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

shy and sat at the end of the table rolling perfect cigarettes two at a time, one for him and one for her.
    It was upsetting to watch. And yet I liked Maud anyhow, which shows you that I could rationalize as much as she did. She was otherwise kind and funny, and I wondered if she’d imagined that this would be her life, in exile in France with two children and another coming, dead broke all the time, in love with the second drunk in a row, a man who himself had two daughters back in England. Maud could not give up drinking, and so convinced herself it was not so bad; I could not give up my fondness for Maud, and so I tried to think of her drinking as a mildly entertaining eccentricity. She thought I was crazy for not drinking, or maybe she just thought I was American and therefore a bit of a priss. And I’m afraid I compared my own prenatal habits to Maud’s and felt superior. Surely I was doing everything right, everything you needed to do to have a healthy baby.
    We saw them last a few days after Pudding died: we met at their bar, the Café du Commerce, in the next town over, the town whose name I cannot remember and refuse to look up. I dreaded it. For a few months Maud’s daughter’s greatest pleasure was to say to me, “You have a GREAT BIG BELLY.” I thought it was possible that if Madeleine said anything to me about my stomach, I’d punch her in the face, and I did not want to be a woman who punched four-year-olds in the face. We sat outside under the arcades. All winter long my American friends who heard my stories about the Sots found it hilarious that Jack and Maud knew only the teetotaling me: I like a drink myself, under ordinary circumstances. These were not ordinary circumstances, either. I gulped beer and smoked, and Finn and Madeleine as usual ran around and rifled through the postcard stands of the tabac next door, and Madeleine didn’t say anything, and I remembered two weeks before, when we’d been at the presbytery and Finn stripped himself naked and climbed up onto my chair and stood next to me, and I put my hand on his bare little bottom, and thought, This is what having a little boy will be like, and thought, Oh, I’m ready .
    Maud had a little girl last September, named Mia. That’s all I know.

T he first thing we did back at Savary was dismantle the future. That is, Edward broke down the portable crib that had been waiting for a few weeks on my side of the bed. I threw out all my maternity clothes, just threw them away, along with the single package of diapers I’d obediently bought (my baby book warned me that you could never be really sure how big your newborn would be). We tossed out the stuffed hippopotamus from Edward’s sister and any other toylike object. For a month I’d fallen asleep looking at an old artist’s palette that had been painted to look like a grinning face, like Punch in profile. Another flea market find, we’d hung it over the crib. That we burned in a bonfire out back, along with the baby books.
    But not the baby clothes.
    The baby clothes had crowded out mine in my chest of drawers. There were the silly things I’d bought him, ludicrous, adorable, irreplaceable. A pair of plaid plus fours. A striped turtleneck with a picture of Babar. A thick blue and brown coat with toggle closures. Those leather baby shoes. An Iowa Hawkeyes onesie, his first present, which our friends Tim and Wendy had brought when they came to visit. A Union Jack hat from Catherine, my sister-in-law, along with a 1940s-style cloth coat. Two beautiful tiny sweaters knit by Edward’s mother. Bibs. Socks. About half the clothes were hand-me-downs from a little boy named Owen who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was outgrowing things faster than his mother could keep up.
    Who can separate practicality from hope from lingering superstition? We wanted another child. We wanted to fill those clothes.
    And so, without even looking, we packed them away, three boxes full. We could throw them