Beth and I sit in Dr. Florio’s office. My wife flips through the March 2000 issue of Parents magazine. She’s uneasy, rifling through the pages without looking at them.
I grab her hands, take the magazine away. “Will you just relax, honey?”
She inhales deeply, turns and looks at me. “Bite me.”
We’re here for the eighteen-week ultrasound. This time around we’re finding out the baby’s gender—that is, if my wife doesn’t have a heart attack in her OB’s waiting room.
I left Jack at home with Sasha. Jack is staying with us for a few days. Mom is up in Indianapolis with Aunt Claudia getting all of Grandma Louise’s affairs in order.
Grandma died last week. I tried to cry at the funeral and play the part of the heartbroken grandson, but it’s hard to get past the fact she was such a psychotic, racist bitch. Jeanine brought her fiancé, Marcus. They met in Portland when Jeanine was his physical therapist. Marcus is a professional basketball player for the Idaho Stampede of the Continental Basketball Association, and he’s black as coal. Grandma would have hated him, and I loved Jeanine for bringing him.
There’s a lot riding on today’s OB visit. One girl and one boy is the master plan. This pregnancy has no other option but a boy. Our new gay neighbors, Oscar and Marshall, told us to load up on red meat and salty snacks and for me to pound a pot of coffee before sex to get the Y-chromosome sperms swimming faster. Beth’s thong-wearing aerobics instructor with the store-bought breasts—I think her name is Shena, but I might just have Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” in my head—told her to have “as much sex as humanly possible” because more boys are conceived during the honeymoon phase of a relationship. Needless to say, I’m a fan of Shena. Beth’s hairdresser, Jodi, told her to let me initiate sex and focus on my pleasure because “if the man climaxes first, you almost always conceive a baby boy.” I like Jodi, too. Her hair is two-toned, blonde with dark roots. She has these wild sky-blue eyes that give her a hot, older-woman vibe, like Julie Christie in Afterglow. A lot of people say if they had a time machine, they’d go back two thousand years and meet Jesus Christ; personally, I’d just go back to 1965 and fuck Julie Christie. Jodi has been pumping out kids since her teens and sneaks out for a smoke every fifteen minutes. When she washes my hair, it feels so good I feel like I’m cheating on my wife.
Putting aside our friends’ learned advice, and Beth’s father being a pediatrician and all, we’ve done our homework on this one. There are fifty-one boys born for every forty-nine girls, so we know math is on our side. We flirted with trying the Shettles Method, which mandates “deep, penetrative intercourse no more than twenty-four hours before ovulation and no more than twelve hours past ovulation.” The Chinese Conception Method showed some promise, right up until we realized all our dates were wrong because we were using the Gregorian calendar instead of the Chinese lunisolar calendar. Ultimately, we settled on the Whelan Method—i.e., having sex at the beginning of Beth’s cycle up until four-to-six days before ovulation. Whelan doesn’t specify the level of depth or penetration like Shettles does, so I improvised. (I’ve narrowed it down to somewhere between “fuck me harder” and “fuck, that hurts.”) All I know is the Whelan Method involves more sex than most any other approach, so I’m willing to make the sacrifice—you know, for the children.
The door to the waiting room opens. A nearly attractive nurse with pinned-back hair and comfortable shoes holds a clipboard and smiles at us. “Mrs. Fitzpatrick?”
Dr. Florio smiles at my wife, her hand on her belly. “How you feeling, kiddo?”
“Not so good, to tell you the truth,” Beth says. “I’ve had a lot more nausea and a lot less sleep with this pregnancy.”
“Interesting.” Dr. Florio squirts the ultrasound gel onto my wife’s bulging abdomen with her right hand, follows up with the transducer in her left hand. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”
We eye the black and white sonogram. There’s only so much you can see four and a half months into a pregnancy, at least that’s what I remember with our daughter. With her translucent spine and huge head, Sasha looked more like a cross between a baby dinosaur and Patrick Ewing.
“Whoa!” I say. “That popped up fast.”
We see the back of our baby. It turns. We see a beating heart. “Hmmm…” Dr. Florio says.
Beth turns to her. “What?”
“Your husband was right. He did pop up fast.”
“He popped up fast?” I say.
Dr. Florio points to the baby’s now-obvious phallus. “Oh, he’s definitely a boy.”
Beth raises her hand. I give her a high five. She notices Dr. Florio’s pensive look. “Is there something you’re not telling us, doctor?”
“There’s a reason he popped up fast,” Dr. Florio says. “I’m going to turn the probe ninety degrees here and let you see for yourself.”
“Holy shit,” Beth says.
“What?” I say. “What am I looking at?”
Dr. Florio adjusts the transducer. “You’re looking at two heartbeats, Hank.”
“Come again?”
Beth puts her hand over her face. “I’m pregnant with twins.”
“That’s why you poked out so quick at eighteen weeks.”
“And that’s why you’re sicker,” I add, “and not sleeping compared to when you were carrying Sasha.”
“It certainly explains a lot,” Beth says. “I got the hormones of two boys raging inside me.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Florio says.
I shake my head. “Are you sure, Doc?”
She points to the video monitor. “There are clearly two babies, kiddo. The second one is just lying across the bottom, hiding almost. And they both look to be boys.”
“And this would explain the abnormalities in my AFP tests a couple weeks ago?” Beth asks.
Dr. Florio nods. “It totally explains it.”
I have no idea what the hell “AFP” means, but I give a confident, affirmative nod as if everything in the world now makes sense. I can barely get past page twenty of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. My interest always starts to lag in the middle of the Fibroids section, and I completely jump ship at Incompetent Cervix.
My wife is crying.
“Beth,” I say. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just a little scared is all.”
“These two boys look perfectly healthy, kiddo.”
“It’s not that, doctor,” Beth says. “It’s just that I’ve been reading up on vaginal births after a cesarean. I was really hoping with this pregnancy that I could at least try to—”
“VBACs aren’t for everyone. They’re not for most people, quite frankly.”
“I know that.”
“Least of all gymnasts and their narrow pelvises.”
“As you’ve told me before.”
“Let’s just cross that bridge when we come to it.” I run my hands through Beth’s hair. Brushing her bangs back, I kiss her on the forehead. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”