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

  That’s what I thought until Pudding died, and then, at least for a while, I was like a sinner trembling on the edge of faith, demanding of the future: come, prove yourself, and I will renounce the past and everything I believe in.

  In the exam room I did not yet have the courage of my convictions. I took the phone from Sylvie.

  “Elizabeth, I am so sorry,” Claudelle said. “Oh. I am so sorry. Please know my heart is with you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “OK. Thank you.”

  Later I would wonder why Sylvie had made me talk to her. She did it with a kind of medical authority, and I dumbly accepted, thinking that she knew what I needed.

  I don’t think it did me a bit of good.

  Edward and I clung to each other in the hallway of the Tripod Hospital, waiting for someone to take us to a room upstairs on the ward. The staff would see if they could find a cot for Edward. Otherwise he’d go to a hotel. A midwife passed by, a woman in her early fifties with short hair and a slightly daffy demeanor. She said, in French, Why do you look so sad? You’re going to have a baby!

  “Le bébé est décédé,” Edward answered.

  There’s a certain French — gesture? moue? — that is ubiquitous and hard to translate. In answer to a question or piece of information, the French person fills his or her mouth with air and then puffs it out, eyebrows raised. It means, It is difficult to say, and it can be the answer to, How do you drive to Lyon? or Do you have this in my size? or, it turns out, The baby is dead.

  Of course it all felt like an emergency to us, something to be taken care of immediately. Who would make a woman spend one more moment on this earth than is necessary with a dead child in her body? I thought I’d be induced instantly, I would deliver instantly, and then we could talk about leaving.

  No. They would give me some medication to soften my cervix. The next day nothing would happen other than some blood tests to see if they could find an explanation. It’s very important, the doctor on the ward explained. The day after that, they would induce, and le travail would commence when it commenced. We could only hope for the best.

  The hospital room was no more picturesque for being French. They had found a folding cot for Edward, a miserable mid-1980s-ish polyester-sheeted appliance that meant he could sleep next to me, though at a considerable drop from the high hospital bed. There’s a peculiar kind of loneliness, sleeping in a room near but not next to the person whose body you most require. He felt too far away. I’d wanted to trail my foot off the bed, dip it into his. Whenever I got up in the night to go to the bathroom — because there was still a weight pressing down on my bladder, the same as there had been the night before (before the baby had died) — Edward woke up at the slightest rustling of the sheets and took me there.

  In the morning he folded the bed back up, and we asked the midwife if we could leave and go into Bordeaux. The morning’s blood had already been taken. They had no more plans for me that day. She spoke to the doctor, and we were given a two-hour pass, as though I were a patient on a mental ward.

  We left the car where it was and took the streetcar downtown and found one of Bordeaux’s hidden backstreet plazas. As we turned the corner, a black cat suddenly ran in front of us.

  “You’re too late, mate,” Edward told it.

  We bought a pack of cigarettes without discussing it and sat down at a café, and I ordered an enormous glass of strong beer and lit up. We were in France. In the United States a heavily pregnant woman would be lynched for less, but here nobody seemed to notice.

  The weather was horribly good.

  That morning at 6:00 French time I had finally gotten hold of my parents. That is, my mother had answered the phone and I’d told her. It was not quite midnight in America. It was still the day before. Dark there, dawn in Bordeaux. My parents had been out at a party. I pictured my mother sitting on the edge of their bed. “Here,” she said, “your father’s just coming in, do you want — ” Then she said in a certain voice, almost to herself, “I’ll tell him.” I was absurdly grateful that she’d made the decision for me. I could bear almost anything but breaking the news and wanted to do it as few times as possible.

  (This is still true. There are friends, not close ones of course, who knew I was pregnant but did not hear what happened, and when they’ve written and said, “How’s motherhood? Your son must be a year old by now!” I have simply never answered.)

  At the café I called my parents again. My father answered, and when he heard my voice he said, “Oh, my darling, what can I say but that I love you with all of my heart.”

  I called my friend Ann. I could hear her excitement at my voice — she’d been waiting for her happy phone call — and I told her my news and said that I needed a favor. Anything, she said, getting ahold of her tears. The sun at the café was quite bright.

  I asked her to phone my friend Wendy and to split the calls to my other friends between them. I read aloud telephone numbers.

  Why am I finding this harder to write about than anything?

  There was no oxygen in the little plaza in Bordeaux. Edward and I both felt it. I could not look people in the eye, lest they smile and ask me about my baby.

  “This was a mistake,” said Edward. “We don’t belong here.”

  Meaning, Out in the world. We’d escaped, but where could we go, with me in my condition?

  Time had bent again. Time had developed a serious kink. Our old life — the one where we planned our existence around the son we were expecting — had ended, but our new life — the one where we tried to figure out how to live without him — couldn’t start yet. We were stuck in a chronological bubble.

  He was there, after all, still. He rode with us on the streetcar. He sat at the café table with us. He appeared in the shop windows we passed, though I didn’t look to the side to see. We just pretended that he didn’t.

  Here’s my question: was I pregnant then?

  I was in the shape of a pregnant woman. I’m sure I walked like one, though my arms floated away from the fact of my stomach (no rubbing, no resting, no thoughtless, fond tapping). Really, what was I? Was I pregnant? There should be a different word for it, for someone who hasn’t yet delivered a dead child. Maybe there is and I don’t know it, but I’m not about to ask.

  My child had died. The next day I would see him for the first time. But until then, what was I? A figure common in old paintings and poetry. The bereaved carrying the remains of my beloved dead. Not out of bravery. Not out of devotion. Not out of hope that God had gotten it wrong and would change His mind.

  Because I had to.

  We went back to the hospital, where we could smoke on the park benches outside the building like the mental patients we were. Hard cases, not to be trusted with privileges.

  A year later, when we spoke of the anniversary of Pudding’s death, it was hard to know how to measure it. It felt like something biblical, though not out of the Testament I know anything about. He died, and then two days later he was born. Where was he in the meantime?

  Since he died, I’ve never had a dream of him alive.

  In the morning the ward midwife came to get us. We’d been awake for hours. I went down the hall first, to the showers, five tiny cabins on a narrow corridor. I barely fit. It was the first shower I’d taken since Pudding had died. I soaped myself without looking, dried myself with the sad French institutional towel, and put on the hospital gown.

  What is there to say of the labor, the delivery? The midwives, one in her thirties and one in her early twenties, were sweet and attentive. The oddball anesthesiologist came back and gave a long lecture in English about epidurals, how they blocked both pain and the ability to sense temperature. He tested his work by running an ice cube down my leg. This epidural, he said, taking a seat next to my bed and crossing his legs in a jaunty manner, was self-administered. I would have a button to press for more relief. It still might run out, and I should say if it did. It did run out. They fed more medication into the machine, which fed i
nto me. In that dry patch of no pain relief, I twisted Edward’s hand and said in a panicked voice, “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this!” but I gather plenty of women in labor say the same thing.

  Edward and I had discussed it: I told him to leave the room for the actual delivery. It was a horrible thing to go through, and I wanted to spare him. That is, the watching seemed horrible to me. The delivery did not seem nearly so bad. Really, it felt like the last thing I could do for Pudding.

  Edward had shouldered a great deal in the past few days, he had pushed his enormous pain aside to tend to me, and this seemed like one piece of pain I could keep him from. Pudding’s death was something the two of us went through together. The delivery wasn’t, couldn’t be. In the end, it didn’t even seem like something I went through. Those midwives in their French politeness called me Mrs. Harvey, Madame Harvey. They addressed me in the formal manner: Poussez, Madame Harvey, très bien, Madame Harvey, and that’s who it was happening to, someone else, someone differently named, worthy of respect. The epidural did its job and I felt nothing and in the end it wasn’t something Edward and I went through together and it wasn’t something that I went through by myself. It was something that Pudding had to go through. We three women in the room did our best to help him but in the end he was alone.

  They took him immediately from the room to clean him up and got Edward. He looked so sad, my poor husband. I don’t know how long he’d been out of the room. Twenty minutes, I think. Everyone had told us that it was very important to see our child no matter what. Now we waited dutifully for Pudding. The nurses brought him in and set him on the delivery table, in front of where I sat cross-legged in my gown.

  “He looks like an old man,” Edward whispered, stroking his arm. A medium-sized baby, just over seven pounds. We touched him very tenderly. He wore a diaper and a knit yellow hat. The hair beneath the hat was dark, like mine. His cheeks were plump and his legs were skinny, and yellow, and undeniably dead. From the waist up he was rosy, and his lips were very, very red, very defined in his face. They were his father’s lips.

  We stroked him and told him we were sorry. Later Edward said, “I didn’t know what it was I was feeling. Then I realized it was seeing someone and knowing immediately that you love him.”

  “We’re ready,” we told the midwives, and they took him away. My great regret is that I didn’t pick him up.

  For a long time when I looked at Edward, the first place my eyes stopped at was his mouth.

  Faces famously fade from memory, and yet I swear I remember exactly what Pudding looked like. I’m glad I don’t have a picture to contradict me. The lips and the rosiness were the result of blood and gravity. His lips were lovely because he was dead, and because he’d been upside down inside of me, and because he was dead.

  All day long I wondered where Sylvie was. She had told me she would be there for the delivery. She finally showed up in the hospital room at five. The first thing she said was, Elizabeth, you were careful about what you ate, weren’t you?

  I was in bed, holding very still, but even so I froze. I said in my bad French, I thought I was, but maybe . . .

  That’s not it, said Edward.

  She got a frightened look on her face and began to pat my frozen arms. Your baby, she said in French, your poor baby. She’s trying to make me cry, I thought, and I still think that’s what she was doing: she was worried that we blamed her, and so she tried to push the blame off onto me, and then she realized it was perhaps not the right time for such a transfer and tried to distract us from what she’d just said. She patted my arms harder. It’s very sad, she said.

  I wanted her to leave, but I could not ask, because of course this was all my fault. I still believed that, a conviction so awful and unshakable that I didn’t say it aloud. If I’d said it to Edward, he would have tried to dissuade me, and my belief was an inoperable cancer, dangerous where it was but more dangerous to move. I could not put my finger on what I had done wrong. Eaten something. Failed to eat something. Rested too much or exercised too much. Got pregnant too old. Was smug. He died inside of me: Of course it was my fault. It happened on my watch.

  I think, said Edward in a firm voice, Elizabeth would like it if you’d leave now. At the time it seemed like an astonishing piece of mind reading. Sylvie nodded and got up. Call me before you leave Bordeaux, she said, but we never did.

  The midwife on the ward the next day was the kindest of all of them, in her forties, with dark hair gathered back and a careworn face. She gave me a sponge bath, and then she said, How are you?

  Not good, I said.

  But how, she asked me seriously, is your morale?

  I smiled. I said, still smiling, not good. Not terrible but not good.

  Of all the people who attended to me over those days, she was the only one who seemed to know that a sad thing had happened.

  As she left I said, You’re very kind.

  She shrugged. Then she said, “C’est normal,” it’s normal, which means, of course, Who wouldn’t be kind to you? But she said it in a voice that suggested that she knew: it wasn’t normal after all.

  I have mostly forgiven myself, and on good days I can say, What else could I have done?

  I find myself thankful for large and small things, in the way of people who’ve lost two limbs and are glad not to have lost four. Labor and delivery took four hours altogether; that was a mercy. They gave me medication that prevented my milk from coming in, which worked: that, too. We were thankful for the midwives who’d delivered Pudding. The young one said, À bientôt, when she left, See you soon. We were thankful that we could leave France, thankful that we could live near the sea for a few months, extraordinarily thankful that I got pregnant again so soon, and that the pregnancy held. I am not sure what sort of person I would be if that hadn’t happened.

  Even now I feel a scalding, pleasureless relief that I pressed Claudelle to see me that morning. I wish I had pressed her more; I wish I had alarmed her into sending me immediately to the hospital — the one in Bordeaux, or the more terrifying one five minutes away from her office. But in the absence of that, I am relieved that when she said, Come at five, I’d said no. If I’d gone at five, Pudding would have been dead already. I wouldn’t have known when it had happened, and I don’t know how I would have gone forward in the world.

  A year and three days after the morning I checked out of the hospital, Edward and I woke up in our second rented house in Saratoga Springs, an enormous Victorian we’d moved to a month before. The grubby rental house was around the corner. We might have stayed, but the owners decided to put it on the market, and so we ended up a block away, in a place that, it would turn out, had bats. We ate a small breakfast and wondered what the day would be like. We still weren’t people who could say under such circumstances, “By this time tomorrow, we’ll have a baby!”

  I got dressed in a pair of stretchy black pants and a stretchy black top and put on lipstick and asked Edward to take my photograph: I hadn’t posed for a single picture for all of this pregnancy. I stood on the porch and smiled. It was a lovely spring day. Then we walked to the hospital.

  Nurses are like anyone else when it comes to small talk, and while they went about their work they asked the usual questions. Boy or girl? Have you picked out a name? Are you wearing lipstick? To deliver a baby? At one point I had nurses on both arms looking for a likely vein for the IV. “You have very slender veins,” said one, pulling out a failed line.

  “Shall we call for Marilyn?” another asked.

  No, I thought, I wouldn’t name a baby Marilyn.

  The mention of Marilyn, legendarily good at IVs, roused the competitive spirit of the first nurse. “Let me try again,” she said, and moved up my arm. This time when she failed she left behind an enormous amethyst bruise.

  “Shall we call for anesthesia?” said the nurse who’d suggested calling for Marilyn, and I thought dreamily, Anesthesia. That’s a nice name.

  The anesthesiologis
t came to put in the IV. He thought we looked familiar, and realized he’d seen us the night before at the DMV. That was somehow unnerving.

  The nurse started the Pitocin drip. Dr. Knoeller came by.

  “What are you thinking for names?” she asked.

  We said we weren’t sure.

  “Well,” she said, “I have a spare boy’s name, if it’s a boy.”

  We stared at her, our hearts full of love, sure that this would be the best boy’s name ever.

  “Lance,” she said.

  Which immediately struck me as an unfortunate name for the son of a doctor.

  Even happy labor stories can be excruciating in their details. The Pitocin drip went in at 9:30 a.m. I was hooked up to a fetal heart rate monitor and a contraction monitor, the same sorts I’d been on twice a week at the practice. After several hours I asked the young nurse, “Am I having any contractions yet?”

  “ ’Bout every two to three minutes,” she said. I hadn’t felt a thing.

  I was glad that Edward hadn’t been in the room for Pudding’s delivery: now, when I looked up at him from the delivery table it would be new, and when he told me we were almost there it would be new, it would be what I’d expected, and wholly unfamiliar. He opened a book to read to me. David Copperfield this time, which begins with a hair-raising birth. “Keep going,” I told him, admiring the great girth of the rest of the account of that baby’s life.

  Dr. Knoeller stripped my membranes at 5:00. At 6:00 I asked for an epidural. At 7:36 —

  I’m skipping some details: the baby’s heart began to decelerate during contractions. Dr. Knoeller came in to check me and was surprised to see that I was fully dilated. The baby’s heartbeat continued to decelerate during contractions. I became aware of the decelerations, even though I couldn’t feel the contractions: I could hear the beeping monitor. I started to watch the clock on the wall and could see that sometimes the heartbeats were in step with the second hand: sixty beats a minute, good for a grown-up but bad for a baby. My old fetish, the heartbeat. This monitor, threaded up me and onto the baby’s head, had a cold science-fiction beep. It was time to push, but it was hard when the effort came at the same time the heartbeat slowed: I tried to concentrate on my work, the work, but I couldn’t with that soundtrack. They put an oxygen mask on me so the baby would get more oxygen. Dr. Knoeller and the nurses told me that I was doing wonderfully, I was almost there. Edward was stroking my forehead and saying the same thing. Maybe they were lying. I suspected that they were. One of the nurses said to Dr. Knoeller — I didn’t hear her, thank God; Edward told me later — that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. They told me to rest, and the heartbeat sped up. They told me to push and it slowed down again.