Where'd You Go, Bernadette

by Maria Semple

People who don’t get seasick have no idea what it’s like. It’s not just nausea. It’s nausea plus losing the will to live.

All that matters during those two days is that he keep me away from guns. In the throes of seasickness, blowing my brains out would be an easy call.

I don’t have the thing where you wheeze. I have the even grosser thing where any time I get sick, even if it’s a stomach virus, it’s followed by two weeks of disgusting phlegm, which I have no choice but to cough up.

“I hear you’re going to boarding school,” she said. “Whose idea was that?” “Mine,” I said. “I could never send Kyle to boarding school,” Audrey said. “I guess you love Kyle more than my mom loves me,”

the heights of the swells would shock you if I told you.

In the seventies, Dale Chihuly was already a distinguished glassblower when he got into a car accident and lost an eye. But that didn’t stop him. A few years later, he had a surfing mishap and messed up his shoulder so badly that he was never able to hold a glass pipe again. That didn’t stop him, either. Don’t believe me? Take a boat out on Lake Union and look in the window of Dale Chihuly’s studio. He’s probably there now, with his eye patch and dead arm, doing the best, trippiest work of his life. I had to close my eyes.

Audrey had a crazy smile. Mom and I share a fascination with what we call happy-angry people.

Here’s something about Mom: she’s bad with annoyances, but great in a crisis. If a waiter doesn’t refill her water after she’s asked three times, or she forgets her dark glasses when the sun comes out, look out! But when it comes to something truly bad happening, Mom plugs into this supreme calm.

Architecture has always been a male-dominated profession. Until the emergence of Zaha Hadid in 2005, one was hard-pressed to name a famous female architect. Eileen Gray and Julia Morgan are sometimes mentioned. Mainly, female architects stood in the shadows of their famous male partners: Ann Tyng to Louis Kahn, Marion Griffin to Frank Lloyd Wright, Denise Scott Brown to Robert Venturi.

There’s a story that during the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola had a sign on his trailer: “Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.” That’s the way it is with houses.

Who knew that our Elgin had a bike-riding, Subaru-driving, Keen-wearing alter ego just waiting to bust out?

First off, whoever laid out this city never met a four-way intersection they didn’t turn into a five-way intersection. They never met a two-way street they didn’t suddenly and for no reason turn into a one-way street.

In a nutshell: Once when I was a kid, there was an Easter egg hunt at the country club, and I found a golden egg, which entitled me to a baby bunny. My parents weren’t at all amused. But they grimly bought a hutch and we set up the bunny in our apartment on Park Avenue. I named the rabbit Sailor. That summer, I went away to camp, and my parents repaired to Long Island, leaving Sailor in the apartment with instructions for the maid to feed him. We returned at the end of August to find that Gloria had run off two months prior, with the silverware and Mom’s jewelry. I ran to Sailor’s hutch to see if he’d made it through alive. He was backed into the corner, shivering, and in the most wretched condition: he had become so malnourished that his fur had grown horribly long, his body’s attempt to compensate for his slow metabolism and low temperature. His claws were an inch long, and worse, his front teeth had curled over his lower lip so he could hardly open his mouth. Apparently, rabbits need to be chewing on hard things like carrots; otherwise their teeth will grow. Terrified, I opened the cage door to hug little Sailor, but, in a spastic fury, he started scratching my face and neck. I still have the scars. Without anyone attending to him, he had gone feral. That’s what’s happened to me, in Seattle. Come at me, even in love, and I’ll scratch the hell out of you. ’Tis a piteous fate to have befallen a MacArthur genius, wouldn’t you say? Poof.

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 don’t know if it’s possible to feel everything all at once, so much ...

know

Ice. It’s trippy, symphonies frozen, the unconscious come to life, and smacking of color: blue. (Snow is white; ice is blue.

Antarctica is the highest, driest, coldest,

and windiest place on the planet. The South Pole averages sixty below zero, has hurricane-strength winds, and sits at an altitude of ten thousand feet.