An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

actual trees. We would have knocked on anything . It’s amazing we didn’t fling ourselves into department stores, asking desperate directions to the furniture department, please, monsieur, quick to a bedpost, as we wondered what the wood-knocking statute of limitations was, after you had said aloud something that required it. Later Edward admitted to me that when he was alone in Bergerac, he went into the church and lit candles for Pudding’s safe arrival. He put his hand on his wooden bedside table so often that he was surprised it didn’t take on the shape of a loose glove from erosion, like a stone he’d seen in Santiago de Compostela that has been touched by centuries of pilgrims.
    Pregnant with Pudding, I didn’t buy baby clothes, told my family not to buy baby clothes. And then, when I was six months pregnant, I broke down. My first purchase was two pairs of tiny baby shoes in Bergerac: a pair of loafers and some light blue leather boots with mod spaceships flying across the toes.
    “I thought you weren’t going to buy anything,” Edward said.
    “These are not for Pudding,” I said. “They’re for some other little boy.”
    And with that it was easy to start buying clothing, and easy to start a memoir all about my happy, uneventful pregnancy. Easy to thumb my nose at the evil eye. We knocked on wood and made wishes, but by eight months all the wishes I made were like a smug joke I had with myself. I knocked wood and I wished on stars, but sometimes there was something else to wish for, something that hadn’t already been taken care of, and so I did.
    I just thought he was a sure thing.
    I wrote about our doctors, my search for a gym in the French countryside, what we ate, our friends down the road. It would make a good book, I thought: I’d end it with the three of us leaving France together. I tried not to write sentences that made it sound as though he were already born and things were fine, because I wasn’t willing to tempt the evil eye that much. Eventually I wrote 170 pages. They’re still somewhere on my computer.
    That’s another reason I wrote down, This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending: I was in the habit of narrating my daily life.
    I didn’t write a single word of this second book during my second pregnancy.

H ere’s what else we didn’t do when I was pregnant the second time.
    Knock wood. Light candles. Tell ninety percent of the people we knew that I was pregnant. Have an amniocentesis. Pick up pennies. Wish on: stars, white horses, alarm clocks reading 11:11, wishbones, blown dandelion fluff. Buy baby clothes. Pick names. Find out the baby’s gender. Come up with an in utero name: the kid was “the kid” or “whoever it is” or merely the unspoken result of “if everything goes right.” Begin sentences, “After the baby’s born . . .” Toss spilled salt over left shoulders. Give a fuck about the number thirteen no matter where it showed up.
    No matter how much we wanted to.
    I can’t remember how long we’d known that Pudding was dead before we declared that we would have another child, or which one of us first said it. Certainly it was within minutes of hearing the bad news, and we both kept repeating it, not because we were done with this baby, but because that sentence — we’ll have another child, we’ll have another child — was like throwing out a towline. It was like believing in the future instead of in the place we were at that moment. We vowed to try as soon as possible.
    “But not in August,” I said after a while. August was when Pudding was conceived. August meant an April or May baby. That seemed like too much.
    And then we left France, and I decided to be practical about everything. I was thirty-nine, I wasn’t going to toss away a whole month like that. Anyhow, what were the chances? How could we count on anything?
    So I couldn’t say, We will have another child. Instead, I said, “I hope we can have another child.” It