An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir (2 page)

(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 glass 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 passed 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,
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.

W
hich 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
. 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 shift 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
despite this here snoring baby), someone dear and distant, saying,
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 fetishize, 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?
I can’t bear any of the possible answers.

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

T
his 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 space 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
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 glasses, 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 space 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 spaces 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 raccoonish, foxish Jacob Marley, rattling his chains above our bedroom to make us feel fully Dickensian. 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 goddamn 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.
That’s why I wrote down that sentence in the hospital,
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 château. The château 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 cocktail. 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 wishing 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 hello while on treadmills and the gym owner shook your hand and said, “Ça va? Et le bébé?” 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.

I
f 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 advertisements 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
that person.