An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir by Elizabeth McCracken Read Free Book Online

deliver long monologues about hunting and what he’d learned about American police by watching Cops: “America? Gun. Security. Boom: no problem. Person? In house? Gun. Look up. Boom. Fox? No good. So, boom. No dead. Black. Pig. Me, friend, boom boom. No dead.” Lola spoke to him in Greek. She was fluent but had such a thick cockney accent that I swore I was always about to understand her — it sounded as though she were saying, “Acropolis Demetrius where to, Guvnor? Sophocles Melanoma, ’ave a pork pie.”
    The dining room at the presbytery was long and rectangular, filled mostly with a long rectangular table. Everyone smoked. Everyone drank. Even Finn, the two-year-old, a sweet and goofy kid who spoke, as far as I could tell, Esperanto, drank: he had to be stopped from emptying the dregs of beer bottles left on the table. The next carafe of wine was always warming on the woodstove. On winter nights they closed the shutters against the cold, and it was like being sealed up in a wall.
    The night of Jack’s forty-ninth birthday party fell on the last night of hunting season, and so Pete the Greek wasn’t around, having vowed to bag a wild boar. Lola herself had to go home early, to attend to her business: she produced a kind of phone-in television infomercial that showed on English cable. Originally she’d supervised what she said was the first phone-sex call center in England. The problem was, according to her, with all of those women working together in the same room, their periods synchronized, which made for a hellish work environment. Now she dealt in psychics. People watched the show and texted in questions; her hired psychics, in the comfort of their own homes, would have to text back one hundred characters of prophecy. This night she was short a couple of psychics and so had to do an overnight shift herself.
    “The number one question,” she explained before she left, “is ‘Will he come back?’ But you get everything. When is the next Al Qaeda attack, will I meet the love of my life next week, another psychic says he will come back, can you confirm, do you have a message from my dead grandpa.”
    “What do you say?” I asked.
    Her eyes were khaki green that night. “Well, sometimes you sort of get an image, and you tell them, ‘I see an old coat and a rainbow and an empty bottle.’ It’s amazing how often that’s really meaningful to someone.”
    I couldn’t tell whether amazing meant she was amazed at her psychic abilities or the nature of coincidence or the ability of a desperate mind to find meaning in a random assortment of visuals. I thought about asking her if I could help out one night, though I never worked up the nerve. I liked the idea of trying to summarize someone’s best dreams in a handful of characters, a kind of augural haiku. That’s how I saw my role in fortune-telling. I had no need of psychics myself. I knew my future.
    Then Maud was pregnant, too. “Christmas!” she said, as though Christmas were a famous time for getting accidentally pregnant.
    She made for a very strange pregnancy support group. Though she was a smart woman and the daughter of a doctor, any good sense she had was clouded by the fact that she drank and spent all of her time with people who drank. How could she stop? The winter was too cold not to drink, the spring too lovely, the summer too bakingly hot. She told me in all seriousness that the more pregnant you were, the more you could drink, and that after three months there was no danger, because the baby was already “fully formed.” The doctor father, who we never met, was apparently also a great drinker, and perhaps his prenatal advice was likewise shaped by his feeling that it would be a shame to deny his daughter anything that might quench her considerable thirst. Her pregnancy intake was modest compared to what she’d been drinking before. That is, whenever I saw her she drank four or five beers. She smoked, too. At dinner parties Jack was very