An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [14]
Later that day I felt my stomach. There it was, the hard fact of his back, a sweet, dorsal, infant curve. I had always loved the sentimental science of the ultrasounds, seeing the screen, his bodily essence paradoxically disembodied, his bones decisive, the little snub nose, the lump where Dr. Bergerac had typed boy, the heart working away in all of its miraculous clockwork gadgetry. But there was always something Ground-Control-to-Major-Tom about the experience. Deep down, I believed, in the way of moon-landing deniers, that it was all well and good to show me this dim grayscale picture on a screen, but you call that proof? Surely it was a hoax, it had to be a hoax: it was easier to believe it was fake than to accept it was possible, real, done.
Now: my hand, my stomach, his back. A human being. A boy baby. Pudding himself.
The problem was that Claudelle didn’t deliver babies anymore: her children had complained about the hours she’d had to keep. Still, she knew a midwife in Bordeaux who did. She called Sylvie and made the appointment for us, since Sylvie didn’t speak English. (“The important word is the same,” Dr. Bergerac had pointed out. “Poussez, madame.”) The next week we drove to Sylvie’s office in Bordeaux. Like Claudelle’s office, it felt more like the living room of a graduate student in Women’s Studies than anything medical.
Sylvie herself was energetic and full of metaphors. Upon checking my cervix, for instance, she announced, The door is closed! The baby is upstairs! When she asked me about pain relief and I said that I’d rather forgo everything, she said, in English, “Strong woman!” and showed her biceps. Best of all, she was willing to come to Savary and pick us up and drive us to the hospital in Bordeaux.
She even said we could have a home birth. I mulled the idea over. To give birth in a farmhouse seemed appealingly Little House on the Prairie. “You are almost forty!” my friend Wendy told me when I asked what she thought. “It’s your first pregnancy! You are not allowed to have a home birth!”
She probably had a point.
I told my mother, “So I’m going to have a midwife deliver the baby, but in the hospital.”
“Are there doctors in this hospital?” my mother wanted to know.
“Of course.”
“Why doesn’t one of them deliver the baby?” she asked.
But I loved Sylvie’s optimism. Why not be optimistic? Everything was going so well. My friend Patti told me I should be the poster girl for Advanced Maternal Age pregnancies. I felt great. I ate intelligently, if a little heavy on the chocolate mousse. My major problems were a touch of sciatica, a touch of pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. I got more and more pregnant, blew past my American due date, which was April 18, but the midwives weren’t worried: my French due date wasn’t until April 27. I paid out of pocket for everything and submitted bills to my American health insurance, and at the end of every appointment, when I was asked for fifteen, or twenty-five, or thirty euros, I wanted to say, “That’s adorable!”
Sylvie came to Savary for a last visit. She arrived with a plush stuffed pelvis and a slightly soiled baby doll to act out Pudding’s escape route. “Voilà,” she said, threading the doll through the pelvis: delivering a baby was like uncorking a bottle of champagne, sometimes you had to twist this way and that before it came free. Then she hooked me up to heart rate and contraction monitors and handed me a game-show-like button on a cable, to press when I felt Pudding move.
“Tout est parfait,” said Sylvie. The door was still closed. The baby was still upstairs.
Why worry about due dates? I wasn’t even impatient. A neighbor had told us a nightmare story of an alcoholic woman in Ireland she’d known who went two weeks past her due date without telling her doctors, and her child died: starved to death inside of her, really, because her placenta had stopped functioning