An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [23]
It’s the last days in Savary where my memory starts to get oceanic: it shifts, it suddenly dips, it drops out of view and then comes over my head in a wave. I splutter, my mouth full of the stuff. We drank a lot of wine on the patio. We cried a lot. We watched every meaningless video in our collection. I checked my e-mail all the time. I needed to know who was worried about me. I’ve reread some of the e-mails I wrote back to friends recently, and I’m astounded by how chipper I sound; I even find them slightly creepy, and I wonder if my friends did, too. I remember one long phone conversation with my brother during which I walked around and around the L-shaped dining room table in the L-shaped dining room (diners at one end wouldn’t be able to see diners at the other end) touching the back of each chair; I hung up the phone loving my brother even more than I had before, but now I can’t recall a word that either of us said. My parents arrived a few days later — they’d scheduled the trip months before to meet Pudding — and I remember almost nothing of that visit other than one day we had a great deal to drink at lunch, and then we all took very long naps, and then Edward made Ovaltine and toast for dinner.
The day my parents left, we left Savary for good and began traveling.
But before this, we had one day — this is very strange, it’s the last day I remember really clearly — when somehow everything was slightly better. Not all right at all, but one day we made jokes and actually laughed at them. A day of grace. We knew that something very, very terrible had happened, but it seemed to have happened to someone else, perhaps to someone very dear to people dear to us, a friend of a friend we’d always heard stories about. There was sadness in the house, but it didn’t have us by the throat. Even as it happened, I wondered what it meant. Was it possible that already we were returning to ourselves?
Things got much worse after that.
The journey from Duras to Holt — from the farmhouse by a vineyard in France to a four-bedroom cottage not too far from the North Sea — was Odyssean. That felt right. It felt good to do hard physical travel away from . . . away from everything. First we drove north to a small village near Angoulême, where we spent two nights with old friends of Edward’s — dear friends of mine now, too — and where I was very poor company.
Then we drove to Nantes, to drop off our rented Peugeot. Then we caught a train, and then a bus, to Roscoff, where we spent the night in a hotel looking over the harbor and wandered around all day until it was time to catch the overnight ferry to England. We got off at Portsmouth and took the train to Penzance, where Edward’s parents picked us up. We spent three nights at their time-share in Cornwall, where I continued to be poor company, rode with them to London, two nights there, took the train to Suffolk, where we met up with Edward’s parents again at their house. Three days later, in my mother-in-law’s loaned VW, we drove to Holt.
Somewhere in there was Mother’s Day. We were with the friends near Angoulême. I lurked in a far doorway and smoked and drank wine by myself. My parents were still in France, and I had to call my mother to wish her a happy day, but I didn’t want to. Was I a mother, I asked myself, and despite Lib’s beautiful e-mail I still don’t know the answer. I want to tell that sad version of myself, Of course you’re a mother, just one who’s learned a hard lesson. I want to tell that sad version of myself, I’m sorry, no, it’s tough luck, he died before you met him, people keep track of such things, and if we call you a mother, then where does it stop? It was the uncertainty that seemed unbearable to me. Even now. This year I had a very glorious baby with me, but was it my first Mother’s Day, or my second?
Those weeks were miserable with