Seattle, Washington

Seattle, Washington is the setting of the Branch family’s relocation and a city Bernadette Fox views through a mixture of practical interest and comic exasperation. Its comparatively inexpensive houses help draw her from Los Angeles, but the city’s Craftsman-dominated streetscape, distinctive social vocabulary, and technology culture become recurring objects of her criticism. For Elgin Branch, by contrast, Microsoft offers a professional environment in which he seems to find his natural habitat.

Arrival and the housing market

The move begins after Elgin’s animation company is bought by Microsoft. Although Elgin does not need to relocate, Microsoft strongly recommends that he do so; Bernadette is eager to use the opportunity to leave Los Angeles after an unspecified event she describes as huge and hideous. Her account makes clear that the move is not simply a response to Elgin’s work: Seattle also offers an escape from a city she wants to leave behind.

On her first trip to Seattle, a realtor collects Bernadette at the airport and takes her to view houses. Against the cost of Los Angeles real estate, Seattle’s prices strike her as astonishingly low, like the tempting bargains of an IKEA shopping trip. The comparison captures the force of the market’s appeal: affordability can make a buyer consider houses she might not otherwise want, just as cheap household goods invite purchases beyond actual need.

Houses, streets, and the city’s appearance

The houses shown to Bernadette are overwhelmingly Craftsman-style: turn-of-the-century examples, restored houses, reinterpretations, modern takes, and properties in need of work. She imagines Seattle residents as collectively conditioned to want thick walls, small windows, dark rooms, low ceilings, and poor placement on the lot. Her complaint is not that there is only one version of the style, but that its many variations still seem to impose the same architectural habit.

Her critique widens from houses to the city’s layout. She objects to four-way intersections that become five-way intersections and two-way streets that become one-way streets, and says that attractive views are blocked by a twenty-story old folks home with no architectural integrity. The descriptions make Seattle’s built environment feel, from her perspective, less like a coherent design than a series of baffling interruptions. Yet the contrast with Los Angeles remains important: the houses that irritate her are also cheap enough to make the city an enticing destination.

Local culture and work

Writing to Paul Jellinek, Bernadette inventories Seattle’s everyday expressions and customs: women are called gals, people folks, a little bit a skosh, tired people logy, and something slightly off hinky. The list also includes crisscross applesauce, sunshine, partners, dropping the f-bomb, coughing into one’s elbow, and no worries as a response to requests. Her accumulation of local vocabulary turns ordinary manners into evidence of how foreign the city feels to her, and she bluntly says she hates living there.

Seattle is also presented as a center of technology, with the Internet and Google search among the tools that let Bernadette investigate an architecture competition in Los Angeles after a chance encounter outside the public library. Meanwhile, Elgin finds a setting at Microsoft that recalls his MIT all-nighters: fluorescent-lit corridors, late-night work, pencils thrown into ceiling tiles, and vintage Space Invaders. When Microsoft makes the newest campus the home of his team, Bernadette reads the sign for a sandwich shop in the atrium, advertising Boar’s Head deli meats, as a small emblem of his new life there. Seattle consequently holds two different meanings in her account: a place she resents inhabiting and the place where Elgin appears professionally at home.