Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“The last surgery was when I was five. I know I’m supposed to be so smart, but guess what? I don’t remember any of it! And double-guess what? I’m totally fine now, and have been for nine and a half years. Just take a timeout and ponder that. For two-thirds of my life I’ve been totally normal.”

This passage appears immediately after the letter from Elgin writes to an administrator at Choate describing the early struggles Bee experienced because of her heart defect. Elgin’s letter describes this as the “essential fact” about Bee, a characterization Bee strongly rejects. The letter also suggests the degree to which Elgin’s view of his family is tinged by anxiety. On the other hand, Bee does not want to see herself as “sick” or as defined by her early illness. She sees herself as “totally normal,” an attitude that carries over to other aspects of her family’s life.

“During the ballet, the princess is sleeping as thorny branches grow thicker around her. That’s what I felt like in my bedroom. I knew our blackberry vines were buckling the library floor and causing weird lumps in the carpet and shattering basement windows. But I had a smile on my face, because while I slept, there was a force protecting me.”

In this passage, Bee expresses regret on hearing that the blackberries choking the Branches’ property are about to be removed by Audrey Griffin’s “abatement specialist.” While the blackberries growing up into the house are seen by other characters as a sign of the disorder and neglect that have crept up on Bernadette and her family, Bee romanticizes them as similar to the rose briars that envelop the princess’s castle in Sleeping Beauty. This reflects Bee’s determination to see her family in the best possible light, as well as how successful Bernadette has, in fact, been in making Bee’s childhood stable and happy, even as the rest of her life falls into ruin.

“When Bee was five, I was in her room playing restaurant. She took my order, and after lots of furious activity in her miniature kitchen, she brought me my ‘lunch.’ It was damp and brown. It smelled like dirt, but fluffier. ‘I dug it up,’ she remarked proudly, and pointed to the wood floor. It was so damp from the years of rain, Bee could literally dig into it with a spoon.”

If Bee is able to romanticize the decay of the Branches’ home, Elgin is not. This passage comes from his letter to Dr. Kurtz, asking for her assistance in persuading Bernadette to enter a mental institution. For him, the literal decay of his house is a frightening symbol of the what he sees happening to his wife, and Bee’s ability to find joy in the circumstances of their life is a sad irony.

“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.”

This passage also comes from Elgin’s letter to Dr. Kurtz. The metaphor comes from the title of an old guidebook that Bee was fascinated by as a child, in which pictures of ancient Roman buildings as they looked in their prime appear as transparent overlays to photos of the ruins they have become. (It is fitting that Elgin choses an architectural metaphor, considering Bernadette’s former profession.) The image of Bernadette as a ruin of her previous self sums up Elgin’s view of the situation. His description of her current state as “ungovernable” indicates that he thinks the proper response is to seize control of the situation and impose his own idea of order on it, a response that will backfire dramatically.

“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?’”

In this passage from the Artforum profile, Ellie Saito, the only other female student in Princeton’s architecture program at the time Bernadette earned her degree, expresses her frustration at what she sees as Bernadette’s failure to act as an ally, while revealing the young Bernadette’s intense focus on practical detail. Bernadette’s habit of knitting through class, like her comment about the shoes, reveals her preference for hands-on experience as opposed to theory and her lack of concern as to how others perceive her. Her youthful engagement with the practical will disappear in Seattle, while her brusque, aloof manner of dealing with others will only intensify.

“Beeber Bifocal just kind of evolved. It’s not like Bernadette had a big idea going in. It started with knitting the glasses together. And then came the tabletops made out of lenses. Then the table bases made out of machinery parts.”

Paul Jellinek’s description in Artforum of the process by which Bernadette created Beeber Bifocal exemplifies what he and others most admired about her work—her ability to transform castoff materials into functional, even elegant, architecture, arising from a close focus on the practical possibilities inherent in even the most unlikely materials.

“No doubt they expected some ugly-ass yurt made out of license plates and tires. But when they walked into the Twenty Mile House, they started laughing, that’s how gorgeous it was. A sparkling clean glass box, not an inch of drywall or paint.”

In this passage from the Artforum profile, Paul Jellinek describes the MacArthur committee’s reaction to the Twenty Mile House. As in his description of Beeber Bifocal, Jellinek emphasizes how completely Bernadette was able to reimagine and transform the most unpromising materials.

“‘It’s Saint Bernadette,’ Elgie said. ‘Our Lady of Lourdes. She had visions, eighteen in all. You had your first vision with Beeber Bifocal. You had your second vision with the Twenty Mile House. Here’s to sixteen more.’”

Judy Toll describes Elgin’s gift to Bernadette of the locket—which plays a role in Bernadette’s account of Bee’s infancy, and finally in Bernadette’s reunion with Bee in Antarctica, when Bee gives Bernadette the locket and finds that Elgin has added “Bee” and “Your Escape” to the list of “miracles.” The locket indicates how deeply Elgin loves and values Bernadette and her creative ability. However, there is also an irony in Judy Toll’s rosy-hued retelling of the circumstances of Elgin’s gift and the warm, intimate tone created by her use of “Elgie” in place of “Elgin.” The scene takes place at a lunch celebrating Judy Toll’s sale of the Twenty Mile House to an unknown buyer secretly acting on behalf Nigel Mills-Murray, who is buying the house only to destroy it. Judy Toll has unwittingly betrayed the couple she portrays as her friends.

“You probably wonder what I’ve been doing for the last twenty years. I’ve been resolving the conflict between public and private space in the single-family residence.

“I’m joking! I’ve been ordering shit off the Internet!”

This passage comes from Bernadette’s long letter to Paul Jellinek, written after she learns of the 20 x 20 x 20 competition, in which Bernadette attempts to justify, or at least explain, her abandonment of her vocation. It demonstrates the lively but biting humor with which she expresses her unhappiness and hints at her sense of self-loathing. There’s also a poignant contrast between the emphasis in her early work on making things out of humble materials found on-site and her current practice of living her life by ordering everything off the Internet. The contrast between the idealistic sound of “resolving the conflict between public and private space” and the sordid reality of “ordering shit off the Internet” also suggests the gap between the idealistic language of Elgin and his fellow tech gurus and the reality of projects such as Samantha 2.

“There are maps on every wall, which is perfectly normal, right, for businesses to have a map on the wall showing their territories or distribution routes? Well. On Microsoft’s walls are maps of the world, and in case you’re still unclear about their dominion, under these maps are the words: THE WORLD.”

In this passage from the same letter to Paul Jellinek, Bernadette describes her deep ambivalence about Microsoft and its culture. She cannot decide whether the company, which she elsewhere jokingly refers to as “Big Brother,” is “marvelous and Utopian” or “sinister and evil” (133). On a more personal note, she recognizes that Elgin has found a home and sense of purpose there, but also that its totalizing work culture has pulled Elgin away from his family.

“Sometimes these cars have Idaho plates. And I think, What the hell is car from Idaho doing here? Then I remember. That’s right, we neighbor Idaho. I’ve moved to a state that neighbors Idaho. And any life that might still be left in me kind of goes poof.”

In her letter to Paul Jellinek, Bernadette rants about what she sees as the provincialism of Seattle. As Elgin notes in his letter to Dr. Kurtz, complaining about Seattle life has become one of the ways in which Bernadette expresses her discontents and releases the creative energy which used to go into her work. She displaces her sense of failure and self-loathing onto her adopted city and half-seriously blames it for her personal stagnation.

“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?”

In this passage, Bernadette gives voice to how deeply she was wounded by the destruction of the Twenty Mile House and her frustration at her inability to overcome it. Elgin, who reads this letter after the FBI hacks Bernadette’s email as part of the investigation into Manjula, sees this focus on her lost work as a betrayal of him and of Bee. However, he also expresses jealousy that she was able to reveal her feelings about it to Paul Jellinek but not to him.

“I was all torture and adrenaline. I had no thoughts, no emotion. 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.”

Bernadette describes to Paul Jellinek the overwhelming experience of giving birth to Bee, only to be told that Bee will soon die. This passage shows how Bee became the focus of the energy which Bernadette had previously channeled into her work. This moment sets the stage for Bernadette’s deal with God (in whom she otherwise does not believe), in which she promises to give up building if Bee lives. Significantly, Elgin is described as a frustrated onlooker at this moment, unable to see Bernadette clearly through the fogged windows of their parked car.

“I understood then that Bee was other and that she had been entrusted to me. You know those posters of the 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.”

In this excerpt from the same letter, Bernadette describes how she came to give Bee her full name of Balakrishna, meaning “divine child Krishna,” after seeing Bee in her incubator for the first time. She decides to interpret Bee’s blue coloring, an effect of her heart condition, not as a sign of Bee’s likely death, but as a mark of her “divine” nature as a gift entrusted to Bernadette. Bernadette’s description of Bee as both creator and destroyer also indicates how completely Bee’s birth transforms Bernadette’s life.

“Are you done? You can’t honestly believe any of this nonsense. People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”

In his short and blunt response to Bernadette’s lengthy letter, Paul Jellinek dismisses the idea that Bernadette is no longer able to create because of the experiences of the past 20 years. He sees creativity as fundamental to Bernadette’s being and implies that her problems are a consequence of her failure to create, and not the other way around. Here, as in his contributions to the Artforum profile, Paul Jellinek shows that the high regard in which he holds Bernadette’s work co-exists with a willingness to criticize it (and her). He is also able to communicate with her in ways that Elgin is not, something that arouses Elgin’s envy.

“I was struck by the intensity of it all. I’ve never seen a group of people so self-motivated, working at such a high level. The pressure was palpable, but so was the camaraderie and love for the work. Most striking was the reverence paid to Mr. Branch, and his joking, egalitarian nature, even under extreme stress.”

In this passage, Dr. Janelle Kurtz describes the atmosphere at Microsoft when she visits Elgin in his office prior to the intervention. Dr. Kurtz notes, in a more neutral way, the same qualities to which Bernadette reacts so strongly. Dr. Kurtz also emphasizes the high status and deference which Elgin enjoys at Microsoft. By contrast, he feels overwhelmed and out of control when dealing with his life outside the office.

“I was the baby Jesus. Mom and Dad were Mary and Joseph. The straw was my hospital bed. I was surrounded by the surgeons and residents and nurses who helped me stay live when I was born blue and if it weren’t for them I would be dead now. All of those people I don’t even know, I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup if I had to, but they had worked their whole lives to get the knowledge that ended up saving my life. It was because of them that I was in this magnificent wave of people and music.”

Bee describes her unexpectedly intense reaction to the Nativity scene and carol-singing during the Rockettes Christmas concert. The image of herself as “baby Jesus” surrounded by all the medical personnel who helped to save her life echoes Bernadette’s vision in the hospital of the blue infant Bee, hooked up to a mass of monitors, as “Balakrishna.” In this moment, Bee also identifies with her sickly infant self, something she is otherwise unwilling to do. She understands how miraculous her survival appears from her parents’ perspective.

“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.”

Bee describes the wave of feeling that overcomes her at the Rockettes concert. This intensely emotional experience occurs the night before Bernadette’s disappearance, beginning a period that will test the limits of Bee’s love for and faith in her family. Bee’s experience also provides an example of the characters’ complicated relationship with religion. Bee understands the appeal of religion but does not fully embrace it.

“I laughed because I knew Mom would think it was funny that now I was the one crying. I looked up. But she was gone. It was the last time I saw her.”

In this passage, Bee describes looking up to see Bernadette watching her perform with the first graders on World Cultures Day. Bee is playing her flute while the first graders sing a Japanese nursery rhyme about a little elephant. She has also choreographed an elephant dance for them to perform while singing the English version of the song, which ends “Oh, you know it’s my mama that I love” (215). Bee earlier tried to keep Bernadette from attending the performance because she feared Bernadette would cry in public. Instead, it’s Bee, fresh from her experience at the Rockettes concert, who cries. This role reversal hints at the larger role reversal that will occur after Bernadette’s disappearance, when it is Bee who takes on the job of finding Bernadette.

“A full hour must have passed. I didn’t move. I just breathed and stared at the floor. 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.”

In this passage, Audrey Griffin describes her moment of insight after learning of Elgin’s plan to have Bernadette committed. Faced with the consequences of her lie about Bernadette running over her foot and her conflicts with Bernadette over the blackberries, Audrey abandons the feud and decides to become Bernadette’s champion.

“‘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 to do it for seventy-five cents an hour, and you tried to have her committed to a mental hospital!’”

Bee, arguing with her father as they travel to the Antarctic, points out the parallels between Samantha 2 and the use of her mother made of Manjula. Earlier, Dr. Kurtz had described Samantha 2 as an “extreme version” of “an alarming trend toward reality avoidance” (205). Both Bee and Dr. Kurtz suggest that the technological utopia envisioned by Elgin and his coworkers is simply another form of escapism.

“In this hostile, black water, it turns out there’re millions of the craziest sea creatures I’d ever seen, things like glassy sea cucumbers, worms covered with graceful, foot-long spikes, fluorescent-colored sea stars, and copepods, which are spotted and striped, like out of Yellow Submarine. The reason I’m not calling any of them by their scientific names (not like I would) is because they don’t have names yet.”

Bee describes watching the daily videos of undersea life made by the scientists aboard the cruise ship and shown each night on the ship’s television system. For most of the novel, Antarctica has appeared as remote and forbidding, a place of emptiness and mystery, cut off from the world by the dangerous waters of the Drake Passage, a symbol of the unknown. But once Bee is there, she finds that it is teeming with life, albeit in unfamiliar forms. This foreshadows the discovery that Bernadette’s journey to Antarctica has culminated not in death but in new and unforeseen possibilities.

“I 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.”

Bernadette describes the icebergs of Antarctica in her letter to Bee. Like Bee, Bernadette finds Antarctica to be a place full of the new and unexpected. Bernadette describes the icebergs in architectural terms, fittingly enough, as she is in the process of rediscovering her vocation as an architect.