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

by Elizabeth McCracken

  But Superman never shows. I can see it so clearly. In one panel we are safe and stupid. In the next we’re only stupid.

  Those moments come later, toward the end of the pregnancy.

  X-rays and interns aside: the real reason I left Dr. Bergerac is that I didn’t love him. I wanted to. He was very cute and liked Tintin, and he even spoke English, but he was also authoritative, bossy about my weight, and far preferred talking to Edward (as Dr. Baltimore had far preferred talking to me). Before sonograms, he applied the necessary gel from a squirt bottle as though spraying a graffiti tag, and afterward he dropped wads of paper towels onto me from a height and left me to mop up. He made it clear that if he thought I needed an epidural, I would have one, no matter what. I didn’t know what to expect of birth, but I wanted it to seem like a collaboration. So I was delighted when, seven months pregnant, I found an English-speaking midwife through a midwifery Web site, a fox-faced woman name Claudelle who shared office space with a yoga instructor in a nearby town. At first I saw her with Dr. Bergerac’s blessing: at the Bergerac hospital, my monthly checkups would be with a midwife anyhow, and Claudelle lived much closer to us. At my visits she checked my blood pressure and asked me a variety of questions and once or twice had me bounce on one of the exercise balls she shared with the yoga instructor. I thought I would miss the sonograms, that is, until Claudelle put her hands on my stomach, and described Pudding.

  “Ah,” she said, rounding the left side of me. “There ’e is. See,” she said, and put my hand in place of hers. “There is his back, on the left. A good place. Easy to get down. His head is down here. He’s getting ready.” Then she got out the stethoscope with the attached speaker and found the old-time radio coconut-shell horse hooves of his heartbeat. “Very good,” she said. “You hear? Tout est parfait.”

  Later that day I felt my stomach. There it was, the hard fact of his back, a sweet, dorsal, infant curve. I had always loved the sentimental science of the ultrasounds, seeing the screen, his bodily essence paradoxically disembodied, his bones decisive, the little snub nose, the lump where Dr. Bergerac had typed boy, the heart working away in all of its miraculous clockwork gadgetry. But there was always something Ground-Control-to-Major-Tom about the experience. Deep down, I believed, in the way of moon-landing deniers, that it was all well and good to show me this dim grayscale picture on a screen, but you call that proof? Surely it was a hoax, it had to be a hoax: it was easier to believe it was fake than to accept it was possible, real, done.

  Now: my hand, my stomach, his back. A human being. A boy baby. Pudding himself.

  The problem was that Claudelle didn’t deliver babies anymore: her children had complained about the hours she’d had to keep. Still, she knew a midwife in Bordeaux who did. She called Sylvie and made the appointment for us, since Sylvie didn’t speak English. (“The important word is the same,” Dr. Bergerac had pointed out. “Poussez, madame.”) The next week we drove to Sylvie’s office in Bordeaux. Like Claudelle’s office, it felt more like the living room of a graduate student in Women’s Studies than anything medical.

  Sylvie herself was energetic and full of metaphors. Upon checking my cervix, for instance, she announced, The door is closed! The baby is upstairs! When she asked me about pain relief and I said that I’d rather forgo everything, she said, in English, “Strong woman!” and showed her biceps. Best of all, she was willing to come to Savary and pick us up and drive us to the hospital in Bordeaux.

  She even said we could have a home birth. I mulled the idea over. To give birth in a farmhouse seemed appealingly Little House on the Prairie. “You are almost forty!” my friend Wendy told me when I asked what she thought. “It’s your first pregnancy! You are not allowed to have a home birth!”

  She probably had a point.

  I told my mother, “So I’m going to have a midwife deliver the baby, but in the hospital.”

  “Are there doctors in this hospital?” my mother wanted to know.

  “Of course.”

  “Why doesn’t one of them deliver the baby?” she asked.

  But I loved Sylvie’s optimism. Why not be optimistic? Everything was going so well. My friend Patti told me I should be the poster girl for Advanced Maternal Age pregnancies. I felt great. I ate intelligently, if a little heavy on the chocolate mousse. My major problems were a touch of sciatica, a touch of pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. I got more and more pregnant, blew past my American due date, which was April 18, but the midwives weren’t worried: my French due date wasn’t until April 27. I paid out of pocket for everything and submitted bills to my American health insurance, and at the end of every appointment, when I was asked for fifteen, or twenty-five, or thirty euros, I wanted to say, “That’s adorable!”

  Sylvie came to Savary for a last visit. She arrived with a plush stuffed pelvis and a slightly soiled baby doll to act out Pudding’s escape route. “Voilà,” she said, threading the doll through the pelvis: delivering a baby was like uncorking a bottle of champagne, sometimes you had to twist this way and that before it came free. Then she hooked me up to heart rate and contraction monitors and handed me a game-show-like button on a cable, to press when I felt Pudding move.

  “Tout est parfait,” said Sylvie. The door was still closed. The baby was still upstairs.

  Why worry about due dates? I wasn’t even impatient. A neighbor had told us a nightmare story of an alcoholic woman in Ireland she’d known who went two weeks past her due date without telling her doctors, and her child died: starved to death inside of her, really, because her placenta had stopped functioning and no one had noticed. That wouldn’t be my problem. In the past week I’d had a fetal monitor strapped to me, and a sonogram, and even an impromptu pelvic X-ray that seemed to be for a good reason.

  We were ready for Pudding.

  And then the calamity.

  Every day of my second pregnancy, I thought of Pudding, of course. But I tried not to think of the exact circumstances of his death. At first I was worried I’d stay in bed weeping, and then I thought: If I remember everything, I’m done for. If I remember, I will walk to the nearest hospital and ask for a nice bed in the psychiatric wing, I promise to be quiet, I promise I will not ask for narcotics, just keep me, nurse, for a few months. In May you can transfer me please to maternity. I am not crazy, but I am being careful: I am not crazy, but if I’m not careful I will take a wrong step and end up in the forest. Sometimes I can feel it happening: my memory, my bad memory, my untrained memory. It creeps toward that time, the end of April 2006, a child warned away from dangers and therefore obsessed by them. Help me. We need to grab it by the scruff of the neck: not yet.

  Not yet.

  It was Maud who told me the story of that tragic drunk woman, and Maud who put me off the close by hospital in Marmande: her son, Finn, was born there black-and-blue from a hard delivery. Maud, who our landlady paid to look after Savary, was our social life, along with her Anglo-Irish boyfriend, known at the bar where they drank as Jack the Irish Two — there were so many Jack the Irishes that they needed to be numbered. Maud’s father, who sometimes visited, was Jack the Irish Three. Jack and Maud lived ten minutes away from us in an old presbytery with Maud’s four-year-old daughter, Madeleine, and two-year-old Finn; a lovely lemonade yellow, lion-headed retriever; and a cat named, by Madeleine, Two-Dogs.

  Maud was in her late twenties, with messy boy-cut blond hair and a wicked sense of humor. Jack was about fifty, tall and thin and ponytailed: he looked like the bass player of some band that had been medium big in the 1970s. They both drank a lot. We called them the Sots. They invited us over to dinner parties with their other Anglophone friends: a plumber named Eric and his sad wife, Marie; straw hatted Ted and his wife, Elaine, who were older and more cheerful; and a voluble, chubby, sexy woman named Lola, who had a Greek boyfriend named Pete. Lola’s father was Indian and her mother English; she had caramel skin, striped hair, and an extensive wardrobe of colored contact lenses. The blue ones made her look as thoug
h she were developing cataracts, and the green ones as though she were about to turn into the Hulk. Her boyfriend, Pete the Greek, spoke scarcely any English but liked to deliver long monologues about hunting and what he’d learned about American police by watching Cops: “America? Gun. Security. Boom: no problem. Person? In house? Gun. Look up. Boom. Fox? No good. So, boom. No dead. Black. Pig. Me, friend, boom boom. No dead.” Lola spoke to him in Greek. She was fluent but had such a thick cockney accent that I swore I was always about to understand her — it sounded as though she were saying, “Acropolis Demetrius where to, Guvnor? Sophocles Melanoma, ’ave a pork pie.”

  The dining room at the presbytery was long and rectangular, filled mostly with a long rectangular table. Everyone smoked. Everyone drank. Even Finn, the two-year-old, a sweet and goofy kid who spoke, as far as I could tell, Esperanto, drank: he had to be stopped from emptying the dregs of beer bottles left on the table. The next carafe of wine was always warming on the woodstove. On winter nights they closed the shutters against the cold, and it was like being sealed up in a wall.

  The night of Jack’s forty-ninth birthday party fell on the last night of hunting season, and so Pete the Greek wasn’t around, having vowed to bag a wild boar. Lola herself had to go home early, to attend to her business: she produced a kind of phone-in television infomercial that showed on English cable. Originally she’d supervised what she said was the first phone-sex call center in England. The problem was, according to her, with all of those women working together in the same room, their periods synchronized, which made for a hellish work environment. Now she dealt in psychics. People watched the show and texted in questions; her hired psychics, in the comfort of their own homes, would have to text back one hundred characters of prophecy. This night she was short a couple of psychics and so had to do an overnight shift herself.

  “The number one question,” she explained before she left, “is ‘Will he come back?’ But you get everything. When is the next Al Qaeda attack, will I meet the love of my life next week, another psychic says he will come back, can you confirm, do you have a message from my dead grandpa.”

  “What do you say?” I asked.

  Her eyes were khaki green that night. “Well, sometimes you sort of get an image, and you tell them, ‘I see an old coat and a rainbow and an empty bottle.’ It’s amazing how often that’s really meaningful to someone.”

  I couldn’t tell whether amazing meant she was amazed at her psychic abilities or the nature of coincidence or the ability of a desperate mind to find meaning in a random assortment of visuals. I thought about asking her if I could help out one night, though I never worked up the nerve. I liked the idea of trying to summarize someone’s best dreams in a handful of characters, a kind of augural haiku. That’s how I saw my role in fortune-telling. I had no need of psychics myself. I knew my future.

  Then Maud was pregnant, too. “Christmas!” she said, as though Christmas were a famous time for getting accidentally pregnant.

  She made for a very strange pregnancy support group. Though she was a smart woman and the daughter of a doctor, any good sense she had was clouded by the fact that she drank and spent all of her time with people who drank. How could she stop? The winter was too cold not to drink, the spring too lovely, the summer too bakingly hot. She told me in all seriousness that the more pregnant you were, the more you could drink, and that after three months there was no danger, because the baby was already “fully formed.” The doctor father, who we never met, was apparently also a great drinker, and perhaps his prenatal advice was likewise shaped by his feeling that it would be a shame to deny his daughter anything that might quench her considerable thirst. Her pregnancy intake was modest compared to what she’d been drinking before. That is, whenever I saw her she drank four or five beers. She smoked, too. At dinner parties Jack was very shy and sat at the end of the table rolling perfect cigarettes two at a time, one for him and one for her.

  It was upsetting to watch. And yet I liked Maud anyhow, which shows you that I could rationalize as much as she did. She was otherwise kind and funny, and I wondered if she’d imagined that this would be her life, in exile in France with two children and another coming, dead broke all the time, in love with the second drunk in a row, a man who himself had two daughters back in England. Maud could not give up drinking, and so convinced herself it was not so bad; I could not give up my fondness for Maud, and so I tried to think of her drinking as a mildly entertaining eccentricity. She thought I was crazy for not drinking, or maybe she just thought I was American and therefore a bit of a priss. And I’m afraid I compared my own prenatal habits to Maud’s and felt superior. Surely I was doing everything right, everything you needed to do to have a healthy baby.

  We saw them last a few days after Pudding died: we met at their bar, the Café du Commerce, in the next town over, the town whose name I cannot remember and refuse to look up. I dreaded it. For a few months Maud’s daughter’s greatest pleasure was to say to me, “You have a GREAT BIG BELLY.” I thought it was possible that if Madeleine said anything to me about my stomach, I’d punch her in the face, and I did not want to be a woman who punched four-year-olds in the face. We sat outside under the arcades. All winter long my American friends who heard my stories about the Sots found it hilarious that Jack and Maud knew only the teetotaling me: I like a drink myself, under ordinary circumstances. These were not ordinary circumstances, either. I gulped beer and smoked, and Finn and Madeleine as usual ran around and rifled through the postcard stands of the tabac next door, and Madeleine didn’t say anything, and I remembered two weeks before, when we’d been at the presbytery and Finn stripped himself naked and climbed up onto my chair and stood next to me, and I put my hand on his bare little bottom, and thought, This is what having a little boy will be like, and thought, Oh, I’m ready.

  Maud had a little girl last September, named Mia. That’s all I know.

  The first thing we did back at Savary was dismantle the future. That is, Edward broke down the portable crib that had been waiting for a few weeks on my side of the bed. I threw out all my maternity clothes, just threw them away, along with the single package of diapers I’d obediently bought (my baby book warned me that you could never be really sure how big your newborn would be). We tossed out the stuffed hippopotamus from Edward’s sister and any other toylike object. For a month I’d fallen asleep looking at an old artist’s palette that had been painted to look like a grinning face, like Punch in profile. Another flea market find, we’d hung it over the crib. That we burned in a bonfire out back, along with the baby books.

  But not the baby clothes.

  The baby clothes had crowded out mine in my chest of drawers. There were the silly things I’d bought him, ludicrous, adorable, irreplaceable. A pair of plaid plus fours. A striped turtleneck with a picture of Babar. A thick blue and brown coat with toggle closures. Those leather baby shoes. An Iowa Hawkeyes onesie, his first present, which our friends Tim and Wendy had brought when they came to visit. A Union Jack hat from Catherine, my sister-in-law, along with a 1940s-style cloth coat. Two beautiful tiny sweaters knit by Edward’s mother. Bibs. Socks. About half the clothes were hand-me-downs from a little boy named Owen who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was outgrowing things faster than his mother could keep up.

  Who can separate practicality from hope from lingering superstition? We wanted another child. We wanted to fill those clothes.

  And so, without even looking, we packed them away, three boxes full. We could throw them out later, if we had to.

  That afternoon we called the movers, who were going to take our boxes to Edward’s parents’ house in England. They were supposed to come in five days, but we hadn’t settled on an actual time. The owner of the business, an English guy in his thirties, had been over to the house two weeks before to give us an estimate. A lifetime ago. We’d talked about babies. His son had been born in Bordeaux, too, with kidney problems. The hospital was good, he’d said. Now Edward left a message with th
e receptionist at the moving company explaining what had happened.

  “It doesn’t need to be mentioned again,” said Edward. “I just wanted him to know ahead of time so he won’t ask.”

  The owner called back later that day, all business, to say that he’d be over the next morning to take our stuff.

  “I thought Monday,” said Edward.

  No, said the mover, this was it, their one trip for the month.

  “You do understand what we’ve gone through,” said Edward cautiously.

  Yes, he did.

  It was Thursday. I checked the voicemail, sure that he’d said Monday. He had.

  Edward called back.

  Well, said the mover, then that was a mistake, but that’s how it is.

  It seemed too much to bear. How could we be expected to buy packing tape when our child had died? To pack in eighteen hours what we’d thought we’d had three days to do? To stay up all night sealing up cartons, for someone else’s mistake? I was furious, insane at the injustice of having to deal with anything even mildly difficult in the face of the hardest thing in the world. “When,” I asked Edward, as we drove to buy more tape, “did we become characters in a Raymond Carver story?”

  We spent the day packing and cursing the mover. It was invigorating to have such a villain. I didn’t care about his carelessness, only his cowardice: if he’d abjectly apologized I would have forgiven him. “I’m going to tell him,” I told Edward.

  “Good.”

  “I’m going to say, I just hope no one is ever this cruel to your wife, or your child.”

  “I think you should.”

  “I’ll say, How would you feel — ”

  But he sent over a single hired hand to do the work, and I was spared the pleasure.

  At night when I’m tired I still write him angry letters in my head before I fall asleep.