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

by Elizabeth McCracken

  We were stunned into silence, because of course that was the question. Even if you rephrased it — as Edward pointed out, one in two hundred sounds worse than one half of one percent because with the former you visualize actual people — we weren’t willing to risk it. Once you’ve been on the losing side of great odds, you never find statistics comforting again.

  She said in a manner both businesslike and warm, “Let me just say that I had an amnio myself, but I didn’t have your history.”

  And just like that, our history was in the room, and I had found a doctor I loved.

  Another woman might want a doctor who promised things: an optimist, a dreamer. Not me. I wanted exact realism and no promises. On one visit a nurse spoke of the kid as though he or she was a foregone conclusion, and I hated it, I wanted to correct her, I wanted to point out that I’d thought that once, and look what happened.

  “Well, very good,” Dr. Knoeller said at the end of every visit. “So far, so good. Let’s hope it continues that way.”

  And then I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, and when Dr. Knoeller walked into the room, I swore you could see Walt Disney bluebirds toying with her stethoscope and bunnies congregating around her heels.

  “Twenty-eight weeks!” she said. “Now we can relax.”

  For my first pregnancy I couldn’t imagine not finding out the baby’s gender. I’d asked Lib why she’d allowed her two daughters to keep their mystery in utero, and she said, “I didn’t want to project who I thought they’d be. I wanted them to be themselves.”

  This is exactly the kind of thoughtful and maternal answer I’d expected from Lib. Me, I wanted to project. I was impatient to make up stories about whoever Pudding was, kicking about in my midsection, but how could I without that essential piece of information? For our second child we decided to do everything differently — no amnio, no peeking during ultrasounds. Now and then I wondered whether that was wise: should something happen (it won’t!), should the worst happen (it’s not impossible!), wouldn’t we rather know? It’s terrible to miss Pudding, of course, no matter what, but — this is a total illusion, I understand, nothing but the sentimentality of expectant parents spinning fairy tales ahead of time, viewed in the rearview mirror — it feels like we knew him. I can’t wrap my brain around losing a child and learning only then whether you’d lost a son or a daughter. Not finding out felt like an odd form of optimism.

  By the end of my first pregnancy I’d felt very tender toward Pudding — to my made-up companionable Pudding, an infant who would of course love us the minute he saw us, who loved us already, who contained within him not only infancy but babyhood and toddlerhood, who already listened to our voices, who was impatient to meet us (so why was he taking his time?). I stroked my stomach and told him stories; when he kicked, I poked him back. We went to the pool together, me swimming in the chlorinated municipal water of Bergerac, he swimming inside me, both incredulous at how the French could gossip while doing the backstroke. We went to the gym together, where the French not only gossiped and kissed each other in the squat rack, but tucked their shirts into their exercise pants. I ate so that he could eat: I announced what was on the menu.

  You don’t need much to hang a personality on someone you haven’t met: a name, some knowledge of the parents, a gender. You can spin anything you want out of those things.

  But it wasn’t all so easy. Every now and then, like any pregnant woman, I would panic. When did I last feel this baby move? Then I would lie on the sofa, and put my hands on my stomach, and wait to feel a kick, and then another. Both Dr. Baltimore and Dr. Bergerac had sonograms in their offices, and so for the first six months we saw Pudding on the Big Screen every month. Yes, I did worry, sometimes.

  But mostly I didn’t.

  This is one of the most painful things for me to remember. I was smug. I felt sorry for women with complicated pregnancies and gloated that I wasn’t one of them. I believed that the pregnancy would continue to be a delight. I imagined that traveling with him afterward, at four weeks old, to England and then to America, would be only an adventure, a story I would tell him for the rest of his life.

  I believed he was perfect.

  I don’t know whether my faith is explained by hormones or misplaced trust in medical science. I just believed he was perfect. I believed I understood him.

  Of course that wasn’t true of my second pregnancy, when I was certain every other moment that something was going terribly wrong. I was neurotic about food; I washed my hands like an insane person. Among my many worries was that I would feel unconnected to this second occupant and that this indifference would travel through the placenta and warp the developing psyche. But I turned out to feel another sort of closeness. Pregnant with Pudding, I often didn’t even realize how big I’d gotten; we communicated via dream telegraph. During my second pregnancy, I was by necessity obsessed with the physical, and this baby — who was in there, anyhow? — was a great in utero kicker and squirmer. Once the kid was big enough for me to feel, I would think once a day, panicked, When’s the last time I felt the baby move? And then I’d palm my stomach. Thump, thump, thump. What a good baby, what a wonderful obliging baby, was there something wrong with that baby, to make it shift so? Was that a kick or a shudder or head banging? You couldn’t deny it: there was a baby in there. Even so, I sometimes wondered whether I was making it up.

  “Shh,” I’d say to my stomach, “you’re all right,” and to Edward, “Who’s in there, do you think? It could be anyone.”

  “Not anyone,” he’d say, looking a little troubled.

  I taught my classes and grew subtly stouter but said nothing. It seemed as though something terrible would happen if people knew. By which I mean: not that we would be tempting fate, but that I would have to acknowledge that the pregnancy was real, and if I did that, I was sure, I would take to my bed until spring. I told a handful of friends in October, and a handful of relatives at Thanksgiving.

  Lib insisted I was having a girl. Edward, who had correctly and with great certainty predicted Pudding’s gender, agreed. I had no idea. When I was four months in, Ann declared, no room for argument, that I was pregnant with a boy, and listen: her husband’s daughter was pregnant, too, and Ann had said Josephine was going to have a boy, and the first ultrasound had the temerity to disagree with Ann’s prediction, but Ann wouldn’t budge, and then the second ultrasound said, All right, yes, a boy.

  This perturbed Edward. “I thought I knew,” he said. “Why’d Ann have to say that?”

  At the hardware store a woman behind the counter said, “So do you know for sure you’re having a boy?” but a pedicurist the same day shook her head and said, Girl, and wasn’t a pedicurist almost a medical professional? It amused me to spend so much time pondering a question that could be at any time answered with reasonable certainty. By the last month of pregnancy I had my amniotic fluid checked by ultrasound twice weekly, not to mention plenty of other diagnostic tools. But I never bent.

  Maybe I had just acquired new superstitions, and given them disguises.

  We’d planned for Pudding in stories, plane tickets to see family, and tiny French outfits. Then I was pregnant again and we counted on nothing, and so we prepared for the future by taking classes. We signed up for four:

  1. A four-week childbirth class through my ob-gyn practice, taught by one of my favorite people there, the nurse coordinator. Of course I already knew what to expect of such a class. I watched TV, didn’t I? We’d sit on the floor in the bobsled position, surrounded by other couples, and Edward would be told to tell me to breathe.

  We never left our chairs, and in fact we knew most of what was taught, having been through childbirth before. I wanted to raise my hand and interrupt the lovely nurse every other sentence to say: “You mean if, not when.”

  2. An infant car seat installation class. We were the only ones who showed up. The instructor was a thin blond woman, I think in her late forties, who had four sons, aged four, seven, seventeen, and twent
y-five. I was dying to know her story, but I didn’t ask. Her teaching style appealed to us, because like auto safety professionals everywhere her message was: YOU COULD EASILY GET DECAPITATED OR DECAPITATE SOMEONE ELSE! But! DECAPITATION IS EASY TO PREVENT IF YOU AREN’T DUMB AND CARELESS LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD. The worst could happen, here’s how to minimize it. That’s what we wanted.

  We started the class with a short test, which included the question “What is an accident?”

  The answer she was looking for: an accident is force times mass. That is, she wanted to impress upon us that in an accident, loose objects in the car — water bottles, spare change, and so forth — could become imbedded in, or pass through, your child. Everything should be locked in the trunk, though purses were fine as long as they were zipped shut and seat-belted in.

  We’d already had our seat installed at the local firehouse by two policemen who’d struggled with the job. One had the sort of authoritative, well-tended mustache that only police or firemen can carry off; the other was tall and curly-haired. Together they crawled into the backseat of our car and frowned. “This is a hard car,” one had said, and I theorized that the Cadillac Catera — my parents had given it to us when they’d bought a new Subaru — had not been designed for the childbearing demographic. The policemen pushed and pulled and used a wedge of foam noodles duct-taped together, and then, as they showed us how to buckle a baby doll into the removable seat, told us not to move the base if we could avoid it. We told them we were taking a class in a few days, but we wouldn’t let the teacher move it. “You’re taking a class with Cindy?” one of the policemen said. He looked frankly a little frightened.

  Cindy, it turned out, had taught the policemen how to install seats, and she was skeptical about the foam noodles. “Right,” she said. “Let’s see what one woman can accomplish compared to two men.” In three minutes she’d reinstalled the seat without the noodles, and then she taught Edward.

  “Can I keep this?” she asked, slapping her palm with the noodle wedge like an old-fashioned movie policeman with his nightstick. “I’m going to see those guys next week at a safety event, and I’d like to give them this as a present.”

  3. An infant care class at the local hospital. In truth, neither Edward nor I knew anything about babies. Surely most of it was on-the-job training, but some advice on, say, diaper changing and bathing would help. For the first three hours of this session, the labor and delivery nurse who taught it explained the various things that could make your newborn baby look unsightly — stork bites; tarry black stool; rashes of all kinds; thick, greasy, channel-swimming fat; back hair; lumps from vacuum deliveries; dents from forceps deliveries.

  Then we got on the issue of circumcision.

  Perhaps the only real conversation Edward and I have ever had on the subject of religion came after our wedding. We’d been married with dueling officiants, now the village priest and his sonorous voice and official vows, now the American rabbi and the smashed glass and cries of mazel tov. I had been late to the service. To fill time, the church organist played first “If I Were a Rich Man” and then “Jesus Christ Superstar.” In other words, it had taken some work to appeal to both of our families.

  “My mother says the next thing to worry about is christenings and circumcisions,” I said to him.

  “No to both,” he said, and we solemnly shook hands on it.

  So I didn’t say anything at all about it when the topic came up: we knew what we’d do. The nurse, who’d already distinguished herself by saying that the administration of eye salve was mandated in “all forty-eight states,” was clearly completely and totally against circumcision but knew that she couldn’t say so. Well, not in so many words. “The United States,” she said, “is the only so-called civilized country that regularly circumcises. So think about that.”

  “It seems,” said one thoughtful young husband, “like a lot of people say that you should circumcise a boy so he’ll look like his father.”

  “Yes!” said the nurse. “And you know what? How many men are homophobic? Let’s face it: all of them! So what are the chances you’ll be hanging around naked with your kid anyhow?”

  Apparently I made a noise that was translatable as: lady, that is eighteen kinds of batshit.

  “You don’t agree?” she asked me.

  Now I should say I’d already gotten in trouble because she’d earlier heard me making fun of the swaddled infant she’d drawn on the whiteboard. Also, when she’d said the thing about forty-eight states, I’d turned to Edward, and said, “That’s not right,” just so that he, a foreigner, would not be confused, I swear that’s the only reason.

  What I’m saying is I was already not Nurse Batshit’s favorite student.

  “Well,” I stuttered, “I mean, I don’t know, it’s not, it’s just, I don’t think — listen, you don’t need to convince me anyhow: I’m married to a European.”

  “I have a European parent,” she said, in a voice that suggested that I meant European to be a euphemism for nudist: she understood, but this really wasn’t the place to discuss it.

  I’m glad I wasn’t being graded.

  4. An infant CPR class. This took place in the basement of the public library and was the most oversubscribed class of all, as well as the most motley: there were two other heavily pregnant women, a bunch of day care workers, a few other couples, and some EMTs brushing up on their skills. The teacher was a pepper pot of a woman with six kids. She’d brought two of them with her, a pair of mismatched nine-year-old fraternal twin boys.

  The rescue mannequins were the usual beige objects that looked as though they’d died of heroin overdoses, even the two infant dummies. There weren’t enough to go around, so to make up for the lack, the teacher had brought a variety of dolls. For instance, Elmo. And Kermit the Frog. And the green Teletubby, the Cat in the Hat, a Rugrat, a character I’d never heard of called Doug, Raggedy Ann, and a Cabbage Patch doll. The history of beloved commercial dolls. She gave us pieces of plastic to lay over the mouths — or muzzles, or whatever you call the thing through which a Teletubby takes its nourishment — dental dams, essentially, to make safe the practice of artificial respiration on toys. The man next to us had the green Teletubby. He was the only person there who was learning for a specific, already earthbound person: his son, he said happily in a Chinese accent as thick as his crew cut, was five days old. You would have easily picked him out as the new father, he was so tender with the Teletubby, so cautious as he supported its head and adjusted the bit of plastic wrap.

  The twins stood in when we learned about older children.

  “Here’s where you press,” the instructor said, indicating the spot on the littler twin. He had blond ringlets and a potbelly.

  “And then they throw up!” he said.

  “Yes, sometimes,” she said.

  “And then they eat it!”

  “That doesn’t happen,” his mother said, frowning.

  “Who wants to save me?” the taller twin asked the students politely, but we were all a little shy about rescuing a perfectly safe boy, right in sight of his mother.

  I made sure I got my hands on one of the actual dummies, the kind with a balloon down its throat, whose chest rose when you blew into the mouth: I needed the physical reassurance. I put my hand across its torso. As long as I breathed, the dying plastic baby breathed. When I stopped, it stopped.

  “Listen,” the woman announced suddenly, in the voice I recognized from fourth grade, a room full of kids working on projects, a teacher with a point: listen up, people. “Listen, children don’t die. They rarely die.”

  She said this to calm us. If you think that children rarely die, then it’s easier to save them. I dandled the plastic baby on my knee and bit my lip.

  My notes from that class say:

  WORRY IN THIS ORDER

  A ir

  B reathing

  C irculation

  And that of course is why we were taking all those courses: We wanted to be tol
d, Worry in this order. We were delighted to know the damage a single loose almond in the cab of a car could do in the event of an accident, because then we could remove that almond and be vigilant about future dropped almonds. We wanted to hear all the details of a caesarean just in case; we wanted to know ahead of time how common vacuum-assisted births were. Once, we had belonged to the school of Cross That Bridge When We Come to It. Now we wanted all bridges mapped, the safety of their struts, their likelihood of washing out, their vulnerability to blackguards, angry natives, cougars.

  Here is the worst thing that happened during my second pregnancy.

  Edward had gone back to England for a month so that he could come back to America. I went to the doctor because I was worried about some minor pregnancy symptom. The ob-gyn was a nice bespectacled woman in her fifties, who I’d never seen before. Earlier in the pregnancy a different doctor had said, “Now, this is just about the time when you can hear a heartbeat,” and she’d put the monitor on my stomach and found nothing and we’d been rushed into the sonogram room, where all was well. Now, weeks later, the bespectacled doctor could not find a heartbeat.

  At first that was fine. I lay back and let her feel around and remembered the earlier impossible-to-find heartbeat.

  “There it is!” the bespectacled doctor said, and then “No, that’s you.” She took hold of my wrist to feel my pulse, slower than a baby’s. Every now and then we heard a thud thud through the monitor, and she’d pincer my wrist and shake her head: me again. I had a heartbeat.

  After a while, I thought, Well. What if this is it? What do I do next? Call Edward in England, of course, but then what? Do I go home and get drunk? Drive like hell in the direction of my nearest good friend? Throw myself into the Hudson?

  She said, “It’s no good. Now your heart is beating so fast, I won’t be able to tell the difference.”