"Where'd You Go, Bernadette"

[fiefoe]

I was just thinking I'm tired of books where people die left and right, and lo, Maria Semple's book jumped into my lap. The first half was jaunty if slight satire, but the story (and the characters) got deeper and bigger towards the end. Quite a satisfying read.

• To do this, you must emancipate yourselves from what I am calling Subaru Parent mentality and start thinking more like Mercedes Parents... Let me rock it straight: the first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard.
• everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.
• an avalanche of equality / patent cubes
• For instance, did you know the difference between Antarctica and the Arctic is that Antarctica has land, but the Arctic is just ice?
• our admissions department has been working with Yale’s PACE (Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise) Center to develop a hard measure of the soft skills required to adjust to the academic and social challenges of boarding school...  In this new vocabulary of success, there are two words we like to use when describing our ideal student. Those words are “grit” and “poise.” Your daughter tested off the charts for both.
• All day and night it cracks and groans, like it’s trying to get comfortable but can’t, which I’m sure has everything to do with the huge amount of water it absorbs any time it rains. It’s happened before that a door all of a sudden won’t open because the house has settled around it. This was the first time Ice Cream was involved.
• Galer Street is so ridiculous that it goes beyond PC and turns back in on itself to the point where fourth graders are actually having to debate the advantages of China’s genocide of the Tibetan people
• Chihulys are the pigeons of Seattle. They’re everywhere, and even if they don’t get in your way, you can’t help but build up a kind of antipathy toward them.
• Audrey hysterical. Husband calling city attorney. I don’t do black swan.
• Ollie-O was in a semicatatonic state, uttering nonsensical phrases like “This is not biodegradable—the downstream implications are enormous—the optics make for rough sledding—going forward—” before getting stuck on the words “epic fail,” which he kept repeating.
• “Thank the Lord, no.” Audrey had a crazy smile. Mom and I share a fascination with what we call happy-angry people. This display of Audrey Griffin’s had just become the best version of that ever.
• Bernadette designed these nautilus-shaped viewing platforms, which echoed the fossils in the travertine and the whorls of the Watts Towers.
• a private school in Seattle. It read, “CUSTOM TREE HOUSE: Third-grade parent Bernadette Fox will design a tree house for your child, supply all materials, and build it herself.” I contacted the head of school about this auction item. She emailed back: “According to our records, this auction item received no bids and went unsold.”
• Of course, the “Race for the Root” was a triathlon, because God forbid you should ask one of these athletic do-gooders to partake in only one sport per Sunday.
• 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.
• FBI Agent Marcus Strang was in the middle of informing them that “Manjula,” the Internet assistant, had stolen all his miles on American Airlines last week.
• The reason we chose Utah is because it’s the only state that by law essentially allows you to kidnap your child, so they specialize in these wilderness programs.
• I must must must pe right there standing by Elgie’s side when Pernadette gets off that shib tomorrow. If HE doesn’t tell her I’m bregnant, you petter pelieve I will
• My screaming had caused enough of a ruckus for the captain to at least turn around. The sight of Elgie flat on the slimy dock, groaning, “My wife, my wife,” with a gun pointed at him, and me jumping up and down, was enough for even a German to take pity.
• Underneath, she was wearing a fishing vest. She patted it. Through the mesh pockets, I could see her wallet, cell phone, keys, passport. “I can do anything,” she said with a smile.
• That was a lie, because how can seeing a ship give you closure? But after Choate, I quickly learned that in the name of closure Dad would let me do anything.
• I was lying there on the bed, seeing the backstage of time, how slowly it went, everything it’s made up of, which is nothing... So, like the ballet stage manager, I pulled one rope in my brain, then the other, then five more, which closed my eyelids.
• They were gigantic, with strange formations carved into them. They were so haunting and majestic you could feel your heart break, but really they’re just chunks of ice and they mean nothing.
• Dad asked. “When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It’s the same as a runner’s high. These days, we all spend our lives staring at screens twelve inches in front of us. It’s a nice change.”
• He said after he was down here the first time driving a Zodiac that he went back home and immediately got into a car accident because he was looking left to right, left to right, and ended up rear-ending the car directly in front of him. But that’s not personality. That’s just a car accident.
• Here’s what surprised me about penguins: their chests aren’t pure white but have patches of peach and green, which is partially digested krill and algae vomit, which splatters on them when they feed their chicks.
• Ice. It’s trippy, symphonies frozen, the unconscious come to life, and smacking of color: blue... saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world’s fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman’s shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit’s cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black.
• and the kicker, “can go long stretches without showering.” For the past twenty years I’ve been in training for overwintering at the South Pole! I knew I was up to something.
• Gigantic puffy clouds, welcoming, forgiving, repeating infinitely across the horizon as if between mirrors;