Eventually it was Marilyn’s turn, and the nurse asked her to go back. Then she turned to me and asked, “Do you want to come, too?”
It’s one thing to head downtown when I’m in bed with a woman, it’s quite another when her legs are up in the stirrups! I swallowed hard and gurgled out, “Uh… uh… that’s okay. I’ll stay here.” She gave me a smirking smile and led Marilyn down the hallway. I felt like every woman in the waiting room was staring at me and finding me wanting.
Twenty minutes later, the nurse reappeared. “Mister Buckman? Could you come with me? The doctor would like to see you along with your wife.”
That jolted me out of my complacency! Doctors never want to see the relatives unless something really bad is happening! “What’s wrong? Is Marilyn all right? What happened?”
“Your wife is fine, Mister Buckman. Just come on back and the doctor will talk to you.”
That just meant that it was so awful it couldn’t be mentioned in public! I walked down the hallway as scared as I had ever been in my life. The nurse opened the door and motioned me forward. Inside my wife was up on the exam table, her legs stretched out and not in the stirrups, and covered with a sheet. She was looking at me with a smile. “What’s wrong?!” I blurted out.
“Nothing’s wrong, Mister Buckman. Your wife is fine,” answered Doctor Harrington. She was a middle-aged woman with a strong face and a bright smile.
“Then what’s the problem?”
The doctor rolled her eyes, so this must be a common enough occurrence. Marilyn answered, “Well, I thought you might like to see the ultrasound!”
“Oh!” I breathed deeply. “I thought… never mind. Yeah, okay, sure.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it,” she said peevishly.
“No, I’m fine. Sure, let’s do it.”
She looked only slightly mollified, and I moved closer and held her nearest hand while the doctor started her procedure. The ultrasound equipment was located on a rolling cart. She threw some switches, turning on a cathode ray tube monitor, and then she washed her hands and squirted some jelly on the end of a flat ended tube sort of thing, the transducer. The sheet was pulled away from Marilyn’s midsection, showing her oversized belly, and Doctor Harrington placed the flat end of the tube against Marilyn’s stomach.
Marilyn jumped at the contact. She blushed and said, “It’s chilly!”
Doctor Harrington laughed and said, “We keep it stored in the freezer, next to the stethoscopes. It will warm up in a moment.” She began moving the wand around and ghostly black and white images began flashing on the monitor. “Okay, here we go!”
For the life of me, I have no idea how anybody actually can read this stuff. The same goes for X-rays. It’s all black and white and weird shades of gray, and none of it looks like the pictures in the human biology books I’ve seen. Of course, I can’t see shit in a microscope either.
The doctor was still talking, half to herself and half to Marilyn. I wasn’t paying all that much attention, just standing there by Marilyn’s head and holding her hand. Then I started paying attention when she said, “Well, that’s interesting! Look at that!”
Huh?! “Look at what?” I asked. I just stared at the screen, looking at blobs of gray and white.
“Your children.”
I stood there dumb for a couple of seconds, and then replied, “Excuse me?”
Marilyn was grinning madly by now. “Twins!”
Doctor Harrington smiled and, while holding the wand against Marilyn’s belly, traced a pair of blobs on the screen with the index finger of her free hand. “That’s one head and that’s the other.”
I stared in disbelief. “Oh my God!”
I almost missed Marilyn asking, “Boys or girls?!”
“Girls!”
“Holy Christ!” I exclaimed. Now it was Marilyn holding my lifeless fingers. I just stared at the screen in horror!
“What’s wrong?” asked the doctor, looking at me with concern.
“Carl! What’s wrong!?” demanded Marilyn.
I stared at them, first the doctor, and then at Marilyn. “Twin girls? You’re sure?”
The doctor smiled and nodded. “Well, we won’t know for sure until July, but I’d put it over 90 %.”
“Twin girls?” Suddenly I felt light headed. The nurse grabbed a chair and pushed me into it. I took a deep breath and looked at my wife.
“Isn’t this exciting!?” she said.
Exciting? This was a disaster! All I could think of was what Maggie had been like as a teenager and what having two of her at the same time would be like. Yes, I knew Charlie and Parker were nothing alike, and I knew these girls would be nothing like Maggie, but still! Maggie hadn’t been a bad kid, but it’s never a good thing when your daughter knows all the deputy sheriffs in the county by name!
“You know what twin baby girls grow up into, don’t you?” I asked.
Marilyn was smiling now. “Tell me, what?”
“Twin teenage girls! Marilyn, how could you do this to me! One at a time would be bad enough, but two!”
“You bastard!” The doctor and the nurse just laughed at me, and Marilyn sputtered indignantly. Then she brightened even more. “Just wait, the next time we’ll have triplets! One, two, three!”
I slapped my forehead and groaned. “That’s an arithmetic progression — one, two, three, four. What if it’s a geometric progression!? One, two, four, eight… oh, my God! Marilyn! We’re getting a divorce!” Marilyn just laughed at me now. The doctor snorted and rolled her eyes.
I just sat there shaking my head while the exam finished and Marilyn got dressed. Marilyn was ecstatic about the idea of twin girls. I just shook my head in disbelief. At one point, she got so bubbly, I had to ask, “So, who’s the father? There’s never been twins in the Buckman family!”
“You bastard!” she laughed. “There have been a few in the Lefleurs.”
“Yeah? You guys have also been known to marry your cousins!”
She gave me another raspberry for that one. “These are all yours!” I was told. She wrapped me in a big hug. “This is so exciting!”
“Ancient Chinese curse — ‘May you live in exciting times!’”
“You’re just a fuddy duddy!”
“Let’s go.” I loaded Marilyn back into my car and headed, not towards Tusker and Tessa’s to retrieve Charlie, but kept going, down to the Dodge dealership in Timonium.
“Where are we going?” asked my wife.
“You’ll see.” I pulled into the lot and parked in front of the showroom. “Out!” I said.
“What are we doing here?” she asked.
I smiled at her. “Do you honestly think you can cram Charlie and a pair of twins into your midget-mobile? You need something a bit bigger.”
“I like my Toyota just fine,” she protested.
I nodded. She had liked her Toyota, but way back when, on the first trip through, after she drove her first Dodge Caravan she fell in love with the whole minivan idea, and kept buying them for the next thirty plus years, even after the kids were out of the house. “Just give it a shot. You need the room.”
We headed inside, where we were descended on by a pack of hungry wolves. Well, at least one hungry wolf. He took one look at Marilyn’s baby bump (which was really more than just a bump these days!) and gave a big smile. He was already spending his commission check!
To be fair about it, when Chrysler invented the minivan in the mid-Eighties it was a marketing breakthrough. It was a station wagon for baby boomers who wouldn’t be caught dead in their parents’ station wagon! Built on a car chassis, it was roomy and comfortable, handled nicely, wasn’t ludicrously expensive, and really fulfilled a need. Chrysler had only started selling them a few months ago, and nobody else had anything like them. For the next thirty years we probably drove every single type, and the Chrysler versions were generally above average. They invented them, and pretty much defined what they could do and be.