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

or his death or my pregnancy. I could almost see myself with my uncombed hair and filthy nightgown, the tiny corpse in a winding sheet in my arms, walking down a nineteenth-century street as I knocked on doors. I could hear my voice: Would you like to see my baby?
    This for the merest reference to what had happened to me.
    I was a character from an opera who might at any moment let loose with an aria, and generally people tried to cover it up with conversational ragtime. People changed the subject. They smiled uncomfortably. Some tried extraordinary juggling acts, with flung torches of chitchat and spinning scimitars of small talk.
    They didn’t mention it. They did not say, I am so sorry or How are you?
    I felt in those first weeks, meeting people I knew, like the most terrifying object on earth.
    Who knows what other people think? Not me, and especially not then. Still it surprised me, every time I saw someone who didn’t mention it. I am writing this and trying to remember how it felt at the time, and trying to imagine what people were thinking. I am trying to remember what I have thought when I’ve done the same thing, all those times I didn’t mention some great sadness upon seeing someone for the first time. Did I really think that by not saying words of consolation aloud, I was doing people a favor? As though to mention sadness I was “reminding” them of the terrible thing?
    As though the grieving have forgotten their grief?
    I remember one lunch with people who loved us in London early on, two of the most excruciating hours of my life. Nothing but that endless juggling: Other people’s jobs and boyfriends. What kind of wine to order. This was two weeks after Pudding died. I might have been something like that gothic character one step short of total ruin: I wanted to rock and sing lullabies and hold out my torn, bloody nightgown and run my hands through my wild hair, and yet I knew you weren’t supposed to do such things in polite society. My hair was uncombed, and my face was puffy from lack of sleep and crying and too much wine, and my clothes were what I’d salvaged from the middle of my pregnancy, because of course even though people might pretend nothing was out of the ordinary I had the body of a woman two weeks postpartum, soft and wide around the middle, and if I’d been one step worse off I might have lifted my shirt up to display my still livid stretch marks.
    But I didn’t. I could feel how uncomfortable my mere presence made people feel, and I couldn’t bear it. So I sat in this Indian restaurant and listened. Sometimes a piece of palaver came loose and shot straight toward me, and somehow I caught it and tossed it back.
    All the while, all I could think was: Dead baby dead baby dead baby .
    And I know everyone around that table was thinking the same thing, every single person.
    I’ve never gotten over my discomfort at other people’s discomfort. When people say, What have you been up to, I hesitate. I will tell myself, Now, if this were a husband or father or sister who died, you wouldn’t simply omit the fact . If I say anything, people mostly change the subject anyway, and I can’t say that I blame them.
    I’ve done it myself, when meeting the grief-struck. It’s as though the sad news is Rumpelstiltskin in reverse. To mention it by name is to conjure it up, not the grief but the experience itself: the mother’s suicide, the brother’s overdose, the multiple miscarriages. The sadder the news, the less likely people are to mention it. The moment I lost my innocence about such things, I saw how careless I’d been myself.
    I don’t even know what I would have wanted someone to say. Not: It will be better. Not: You don’t think you’ll live through this, but you will. Maybe: Tomorrow you will spontaneously combust. Tomorrow, finally, your misery will turn to wax and heat and you will burn and melt till nothing is left in your chair but a greasy, childless smudge. That might have