Where'd You Go, Bernadette

by Maria Semple

Mom disappears into thin air two days before Christmas without telling me? Of course it’s complicated. Just because it’s complicated, just because you think you can’t ever know everything about another person, it doesn’t mean you can’t try.

The choice of private schools is both fear-based and aspirational. Mercedes Parents are afraid their children won’t get “the best education possible,” which has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the number of other Mercedes Parents at a school.

“You’re bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”

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.

But he trusted her. The wives always make these decisions anyway.

The important thing to come out of it—and she knew it—was that she had forged a distinct point of view, which was, simply, to waste nothing.

Seattle is the only city where you step in shit and you pray, Please God, let this be dog shit.

He gets to keep creating, and I’m the one who’s still in pieces?

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.

Getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Not getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Even sleeping makes my heart race! I’m lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It’s a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them.

People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.

If you’re so hell-bent on placing blame, I suggest you look in the mirror.

Maybe that’s what religion is, hurling yourself off a cliff and trusting that something bigger will take care of you and carry you to the right place.

I felt so alone in this world, and so loved at the same time.

I wish a camera had been trained on me, because it would show what it looks like for a woman to be awakened to the truth. The truth? My lies and exaggerations would be responsible for a mother being locked up.

My mouth hung open, but no words came out, just a crackly moan. If there were words to it, what they would say was, Anything but this.

“What was Mom’s big crime, anyway?” I screamed. “That she had an assistant in India doing errands for her? What’s Samantha 2? It’s just something so people can sit around and have a robot do all their shit for them. You spent ten years of your life and billions of dollars inventing something so people don’t have to live their own lives. Mom found a way of doing it for seventy-five cents an hour, and you tried to have her committed to a mental hospital!”