House Call

I signed up for a life insurance policy with my new job a few weeks back. I didn’t think anything of it, really. I checked the 3x salary box because it was very affordable. I thought, ‘This will come off really noble if I die.’ I thought, ‘If I die, and Jenny gets this check, she’ll think I did a good thing.’ Then I forgot about it.

Well, I guess life insurance isn’t some cheap thing you sign up for and forget about. No, it’s a little more complicated than that. Is it my age? I’m not sure. But a couple of days after I signed up for this life insurance, I got an email from the HR folks telling me I had to fill out a special health form by such and such a date.

I’m not a big fan of forms. Especially paper forms, where I have to hand write in all this information, which supposedly everybody already knows, like my social security number and birth date and marital status and disease history (which, in case you’re wondering, is totally clear). So I procrastinated and didn’t fill out the damn form until the last possible moment. I filled out the form and turned it into HR, and then I forgot about it.

Well, they wouldn’t let me forget about it. The life insurance company, that is. I’d say it was about a two weeks after I filled out the form that I started getting calls at my desk, at work. I don’t get many calls at my desk. Everyone emails and instant messages these days. Who actually uses the phone? When I got a call, I picked it up and said, ‘This is Darby,’ and I immediately heard that strange background noise that tells you it’s a telemarketing call. You know what I mean? You can hear about a hundred voices in the background, along with keyboard tapping, phones ringing, people talking urgenrly, and a general loud hum. There would be a pause. A long pause, then someone with an accent would start asking for ‘A mister Barbie.’ So I hung up. First off, get my damn name right. Don’t you think I might be sensitive about being called Barbie? Secondly, don’t they have a first and last name designation on whatever form you’re reading? Thirdly, if you can automate the phone call, can’t you automate something whereby there is no tell-tale pause? How about a voice or something that tells me, instantly, what the hell you want.

Well I endured about four of these calls until someone got through to me and told me what was going on. Hats off to this person. No pause, no craziness, just saying my name right off and saying, before I could hang up, ‘You must see a doctor.’ That worked. I had to have a doctor’s exam to be approved for this life insurance. Man, I thought. What a pain in the ass.There was that aspect of it. But, that wasn’t the big problem, not really. No, it’s more emotional than that. I’m the type that usually feels like the next doctor’s appointment will, in all likelihood, result in a dire prognosis. Essentially, I’m living random doctor visit to random doctor visit. I’m sure with each exam that the doctor will discover cancer, or worse, and what measly pleasure I wring out of life currently will be drastically reduced, if not eliminated.

But this got stranger. I learned in the phone conversation that this outfit could send a doctor to my house. Really? Like an in-house visit. It sounded so 1950s. I couldn’t believe it. Really? Sure, they said. Then we discussed visitation times, and eventually, we landed on seven in the morning a week off. That’s where I was a few days ago, bright and early, when the doctor knocked on my door. Somehow I’d managed to get up and put on some clothes.

I escorted the doctor into our dining room room, and we sat a table, and he asked me a bunch of health related questions, i.e. medical history, family history, social security number, etc. The whole thing was very odd, break of dawn, with this pleasant pudgy man sitting at my dining room table and mildly interrogating me. Tallulah stood and watched for a while, a Little Mermaid plate of Raisen toast in one hand and a cup of orange juice in the other. “What’s wrong with you, daddy?” “Where to start?” I quipped. Then I ushered her into the kitchen with Jenny. I had to give a urine sample. Not sure how to explain to a five year old why I needed to give my pee to a doctor. She went, reluctantly. The urine sample was done by going into my bathroom and peeing into a cup and a couple of vials, then placing caps on each vial to seal them. The cup had a thin black line across the bottom of it. Do I keep the cup or give it to the doc? Throw it away, he said when I started to bring it out to him. “What do I want with that?” I felt silly. But there was one thing I had to note. The pee activated something in the line, and a green 94 appeared. What the hell did this mean? The doctor nodded his head and said, “Good.”

Then it was time for the blood test. The doctor moved swiftly, pulling a kit out of a small cardboard mailer box. Talking all the while about Boston, where his son was in school, he plunged the needle and sucked out the blood, all painlessly. He had small, stumpy fingers, and they were adept with the needles, the rubber band around my bicep, and the guaze pad he applied to the teeny wound. The entire time, my hand is lying on his knee, and my daughter Tallulah is calling my name through the closed door.

We talked briefly while the doc held the gauze pad for a few moments to my small blood wound. He seemed impressed that I’d traveled some, earning the remark, “You’re one of the cool guys. People here in the South, they never leave.” He wasn’t from the South himself, not that I could tell, because when I asked him where he was from, he sort of shrugged. He didn’t want to say.

After the doc left, I wondered, for a little while, if he was legitimate. I’d asked for his card, but he’d scrawled out and address and written a new phone number. I could barely read the handwriting. What was happening here? My thoughts raced. He’d just poked me, taken my social, and taken a bunch of my urine. What could a stranger do with this information? I looked the card over intently. Was this a real service or part of some crazy scheme that I’d stumbled into, all under the ruse of “life insurance.” He’d said the blood was for an AIDS test; but what if he was some incredible con man, what if he’d given me AIDS? That was it, surely. The life insurance company sent the man here to give me a disease so…..

Don’t be crazy, I finally told myself, despite the fun I was having. There in the door, watching his headlights back out of the drive, I shuddered. A part of me wanted to run across the lawn, hail him down, and invite him in for breakfast. I needed more. I needed to know more. I needed to trust him. Maybe he could be my doctor in Atlanta? Maybe this whole strange affair could amount to something. But I didn’t move. I closed the door when the headlights faded into the dawn. I picked up Tallulah, and I started answering questions about the thick, blood splotched band-aid in the crook of my elbow. “Daddy, what’s wrong with you?” she kept asking. “Nothing,” I said, finally, lying really. “Daddy’s perfectly fine.”

Twins

By mid-October, I'll be the father of twin identical girls, names to be determined. Jenny is twenty-six weeks into her pregnancy. At thirty-four weeks, the babies will be delivered.

The whole business is utterly shocking. We wanted another kid. We planned for another one. We got the positive test on the home pregnancy kit. And then a week later, after Jenny visits the doctor, we get floored with the news. Jenny told me in our little bedroom here in North Druid Hills, in the dusk of a Spring day, with Tallulah crawling over the bed and babbling. It's funny when a change in your life occurs like this; the revelation does not come suddenly. It's just a little fact that's kind of attached to you, just attached, barely. You're aware that a huge change has taken place, that it is inside of you and likely irreversible; but you do not understand it. I mean, me, of course. I did not get it. I knew it was happening to us, to me, to Tallulah, to our lives. But I did not feel it, not the way I am beginning to as the moment of their arrival approaches.

When Jenny was being examined by her doctor, he said to her, 'Congratulations.' Then he said, 'Hold on.' He did a little more looking. 'Congratulations, again,' he said. It's not much of a story, really. But it's a powerful one for me. It's funny, and crazy, and deeply personal. A small two word comment that will reverberate for years in my life.

I wish I'd been there. I wish I could have seen the look on Jenny's face. I can imagine it, sure. I've seen her stunned several times. But this just seems like a wholly different enterprise. Twins.

What I always first think about, when I think about these twins, is the total unpredictability of it. Whatever you feel about life and living and all that mess, you have to admit, you don't know what's going to happen next. You really just don't know. It never occurred to me that I would be the father of identical twins.

I should correct myself. The thought did cross my mind, but only after Jenny was pregnant and before her doctor's visit. We were at a Braves game. We were standing in line for the so-called "Running of the bases" on a hot Sunday afternoon. A few places up from us in line was a mother with two beautiful twin girls. Jenny makes light of it now, but this is what happened. I said, 'What would that be like? What if that happened?' She didn't really say anything that I can remember; and I let the thought go, although now I can clearly remember their appearance.

Now I am not one to believe in the things you'd need to believe in because of this incident. I only think it's odd, strangely coincidental. And I didn't consider the twin thing that deeply at that moment. If I think about it now, I only thought, 'Those kids are beautiful.' And they were, two blonde hair tots in plaid green dresses.

What I think about the most now is the fragility of life that Jenny carries in her body. There is a difference in carrying one and multiples. Statistically, of course, it's more dangerous for the life of the babies, what Jenny is undergoing. But that is not what I mean to say. There is something more immediate or visceral about the bodies, the actual twin bodies, inside of Jenny. There are two of them in there, almost like a club of kids, twisting and turning around each other.

Jenny gets sonograms every week. Sometimes I go with her. A few weeks ago, I sat and held her hand while they squirted a gel all over her bare belly and then started probing with the x-ray rod. It's horrible, crude photography, to be honest; but every so often, we could get a glimpse of both of the girls, suspended in the dark amniotic sac. We could see, crystal clear, however fleeting, their teeny hands and feets, or the exact articulation of their small, curved spines. Then the image would shift, or a kid, would move, the whole splatter of shades of gray was turbulent, unreadable. A few moments later, staring at strangeness, Jenny would relax her hand.