One and the Same (12 page)

Gil refuses to let Avi disparage himself. “I think being a Harvard Law School graduate and now being a U.S. attorney—it doesn't get much better than that,” he says. He goes further, describing Avi as a “BMOC” in college when Avi was at Kentucky and Gil was at SUNY-Binghamton. “I'd come visit him,” Gil recalls, “and for a New York Jew to achieve such prominence in Kentucky—it's unheard of. It's the first time I felt such pride in my brother's achievements. Before that, any achievement he got meant that I was probably a little jealous because I didn't get it.”

Gil recounts that when he was recently honored at a Manhattan dinner for his chief residency, he knew immediately whom he wanted to invite. “Aside from my wife, I wanted my brother there,” he says.
“Because I always think that Avi's strengths are partially what drive me to achieve also. I think I am who I am today because of the competition that I had with my brother back then. And I want to make him proud of me.”

A fraternal twin I'll call Daniel (he preferred a pseudonym) is clearly still bitter about being labeled the less smart one all his life. “When I told my brother that you were interviewing me, he said, ‘Be kind.' Because he still thinks that I'm resentful, having always felt myself the vanquished.”

He describes how the family's adulation of his brother colored everything. “You don't want to get rid of your twin, but you do want to get rid of your twin,” he says, recalling the feeling. “There are all sorts of fantasies of killing them off or keeping them around. You go back and forth.”

Even birthdays are tainted. “I always have to remember to get him a birthday card on my birthday. To this day, I can't just have
my
day, where I don't have a chore.”

It was years of psychoanalysis after college that pulled Daniel out of the worst of it. “That's when I started to process what it was like to have this experience of constantly being under his thumb in some ways. And how difficult it was. It's funny, when I hear someone is having twins, my first thought is, Oh, I'm so sorry. Both for the twins and for the parents. For the parents because I know how hard it is, and for the twins because I think it's harder than not.”

Hating one's twin is rare and definitely carries an extra stigma—as if it's particularly awful to loathe the person you're supposed to be closest to, or to spurn the friendship other people wish they had.

Gertrude (she preferred not to give her last name) is eighty-five years old and lives in a retirement village in Southern California. She doesn't hold back when it comes to her twin experience: “I feel like it ruined my life, very frankly,” she says in a coarse, effortful voice on the phone. “I've had a hard time with it ever since we were born.”

Gertrude and her sister grew up in a small town in upstate New York. “I know there are twins who bond as early as intrauterine,” Gertrude says, “but I wasn't one of them. I was told that I pushed and pummeled and scratched her. She seemed like an appendage who clung to me her whole life. … I looked after her, even though my true feelings were to find a way to drop her in a hole somewhere. I had the sense that she wanted to become me—to crawl inside of me and be me. I had a real identity crisis at seventeen, started to punish myself, lost sleep, had symptoms of sickness.”

Gertrude says there was no distance between them, hard as she tried to create some. “Oh, I could never shake her,” she says bitterly. “We were always together. … She made me stay with her, walk with her. We slept together, went to college together. She was always there. I couldn't lose her.”

Today, Gertrude's twin lives in a senior facility many hours away. “She calls me very often,” Gertrude says, sounding drained by it. “She pushes me to tell her I love her, calls me ‘sweetheart.' I try to return her affection, but I have trouble summoning up real feeling.”

How much does she see her sister these days?

“As little as possible.”

It's hard for me to get a handle on why being a twin was so suffocating for Gertrude.

“I was never my own person. I always had to consider my twin. I didn't belong to me. I can't see that there was anything positive about it. I feel as if I lived half my life. … And here I am; I got to be this old lady. Now I just take it easy, do a little sculpture, painting, and try to put it out of my mind.”

But as soon as I chalk this story up to an anomalous case of twin disgust, Gertrude surprises me. “I care what happens to her,” she announces suddenly. And then, even more incongruously: “I think I would feel devastated if I lost her.”

Fraternal twins Sheila Lambert and Erica Frederick, sixty-one, who are both slim and olive-skinned in a way that suggests Middle Eastern
blood or decades of tanning, didn't speak to each other for three years and now spend every summer weekend together. “It's almost like we had to have this separation,” Sheila ventures, “to figure out how much we value each other. And to leave the baggage of ‘Who do my parents prefer? Who's the smarter? Who's the better-looking? Who's this? Who's that?' Those three years helped us leave all that behind.”

So their parents constantly compared them?

“I don't think they actually did, but it was our
perception
that they did, and certainly that others did,” replies Sheila. “And we always thought the other came out ahead in that comparison. … Each of us thought our parents thought the other was smarter.”

“And the favorite, too,” Erica adds.

Their childhood loyalties were not to each other but to their separate friends.

“They delighted in putting a wedge between us,” Erica recalls.

“And we let them do it.” Sheila nods.

What precipitated the breach decades later was one misinterpretation on top of another. When neither called to sort it out, silence set in. “It was really just a horrible time,” Erica says, sitting in her spacious office at Manhattan's Hebrew Union College, where she's executive vice president of development. “Such a huge hole in my life, in my heart.”

Their grandmother's ninety-fifth birthday broke the stalemate. “We were sitting together,” Erica recalls, “and I guess we just said, ‘It's time.'”

“Since we reconnected,” Sheila adds, “I don't think we've had even one fight. We never spoke about the period of estrangement. … To this moment we've never discussed those three years.”

Dr. Michael Rothman, supervising psychologist at New York's Beth Israel Medical Center, says the groundwork for competition is laid before birth. “Twins are not favored equally in the womb,” he writes in “The ‘Twin-Self' System.” “And thus one twin, by circumstance of biological randomness, is a weaker womb-dweller than the other.” The notion that twins are battling in their earliest moments—for
nutrition in the womb, then to get out, then for mother's milk and attention—is explored in Rothman's review of the psychological literature on the subject. He cites psychoanalyst Dr. Susan Davison, who reported in 1992 on her observations of one set of twins, Luke and Mark. Davison “describes events that occurred in the twins' third and fourth months that reveal the beginnings of a rivalry as each twin developed a stronger awareness of the other. … As the mother would tend to one twin, the other would cry and bawl hysterically. … There appeared to be an intense competition brewing in which attention was the primary yet limited commodity. … Of particular distress for the boys was witnessing the other being breast-fed.”

Rothman quotes Davison's article, “Mother, Other and Self—Love and Rivalry for Twins in Their First Year of Life”: “‘By 3 months the twins were exquisitely aware of not being each other: Mark could tolerate mother attending to Luke, but not the sight of Luke breastfeeding. He “knew” he was not having something Luke was at that moment having and what's more he wanted it too. At 4 months it was slightly more complicated in that Luke began to protest when mother left the room, and it may not be too fanciful to think that for her to return with Mark seemed to him like a betrayal. His lovely squeals and shouts were not good enough, Mark had only to cry from the next room to steal their mother away from him, and then insult was added to injury when Mark was breast-fed despite Luke's insistence that he wanted mother for himself.'”

Rothman sums up the inborn strain between twins: “Born into an environment in which need-gratification is not a simple matter, twins must immediately engage in what remains one of their most salient relational patterns: They must both compete against and collaborate with each other in order to attain the sought-after nurturance from their parents.”

It makes sense intuitively that, like any newborn mammals, there would be a fight for sustenance. But the fact that this congenital opposition is happening alongside a primal intimacy strikes me as
somewhat contradictory. And, in fact, Rothman does emphasize that twins have an instinctive benevolence alongside their feuds: “As important as it is to acknowledge that competition is part of the twin relationship, as one will always achieve something before the other,” Rothman writes, “they still function as intimate companions capable of soothing each other.”

It reminds me of one of Klagsbrun's quotes, which I underlined when I read her book: “Both the rivalry and the closeness may be fueled by the same thing: alikeness.” That to me encapsulates the tension of twinship. Klagsbrun elaborates on this when we talk. “You want to be treated the same and you want to be treated differently. You want to be alike and you want to distinguish yourself.”

Journalist Lawrence Wright underscores the same idea in his 1997 book,
Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are:
“There is one side of you that wants your twin to be exactly like you in every detail, a perfect replica, but another side of you is struggling for air. You feel like you are being smothered by the sameness.”

Janet Lee Bachant had a heightened kind of rivalry in childhood, because she was the third wheel in a triplet set: Her two triplet sisters were genetically identical twins, while Janet was the odd fraternal sibling. Even though she was one of a threesome (still exceptional when they were born, in 1944, prior to the use of widespread fertility treatments), and even though they were all dressed alike till age twelve, the other two—Nancy and Karen—were the standouts: They were the identical twins and an inseparable team. “I'd say it was my first memory,” Janet tells me. “That they wouldn't play with me. I played by myself.”

The isolation was compounded by the attention the Bachant triplets received, not just due to the phenomenon of their birth but because their father didn't live to meet them—he died on the beaches of Normandy in August 1944. A news story several years later followed up on how the triplets were faring, and quoted Janet's mother,
who'd remarried: “The twins stick together. And Janet gets pushed around. Sometimes they gang up on her—though she has learned to protect herself. She has to—with the two of them pushing her about. … They don't want her to play games with them.”

Janet had the advantages of being seven minutes older, prettier, and a more deft musician. But she is always the one standing apart in photographs.

Now sixty-four years old and a psychologist, Janet lives in Manhattan and talks to her sisters more than she sees them, since Karen is in London and Nancy in Seattle. She's closer to them these days, but it's obvious her childhood exclusion left scars. “No question that it was the central, informing event in my life,” Janet says flatly. “I did feel like a triplet because that's what I was always told that I was, but I never felt like a twin. In some way I felt outside of something.”

She says it led to a necessary, healthy independence, but also a permanent extra-sensitivity. “Certainly in the present day, when things happen in which I feel left out, I get really triggered,” she tells me. “It must be automatic. We all went to Normandy a few years ago to mark my father's death, and at one point we went to a flea market; Nancy and Karen were shopping up and down the rows of the market when all of a sudden they were just gone. I went back to the car, looked up and down the street, and it turned out that they'd decided that they were going to go to lunch; so they went to a little café. I was apoplectic.”

The distrust she learned as a kid, Janet believes, later informed her romances. “I'm in my second marriage,” she says, “and I would say that my earlier relationships were characterized by being involved with people who were not available to me.”

Her social unease is similarly traceable. “Glibly, I say, ‘I was born in a group, and that was enough groups for me.' I don't enjoy being in groups. I think that probably comes directly out of the whole situation.”

When I spoke to Janet's triplet sister, Nancy, who runs a theater
company outside Seattle, she said that the twin-plus-one dynamic didn't last: “I'm closer to Janet now than my twin. Maybe because Karen is away in London. Sometimes being as close as identical twins are can bring a lot of friction, as well. Maybe there's relief in having another one who isn't the same as you.”

When I ask Rabbi Wolpe why he thinks the Bible renders its twins as mainly combative, he ventures that it reflects a fundamental need: to be distinct. He paraphrases an apt line from the W. H. Auden poem “September 1, 1939”: “Auden says something about it being the struggle that's bred in the bone, not to be loved but to be loved alone. In other words, we don't want to be one of many; we want to be
the one,”
Wolpe explains. “For nontwins, if you're the younger child, it's more clear: The older child has already been established and has been there awhile, so you come into a world in which there's a struggle for primacy, but it's already assumed that there's someone ahead of you, with all that that implies. But as a twin, it's got to be very hard. Because you can't even be unique. Not only can you not be the only one; you can't even be the unique one.”