An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [30]
“It doesn’t look like we need to go through that,” said Olivier. He’d been wonderful, calm, warm. “We could —”
“No,” I said. “Let’s not.”
“No,” he agreed, and I could hear the relief in his voice.
The midwives had said that the umbilical cord was looped around his neck and that the amniotic fluid was low, but we’ll never know what happened. I’m fine with that. No one explanation, no one moment I can worry over, rub at in my brain, saying, There. If only I’d done exactly that differently.
Still, pregnant for the second time, some days I just imagined that I had done everything wrong, and was doing everything wrong all over again. All chemicals seemed dangerous; ditto substances organic and dirty. Mothballs, mice, Febreze, mold, lead dust, flies — baby killers, every last one.
Anyhow, one of my kind and eloquent colleagues talked to the landlords, and they agreed to hire professional cleaners, and that was that.
No, I insist: other people’s children did not make me sad. But pregnant women did. In the waiting room of a Saratoga Springs ob-gyn practice, for my first visit, I watched the other women. The practice was next to Saratoga Hospital, which we could see from the back windows of the grubby rental house. One woman had brought a toddler boy, who held in his lap a plastic toy that played “The Wheels on the Bus” in a doorbell-to-hell electronic chime. A younger woman tugged at her low-slung maternity jeans as she backed into a chair, and then she patted her stomach. “When are you due?” asked the already mother, and the young woman answered, “Friday. I can’t wait.” I have nothing in common with you, I thought. That shows I had already forgotten the one lesson I’d vowed to learn: you can never guess at the complicated history of strangers.
All of a sudden I missed Savary, missed being the only woman in an unwed mothers’ home: I wanted to go away with Edward and not mention anything to anyone until we had an actual baby to show off. If we had an actual baby to show off. The waiting room end tables were piled high with pregnancy and parenting magazines, every one as sweet and awful and toxic as the Febreze-scented curtains back at the house. And then I felt toxic, outgassing pessimism, worry, bad luck.
Even the paperwork was intolerable. I checked boxes and wrote terse explanations. Previous pregnancies: 1. Living children: 0. Explanation . . . The receptionists were being raucous behind the glass window into their office, but when the young woman took my clipboard and reviewed it she looked up at me, full of sympathy.
I sat back down and flipped through the stacks of magazines until I found a copy of O, with a cheerful, childless Oprah Winfrey on the front. Then the nurse called me in.
First the familiar urine sample. I carried the half-filled cup, as directed, down the hall to a far examining room, which was disconcertingly decorated with wood paneling and pheasant-patterned wallpaper and pheasant-themed prints. The doctor was a man in his fifties; the office was his. It felt like the den of a befuddled father of many daughters, the place he went for a little manly time alone with his pheasantalia, only to discover that no matter what, he was chased by damnable women who insisted on offering him cups of urine before dropping their pants. He flipped through my just completed records.
“This is your first pregnancy?” he asked. If I hadn’t become pregnant again, I might have gone years without saying it. This was the first time of many; I’d say it every month, then every week, then twice a week. “I had a child who was stillborn.”
The doctor was pleasant and kindly, but he seemed unsure of how to respond. Medically,