An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [8]
We didn’t call my occupant the Baby, which seemed inaccurate, cloying, and too optimistic. We were superstitious. For some complicated, funny-only-to-the-progenitors reason, we settled on the names Pudding and Wen (in case we were having twins, which, as the daughter of a twin, I worried about). Then the first ultrasound showed the single pocket-watch heart, and so it was just Pudding, boy or girl. What’s Pudding doing? How are you, Pudding? The baby ticking away was Pudding all September in Paris, and Pudding when we moved to the countryside in October. And then we had the amnio, and Pudding seemed to suit a little boy, the little boy we were making up day by day — I made him up literally, of course, cell by cell and gram by gram, and Edward and I made him up in conversation and dumb flights of fancy. Pudding! we’d say to my stomach. Pudding, what are you up to? Pudding was Pudding to us and soon enough to all our friends and family: everyone called him that. I couldn’t imagine naming a baby ahead of time, calling a baby by his earth name before he was a citizen of this world. Naming seemed a kind of passport stamp.
But it was one of the first things we were told, after we found out that he was dead: the baby needed a name. I was sitting outside the first hospital of the day, waiting with Sylvie, the midwife who we’d found to deliver the baby. She was a sinewy woman in her midforties who spoke about ten words of English but was hugely enthusiastic. We’d just heard the bad news. I was more than forty-one weeks pregnant. It was late April and the weather was fine and it was better not to be inside any kind of medical room for the moment. Sylvie was holding my hand. Soon we’d go to a different hospital. This hospital was only for living children. They didn’t do autopsies. We needed an autopsy. Sylvie and I sat across from two teenage boys who were smoking, and more than anything I wanted to ask one for a cigarette but I didn’t.
The language of disaster is, handily, the language of the barely fluent. I kept saying to Sylvie, Je ne comprends pas. C’est incroyable. C’est incroyable. Edward was at the far end of the parking lot, calling his parents on our cell phone since we’d come to one of those moments of nothing to do.
You must find a name, Sylvie said. For the certificate.
How could we pick a name out of the handful we’d idly considered? How could we do that to him? Oh, I don’t mean to be maudlin, and I do not believe in some lousy afterlife where babies who don’t get to be born are ushered off by a kindly black-and-white angel, a real creepy Boy Scout leader of an angel. I hate that fucking angel, cupping the downy heads of all those unborn babies, almost as much as I hate the phrase “unborn baby” itself, I am trying to disbelieve him so I don’t have to look at him, but he’s lodged in my head. He’s rounding them up, he’s saying, Come here, little souls, it’s not your time yet — tell me your name — what did your parents call you?
No more talk of angels. I can’t stand the tendency to speak of dead children as such. I do not want him elevated to angel. I do not want him demoted to neverness. He was a person, that’s all.
Edward came back from the privacy of the far reaches of the parking lot, still holding the cell phone. He wasn’t crying anymore, but he had been. I told him we had to name the baby for legal reasons.
“We’ll call him Pudding,” he said, in one of those moments that sounds improbably sentimental to me now but at that moment was exactly right. A new name would be only a death name, another way to say that he hadn’t exactly existed before now. How could he suddenly be an Oscar or a Moses? How would he ever find his way, renamed like that? His parents called him Pudding, always. Even now we do. It’s the name on the certificate the city of Bordeaux gave us in early May, certificat d’enfant