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

grounds.
    Then Edward said, “Look!”
    Huddled together under a nearby tree were about thirty does. In my memory they look slightly worried, twisting their heads over their shoulders — to look at us? wondering where everyone else had gone to? All our married life, Edward will say, Look, and point, and it will take me several moments: he has spotted the heron, the big brown hare, the cardinal so red it can only be called cardinal red. He grew up in the country. He sees the wildlife. I reflected on this truth as I watched the beautiful kaffeeklatsch of does worry beneath their tree. Then I looked to my right.
    My God.
    In the wide open, in a dip in the land, were hundreds of deer. Hundreds . Fawns, does, stags, everyone, in a giant herd, the stags marshaling the edges.
    “Look,” I said.
    The deer moved around one another. They shifted, but they didn’t flee. We could see another car stopped on the other side of the pack, and two people on foot. We bipeds held still.
    “I’ve never seen a stag in the wild before,” Edward said. I said, “Well, then.”
    Finally we drove away. We had to get on the road; it was time for the rest of our lives. On the other side of Holkham Hall, the mawkish entity orchestrating all of this threw in for good measure a clump of stags, fifteen maybe, standing behind a knoll, and when we passed by they ducked down like juvenile delinquents as though to hide. Their antlers still forked up.
    I don’t believe in omens. Still, it’s nice to see Nature try her best to persuade you.
    But if you ask me whether this felt like closure, I’ll tell you what I’ve come to believe:
    Closure is bullshit.

W e were lucky that Edward was standing in the grubby kitchen of our rental house in Saratoga Springs when I came down the stairs with the pregnancy test: we were lucky he was in the United States at all. I suppose I was aware that generally speaking, immigration to the States is no cakewalk. I have seen the movies about green card marriages, but we had been married three years, with pictures to prove it, no quickie job at the courthouse (cheap secular weddings being more suspect), but in fancy dress, with caterers. When we’d lived in the United States before, Edward had gotten short-term visas from the University of Iowa, first as a fellow and then as a teacher. We assumed it would be easy.
    It turned out to be very complicated, very fraught, and very boring. Suffice it to say that having applied outside of the country, Edward was supposed to wait until the U.S. government agreed to grant him an immigrant visa. This would take at least six months. The U.S. government, recognizing the difficulty of a long separation, had invented a different kind of visa that would allow a citizen to bring a spouse or fiancé in the meantime. The wait time for that sort of visa was also six months.
    In Norfolk I had written letters explaining our case. I called and e-mailed every number and address I could find, explaining why we couldn’t bear to be separated come September, when I would have to go to New York to start my job. My father’s boss found a lawyer with connections at the INS who helped us for free, but by summer’s end the application had made it through only the first of three governmental offices.
    Every time I called the American embassy in London for advice, using the pound-a-minute help line, I got a different answer. Finally I was told: it was legal for him to come with me to the United States like any tourist as long as he understood that he’d have to come back to England to get the visa to allow him to go back to America to get his green card. Completely legal. Of course, it was also completely legal for the border official to turn him back immediately if he suspected that Edward had no intention of leaving the country to finish the process.
    Edward dressed in his best clothing, bought a necktie at Heathrow, organized all his immigration papers, rehearsed his explanations, bought the