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

by Elizabeth McCracken

  She wrote, “It’s hard to be with grief. We all so want to help and there is really nothing to do. My crazy adored aunt Pauline’s catchphrase was ‘offer it up.’ Those words were a curse, a joke, a prayer and a balm to us cousins over the years. Whack your funny bone, lose your engagement ring, catch your boyfriend cheating, lower your mother’s body into the ground and offer it up. I catch myself these days offering it up, driving around saying out loud ‘Pudding, what the fuck?’ An infant in the ice cream shop almost brought me to my knees yesterday. I breathed her in and tenderly offered it up.”

  She wrote, “At security in Copenhagen on the return trip an extended Middle Eastern family were bidding tearful good-byes to the ancient mother and father. The old lady from ethnic-old-lady central casting, bless her heart, kissed everyone soundly on the cheeks. The babes she held tight, kissed on the cheeks, and planted a big wet one right on their hearts. Well, that did it for me, started bawling quietly and discreetly on the chaotic airport spot. How’s your heart old friend. I’m thinking of you a lot and sending many heart kisses.”

  It’s the last days in Savary where my memory starts to get oceanic: it shifts, it suddenly dips, it drops out of view and then comes over my head in a wave. I splutter, my mouth full of the stuff. We drank a lot of wine on the patio. We cried a lot. We watched every meaningless video in our collection. I checked my e-mail all the time. I needed to know who was worried about me. I’ve reread some of the e-mails I wrote back to friends recently, and I’m astounded by how chipper I sound; I even find them slightly creepy, and I wonder if my friends did, too. I remember one long phone conversation with my brother during which I walked around and around the L-shaped dining room table in the L-shaped dining room (diners at one end wouldn’t be able to see diners at the other end) touching the back of each chair; I hung up the phone loving my brother even more than I had before, but now I can’t recall a word that either of us said. My parents arrived a few days later — they’d scheduled the trip months before to meet Pudding — and I remember almost nothing of that visit other than one day we had a great deal to drink at lunch, and then we all took very long naps, and then Edward made Ovaltine and toast for dinner.

  The day my parents left, we left Savary for good and began traveling.

  But before this, we had one day — this is very strange, it’s the last day I remember really clearly — when somehow everything was slightly better. Not all right at all, but one day we made jokes and actually laughed at them. A day of grace. We knew that something very, very terrible had happened, but it seemed to have happened to someone else, perhaps to someone very dear to people dear to us, a friend of a friend we’d always heard stories about. There was sadness in the house, but it didn’t have us by the throat. Even as it happened, I wondered what it meant. Was it possible that already we were returning to ourselves?

  Things got much worse after that.

  The journey from Duras to Holt — from the farmhouse by a vineyard in France to a four-bedroom cottage not too far from the North Sea — was Odyssean. That felt right. It felt good to do hard physical travel away from . . . away from everything. First we drove north to a small village near Angoulême, where we spent two nights with old friends of Edward’s — dear friends of mine now, too — and where I was very poor company.

  Then we drove to Nantes, to drop off our rented Peugeot. Then we caught a train, and then a bus, to Roscoff, where we spent the night in a hotel looking over the harbor and wandered around all day until it was time to catch the overnight ferry to England. We got off at Portsmouth and took the train to Penzance, where Edward’s parents picked us up. We spent three nights at their time-share in Cornwall, where I continued to be poor company, rode with them to London, two nights there, took the train to Suffolk, where we met up with Edward’s parents again at their house. Three days later, in my mother-in-law’s loaned VW, we drove to Holt.

  Somewhere in there was Mother’s Day. We were with the friends near Angoulême. I lurked in a far doorway and smoked and drank wine by myself. My parents were still in France, and I had to call my mother to wish her a happy day, but I didn’t want to. Was I a mother, I asked myself, and despite Lib’s beautiful e-mail I still don’t know the answer. I want to tell that sad version of myself, Of course you’re a mother, just one who’s learned a hard lesson. I want to tell that sad version of myself, I’m sorry, no, it’s tough luck, he died before you met him, people keep track of such things, and if we call you a mother, then where does it stop? It was the uncertainty that seemed unbearable to me. Even now. This year I had a very glorious baby with me, but was it my first Mother’s Day, or my second?

  Those weeks were miserable with company and travel, with luggage and making conversation, but they were forward movement. One step farther, one step farther.

  We almost had to take one mammoth step back. Immigration at the ferry terminal in Portsmouth was a single thin man behind a single thin podium. His days must have been dull, waving on one EU passport after another, the French coming to England, the English returning home, an occasional intrepid German, none of whom could be stopped and questioned. When he saw my U.S. passport, he perked up.

  “Are you traveling alone?”

  “No,” I said. I gestured to Edward, who’d gone ahead. “With my husband, who’s an English citizen.”

  This is, by the way, not a useful thing to say, and it’s not the first time I’ve gotten in trouble with Her Majesty’s Border Guards: three and a half years before, a woman at Heathrow asked me the purpose of my visit, and I had said, cheerily, “I’m getting married!” The English are as suspicious of undocumented spouses of citizens as the Americans are: they worry you will assume a certain level of privilege and never get around to sorting yourself out legally. At Heathrow the woman made me sit down on a bench for a long time, next to an athlete from Ghana who was likewise waiting for clearance, and let me through only after a long lecture about not overstaying my six-month tourist allowance. In Portsmouth, the thin border guard perked up further, in the manner of a dog who, already sitting up straight, sits up straighter to show that he’s obeying a command and deserves a biscuit. In fact he looked like a Jack Russell terrier with dreams of being promoted to bloodhound. He began to leaf through my passport.

  “It looks to me as though you’ve spent most of the last two years in the United Kingdom,” he said with a certain joy. I couldn’t figure out how he’d arrived at this theory.

  “No,” I answered truthfully. “Three weeks a year, at the most.”

  “Well, that’s not what it looks like to me,” he said.

  We went back and forth. My years as a librarian always help me in such situations: I am very good at keeping my cool with officious, insistent strangers, though my training is on the other side of the desk. I was miraculously polite. Even so it seemed for a while that he might put me on the next ferry back to France. What will I do? I wondered. I pictured myself alone on the ferry, having been manhandled on board by some as yet unseen immigration thug. I tried to explain myself, I tried to remember the exact dates and circumstances of my handful of visits to England. Again and again he told me that it seemed that I’d been illegally living in the United Kingdom. I shifted from foot to foot for forty-five minutes as he did his best to catch me in an inconsistency.

  When, exactly, might we be moved to unpack the shoulder bag, show him the death certificate of very recent vintage, open the tiny blue nylon sack, and pull out the wooden urn of ashes with the brass plaque underneath that said, Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006? Look, we might have said, something terrible has happened to us. Grant us a tiny bit of grace no matter what you think.

  Two things saved us. First, I explained that Edward planned to immigrate to the United States at the end of the summer.

  “Have you begun that process?” he said.

  I reeled off the name and number of every single form I’d filled out.

  Then he asked us what we did for a living, and I said tiredly, “We�
�re writers.”

  He perked up again, like a Jack Russell terrier who dreams of being a famous Jack Russell terrier. I’d seen that look before: As it happens, I fancy myself a writer.

  “Books?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve published three, and my husband has published two.”

  That seemed to do the trick. He took down the particulars of my passport, stamped it, wrote down a code, and waved us through. We were almost free when he called out —

  “Would I find your books in a bookstore?”

  “Yes,” I said as pleasantly as I could, backing away from him. I could smile for only so long. I was worried I’d wasted my year’s supply on this man.

  Here is a character from a gothic novel: the woman with the stillborn child. Her hair is matted and black. Ghosts nest in it. Her white nightgown is mottled with blood. In her hands is an awful bundle: the corpse she cannot bear to put down. She sings lullabies to it, rocks it in her arms. She says in a pleasant but tremulous voice, Would you like to see my baby? He’s such a nice little baby. Such a little, little baby. Shh: he’s sleeping.

  Maybe she’s a ghost, dead in childbirth herself. Better hope for that. Ghosts are terrifying but not so bad as a woman ruined by the death of her child.

  I was not that woman in the months after Pudding’s death. I didn’t weep in company. I mostly didn’t mention the fact that I had been pregnant, that everything in my life was supposed to be different. I felt bad that I made people feel bad for me. I was corseted by politeness: I could feel my organs, rearranged by pregnancy, squeezed now in completely different directions.

  But I felt like that gothic character. At least, I felt like people looked at me as though I were, whenever I did mention the baby or his death or my pregnancy. I could almost see myself with my uncombed hair and filthy nightgown, the tiny corpse in a winding sheet in my arms, walking down a nineteenth-century street as I knocked on doors. I could hear my voice: Would you like to see my baby?

  This for the merest reference to what had happened to me.

  I was a character from an opera who might at any moment let loose with an aria, and generally people tried to cover it up with conversational ragtime. People changed the subject. They smiled uncomfortably. Some tried extraordinary juggling acts, with flung torches of chitchat and spinning scimitars of small talk.

  They didn’t mention it. They did not say, I am so sorry or How are you?

  I felt in those first weeks, meeting people I knew, like the most terrifying object on earth.

  Who knows what other people think? Not me, and especially not then. Still it surprised me, every time I saw someone who didn’t mention it. I am writing this and trying to remember how it felt at the time, and trying to imagine what people were thinking. I am trying to remember what I have thought when I’ve done the same thing, all those times I didn’t mention some great sadness upon seeing someone for the first time. Did I really think that by not saying words of consolation aloud, I was doing people a favor? As though to mention sadness I was “reminding” them of the terrible thing?

  As though the grieving have forgotten their grief?

  I remember one lunch with people who loved us in London early on, two of the most excruciating hours of my life. Nothing but that endless juggling: Other people’s jobs and boyfriends. What kind of wine to order. This was two weeks after Pudding died. I might have been something like that gothic character one step short of total ruin: I wanted to rock and sing lullabies and hold out my torn, bloody nightgown and run my hands through my wild hair, and yet I knew you weren’t supposed to do such things in polite society. My hair was uncombed, and my face was puffy from lack of sleep and crying and too much wine, and my clothes were what I’d salvaged from the middle of my pregnancy, because of course even though people might pretend nothing was out of the ordinary I had the body of a woman two weeks postpartum, soft and wide around the middle, and if I’d been one step worse off I might have lifted my shirt up to display my still livid stretch marks.

  But I didn’t. I could feel how uncomfortable my mere presence made people feel, and I couldn’t bear it. So I sat in this Indian restaurant and listened. Sometimes a piece of palaver came loose and shot straight toward me, and somehow I caught it and tossed it back.

  All the while, all I could think was: Dead baby dead baby dead baby.

  And I know everyone around that table was thinking the same thing, every single person.

  I’ve never gotten over my discomfort at other people’s discomfort. When people say, What have you been up to, I hesitate. I will tell myself, Now, if this were a husband or father or sister who died, you wouldn’t simply omit the fact. If I say anything, people mostly change the subject anyway, and I can’t say that I blame them.

  I’ve done it myself, when meeting the grief-struck. It’s as though the sad news is Rumpelstiltskin in reverse. To mention it by name is to conjure it up, not the grief but the experience itself: the mother’s suicide, the brother’s overdose, the multiple miscarriages. The sadder the news, the less likely people are to mention it. The moment I lost my innocence about such things, I saw how careless I’d been myself.

  I don’t even know what I would have wanted someone to say. Not: It will be better. Not: You don’t think you’ll live through this, but you will. Maybe: Tomorrow you will spontaneously combust. Tomorrow, finally, your misery will turn to wax and heat and you will burn and melt till nothing is left in your chair but a greasy, childless smudge. That might have comforted me.

  We’d chosen North Norfolk because Edward had grown up there. We’d rented the smallest four-bedroom house in the world: three of the bedrooms held only a single bed and a table. Edward shimmied a desk into one of the rooms; I wrote sitting up in bed in another. One of the ways in which we felt

  — not lucky, not that word again —

  Let me say we were glad we were free agents and could go somewhere neutral for several months, neither the place we’d lived while waiting for our child, nor the place we would spend the rest of our lives without him.

  In that small Norfolk town, we spent one week drinking heavily and smoking, and then we gave ourselves a shake, switched to a fish diet, daily exercise, and work. We had time to kill; until the U.S. government sorted out Edward’s immigration application, he was not strictly speaking supposed to travel to the States. We were writers: we wrote. Edward worked on his enormous Parisian novel; I went back to a novel beginning I’d been fiddling around with before I was pregnant, which (I’d forgotten) featured a dead infant. Strangely enough, I was glad for that fictional baby who I’d in all innocence murdered (drowned in a bathtub) a year before: I couldn’t have made him up in my grief, but I could pour my grief into him. I wrote a hundred pages of the book and two new short stories; I worked harder and faster than I had in years. At night we watched movies, straight out of the care packages Ann sent me: all of Carole Lombard, all of Mae West, enough silly distraction to last the summer.

  Some days were worse than others. For about a week I got the opening line of an Auden poem that I’d memorized in high school stuck in my head: About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters . . . The poem describes the Breughel painting The Fall of Icarus, in which (as Auden explains) life goes on despite the tiny white legs kicking up in the corner of a harbor, Icarus sunk. My high school English teacher had explained that the myth was about hubris, ignoring the good advice of your wise father, but for me that summer the painting, the poem, everything, was about lost boys and the parents who’d failed them. One of the BBC channels was showing Steven Spielberg movies, mother after mother failing to protect her son: AI is bad, Empire of the Sun is worse, and E.T. the worst of all: I sobbed on the sofa at the end of it.

  We ate local crab and local seaweed. We swam at Holkham Beach, an amazing stretch of sand that Edward remembered from his boyhood. We went to pubs. We saw children everywhere, of course, and babies. And Edward would always say, “I hope we can have another child,” and
I would answer, “Me, too.”

  Work, walks, wine. Our life as usual, having moved to a new place. We got to know our fishmonger and butcher and greengrocer, picked out our restaurants, opened a bottle of wine at 6:00 p.m. if we were cooking at home. On the one hand it was comforting and even lovely, especially the long walks we took along the Norfolk coast, and on the other hand the very usualness, the loveliness, the freedom to do what we wanted, was a kind of torture: look at your unencumbered selves. After most deaths, I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything’s changed: you no longer recognize the form of your days. There’s a hole. It’s person-shaped and it follows you everywhere, to bed, to the dinner table, in the car.

  For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We’d been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.

  Years before I’d given away an antique postcard that said, beneath a drawing of a pine branch:

  For thee I pine.

  For thee I balsam.

  (I regretted giving away that postcard almost immediately. The recipient didn’t deserve it. Me in a nutshell: I don’t regret a single instance of giving away my heart, but a novelty postcard with a really good pun? I still wish I hadn’t.)

  Now I pined, and pined. I pictured myself: a pine tree. The trail of the lonesome pine. I saw myself green and leaning on the beach, inclined toward my unreachable darling. To be deciduous would be better. I could stand brown and brittle, and then naked, and then in the spring I would start over again.

  Actually, that’s sort of what happened.

  At the end of August we packed up the few things we’d brought with us to Holt. For the first time in our lives, we had not accumulated a single thing in a new country. We spent a few days in Suffolk, with Edward’s family, then a few days in London, then a few days in Boston. On September 5 we paid movers to clear out my vast storage space in Boston, all the things I hadn’t seen in four years, and we drove to Saratoga Springs. The rented house we’d arranged by e-mail months before (when Pudding was still alive) was in a bad state, with cigarette butts and condom wrappers and a fly-infested garbage can. The previous tenants had been smokers, and someone had tried to cover the smell with a quantity of Febreze, and then, when that failed, several spilled boxes of mothballs. Up until then we’d had good luck renting places sight unseen, so odds were it was time for us to land hard, but it felt like ominous luck. Moreover, the house belonged to a retired professor from the English Department who lived out of state, and I saw how quickly I could become a villain if I broke the lease. The movers arrived and unloaded our stuff into the house; we couldn’t figure out what else to do. When they finally left, I went upstairs to the bathroom and took the pregnancy test I’d been carrying around in my purse all day, and brought it down to the kitchen as it developed to show Edward.