An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir

by Elizabeth McCracken

  I’m glad we were in a foreign country. The French probably thought it was an ordinary Anglo-Saxon name, like William, or Randolph, or George.

  From the time I was a child and learned what first person singular meant, I found even the phrase itself beautiful. Most of my life, from childhood to spinsterhood, I had no pronoun problems. Partnered women with their confusing plurals turned my stomach. Who cared whether you and your beloved liked a particular restaurant in unison? Who believed that it was even possible? The love letters I intended to write would be first person and second person: I, you, never we. Even once I met and married Edward, I did my best to avoid the insidious we, which suggested we were a two-bodied, one-brained science-fiction creature, a mutant born of romance. And yet here I am, writing a book as a love letter to Edward and trying to explain — well, every time I try to get further than this into a sentence about Edward, I end up flummoxed: he was so loving and grief-stricken and so careful to set aside his pain to take care of me, and everything I write seems inadequate and sickeningly sweet. Even that last sentence feels inadequate and sickeningly sweet. We went through everything together, and writing we feels presumptuous, because he can speak for himself, and writing I feels presumptuous, because the calamity happened to both of us, was just as awful for both of us.

  Ah, we. When I was pregnant both times and people referred to me and Edward as the three of you or me as the two of you, it always felt wrong. Three of us was the goal, and eventually the mostly foregone conclusion both times. But any photograph would clearly show: there were still only two of us. For the rest of my life, I think, plurals will confuse me. How many children do I have? How many are there of me?

  I’m lying when I say I didn’t get much writing done when I was pregnant with Pudding. True enough for a while. Most days I woke up and had breakfast and then took another nap and then watched some television. Savary had English satellite TV, and I became addicted to the gentle afternoon reality programs of the BBC, all auctions and car boot sales. The two sofas in the main living room weren’t very comfortable, but they were deep and difficult to get out of, or so I told myself.

  But when I was about eight months pregnant, I did something I’d never imagined doing: I started a memoir. Not only a memoir, but one in which I appeared frequently with my pants off. A memoir that would include the phrase my cervix, meaning mine, Elizabeth McCracken’s. What the hell: I couldn’t bend my attention to writing anything else, and I was eight months pregnant, past the danger point, so I thought, so I thought, and I began a funny book about being pregnant in France. I didn’t tell anyone except Edward and my friend Ann, because, of course: bad luck.

  My great-grandfather believed in the evil eye. When registering his eleven children at school (according to his daughter, my grandmother), he would never say how many there were. When you got cocky and kept count, the evil eye could snatch away a child. This was the same reason we never decided for sure on a name, the same reason Edward and I never, not once, talked about our future with our baby without looking for a piece of wood to touch. When the pregnancy was brand-new, in Paris, we became such devoted knockers of wood that we had a hard time making any progress through the city, lurching as we did toward park benches, paneled storefronts, tree stakes, and actual trees. We would have knocked on anything. It’s amazing we didn’t fling ourselves into department stores, asking desperate directions to the furniture department, please, monsieur, quick to a bedpost, as we wondered what the wood-knocking statute of limitations was, after you had said aloud something that required it. Later Edward admitted to me that when he was alone in Bergerac, he went into the church and lit candles for Pudding’s safe arrival. He put his hand on his wooden bedside table so often that he was surprised it didn’t take on the shape of a loose glove from erosion, like a stone he’d seen in Santiago de Compostela that has been touched by centuries of pilgrims.

  Pregnant with Pudding, I didn’t buy baby clothes, told my family not to buy baby clothes. And then, when I was six months pregnant, I broke down. My first purchase was two pairs of tiny baby shoes in Bergerac: a pair of loafers and some light blue leather boots with mod spaceships flying across the toes.

  “I thought you weren’t going to buy anything,” Edward said.

  “These are not for Pudding,” I said. “They’re for some other little boy.”

  And with that it was easy to start buying clothing, and easy to start a memoir all about my happy, uneventful pregnancy. Easy to thumb my nose at the evil eye. We knocked on wood and made wishes, but by eight months all the wishes I made were like a smug joke I had with myself. I knocked wood and I wished on stars, but sometimes there was something else to wish for, something that hadn’t already been taken care of, and so I did.

  I just thought he was a sure thing.

  I wrote about our doctors, my search for a gym in the French countryside, what we ate, our friends down the road. It would make a good book, I thought: I’d end it with the three of us leaving France together. I tried not to write sentences that made it sound as though he were already born and things were fine, because I wasn’t willing to tempt the evil eye that much. Eventually I wrote 170 pages. They’re still somewhere on my computer.

  That’s another reason I wrote down, This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending: I was in the habit of narrating my daily life.

  I didn’t write a single word of this second book during my second pregnancy.

  Here’s what else we didn’t do when I was pregnant the second time.

  Knock wood. Light candles. Tell ninety percent of the people we knew that I was pregnant. Have an amniocentesis. Pick up pennies. Wish on: stars, white horses, alarm clocks reading 11:11, wishbones, blown dandelion fluff. Buy baby clothes. Pick names. Find out the baby’s gender. Come up with an in utero name: the kid was “the kid” or “whoever it is” or merely the unspoken result of “if everything goes right.” Begin sentences, “After the baby’s born . . .” Toss spilled salt over left shoulders. Give a fuck about the number thirteen no matter where it showed up.

  No matter how much we wanted to.

  I can’t remember how long we’d known that Pudding was dead before we declared that we would have another child, or which one of us first said it. Certainly it was within minutes of hearing the bad news, and we both kept repeating it, not because we were done with this baby, but because that sentence — we’ll have another child, we’ll have another child — was like throwing out a towline. It was like believing in the future instead of in the place we were at that moment. We vowed to try as soon as possible.

  “But not in August,” I said after a while. August was when Pudding was conceived. August meant an April or May baby. That seemed like too much.

  And then we left France, and I decided to be practical about everything. I was thirty-nine, I wasn’t going to toss away a whole month like that. Anyhow, what were the chances? How could we count on anything?

  So I couldn’t say, We will have another child. Instead, I said, “I hope we can have another child.” It was bad enough grieving for this child, my Pudding, without lamenting other only theoretical children. I missed the child we lost and I wanted another and these seemed like two absolutely separate aches.

  He was a person. I missed him like a person. Seeing babies on the street did not stab me with pain the way I know they stab some grieving women, those who have lost children or simply desperately want to have them. For me, other babies were other babies. They weren’t who I was missing. Every now and then a baby could take me by surprise and make me weep — for instance, an e-mailed photo of my cousin Rosalie’s son, who (I realized as I stared at it, and closed the file, and opened it up again) looked like I’d imagined Pudding, though as it happened we shared none of the same blood. Babies born to mothers who’d been pregnant at the same time as me hurt a little. I didn’t mind hearing about them, but I didn’t want to meet them. That puzzled me since it wasn’t logical, and even in mourning I liked to think
I was logical, but it was an unhappiness that rose up in me, even months later when I was already pregnant though not broadcasting it, and I saw a friend who’d had a baby three months after me, a wonderful woman who — because she had just become a mother — was so sympathetic and sweet to me. Most people didn’t even mention Pudding; she enfolded me in a hug and said, “Oh, Elizabeth, I am so sorry about your baby” — and I just wanted her to leave, because I didn’t want to be a good and decent and functioning human being and ask after her baby. Even now I have a hard time with the babies born to friends around Pudding’s birth. It’s not logical, and yet there it is: this one is one month older, this one three weeks younger.

  But mostly I just missed my own child.

  About a week after Pudding’s death I got in my e-mail box a photograph of the newborn son of a very lovely woman who’d been a student of mine at Iowa. She’d known I was pregnant, but her friends had very wisely kept silent about what had happened, so as not to terrify her, and therefore her husband didn’t know he shouldn’t send me a photograph of a newborn baby boy. A few weeks later, and it would have been fine: by then, when friends reported that someone I knew had had a baby, they usually added, “I didn’t know whether to tell you or not, but I figure . . .”

  “Oh,” I always said, “if human reproduction has to carry on, I want it to work out for people I like.”

  Still, I wouldn’t have minded a pause in the whole business. A sudden harmless moratorium on babies being born. Doctors would have to tell the unfortunate pregnant, “I’m sorry. It happens sometimes. Tidal, we think. For everyone else, nine months, but for you, eleven months, maybe a year, maybe more. Don’t go outside. Don’t leave your house. Stroke your stomach, fine, but only in your own living room. Keep your lullabies to yourself. We’ll let you know when it’s time.”

  That lovely former student sent a horrified apology when she found out what had happened, but of course I understood. That is one of the strangest side effects of the whole story. I am that thing worse than a cautionary tale: I am a horror story, an example of something terrible going wrong when you least expect it, and for no good reason, a story to be kept from pregnant women, a story so grim and lessonless it’s better not to think about at all.

  Where in France did we live? In the middle of the southwest of the country. In an area called Aquitaine. In a department called Lot-et-Garonne. Forty-five minutes southwest of Cyrano’s Bergerac. Forty minutes east of the tower where Montaigne wrote for the last years of his life. Our address was in the village of Baleyssagues, but the closest place to buy bread and wine and cheese was Duras: three bakeries, a post office, two bars, two pharmacies; Marguerite Duras took her pen name from the town, which is where her father was buried (though not where her own first child, a son, was stillborn in 1942). The nearest train station was in Sainte Foy la Grand. We were, of course, an hour east of Bordeaux.

  My friend Lib has a French friend who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who lost a baby to sudden infant death syndrome. When she found out about Pudding, she said, sadly, “Now France will be ruined for them.” America had been ruined for her, but that loss meant nothing compared to the loss of her daughter. But to lose France, as she knew we would, to lose both France and a child —

  It’s a part of the world I will never, ever, ever go back to.

  Pregnant with Pudding, I wanted things simple, easy, low intervention. (For my second child I would have agreed to anything, a simultaneous caesarean/ induction/being-pounded-on-the-back-like-a-ketchup-bottle/forceps/extra-drugs/extra-pain delivery.) My first obstetrician was a blond woman from Baltimore who practiced at the upscale American Hospital of Paris. I chose her after looking at the hospital Web site. I wanted a female doctor, and the only other choice was a very glamorous Frenchwoman whose photo seemed to have been taken at sunrise outside a disco.

  Dr. Baltimore was a strange combination of businesslike practices and motherliness. She said to the dreamy waving image on the sonogram screen, “Hello, sweetheart!” But she could never quite look Edward in the eye. She was extremely smart and certain, and I found her smarts and certainty calming. On the other hand, every time we tried to explain that we were moving to the country, she came up with some vague plan in which it would be easy enough to come back to deliver in Paris. She did this so automatically and seamlessly — as though we’d asked for her to come up with a plan — that it was hypnotic. We never argued. “Right,” she said at the first visit, fiddling with a small, round paper wheel that reminded me of a teenage girl’s fortune-telling device. “Right. April 18. Well, you could just arrange to be back here for that month.”

  The second visit, when we explained that moving back would be expensive and uncertain, she suggested we could just sleep on a friend’s sofa. The third time she said, well, I’d come in, and if everything looked all right, she could “help things along.”

  It wasn’t till we’d left the office that I realized she’d meant induction. Oh no, I thought: Pudding’s birthday was his decision, not mine. Indeed we did come back from the countryside for a few appointments, for the amnio, for the big four-month sonogram, but then we decided it was time to look for someone closer to Savary, whether or not Dr. Baltimore thought it was a good idea. We heard awful things about the nearest hospital, in Marmande, and so we crossed that off our list and looked at the other nearby medium-sized cities.

  My second doctor was a short, comical Frenchman who spoke idiosyncratic English and practiced in Bergerac, forty minutes away from Savary. He was the only English speaker at the hospital. Dr. Bergerac was in his forties, with black hair that looked painted on and high color in his cheeks. Altogether he seemed like a European hand puppet of a doctor. We sat in his office — he’d decorated the walls with Tintin posters, which made us like him — and he fiddled with the fortune-telling wheel, and said, “OK. Twenty-seven Avril.” This was how we learned that French pregnancies last longer than American pregnancies, at least officially.

  Like Dr. Baltimore, Dr. Bergerac had a sonogram machine in his office, and on our first visit he gave me a routine ultrasound. “Il bouge!” said Dr. Bergerac. He moves! “You have had coffee today. You know what is the gender? Your last échographie, did he say?”

  “I had an amnio,” I said. “So we know it’s a boy.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I agree with this. It is a boy.” He moved the cursor on the screen and typed next to the relevant lump: B O Y.

  Afterward he had a midwife give us a tour of the charming maternity ward. True enough, if something went wrong we’d miss the American Hospital with all its bells and whistles and impeccably clean floors, but this place seemed cozy. A midwife walked down the hall, carrying a red baby with a full head of dark hair. I had never seen such a baby. The Bergerac hospital clearly did good work.

  My next appointment was attended by a very cute blond intern, who Dr. Bergerac was clearly trying to impress. During the sonogram, he spoke to her in French, explaining that we were writers from England, voilà, the placenta, a lot of English people liked to come to this area of France, the Dordogne, there’s the baby’s head, the English found it inspiring, look, the bladder. Then he told her to check my cervix and left the room to talk to Edward. I lay back. The intern rummaged around in the manner of an unhappy wife looking for a wedding ring in a garbage disposal: dutifully, thoroughly, but without much sentiment.

  Afterward the doctor asked me how tall I was.

  “Not very,” I joked.

  “I suffer from this problem as well,” he said. “But ’ow tall? Do not answer in feets, I do not understand them.”

  I shrugged. He gave me a flat-handed “please rise” gesture and appraised me.

  “I am writing for you a prescription for pelvicscan,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “A hex-ray,” he explained.

  At home I poked around on the Internet and asked doctor friends. As far as I could tell, there was no good reason for prenatal X-rays — they could really te
ll you nothing about how easy it would be to go through labor — and there seemed to be a slight risk of childhood leukemia associated with them. I e-mailed Dr. Bergerac to ask him if I could forgo it. He said no. Don’t worry! It’s not dangerous! But it is obligatory!

  And so I just never went back.

  (I’ve always thought I was five feet even, but at my six-week postpartum checkup, the nurse announced, much to my surprise, that I was five one. Which makes me 156 centimeters tall.)

  Of course it occurs to me that Pudding might have lived if I’d stuck with either Dr. Bergerac or Dr. Baltimore. It’s a low-decibel wistfulness; I can barely hear it over the roar of later, louder regrets. This kind is not so bad, the If I Did One Thing Differently, Then Maybe Everything Would Also Be Different sort, a vague, philosophical itch: yes, if life were different, then life would be different. Such thinking feels like science fiction, stepping on a bug in 20,000 BC and altering the course of history.

  Other memories are more troublesome. Here’s a length of time, my brain says, and then it stares, it sees an actual length of time suspended in the air, which then breaks into panels, as in a comic book. Here I am in one panel. I am in the line of danger, but I don’t know it, I am living in the past: the past being defined by the fact that Pudding is alive, but not for long. In the next panel, seconds later, something is supposed to intervene. Superman swooping in, to — what? Deliver the baby? X-ray vision and superhearing are nothing special, every doctor’s office comes equipped. Superman is supposed to come is all I know, so Pudding will persist.