Free An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir by Elizabeth McCracken

and let me through only after a long lecture about not overstaying my six-month tourist allowance. In Portsmouth, the thin border guard perked up further, in the manner of a dog who, already sitting up straight, sits up straighter to show that he’s obeying a command and deserves a biscuit. In fact he looked like a Jack Russell terrier with dreams of being promoted to bloodhound. He began to leaf through my passport.
    “It looks to me as though you’ve spent most of the last two years in the United Kingdom,” he said with a certain joy. I couldn’t figure out how he’d arrived at this theory.
    “No,” I answered truthfully. “Three weeks a year, at the most.”
    “Well, that’s not what it looks like to me,” he said.
    We went back and forth. My years as a librarian always help me in such situations: I am very good at keeping my cool with officious, insistent strangers, though my training is on the other side of the desk. I was miraculously polite. Even so it seemed for a while that he might put me on the next ferry back to France. What will I do? I wondered. I pictured myself alone on the ferry, having been manhandled on board by some as yet unseen immigration thug. I tried to explain myself, I tried to remember the exact dates and circumstances of my handful of visits to England. Again and again he told me that it seemed that I’d been illegally living in the United Kingdom. I shifted from foot to foot for forty-five minutes as he did his best to catch me in an inconsistency.
    When, exactly, might we be moved to unpack the shoulder bag, show him the death certificate of very recent vintage, open the tiny blue nylon sack, and pull out the wooden urn of ashes with the brass plaque underneath that said, Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006 ? Look, we might have said, something terrible has happened to us. Grant us a tiny bit of grace no matter what you think.
    Two things saved us. First, I explained that Edward planned to immigrate to the United States at the end of the summer.
    “Have you begun that process?” he said.
    I reeled off the name and number of every single form I’d filled out.
    Then he asked us what we did for a living, and I said tiredly, “We’re writers.”
    He perked up again, like a Jack Russell terrier who dreams of being a famous Jack Russell terrier. I’d seen that look before: As it happens, I fancy myself a writer.
    “Books?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said. “I’ve published three, and my husband has published two.”
    That seemed to do the trick. He took down the particulars of my passport, stamped it, wrote down a code, and waved us through. We were almost free when he called out —
    “Would I find your books in a bookstore?”
    “Yes,” I said as pleasantly as I could, backing away from him. I could smile for only so long. I was worried I’d wasted my year’s supply on this man.

H ere is a character from a gothic novel: the woman with the stillborn child. Her hair is matted and black. Ghosts nest in it. Her white nightgown is mottled with blood. In her hands is an awful bundle: the corpse she cannot bear to put down. She sings lullabies to it, rocks it in her arms. She says in a pleasant but tremulous voice, Would you like to see my baby? He’s such a nice little baby. Such a little, little baby. Shh: he’s sleeping .
    Maybe she’s a ghost, dead in childbirth herself. Better hope for that. Ghosts are terrifying but not so bad as a woman ruined by the death of her child.
    I was not that woman in the months after Pudding’s death. I didn’t weep in company. I mostly didn’t mention the fact that I had been pregnant, that everything in my life was supposed to be different. I felt bad that I made people feel bad for me. I was corseted by politeness: I could feel my organs, rearranged by pregnancy, squeezed now in completely different directions.
    But I felt like that gothic character. At least, I felt like people looked at me as though I were, whenever I did mention the baby