[Note: Thanks to Curious2c--this story was inspired by, though it's quite different from, his story "Triple Trouble".]
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I suppose you might think I was a complete idiot—the blindest, most stupid of husbands. But the thing is....
Well, first, hindsight is always 20-20. But beyond that, like most happily married men, I loved and trusted my wife. I had absolutely no idea that the woman I had loved and cherished for eight years, with whom I had shared so many intimacies and so many happy memories, was a selfish monster. Or, more accurately, one of a matched set of three selfish monsters.
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Molly's two sisters were a fact of my life, pretty much from the first time she and I ever dated. I'd never even met an identical triplet before, and it was both alarming and quite cool to see three look-alikes—make that three gorgeous look-alikes—when I went to Molly's apartment to pick her up.
We'd met at a grocery store when she asked me to reach up to the top shelf for some herbal tea she couldn't get to. Molly is only 5'2", curvy and voluptuous, with jet-black hair she wears short around her ears. I'm a bit over 6' so I was a natural person to ask for help. I didn't find out until our fourth date that she'd seen me in the produce aisle, thought I was cute, and waited patiently near the herbal tea until I came along so she could ask for help.
That was pretty flattering, I can tell you! And what made it even better is that when she told me, she was lying naked in my arms and we'd just finished making love for the first time.
Our first couple of dates had been really wonderful—we went to dinner and talked until nearly 11 pm, we took a walk in the park and fed the ducks, we went to a rather lame chick-flick and held hands throughout the whole thing. Pretty corny, right? But I was smitten, enchanted, transfixed.
Molly was by a long shot the most beautiful girl I'd ever dated—sexy in a wholesome, girl-next-door kind of way, with a smile that could melt the heart of an IRS auditor. After I'd fetched the tea for her, she chatted with me amiably, allowing me to think that I was picking HER up. And I was absolutely thrilled when I headed to the check-out line with a dinner date for the following Friday.
She'd said something vague about having sisters, but I wasn't prepared for three beautiful Mollys when one of them opened the door and said, "hi, you must be Scott."
I was tongue-tied. "Uh, you, you're, um, not Molly?"
She laughed, as charmingly as Molly had during our conversation in the grocery store, and said, "no, I'm Hannah. Molly and Amy and I are triplets—didn't she mention us?"
"Yes, I guess she did—but somehow I didn't hear anything about 'identical'."
Hannah laughed again. "Molly does that sometimes—just a little fun at your expense. I'll go get her—come on in."
There was yet another Molly in the living room, but of course this one was Amy. They all had the same haircuts, the same figures and the same dazzling smiles, so I didn't have a chance of knowing who was who until Molly came out of one of the bedrooms and said, "hi, Scott. Would you like a nice cup of herbal tea?"
During that first dinner date we talked about everything under the sun, but a lot of time was spent on Molly's life as a triplet. I was fascinated, and wanted to know all about what it was like. Did she enjoy seeing herself in two other faces all the time? Were they closer than most siblings—could they almost read one anothers' minds, the way identical twins are supposed to be able to do? Did they ever switch identities to fool people?
"I don't know if we read each others' minds, exactly," Molly told me, "but we are very close. I feel like I can almost always tell what Amy or Hannah is thinking, and they often do the same thing—like answering a question I haven't gotten around to asking yet, for instance. We've always been that way.
"As for fooling other people--" she stopped, and grinned at me—"I guess we've done a little of that sort of thing. You noticed that we all wear our hair the same way?"
I nodded, and she went on.
"As little girls we loved to fool people—our elementary school teachers, relatives, even our parents! They couldn't tell us apart either, amazingly enough. It was lots of fun, especially when Amy or Hannah got in trouble and wanted to avoid the spanking. 'No, Dad, I'm not Amy, I'm Molly!' "
She grinned. "You can pretty much imagine how it went. Probably drove Mom and Dad crazy.
"Then in junior high we all wanted to be different. For a while it really bugged us that people constantly mixed us up. So we wore our hair differently, and made sure to take different classes, do different activities. Like I was on the yearbook staff, Amy wrote for the newspaper, and Hannah played field hockey.
"But after a few years, we missed being interchangeable, so we went back to being look-alikes. Once in a while I'd take a chem test for Amy, or Hannah would give an oral presentation for me. It helped us all a bit with our grades, you know?" She grinned at me.
"And there was one time when Brad Hendricks asked Amy out on a date, our junior year. She was crazy about him, and when she got the flu the morning of their date she was beside herself. She cried and moaned, said he'd never ask her out again if she canceled the date. In the end, she talked me into being her for one night. It wasn't hard, because it was their first date and they didn't know each other very well anyway.
"Starting with date #2 Amy took over again, and they went out for almost a year. She never told him I'd been her stand-in!"
Years later, of course, I remembered that story with a great deal of bitterness. But as I said, at the time I was sitting across the table from a beautiful, funny, charming girl. I was already crazy about her. And the fact that she seemed to like me too was unbelievable—like a miracle.
The three girls had split up for college, and enjoyed aspects of being apart. But they also missed one another, and so all three had moved back to Cincinnati after graduation. They found a big apartment to share, and that's where I went to pick up Molly for our date—where I met her sisters for the first time.
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So—we can fast-forward eight years. Molly and I dated, we fell in love, and after two years we got married. I considered myself the luckiest man on planet Earth. I had a job in a graphic design firm, and since I had more computer experience than the older guys who ran the place I was a valuable commodity, so I was making good money. We could easily afford a nice three-bedroom house in Oakley Square, just a few miles from our jobs downtown.
And I guess you won't be surprised to learn who our neighbors were. Three years after Molly's and my wedding, Amy had married a tall, rather dull guy named Ted, who worked in financial services. He was perfectly friendly, just not very interesting. Anyway, they lived right next to us, at the end of a little dead-end street called Ferdinand Place.
Amy and Ted's yard backed up to the back yard of a house on Oakpark Place—and guess who lived there? Sorry, you don't get any points, because it was too easy. Hannah, of course, with her husband Arnold. Arnie was the complete opposite of Ted. He was a few years older than we were, a short, funny guy who owned several bowling alleys in the Cincinnati area. He smoked cigars—until Hannah browbeat him to quit—told amusing, frequently off-color jokes, and was terrific company. They'd gotten married a few months before Amy and Ted.
It was no surprise to any of the three husbands that our wives insisted on living so close together. There was a way in which they were almost like Siamese triplets, attached at the hip. Ted and Arnie and I were all used to the way they finished one another's sentences, or seemed to have the same ideas at the same time.
We also adjusted to their need to get together every night—and I mean virtually EVERY NIGHT—to chat for a while before bed. They'd meet in one of our three kitchens, around 9:30 or 10, and visit for a bit, then each one would head home to her husband.
Even after eight years of being with Molly, I could never tell with complete confidence which triplet was which, and Ted and Arnie confessed that they had the same problem. We all got very good at noticing what clothes each wife was wearing, or who had on a particular necklace or set of earrings. When we had Christmas with Pam and Donald, their parents, it was clear that they had as much trouble telling their daughters apart as we did.
This is not to say that their personalities were all the same. Amy was a little stiff, a little more prissy and conservative than her two sisters. Hannah, on the other hand, was the wild one—she drank a bit more, told a few more dirty jokes, and would certainly have been voted "most likely to dance topless on a bar" of the three sisters, though I don't think she actually ever did that. My Molly was in between, and I thought she was perfect: sweeter and more outgoing than Amy, but more level-headed than Hannah.
So it wasn't that you didn't notice differences among the sisters when we were all spending time together. Rather it was that you couldn't tell by sight or by voice which was which. Another way of saying it is, when they wanted to fool you, you didn't stand a chance.
Because none of us had kids yet, vacations were easy to plan. As you might have guessed, Molly and her sisters demanded that we vacation together as a six-some. So we took two weeks each summer and went somewhere fun: Las Vegas, or a beach resort in North Carolina, or Italy one year. We were a pretty compatible group, so the husbands didn't object.
But in return I insisted on a week away each year with just Molly—time for her and me alone, no Amy, no Hannah, no brothers-in-law. At first this was a genuine bone of contention, and there were some heated arguments and frosty silences. It took several go-rounds before Molly understood that I was dead serious. In fact it took three years before things came to a head.
"I love your sisters, and I have fun with Arnie and Ted—but I want some time for just us. Is that so hard to understand? That's my deal—you get the two week trip with all of us each year, and I get the one week with you alone."
I must have given some version of that speech about ten times. But it wasn't until the day before our Italy trip, when Molly came home from work and saw that I hadn't even begun my packing, that she gave in. Boy, was that an argument! But I said flatly that unless she agreed to a week away with me, I was staying home. She and the other two couples could go off to Italy without me.
There was more than an hour of yelling—none of it by me—and maybe twenty phone calls to Amy and Hannah. Both sisters came over to help Molly beat me down, but I wasn't yielding. They were happy to explain to me, over and over, how selfish and short-sighted I was being, and how no loving husband would be so inflexible. Etc.
In the end, Molly agreed to my demand, and off to Italy we went. But it was pretty cold between us for several days, and her sisters joined her in making sure I knew I was in the doghouse. If it hadn't been for the support of Arnie and Ted—who were secretly delighted that I'd won, as it meant they'd get the same deals from their wives—I might have given up and flown home early.
