An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [13]
Afterward the doctor asked me how tall I was.
“Not very,” I joked.
“I suffer from this problem as well,” he said. “But ’ow tall? Do not answer in feets, I do not understand them.”
I shrugged. He gave me a flat-handed “please rise” gesture and appraised me.
“I am writing for you a prescription for pelvicscan,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“A hex-ray,” he explained.
At home I poked around on the Internet and asked doctor friends. As far as I could tell, there was no good reason for prenatal X-rays — they could really tell you nothing about how easy it would be to go through labor — and there seemed to be a slight risk of childhood leukemia associated with them. I e-mailed Dr. Bergerac to ask him if I could forgo it. He said no. Don’t worry! It’s not dangerous! But it is obligatory!
And so I just never went back.
(I’ve always thought I was five feet even, but at my six-week postpartum checkup, the nurse announced, much to my surprise, that I was five one. Which makes me 156 centimeters tall.)
Of course it occurs to me that Pudding might have lived if I’d stuck with either Dr. Bergerac or Dr. Baltimore. It’s a low-decibel wistfulness; I can barely hear it over the roar of later, louder regrets. This kind is not so bad, the If I Did One Thing Differently, Then Maybe Everything Would Also Be Different sort, a vague, philosophical itch: yes, if life were different, then life would be different. Such thinking feels like science fiction, stepping on a bug in 20,000 BC and altering the course of history.
Other memories are more troublesome. Here’s a length of time, my brain says, and then it stares, it sees an actual length of time suspended in the air, which then breaks into panels, as in a comic book. Here I am in one panel. I am in the line of danger, but I don’t know it, I am living in the past: the past being defined by the fact that Pudding is alive, but not for long. In the next panel, seconds later, something is supposed to intervene. Superman swooping in, to — what? Deliver the baby? X-ray vision and superhearing are nothing special, every doctor’s office comes equipped. Superman is supposed to come is all I know, so Pudding will persist.
But Superman never shows. I can see it so clearly. In one panel we are safe and stupid. In the next we’re only stupid.
Those moments come later, toward the end of the pregnancy.
X-rays and interns aside: the real reason I left Dr. Bergerac is that I didn’t love him. I wanted to. He was very cute and liked Tintin, and he even spoke English, but he was also authoritative, bossy about my weight, and far preferred talking to Edward (as Dr. Baltimore had far preferred talking to me). Before sonograms, he applied the necessary gel from a squirt bottle as though spraying a graffiti tag, and afterward he dropped wads of paper towels onto me from a height and left me to mop up. He made it clear that if he thought I needed an epidural, I would have one, no matter what. I didn’t know what to expect of birth, but I wanted it to seem like a collaboration. So I was delighted when, seven months pregnant, I found an English-speaking midwife through a midwifery Web site, a fox-faced woman name Claudelle who shared office space with a yoga instructor in a nearby town. At first I saw her with Dr. Bergerac’s blessing: at the Bergerac hospital, my monthly checkups would be with a midwife anyhow, and Claudelle lived much closer to us. At my visits she checked my blood pressure and asked me a variety of questions and once or twice had me bounce on one of the exercise balls she shared with the yoga instructor. I thought I would miss the sonograms, that is, until Claudelle put her hands on my stomach, and described Pudding.
“Ah,” she said, rounding the left side of me. “There ’e is. See,” she said, and put my hand in place of hers. “There is his back, on the left. A good place. Easy to get down. His head is down here. He’s getting ready.” Then