ONE 1 It got suddenly very quiet in the exam room. I was just over six weeks pregnant, at the fertility clinic for a follow-up ultrasound to make sure my pregnancy was on the right track: not ectopic, not an empty egg sac, not a false alarm. There were five of us crammed into the tiny room: a young doctor doing the ultrasound; the senior doc who'd overseen my fertility treatments; a nurse; my husband, Alastair; and me-lying on the table with my feet in stirrups and an ultrasound wand plunged up into my ladyparts. Seconds earlier, the doc wielding that wand had been providing a running commentary on what we were seeing on the screen-a friendly little tour of my reproductive organs: "Right here's your cervix, here are your ovaries, and this, you can see, is your uterus-nice thick lining there-and right here … we should be able to see the … uh…" There was (forgive me) a pregnant pause. I held my breath and waited for the bad news: the embryo was gone or dead or implanted in the wrong place. This was going to be just one more disappointment, one more defeat. Who was I to think that my subpar reproductive system could actually sustain a pregnancy? And what had we been thinking, telling our parents the good news the same day we got a positive pregnancy test? Stupid, stupid, stupid. The doctor now maneuvered the wand until it felt like it was horizontal inside me.
"OK, so," he finally said. "We appear to be looking at two pregnancies." Two pregnancies? I thought. What the hell does that mean? How can one person have two pregnancies at the same time? Unless … "It's twins?" I said, idiotically. "Yep," said the doc. "Congratulations." I looked up at Alastair, dumbstruck. I might have smiled a little, in a "holy crap, can you believe it?" sort of way.
Mostly, though, I was searching for reassurance, proof that he didn't hate me for this. After all, it was my lazy ovaries, and their subsequent dosing up with fertility drugs, that had gotten us into this. And anyway, why had I been so eager to start down the road of fertility treatments? We'd only been trying for a year before we went the intervention route. We could have kept at it a little longer on our own. It might have happened. Looking at him, I wondered if he was thinking all of these same things, hoping he wasn't. But I've known the man since I was eighteen years old, and there are still times when I find his face difficult to read. For a man as funny and often downright silly as Alastair is, his smiles are surprisingly few and far between.
And although his eyes have an impressive capacity for twinkling-one of the qualities that drew me to him in the first place-his poker face is equally good. He gave me what could be vaguely interpreted as a smile, squeezed my hand, and then squinted back at the ultrasound screen. The older doctor, who had been sitting silently on a stool near the sink this whole time, finally spoke. "It's really something, isn't it?" His smile was thoughtful but smug, as if he'd known this all along. And maybe he had; my HCG numbers from the blood pregnancy test a few weeks earlier had been through the roof. Come to think of it, maybe that's why he was here in the first place. I looked back at the ultrasound screen, and there they were: two little black beans in a field of fuzzy gray, each with a small white spot in its center where a heart would soon grow. Something about the fact that there were two of them made them seem more alive, more human, than I think would have been the case if there were only one.
They were hanging out together. Keeping each other company. How strange. How utterly surreal. The doc at the controls hit a button and the image froze. "We'll give you that shot to take home as a souvenir," he said. Then he looked over my shoulder at Alastair and said, very seriously, "Are you OK? Do you need to sit down? You look kind of pale." "No, I'm OK," Alastair said, this time smiling for real.
"But you're sure there are only two in there, right?" Before we left the exam room, the doctors asked if we had any questions. Any questions? I had about a million, tumbling and vaulting through my brain: Can my (rather petite) body handle this? Will I be OK? Will they be OK? What if they're born premature, with all kinds of terrible complications? And while we're at it, how are we going to afford this? Am I going to have to quit my job? Are our careers / social life / sex life over? And, dear God, what if I just don't have what it takes to be a mother of twins? I'd been nervous enough about the prospect of one baby, but this? This was ridiculous. But the only question I could manage to choke out was: Could I really not eat cold cuts? Because of the bacteria or nitrates or whatever the reason was you weren't supposed to eat them when you were pregnant? Because I ate a lot of turkey sandwiches. "You're probably OK with turkey," the younger doc said. "But I'd stay away from the more processed stuff, like olive loaf." The older doctor nodded sagely. "I'd definitely stay away from olive loaf." * * * After shuffling numbly out of the clinic, squeaking our way over the shining, high-wax floors to the banks of elevators-I wondered how many other couples had made the same, dazed shuffle under similar circumstances-we had breakfast in the cafeteria on the first floor.
Alastair got a very large plate of eggs, bacon, and other classic oh-my-God-I'm-having-twins comfort food. I got a blueberry yogurt and a decaf coffee. We sat across from each other at a wobbly table, silent. I believe I eventually said something profound and articulate along the lines of "wow." What else could I say? This was far too much of a shock, far too much to process at once. Alastair, God bless him, was thinking much more clearly, and in a decidedly more positive vein. "You know, I've always worried," he began, "that if we had one baby, we might never get around to having another one. We'd get in the mind-set of having a two- or three-year-old and wouldn't want to go back to the whole baby thing again.
Or we'd be busy with our work and the timing would never be right." Alastair is an only child who'd always wished he had a sibling. Like me, he wanted very much for us to have two children. "And," he went on-he'd clearly done a lot of thinking in the elevator and/or while waiting for his eggs-"there would have been the fertility issues, too. We might have had trouble getting pregnant a second time. Or what if we had one baby first, and then had twins after that? That would be pretty tough." This way, he reasoned, we got our two children in one fell swoop. And yes, it would be hard, especially at first, but we'd do it.
"To be honest," he said, "I think part of me was hoping we'd end up with twins." No part of me had been. But I nodded, hmmed, and conceded all his points. They were good ones. They made absolute sense. Yes, yes, yes, this is good, I told myself. It's better than good. I'm excited.
No, really, I am. We're going to have two beautiful babies. It's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. It's gonna be great. And anyway, who was I to be choosy? For a while it looked like I wasn't going to be able to get pregnant at all, let alone twice at the same time. We had started trying a year and a half earlier, not long after we moved back to Boston after a two-year stint in Iowa, where I got my MFA in fiction writing-along with a hankering for a baby. The urge wasn't so much physical (no tingling ovaries) as psychological: I started feeling maternal around babies, instead of just vaguely amused and slightly annoyed.
I felt a growing sense of fondness and protectiveness for children. A few friends and acquaintances were starting to have babies, and when I held them, it felt more natural and more satisfying than it ever had before. For the first time, I could imagine myself as a mother. Meanwhile, I was starting to feel like something was missing-this despite the fact that life was actually pretty terrific. I was working part-time as an advertising copywriter, as I'd done before grad school, while also working on a novel. Alastair, who's a singer-songwriter and musician, played on the folk scene in Boston and beyond, with occasional brief tours elsewhere in the United States and in Europe. He also worked part-time teaching guitar lessons. It was a lovely, semi-bohemian sort of life, full of books and music and friends and wine.
A lot of wine. But at just shy of thirty-two, I was getting a bit bored with the total freedom of our lives. We were responsible for no one but ourselves, and one very low-maintenance cat. Holidays rang a bit hollow, and weekend days began to feel a tad roomy. One Saturday morning I had the distinct and very strange feeling of waking up and thinking to myself, "Where are the kids?" As if we really ought to have some, and we should all be going to a museum or on a hike or something. Or cleaning out the garage. You know, family stuff. Not that we were unhappy by any means.
And, granted, there were.