An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [12]
Dr. Baltimore was a strange combination of businesslike practices and motherliness. She said to the dreamy waving image on the sonogram screen, “Hello, sweetheart!” But she could never quite look Edward in the eye. She was extremely smart and certain, and I found her smarts and certainty calming. On the other hand, every time we tried to explain that we were moving to the country, she came up with some vague plan in which it would be easy enough to come back to deliver in Paris. She did this so automatically and seamlessly — as though we’d asked for her to come up with a plan — that it was hypnotic. We never argued. “Right,” she said at the first visit, fiddling with a small, round paper wheel that reminded me of a teenage girl’s fortune-telling device. “Right. April 18. Well, you could just arrange to be back here for that month.”
The second visit, when we explained that moving back would be expensive and uncertain, she suggested we could just sleep on a friend’s sofa. The third time she said, well, I’d come in, and if everything looked all right, she could “help things along.”
It wasn’t till we’d left the office that I realized she’d meant induction. Oh no, I thought: Pudding’s birthday was his decision, not mine. Indeed we did come back from the countryside for a few appointments, for the amnio, for the big four-month sonogram, but then we decided it was time to look for someone closer to Savary, whether or not Dr. Baltimore thought it was a good idea. We heard awful things about the nearest hospital, in Marmande, and so we crossed that off our list and looked at the other nearby medium-sized cities.
My second doctor was a short, comical Frenchman who spoke idiosyncratic English and practiced in Bergerac, forty minutes away from Savary. He was the only English speaker at the hospital. Dr. Bergerac was in his forties, with black hair that looked painted on and high color in his cheeks. Altogether he seemed like a European hand puppet of a doctor. We sat in his office — he’d decorated the walls with Tintin posters, which made us like him — and he fiddled with the fortune-telling wheel, and said, “OK. Twenty-seven Avril.” This was how we learned that French pregnancies last longer than American pregnancies, at least officially.
Like Dr. Baltimore, Dr. Bergerac had a sonogram machine in his office, and on our first visit he gave me a routine ultrasound. “Il bouge!” said Dr. Bergerac. He moves! “You have had coffee today. You know what is the gender? Your last échographie, did he say?”
“I had an amnio,” I said. “So we know it’s a boy.”
“Yes,” he said. “I agree with this. It is a boy.” He moved the cursor on the screen and typed next to the relevant lump: B O Y.
Afterward he had a midwife give us a tour of the charming maternity ward. True enough, if something went wrong we’d miss the American Hospital with all its bells and whistles and impeccably clean floors, but this place seemed cozy. A midwife walked down the hall, carrying a red baby with a full head of dark hair. I had never seen such a baby. The Bergerac hospital clearly did good work.
My next appointment was attended by a very cute blond intern, who Dr. Bergerac was clearly trying to impress. During the sonogram, he spoke to her in French, explaining that we were writers from England, voilà, the placenta, a lot of English people liked to come to this area of France, the Dordogne, there’s the baby’s head, the English found it inspiring, look, the bladder. Then he told her to check my cervix and left the room to talk to Edward. I lay back.