Twin beds seem to imply that you should never be sleeping alone. That said, the bedrooms of many children, in the time and place where I grew up, had only one twin bed per room. But not mine. My first bed was a double, and had an antique colonial-era frame my parents bought because it matched our house, which was built in the late 1700s. The bed had four posts with wooden cannonballs on top of them. It was a rope bed, which meant it originally had a grid of rope to support the mattress instead of a box spring. In lieu of the rope, my parents used a piece of plywood. This bed had probably belonged to a couple in New England hundreds of years ago. Their children would’ve slept in the same room, in a smaller bed called a trundle that, when not in use, was stowed under the main bed. I’ve always wondered how the parents had sex.
For me, the double bed was enormous, the floor miles away. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, I’d jump out of bed and make my way down the dark, creaky hallway to my parents’ room, standing at the side of their bed while they slept, their chests rising and falling in unison. Because I did this every night, my mother was never startled when she awoke to find me standing there, and would ask sweetly, What do you want, honey? I never knew.
There was plenty of space in my double bed for another child, but when I had sleepovers, my parents would pull out an extra mattress they kept under the bed (an homage to its earlier trundle) so my friend would have her own bed. I wonder why they didn’t just let us sleep together.
When Giselle and I returned home for Christmas break, I went to her house, since her parents were rarely there, and we sat in the cold on her deck and smoked clove cigarettes.
“I met a girl,” she said. “Her name is Sun-Li, and she fingered me.”
I’m not really sure that’s how she said it. I doubt it rhymed. But that’s how I remember it—that she’d gone off to school, met a girl, and had been fingered by her. I assume she fingered her back, but I can’t remember. I assume we discussed other things, like if they had kissed or touched each other’s breasts before the fingering, but I can’t recall that either.
It’s the finger that sticks out in my memory. A finger points, and in this case, it points to a fork in the road on my sexual map.
I knew I loved Alex when I found out she sang the instrumental parts of songs. I’d thought I was the only one who did this. We’d sing every note of the two-minute guitar solo in the middle of Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain,” going wee doo doo wee doo doo weeee uuuuu in a high-pitched falsetto.
She also loved Phil Collins as much as I did. We’d blast “In the Air Tonight,” not caring if it seemed uncool as we air-drummed madly and belted out its chorus.
One Sunday night in late January, Alex’s high school friend invited us to a party at his fraternity. We brought our friend Anna, who lived on the same floor in the dorms.
At the frat house, we drank cold red wine and danced to hip-hop in the high school friend’s room. He sat on the couch while the three of us danced in a line, sandwiched together, me in the middle, oscillating between Alex and Anna. We locked eyes with each other, challenging. We moved up and down, exploring each other with our noses and chins, feeling the warmth come through the denim.
With our eyes and hands, we asked him to join, but he waved us off. We began kissing, aware he was watching, but he fell out of focus, like the background of a photograph.
We moved to the couch where he was sitting, each of us straddling some part of him, our hands on the wall behind the couch, trying to entice him.
“Do you want us to take off our shirts?”
“No,” he said.
We were surprised and not surprised. Alex had speculated that he was gay, but with all the forced homoerotic behavior going on in fraternities, it was hard to know what anyone’s sexuality really was. We continued to make out over him, but it was clear he was uncomfortable, so we left him alone and walked home.
We went back to our separate dorm rooms. We lay down in our twin beds and went to sleep.
The next morning I instant-messaged simultaneously with Anna and Alex.
Anna: That was fun, but I don’t really need it to happen again.
Me: Right.
Alex: That was awesome. When can we do it again?
Me: Soon?
I took a political philosophy class and the professor assigned Plato’s Republic. I’d heard the word platonic before, to describe a relationship that didn’t involve sex, but I’d never connected it to Plato. I searched in The Republic for the origin of this idea but found nothing.
I felt distanced from the idea of a chaste love, since my one real college friendship had become sexual. I raised my hand in class to ask what a platonic relationship had to do with Plato, and my professor said it was discussed in another book called The Symposium, which wasn’t covered in the class.
At the end of the semester, he assigned Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. I had the flu that week and was bedridden in my dorm, so I read the entire thing cover to cover in one feverish go.
Atwood says: “Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere.”
I underlined this passage. I dog-eared the page. Tangled in my dirty dorm linens, I felt the need to masturbate. These words drew me in and anchored me. For a moment, they ceased my perpetual motion, my constant seeking. I became the paper in my hand. Shaking and then still.
I order The Symposium as I order so many books, at work, with one click. When it arrives, I am pleased to find that it is very thin. I don’t have much time to read these days. I spend most hours after I come home from the office tweaking scripts for ads about compact sedans, World War II video games, or the new brioche bun on a double cheeseburger.
The Symposium is the transcript of a drinking party. It’s funny and boisterous, a bunch of poets and philosophers telling stories and debating the nature of love. When it’s Aristophanes’s turn to speak, he describes a time when there were three sexes: male, female, and a combination of the two. Each was descended from a different celestial body, which makes them sound more like planets than people.
The shape of each [human] was completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck. Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears. There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you’d imagine it.
Zeus wanted to divide these original humans in half to make them less powerful, and he bade Apollo do it “as you might divide an egg with a hair.” I can’t help but see this as an embryo dividing in the womb.
After they were split in two, Zeus ordered Apollo to turn the face and neck so that “man might contemplate the section of himself: [and] thus learn a lesson of humility.” This punishment is also its own consolation. It allows us to face a mirror and imagine that we are gazing upon our twin.
The Rite of Spring is a ballet originally created by the composer Igor Stravinsky in the early 1900s for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The music was experimental for its time, using bitonality—playing in two keys at the same time. The effect is brutal and discordant. It sounds like animals dying. The choreography depicts a group of pagans doing primitive rituals to celebrate the coming of spring. When it was first performed on May 29, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, a riot broke out. The details of this riot are oddly mysterious, but many in attendance claim that traditionalists began to boo as soon as the overture began. Arguments ensued, vegetables were thrown, and nearly forty people were ejected from the audience.
An article in the Telegraph on the hundredth anniversary of the premiere wondered whether it was the music or the dancing that got people so upset. Musicologists
speculate that it could have been the “pulsating rhythms” but that it was “more likely that the audience was appalled and disbelieving at the level of dissonance, which seemed to many like sheer perversity.” Listeners were used to a certain order to the way notes were strung together. With The Rite of Spring, there was none. “At a deeper level, the music negates the very thing that for most people gives it meaning: the expression of human feelings. As Stravinsky put it, ‘there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring.’ ”
For an audience in 1913, the choreography was likely as disturbing. “There’s no sign that any of the creatures in The Rite of Spring has a soul . . . the dancers are like automata, whose only role is to enact the ritual laid down by immemorial custom. An iron necessity rules everything: there has to be a game of Rival Tribes, there has to be a Dance of the Young Girls, and an elder has to bless the earth. And finally, a young girl has to be chosen and then abandoned to her fate, which is to dance herself to death.”
We performed The Rite of Spring at the end of my freshman year.
Since its debut, The Rite of Spring has been adapted by many choreographers. The director of our ballet program, a white-haired Frenchman, improvised his version as we went along. All thirty of us were in the ballet—freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The twenty-three women played the roles of the potential sacrificial victims, and the seven men played the predatory sacrificers. We began with the first movement, which was an ensemble piece. The director showed us the steps with his body, instead of telling us with words. The atonal music, the odd time signatures—learning this piece was like a math problem. We counted the beats, sometimes eight per measure, sometimes ten.
During the first week of rehearsals, we never got past the first movement. The following Monday, he called my name in the hallway outside the studios.
“Can you come in here?” the director said, motioning to the smaller of the two studios. I followed him, expecting a lecture about skipping Pilates that morning. Instead, I saw Nils, one of the few male dancers, waiting for me.
“I want to do a little zing wis you two,” the director said as he put a CD in the portable player on the floor. A pas de deux, I thought. He fast-forwarded through the first movement of the piece until he found the part he wanted. A single trumpet sounded a warning signal, long and mournful, a high-pitched foghorn. The entire string section returned the call, reassuring and full, as though nodding its head and opening its arms in reply.
He placed me in front of Nils and put Nils’s hands on my shoulders, arranging us like mannequins in a store window. When the trumpet sounded, he instructed me to keep my feet in place and lean forward. Nils extended his arms until they were straight, creating an angle between the two of us. When he let go, I was to step quickly away from him, chin high, gaze focused on some point in the middle distance, as if I were sleepwalking. We weren’t dancing together anymore; it was just me. Nils was set dressing, statuary. The next steps were a series of piqué turns en pointe, traveling in a large circle around him. I finished the turns at the trumpet’s most plaintive moment, then shuffled back to him, awash in the ebb of violins and cellos.
“Good,” the director said. To show us what to do next, he played my role, holding one of Nils’s hands high above both their heads, the other hand out like a T, and kicked his leg up to the side. It was comical, a man in his seventies, in a loose button-down shirt and a pair of chinos and sneakers, being partnered by this nineteen-year-old boy. After these kicks, the music changed, and he told Nils to let go so that I could be absorbed back into the crowd.
Later that afternoon, when it was time for the main rehearsal, the director had me do my solo in front of everyone. It was wonderful to spend the first movement of the ballet gyrating with the great mass of dancers and then to be thrust to the center, born into the spotlight.
“Very good,” he said, and everyone remained silent.
“Zhanette,” he said, and turned to extend his hand to Jeanette, a senior, as though asking her to dance. She took his hand and made a show of looking bashful—a half smile, eyes downcast.
“Zhanette eez going to be za sacrificee,” he said.
I did not let my disappointment show. My face was serene, my posture good. I’d thought I was going to be the main sacrificial victim. The lead. Instead, my small solo was just a prelude to her being chosen. The sacrificer was trying me out to see if I’d be good to kill. It turned out I wasn’t.
A ballerina is never supposed to show that she is in pain, though she frequently is. Some of the pain lessens over time, the stronger you get, the more flexible you become. Then, ballet can be transcendent. But no matter how good you are, there are still moments of great pain. There are falls, of course, but it’s the invisible things that plague: tendonitis, bursitis, stress fractures.
Beneath the peach satin of the ballerina’s pointe shoes are layers of canvas stiffened with glue that make the toe box strong enough to stand on. Between the canvas and glue and the flesh of her bunioned feet are the nylon mesh of her tights and the lamb’s wool toe pad, felted by sweat. Quite often there is blood. Blisters form, swell, and then burst, sometimes in a matter of minutes—sometimes in class or rehearsal, and sometimes onstage.
We cut slits in the bottoms of the feet of our tights so we could access these wounds quickly, sitting down on the dusty floor in the wings offstage. We tried Band-Aids, gel pads, more lamb’s wool, tape. None of it helped much. We plastered smiles across our faces and went back onstage, our eyes sparkling. The audience never knew. This was just as important a skill as an arabesque, a fouetté turn, a grand jeté.
Onstage, the large moon hung bright and heavy on the backdrop. The entire string section was buzzing, and we swarmed, running wildly away from our pursuers, hair flowing, arms flailing.
Horns stabbed the air. One! Two! Three! Four! On the fourth blast, fifteen women fell to the ground, each one at the foot of a man. The remaining eight women stood like the seven men did, arms in the air, palms up, as though trying to hold up the sky.
I was one of these women. We did not move. We looked down at our partners on the floor, our gaze calm and fixed. We were listening. A flute played as though speaking, pronouncing the time of death, as the spirits of the women ascended into the rafters. But the women on the floor were not dead. They rose to their feet, undulating like cobras, and we put our arms around them from behind, ensnaring them. In the silence at the end of the measure, they turned to face us, and we all took a collective breath. And then we began to dance.
The low boom of the timpani sounded the one of the four-count and the violins marked the other beats. One two three four . . . One two three four . . .
My partner was Sophia, my best ballet friend that year. We spent afternoons skipping class and ordering delivery from the local frozen yogurt shop. We smoked cigarettes out the window of her eleventh-floor dorm room. Despite the smoking, her skin was beautiful, never blemished. Her red hair made her white skin and blue eyes pale in comparison. She had no breasts to speak of, and not much of a butt. She looked like she could slide easily between two things.
Growing up, I watched reruns of the show where Patty Duke has an identical cousin, also played by Patty Duke. Under the credits, the two Patty Dukes play the mirror game. The theme song rhymes about their looking alike, walking alike, and talking alike.
Identical twin cousins are impossible, of course; twins can only come from the same mother, the same pregnancy. But perhaps this is too narrow a definition. What else do you call it when two people mirror each other? Maybe it’s twinning, a perpetual state of becoming more alike.
The thump of the timpani kept time along with the low string instruments. With my back to the audience, I faced Sophia, locking eyes with her as we matched each other’s movements, but unlike in the mirror game, we used the same limbs: my right arm, her right arm, my left foot, her left foot. To the audience, we were one body with four limbs. We never completely cove
red each other up.
The music changed. Horns shrieked and gongs shimmered like heat over asphalt. This was our cue to switch, for the women to assert themselves over the men. Now Sophia partnered me and I submitted to her, and it felt amazing to do this, to play the man and the woman within the same piece of music, in front of the same audience.
I think about how badly I wanted to dance a solo, to be seen and recognized. Wasn’t that wish at odds with my desire for twinship? But there’s a difference between having a solo and being alone. When you do a solo, there’s an audience cradling you with their attention. When their backs are turned, you’re alone.
My plan had been to quit college, but instead I quit ballet. It sounds almost accidental now. Some kind of administrative mix-up. As if I’d checked the wrong box and given up the thing I’d been doing for ten years instead of the thing I’d been doing for one.
It was the beginning of May, nine months after I’d come to Indiana, and I’d just danced The Rite of Spring in a beautiful theater built in the 1950s. A brutalist building with corrugated concrete interior walls and a rich red and pink carpet, swirled like a Pucci dress. The stage, large as the one at the Metropolitan Opera House, was the last one I ever performed on.
I want to go out on top, I kept saying. That’s what I told my parents. That’s what I told myself. I honestly can’t remember what I told my teachers. I know that I called a meeting and I sat in their office and told them I wouldn’t be returning.
Vanishing Twins Page 2