An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [16]
“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 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