’s life. Contractor David Walker was there every day.
DAVID WALKER:
From the outside, it looked like some junky thing. But you walk in and it’s full of light. That first Saturday I show up with some guys like Bernadette asks. She has no plans, no permits. Instead, she’s got brooms and squeegees and we all go to work sweeping the floor and cleaning the windows and skylights. I ask her if I should order a dumpster. She practically shouts, “No!”
She spends the next week taking everything in the building and laying it out on the floor. There’s thousands of bifocal frames, boxes of lenses, bundles of flattened cardboard boxes, plus all the machinery for cutting and polishing lenses.
Every morning I show up, she’s already there. She’s wearing this backpack with yarn coming out of it, so she can knit while she’s standing. And she’s just knitting and looking at everything. It reminded me of being a kid and dumping out a
bunch of Legos on the carpet. And you just sit there and stare before you have any idea what you’re going to make.
That Friday, she takes home a box of wire bifocal frames. Monday, she returns and she’s knitted them all together with wire. So you have this awesome chain mail with glasses embedded in it. And it’s strong, too! So Bernadette puts the guys to work, with clippers and pliers, turning thousands of old bifocal frames into screens, which she uses as interior walls.
It was hilarious to see these macho guys from Mexico sitting in chairs and knitting out in the sun. They loved it, though. They’d play their ranchera music on the radio and gossip like a bunch of ladies.