An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination Part 1

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.

by Elizabeth McCracken.

Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me that I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child.

(This is not that book.) I was giving a badly attended fiction reading at a public library in Florida. The woman wore enormous denim shorts, a plaid s.h.i.+rt, a black ponytail, and thumbprint-blurred gla.s.ses; her husband's nervous smile showed off his sand-colored teeth. They latched on to me, the way the sad and aimless sometimes do: I haven't been a public librarian myself for more than ten years now, but I retain what I like to think of as an air of civic acceptance. When the reading was over and the rest of the audience had dispersed (if five people can be said to disperse) she gave her suggestion. She really did say it, in a voice that seemed as thumbworn as her gla.s.ses: "You should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child. You're very funny."

I couldn't imagine what she was getting at. A joke book for the bereaved? A comic strip guide to outliving your children?

For instance, she explained, her son was dead. Just recently she and Al - her husband, who smiled apologetically with those appalling choppers - had been on the beach, and Al had been eating a tuna sub, and a seagull came and stole part of the sandwich. And so she knew that the bird was the soul of her teenage son. Al nodded in agreement.

"And I laughed and laughed," the woman said flatly. I was sitting at a table, having signed three books, one for a cheerful old lady who'd called my short stories pointless during the Q & A. Al's wife had taken my place at the podium. She looked out at the empty chairs. "You should write a book with stories like that," she said. "It would be a big hit."

She was a childish, unnerving person. I imagined that she'd been trying people's patience for some time. At first they would have been sympathetic, but after her son had been dead for a while, they'd grow weary of her bringing him up as though the calamity had just happened. Well-meaning friends would look uncomfortable at the very mention of his name. So she had to devise new and sneaky ways to work him into conversations with strangers, at book readings, at the grocery store, at train station information desks, to telemarketers. You have to move on, You have to move on, beige-toothed Al might have said, beige-toothed Al might have said, you can't mourn forever you can't mourn forever. Then she could say, See? I'm not mourning: I'm laughing. I'm looking on the lighter side. See? I'm not mourning: I'm laughing. I'm looking on the lighter side.

And now she wanted an instruction book.

It seemed like the saddest thing I'd ever heard, back before I knew how sad things could get.

A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don't have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son. child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don't have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son.

Still, I'm coming around to understanding what that woman in Florida wanted.

A baby is born in this book, too. That is to say, a healthy baby, our second child. The first child died on April 27, 2006, in France. The second baby - a biological fact lying across my lap asleep at this very moment as I type one-handed - was born one year and five days later in Saratoga Springs, New York. Not a miracle, I insist on it. Isn't that the headline in women's magazines, about stories like ours? "Our Miracle Baby"? I wouldn't have used the word miracle miracle even before fate and biology and the law of averages kicked us in the teeth, back when I believed in luck, when I was a wisher on stars and white horses and pennies dropped in fountains. Those were the pastimes of my first pregnancy. This dozing infant is no miracle, though more than we had the nerve to hope for, a nice everyday baby, snoring now, the best possible thing: dreamt of, fretted over, even prayed for. A ginger-haired baby who conducts symphonies while sleeping, sighing at the dream music. (Those hands! They underscore closing arguments in dream-baby court; they hail dream-baby taxis.) We ourselves didn't pray (our religion is worry; we performed decades of it), but some of our friends did, and the mothers of friends, and nuns on two continents, our nuns-in-law. Such a beautiful, funny-looking, monkeyish, longed-for baby, exactly who we wanted to meet. even before fate and biology and the law of averages kicked us in the teeth, back when I believed in luck, when I was a wisher on stars and white horses and pennies dropped in fountains. Those were the pastimes of my first pregnancy. This dozing infant is no miracle, though more than we had the nerve to hope for, a nice everyday baby, snoring now, the best possible thing: dreamt of, fretted over, even prayed for. A ginger-haired baby who conducts symphonies while sleeping, sighing at the dream music. (Those hands! They underscore closing arguments in dream-baby court; they hail dream-baby taxis.) We ourselves didn't pray (our religion is worry; we performed decades of it), but some of our friends did, and the mothers of friends, and nuns on two continents, our nuns-in-law. Such a beautiful, funny-looking, monkeyish, longed-for baby, exactly who we wanted to meet.

Every day as I love this baby in my lap, I think of my other baby. Poor older brother, poor missing one. I see the infant before me, the glory of the soles of the feet, the lips fattened and glossy with nursing, the nose whose future Edward and I try to predict daily. The love for the first magnifies the love for the second, and vice versa.

Now what I think that woman in Florida meant is: lighter things will happen to you, birds will steal your husband's sandwich on the beach, and your child will still be dead, and your husband's shock will still be funny, and you will spend your life trying to resolve this.

As for me, I believe that if there's a G.o.d - and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible - then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.

For instance: in the hospital in Bordeaux one of the midwives looked at us and asked a question in French. Most of the calamity (that word again; I can't come up with a better one) happened in French, which both Edward and I spoke only pa.s.sably. Used to. My ability to speak French is gone, removed by the blunt-force trauma of those days. I've retained only occasional drifting words. Mostly I have to look things up. The French word for "midwife" is sage-femme, sage-femme, wise woman, I remember that. This particular wise woman was a teenager, checking items off a list. The room was like a hospital room anywhere, on a ward for the reproductively luckless, far away from babies and their exhausted mothers. Did we want to speak to - wise woman, I remember that. This particular wise woman was a teenager, checking items off a list. The room was like a hospital room anywhere, on a ward for the reproductively luckless, far away from babies and their exhausted mothers. Did we want to speak to - "Excusez-moi?" Edward said, and c.o.c.ked an ear.

"Une femme religieuse," the midwife clarified. A religious woman. Ah.

Here's what she said: Voulez-vous parler a une nonne?

Which means, Would you like to speak to a nun? More nuns: of course in Catholic France, it was a.s.sumed that we were Catholic.

But Edward heard: Voulez-vous parler a un nain?

Which means, Would you like to speak to a dwarf?

When he told this to his friend Claudia, she said, "My G.o.d! You must have thought, That's the last thing I need!"

"No," Edward told her. "I thought I'd really like to speak to a dwarf about then. I thought it might cheer me up."

We theorized that every French hospital kept a supply of dwarfs in the bas.e.m.e.nt for the worst-off patients and their families. Or maybe it was just a Bordelaise tradition: the dwarfs of grief. We could see them in their apologetic smallness, s.h.i.+fting from foot to foot.

In the days afterward, I told this story to friends over the phone. We were still in Bordeaux. The hospital had wanted to keep me, but Edward explained that we would check into a nearby hotel - we lived an hour away in an old farmhouse - and come back for the follow-up examination. It will be better for our morale, he said in French, and the doctor nodded. Our terrible news had been relayed by my friends Wendy and Ann to the rest of my friends in America, and now I phoned to say - to say what, I wasn't sure, but I didn't want to disappear into France and grief. I called on our cell phone from our hotel room or from sidewalk cafes in the woundingly lovely French spring. Everything hurt. We ordered carafe after carafe of rose, and I told my friends about the Dwarfs of Grief, and I listened to their loud, shocked, relieved laughter. I felt a strange responsibility to sound as though I were not going mad with sorrow. Maybe I managed it. At that moment I felt so ruined by life that I couldn't imagine it ever getting worse, which just shows that my sense of humor was slightly more durable than my imagination.

Edward and I made a lot of plans that week; we thought all sorts of things were possible. For instance, we decided as we wept that we would go somewhere we'd never been as soon as we could. We were leaving France anyhow: we'd been there for a year and a half, and I'd landed a teaching job in the United States in the fall. Edward would look after the baby while I was at school. Our plan had been to go straight to the States, to Saratoga Springs, to settle in before my job started in September. Instead, we decided to pack the house and just - go. Barcelona, maybe. We pictured ourselves walking beneath a hot, unfamiliar sun, somewhere where the drinks were plentiful and not made in France. We believed that a short while devoted to oblivion and beauty would make us feel better. We thought that we could could feel better. Soon enough the notion seemed ludicrous, and we forgot about our Spanish plans. Instead we spent the summer in England, on the North Norfolk coast, looking at the North Sea and hoping that Edward's U.S. immigration application would be straightened out by fall. feel better. Soon enough the notion seemed ludicrous, and we forgot about our Spanish plans. Instead we spent the summer in England, on the North Norfolk coast, looking at the North Sea and hoping that Edward's U.S. immigration application would be straightened out by fall.

Maybe Spain was just like my early jokes: I wanted to say something to my friends and family that wasn't Our child died and our life is over Our child died and our life is over.

Anyhow, for a few days we were stuck in Bordeaux, killing time until my follow-up appointment. I didn't want to eat, we couldn't drink forever, the hotel room was claustrophobic. Our second morning, we decided to walk through a flea market in a nearby park just to look at something different. All spring we'd gone to French flea markets, driving hours to look at piles of junk, or preposterously priced Louis XVI armoires, or glorious 1930s French bookends. Over the months we'd bought a handsome old clock and a sign advertising oysters, a pair of vases made of WWII artillery sh.e.l.ls and a lampshade hand-painted with sea serpents of the here-be-dragons variety. We'd even been to this very flea market the week before, after an appointment with an anesthesiologist.

(He wanted to look at my back to see if I was a good candidate for an epidural, should I need one; he'd said in English, while thumbing my spine, "You see, I may come across your back in the middle of the night. You say you aren't going to show up in the middle of the night, but somehow you always do. Three, four in the morning, there you are. Always I see you in the middle of the night."

"I'll try my best to avoid it," I said. I planned on avoiding an epidural altogether.

He said, gravely, "Even so.") At the Bordeaux flea market a week later we started down the aisles between vendor tents. Every step I took made me sick. All those flea markets we'd gone to were just a form of daydreaming: we were buying objects for some future house we'd live in with the nice baby we were going to have. The gla.s.s light-up globe would go on his bookshelf. The low chair upholstered in old carpet would be perfect for nursing. In the spring we would flea-market as a family, the baby in his sling cuddled up while I leaned over one of those flat cases filled with metal whatnots, jewelry, cutlery, old coins, one hand on his head to protect him, the other pointing, as I said, "Excusez-moi, madame . . ."

You see, I'd thought he was a sure thing.

Now we pa.s.sed uncomfortable-looking striped sofas, beat-up leather club chairs, birdcages, chipped teacups, immaculate teacups, the heirless heirlooms of anonymous French people: a kind of fossil record. Vendors with their lunches of wine and bread and oysters balanced plates on their knees. We waded in farther, and I started to gasp.

"We're going," said Edward, taking my weight against him, leading me out. "We're going, we're going. We're going, sweetheart, this way."

If he hadn't been next to me, I think I would have fallen to the ground and stayed there.

And that, that, soon enough, was how I felt all of the time. soon enough, was how I felt all of the time.

Where are they when we need them, the Dwarfs of Grief, we sometimes said to each other, when things were really bad.

Which is to say: I want it, too, the impossible lighter-side book. I will always be a woman whose first child died, and I won't give up either that grievance or the bad jokes of everyday life. I will hold on to both forever. I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but that death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, but the death will never disappear from view. Your friends may say, Time heals all wounds Time heals all wounds. No, it doesn't, but eventually you'll feel better. You'll be yourself again. Your child will still be dead. The frivolous parts of your personality, stubborner than you'd imagined, will grow up through the cracks in your soul. The sad lady at the Florida library meant: the lighter side is not that your child has died - no lighter side to that - but that the child lived and died in this human realm, with its breathtaking sadness and dumb punch lines and hungry seagulls. That was the good news. She wasn't going to pretend that he hadn't, no matter how the mention of him made people s.h.i.+ft and look away.

A stillborn child is really only ever his death. He didn't live: that's how he's defined. Once he fades from memory, there's little evidence at all, nothing that could turn up, for instance, at a French flea market, or be handed down through the family. Eventually we are all only our artifacts. I am writing this before our first child turns into the set of footprints the French midwives made for us at the hospital, the stack of condolence cards that tracked us down as we fled France - things that our descendants, whoever they are, however many, might stumble across and wonder about. The urn for his ashes we burned; the ashes we scattered; the hospital bills we paid off. The midwives asked us if we wanted his picture taken. I'd seen nineteenth-century photos, dark with age and fingerprints, children unasleep with eyes closed, maybe a toy wedged in a hand, you could see what was wrong, in the neck, in the mouth: everything. More fossils for the flea market. A dead orphaned child now floating down generations of strangers. Those morbid Victorians, I thought, back when I believed that stillbirth was a Victorian problem. But now I considered the midwives' offer. This was my child, and surely - It was Edward who said, decisively, no, because he was afraid we'd make a fetish of it, and he was right. The photo would not have been of our child, just his body. Only from this distance do I understand the difference.

I imagine those descendants, direct or indirect, cousins many times removed, the greatest of nephews and nieces (one of the ways in which I've changed forever is that even half joking I will not say grandchildren grandchildren despite this here snoring baby), someone dear and distant, saying, despite this here snoring baby), someone dear and distant, saying, Their first child was stillborn Their first child was stillborn. But how will they have heard? Will we sit down and tell our second child and maybe, here's hoping, our third, about their older brother, or will we leave them to find out for themselves?

I don't want those footprints framed on the wall, but I don't want to hide them beneath the false bottom of a trunk. I don't want to wear my heart on my sleeve or put it away in cold storage. I don't want to fetis.h.i.+ze, I don't want to repress, I want his death to be what it is: a fact. Something that people know without me having to explain it. I don't feel the need to tell my story to everyone, but when people ask, Is this your first child? Is this your first child? I can't bear any of the possible answers. I can't bear any of the possible answers.

I'm not ready for my first child to fade into history.

This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.

That's the sentence that kept threading through my brain in Bordeaux. I wrote it down in a notebook; otherwise I would have forgotten.

We lived an hour away from the city and that grim hospital, in an enormous rented farmhouse with a converted attached barn, an oddball structure called Savary, which had at one point been a home for single mothers and their troubled children. The house had eight bedrooms and as many bathrooms and a vast haunted s.p.a.ce upstairs that the landlady referred to as the Dormitory, which smelled of disemboweled teddy bears and tear-stained twin mattresses. Downstairs, in the old-barn part of the house, sofas were backed up against old cattle-feed troughs. Savary was a certain species of French house, the preposterous property bought by an English person dreaming of les bonheurs les bonheurs and high summer rents; we paid almost nothing for October through May, when it would have stood empty anyhow. Everything came from Ikea: sheets, drinking gla.s.ses, light fixtures, beds, kitchen appliances. The walls were stone, and the floors cold tile. and high summer rents; we paid almost nothing for October through May, when it would have stood empty anyhow. Everything came from Ikea: sheets, drinking gla.s.ses, light fixtures, beds, kitchen appliances. The walls were stone, and the floors cold tile.

In my memory the house is gothic, all corridors and abandoned bedrooms. My office was upstairs, off what was described in the inventory as the Second Lounge but really was a s.p.a.ce too lumpen to be a hallway and too windowless and eave-cramped to be a room. Getting to my office after dark involved crossing a series of s.p.a.ces whose light switches were right where I didn't need them. I almost never went. Instead, I stayed by the fire in the front room. We decided we would be hardy: we left the furnace off to save money and wrote, Cratchit-like, in hats and gloves. The place was full of mice. I could even hear them skittering underneath the tub when I bathed. Sometimes we heard a worse noise: according to Maud, the young Irishwoman hired to look after the property, there was a pine marten living in the eaves. I didn't even know what a pine marten was, but in my gloves and hat I imagined a racc.o.o.nish, foxish Jacob Marley, rattling his chains above our bedroom to make us feel fully d.i.c.kensian. I hated that animal, though I never saw it.

In fact, from where I sit now - New York State, the spring of 2007 - everything about our winter in Savary feels dire: the house dirty, the Anglophone friends we made perpetually and depressingly drunk and broke, the language barrier alienating. A single sentence in French can make me sad. Every now and then I will suddenly think, What was the name of the next village over, the one with the covered market in the middle, what was the name of that restaurant we used to go to, and I find I can't remember, the information's gone like a pulled tooth, though my brain will keep poking at the empty spot.

What a terrible time that all was, I'll think.

My memory is a G.o.dd.a.m.n liar. It can only see France - or at least those seven months in the southwestern countryside - through the calamity. If you'd asked before April 27, 2006, I would have said: This is the happiest time of my life. This is the happiest time of my life. That's why I wrote down that sentence in the hospital, That's why I wrote down that sentence in the hospital, This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending. It was very strange to have been so happy so recently, and I felt that if I puzzled it over enough I might be able to find my way back - not to experience it again, of course, but to conjure up the smell on the hem of an article of clothing, to touch in some abstract way something that had innocently, casually touched my happiness, since there would be (he was stillborn) nothing literal for me to touch.

But now there it is when I wipe the smudge away: happiness. I was two months pregnant when we moved to Savary. We'd spent the nine months before that in Paris. For three years we'd split our time between Iowa, where we taught and earned money, and Europe, where we wrote and spent it: Paris twice, Ireland, Berlin, Denmark. People told me, "I'd love to have your life," and I would always say, "But then you'd have to accept my standard of living." We didn't own a house, a car, not even a sofa. We spent our money on souvenir busts and cheap red wine.

Savary was one more adventure. Yes, the house was dark, but it was agreeably hilarious. "We're living in an unwed mothers' home," I told my friends. "We have eight bathrooms and two kitchens and a single possible pine marten." The house was surrounded by farmland and vineyards, cows out some windows and horses out others, and a vast patio off the summer kitchen with a view of Duras, the nearby village, and its medieval hill-set chateau. The chateau was an enormous plain castle that looked, in good weather, like the home of seven beautiful princesses and one befuddled king, and in bad weather like the keep of a brooding, evil, terribly attractive beast.

I loved being pregnant. Whatever hormones had shaken together in my bloodstream, it was an agreeable c.o.c.ktail. I devoted myself to gestating - I didn't write much, but that didn't bother me. Edward cooked and cleaned and tucked me into bed. I rubbed my stomach and loved my husband profoundly. I had the sense that these last months as a twosome were as important as our upcoming months as a threesome: they felt like part of someone's happy childhood. What fun it would be to tell our kid where his parents had spent his gestation and birth. In the spring, sheep and lambs, cows and calves, studded the hills, and I regarded them. I felt stupidly, sentimentally mammalian.

After the baby died, I told Edward over and over again that I didn't want to forget any of it: the happiness was real, as real as the baby himself, and it would be terrible, unforgivable, to forget it. His entire life had turned out to be the forty-one weeks and one day of his gestation, and those days were happy. We couldn't pretend that they weren't. It would be like pretending that he himself was a bad thing, something to be regretted, and I didn't. I would have done the whole thing over again even knowing how it would end.

(Would I really? It's a kind of maternal puzzle I can't get at even now: he isn't here, and yet how can I even consider wis.h.i.+ng him away? I can't love and regret him both. He isn't here, but now someone else is, this thrilling splendiferous second baby, and like any mother I can't imagine taking the smallest step from the historical path that led me here, to this one, to such a one.) No matter how I vowed to hold on to the happiness of the pregnancy, it was impossible, such a solitary pastime. When your child dies you cannot talk about how much you loved being pregnant. You have to give up the stories about the funny French gym you went to, where the women kissed h.e.l.lo while on treadmills and the gym owner shook your hand and said, "ca va? Et le bebe?" You must retire the anecdotes of meeting a pair of Mormons in Bergerac, the comic complaints of how impossible it is for a pregnant person to eat in a French restaurant, your run-ins with French lab workers who refused - pen poised over a cup of your urine, one eyebrow raised skeptically - to believe there was such a thing as a married woman who kept her maiden name. You can't list all the funny names you and your husband came up with for the kid, laughing in bed, late at night. You will lose nine months of your history along with all the other things you've lost.

I had just stepped over the border from happy pregnancy to grief, but I could still see that better, blither country, could smell the air over my shoulder, could remember my fluency there, the dumb jokes, the gestures, the disappointing cuisine, the rarefied climate. I knew already I could never go back, not then, not for any future pregnancy (should I be so lucky).

Of course I wanted to remember what it was like! It was all I had.

Now it's all miles away. Everything's muddled together. At some point I imagined a kind of time - I don't know whether I got this idea from science or science fiction, not being much interested in either - that split into two or more directions when the baby died: on one track he lived and we took him home and somewhere in the universe at this moment we have a one-year-old baby and a newborn and are ignorant, exhausted, cheery (or maybe only the first two); on the other track, the one I accidentally took, he died, and we left France. But time changed backwards, too, and now, no matter what, every single day of my first pregnancy, when I was laughing till I was paralytic at my own jokes about what to name the baby, when I was addressing fond monologues to my stomach as I drove a horrific old Ford Escort through the French countryside, he was already dead, and France was already culpable, and our hearts were already broken.

If you'd asked me five years ago - let's say five years ago and seven weeks - where I saw myself, five years and seven weeks in the future, I would not have mentioned a husband, children, living in six different countries. I was thirty-five and had never had a really serious romance. This mostly didn't bother me. I liked living alone. I even liked going to movies alone and eating in restaurants alone. I would never have called myself single. The word suggests a certain willingness to flirt in bars or take out advertis.e.m.e.nts for oneself on the Internet: single people are social in the hope that they won't be single forever. I was a spinster, a woman no one imagined marrying. That suited me. I would be the weird aunt, the oddball friend who bought the great presents and occasionally drank too much and fell asleep on the sofa. Actually, I already was was that person. that person.

Then I went to a party in New York thrown by Barnes and n.o.ble and discovered that the author of that weird ill.u.s.trated book I'd liked so much was not, as I'd concluded from the work and author photo, a midforties, balding, puffy misanthrope, but a cheerful, floppy-haired thirtyish Englishman. A month later, he came to Boston to work on an art project and called me up. We went out every night for a week. On our third date, he said, "I have something to tell you." It transpired that his name was not, as was printed on his book, Edward Carey, but in fact, as was printed on his pa.s.sport, Jonathan Edward Carey Harvey. He displayed the pa.s.sport to prove this. As revelations went, I could live with it, though it was too late for me to call him anything but Edward. At the end of the week, on our fifth date - which happened to be his thirty-second birthday - he asked me very seriously if I wanted children.

The only other people who'd asked me that question were my similarly aging childless girlfriends. The answer I generally gave was: not abstractly, but if I met someone who really wanted children, and I thought he'd be a good father, and I was relatively sure we'd be married forever or at least for the length of two roughly concurrent childhoods, then yes, I would want children, yes please. I loved family life, adored my parents and my older brother, our decades-old running jokes, our familial obsessions. We went out for long, boozy meals. We took trips together and brought home souvenirs and outlandish stories. The McCracken Family Circus. We even went to the actual circus together, all four of us being actual circus buffs. Yes: I would want children if I met someone with whom I could imagine raising eccentric, friendly, hilarious children who we could bundle off to Europe and museums and circuses no matter how old or young they were. At thirty-five it seemed unlikely I'd meet such a person. That was OK. If life never brought me a husband or children, I wouldn't miss them. I'd devote myself to good works or bad habits.

But I could tell that Edward wasn't asking idly. He has a wide forehead upon which all emotions are legible: sincerity, anxiety, apprehension, skepticism; he has pa.s.sed it down to our sincere, apprehensive, occasionally skeptical second baby. My answer would make a difference.

"Yes," I said. "I think I would."

A week after that - it has been five years and seven weeks, Mother, and I no longer feel the need to juggle the ledgers - he moved into my apartment. When people ask where we met, I sometimes say, "I ordered him from Barnes and n.o.ble."

I'd lived for nine years in Somerville, Ma.s.sachusetts: now Edward and I began to move. For four years, we relocated every few months, to Iowa City, Paris, Ireland, Iowa City, Berlin, small-town Denmark, Iowa City, Paris. We chased jobs and fellows.h.i.+ps and wine and museums, lived in midwestern sabbatical sublets, a thatched cottage that had sheltered Brecht in the 1930s, next door to hard-partying students, in a German villa made over into housing for American academics. Somewhere in there we got married at the small stone church at the bottom of Edward's parents' driveway. The village vicar officiated, backed up by an American rabbi my mother had ordered off the Internet.

My favorite of our dwellings was our last apartment in Paris, the first home of my first pregnancy. We'd had a list of things we wanted in a place to live: s.p.a.ce for two desks, maybe a guest room, maybe a tiny balcony, without a doubt an elevator for certain unsteady relatives. Then we answered an ad in an expat paper. The building was next to the Jewish Museum and around the corner from the Pompidou Centre. We punched the code we'd been given over the phone into the pad by the door, walked five flights of stairs that got narrower and wobblier until we were at the top in a low-ceilinged hallway, rang a bell, and were let into a seventeenth-century high-ceilinged cartoon garret filled with antique furniture. It fulfilled none of our requirements. We loved it immediately. Just then another would be renter showed up, a yellow-clad lawyer from Boston, with wooden skin and leaden hair and the official dreary insinuating underfed brittle aura of a number 2 pencil. We understood that she meant us ill. "We'll take it," Edward told the landlady, a tall woman from Amiens who raised mules and taught English to small boys. "Wonderful," the landlady answered, and the lawyer said in disbelief, "It's fine for one one person. But two?" person. But two?"

"We're writers," I said apologetically. "We're supposed to live in a garret in Paris."

She snorted. "Everyone in Paris is a writer." in Paris is a writer."

The kitchen was small and overlooked the dining area; the guest room was a treacherous loft over the living room; the tub was a slipper bath, half-sized but deep, with a step to sit on, the perfect place to read. Above the bed, where I worked, sitting up, was a ceiling of herringbone beams. Through the bedroom window you could see the turrets of the National Archives; through the dining room window, the chimney pots of Paris.

I was working on a malingering novel, since abandoned (for a while I said, "It died," but not anymore), and Edward on an enormous one. We'd write in the morning, Edward in the dining room and me propped up in bed, and then I'd persuade him to go out to lunch, where we'd order a carafe of wine, and then we'd wander and spend money and not get back to our books till the next morning.

After some months of this, my novel collapsed. I panicked: How would I ever write again? How could we afford to keep living in Paris at this rate? To talk me down from the cliff, Edward suggested the country, where life would be beautiful, cheap, and dull, and we'd have no choice but to work. All right, I said. We found three possible properties on the Internet; we drove out to look at them. The first was a millhouse that had been converted into a restaurant and was now being converted back into a house; from the windows we could see the landlord's apartment, which seemed overly cozy. The second, also a millhouse, had an intermittent rat problem. "Coypou," the landlady explained, and Edward said, "Oh, coypou," as though this const.i.tuted a particularly prestigious sort of rat problem. The third was Savary. Beryl, the landlady, showed us around. Preposterous! we thought. Who needed four times as many toilets as occupants? But the price was right, and we signed a lease that started in three months, and we went back to Paris.

Two weeks later, I sent Edward out to negotiate a pregnancy test. All slightly medical transactions in French pharmacies require negotiation with the pharmacist. I took it, disbelieved it, sent him out for another, which agreed with the first.

We didn't call my occupant the Baby, which seemed inaccurate, cloying, and too optimistic. We were superst.i.tious. For some complicated, funny-only-to-the-progenitors reason, we settled on the names Pudding and Wen (in case we were having twins, which, as the daughter of a twin, I worried about). Then the first ultrasound showed the single pocket-watch heart, and so it was just Pudding, boy or girl. What's Pudding doing? How are you, Pudding? The baby ticking away was Pudding all September in Paris, and Pudding when we moved to the countryside in October. And then we had the amnio, and Pudding seemed to suit a little boy, the little boy we were making up day by day - I made him up literally, of course, cell by cell and gram by gram, and Edward and I made him up in conversation and dumb flights of fancy. Pudding! we'd say to my stomach. Pudding, what are you up to? Pudding was Pudding to us and soon enough to all our friends and family: everyone called him that. I couldn't imagine naming a baby ahead of time, calling a baby by his earth name before he was a citizen of this world. Naming seemed a kind of pa.s.sport stamp.

But it was one of the first things we were told, after we found out that he was dead: the baby needed a name. I was sitting outside the first hospital of the day, waiting with Sylvie, the midwife who we'd found to deliver the baby. She was a sinewy woman in her midforties who spoke about ten words of English but was hugely enthusiastic. We'd just heard the bad news. I was more than forty-one weeks pregnant. It was late April and the weather was fine and it was better not to be inside any kind of medical room for the moment. Sylvie was holding my hand. Soon we'd go to a different hospital. This hospital was only for living children. They didn't do autopsies. We needed an autopsy. Sylvie and I sat across from two teenage boys who were smoking, and more than anything I wanted to ask one for a cigarette but I didn't.

The language of disaster is, handily, the language of the barely fluent. I kept saying to Sylvie, Je ne comprends pas. C'est incroyable. C'est incroyable Je ne comprends pas. C'est incroyable. C'est incroyable. Edward was at the far end of the parking lot, calling his parents on our cell phone since we'd come to one of those moments of nothing to do.

You must find a name, Sylvie said. For the certificate.

How could we pick a name out of the handful we'd idly considered? How could we do that to him? Oh, I don't mean to be maudlin, and I do not believe in some lousy afterlife where babies who don't get to be born are ushered off by a kindly black-and-white angel, a real creepy Boy Scout leader of an angel. I hate that f.u.c.king angel, cupping the downy heads of all those unborn babies, almost as much as I hate the phrase "unborn baby" itself, I am trying to disbelieve him so I don't have to look at him, but he's lodged in my head. He's rounding them up, he's saying, Come here, little souls, it's not your time yet - tell me your name - what did your parents call you? Come here, little souls, it's not your time yet - tell me your name - what did your parents call you?

No more talk of angels. I can't stand the tendency to speak of dead children as such. I do not want him elevated to angel. I do not want him demoted to neverness. He was a person, that's all.

Edward came back from the privacy of the far reaches of the parking lot, still holding the cell phone. He wasn't crying anymore, but he had been. I told him we had to name the baby for legal reasons.

"We'll call him Pudding," he said, in one of those moments that sounds improbably sentimental to me now but at that moment was exactly right. A new name would be only a death name, another way to say that he hadn't exactly existed before now. How could he suddenly be an Oscar or a Moses? How would he ever find his way, renamed like that? His parents called him Pudding, always. Even now we do. It's the name on the certificate the city of Bordeaux gave us in early May, certificat d'enfant sans vie, certificat d'enfant sans vie, certificate of the birth of a child without life - birth certificate, death certificate, whatever you want to call it. Sometimes it seems too sweet to me, but mostly I just think: that's who he is, he's Pudding. certificate of the birth of a child without life - birth certificate, death certificate, whatever you want to call it. Sometimes it seems too sweet to me, but mostly I just think: that's who he is, he's Pudding.

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 first person singular meant, I found even the phrase itself beautiful. Most of my life, from childhood to spinsterhood, I had no p.r.o.noun 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 meant, I found even the phrase itself beautiful. Most of my life, from childhood to spinsterhood, I had no p.r.o.noun 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, 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 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 we feels presumptuous, because he can speak for himself, and writing feels presumptuous, because he can speak for himself, and writing I I feels presumptuous, because the calamity happened to both of us, was just as awful for both of us. 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 the three of you or me as or me as the two of you, 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? 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, my cervix, meaning mine, Elizabeth McCracken's. What the h.e.l.l: 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. meaning mine, Elizabeth McCracken's. What the h.e.l.l: 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 c.o.c.ky and kept count, the evil eye could s.n.a.t.c.h 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 anything. It's amazing we didn't fling ourselves into department stores, asking desperate directions to the furniture department, please, monsieur, 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. 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 s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps 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.