“What about that wedding six months ago?” Debbie asks Lisa. “Was it Kristen or Kirsten?”
“See! We don’t even know!” More laughter.
Though they complain about being everybody’s favorite mascots or diversion, they clearly revel in their popularity. “We were blessed with the gift of gab,” Debbie says. “We’re the icebreaker. Most people may think that’s overwhelming and exhausting, but the truth of the matter is—”
“We’re visionaries,” Lisa says.
“We have an infectious enthusiasm for life,” Debbie continues. “We infect people. I can’t name someone who’s met us in our lives who doesn’t remember us. Not me alone—there’s plenty of people who forget about me alone. But together, I don’t know anybody that forgets meeting us together. And that’s a twin thing.”
Lisa: “And that’s our twin slogan. …”
In unison: “YOU CAN ONLY MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION ONCE: WE MAKE IT TWICE.”
Debbie: “We exhaust ourselves.”
And sometimes, despite their effusive intimacy, they come to blows. “There’s a lack of respect that goes on between twins,” Lisa explains. “Because it’s like fighting with yourself. I could say curse words—things that truck drivers would say—but we don’t hold it against each other.”
“You know how you say the meanest things to those you love?” Debbie asks me.
“Vicious,” Lisa adds.
“It’s worse than being married,” Debbie says. “Because you—”
“Push buttons,” Lisa says.
“You can say anything you want,” Debbie says, “because we know in our relationship, it’s over in a second. If I say, ‘F YOU! DROP DEAD!’ two seconds later it’s like, ‘Are you going to meet me in a half hour to go shopping?’”
Speaking of shopping, Lisa does it for both of them. “I buy two outfits of everything,” she explains. “Debbie doesn’t come with me. So unless a store has two, I won’t buy it. I’ll walk in the store and say, ‘Can we try this on?’ And I see the saleslady look around, like, ‘Who are you referring to? Who is the we?’ I’m the only one standing there.”
How did Lisa become the designated shopper?
“Because I don’t like it,” Debbie says. “I haven’t gone shopping in twelve years.”
Do they relate to the many twins who have difficulty being seen as a set?
“They choose to be considered separate. We choose to share what we are.”
Debbie: “To answer your question—”
Lisa: “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I was.”
Debbie: “We believe that the people who have a problem with it are not the twins themselves; it’s society. Everybody our entire life”—she uses the singular—“since we were five years old, has been trying so hard to find the differences between us: Who’s taller, who’s skinnier, who’s prettier, who’s smarter, who’s sexier, who’s better. If everyone left twins alone, then you wouldn’t see all these talk shows with twins who hate each other.”
“Every day you’re being picked apart,” Lisa confirms. “Every day you’re being compared. People feel the liberty to say whatever they want, like we’re a circus.”
“It’s sort of like we always have to be on,” Debbie says.
“But you are always on,” I point out.
“For us, it works,” Lisa says simply. “We know we’re always going to get attention and people are going to stop us on the street, and we use it to our advantage because our business is related to twins. But for a lot of people, the attention is just annoying. They think, Yeah, we’re twins, whatever.”
Lisa wants to make it clear that they have existed apart—once. “When I lived in Australia for a year in 1990.” Debbie concedes that was the first time she got a serious boyfriend. “I ended up living with him, but it didn’t last.”
Has the twinship generally gotten in the way of romantic relationships?
“NO,” they answer in unison, as if anticipating the question.
Lisa now has a long-term boyfriend, Bill, who, she says, “embraces our twinship. He gets it. He leaves us alone. My boyfriend is very quiet—obviously because he wouldn’t have room to get a word in. So for him, he’d be happy sitting at home reading a book, while we want to be off doing our twins stuff and being on. Debbie and I had a fight in Paris on the Champs Elysées—a screaming fight in the middle of the street, while Bill’s walking along, ‘La, la, la,’ and we’re screaming, ‘FUCK YOU!!!!!!’”
They agree that any man who dates one of them has to know that the twinship takes precedence—no matter what hour of the night. “Lisa would call me at one A.M.,” Debbie says, “and after we spoke, my boyfriend would say, ‘Why didn’t you tell her it was too late to call?’ I’d say, ‘Because it was Lisa. She had to tell me something.’ ‘What did she have to tell you?’ ‘She wanted me to turn on Channel 2 because there was something on.’”
“Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Lisa remembers.
“‘Why does she need to tell you that?’” Debbie continues quoting her boyfriend. “‘Because it’s important.’ It’s a twin thing.”
Lisa tries to explain it with another anecdote: “We know a man who has been married for fifty years to an identical twin. He said to me, ‘Let me put it to you this way: If, God forbid, I had to stand on a cliff with my wife and her twin, and make a decision which one of us was going to be pushed, I might as well jump.’”
Donald Keith, seventy-two, a former army major who cofounded the Center for the Study of Multiple Birth with his twin, OB-GYN Dr. Louis Keith, is unapologetic about the seniority of twinship. “I say to people, ‘You as a mother or father are not going to get between those two people. You, as a spouse, will have your own place, but you’re not going to get between those two people. However, if you get between the two, look out. Because you may lose.’ My second wife couldn’t stand the relationship. She was against my being that close to Louis and talking to him every day. I could talk to him from my office but not from home. It hurt me and he knew it, and he was hurt. I’ve now been married to my third wife twenty-two years, and we’ve tested our patience with each other on many occasions because of what I did with Louis or for Louis. Because it came before what she wanted.”
“I think that anybody who marries a twin,” Debbie says, “has to understand that they’re marrying two people. Men who marry twins get all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of marrying two women.” She says it can be unsettling. “Two years ago I went out with a gentleman who was forty-seven, single, never been married, an only child. And we had one of the best dates I ever had. But afterward, he never called. Okay, so that could be a typical girl story. My girlfriend looked into it—she happened to be dating his buddy—and she said, ‘That’s odd that Jim didn’t call Debbie.’ And Jim said, ‘Yeah, I thought she was hot, but you know what? She’s a twin.’”
Lisa sums it up gravely: “He couldn’t handle that.”
Debbie: “He couldn’t handle the ‘We’ world.”
Debbie admits that her confidence as a desirable woman is shaken when Lisa’s not at her side. “I’m so used to being looked at, I could walk into a huge trendy restaurant with Lisa and I’d be fine. If I walk into that same restaurant and someone looks at me, and I’m by myself, I get very insecure. I think, What are they looking at? Sure, I could say to myself, Maybe they’re looking because I’m pretty or something. But I can’t. I am telling you, with Lisa next to me, I will dance on a bar; I can stand in front of a thousand people and give a speech. I could have stuff hanging out of my nose, or my zipper could be open, but when I’m with Lisa onstage, I’m in my element. Because they’re not looking at me; they’re looking at us. A guy once said to me, ‘I don’t want to know about your twin thing; what are you like?’ I froze and started to feel upset. Because I couldn’t answer him.”
Lisa underscores this: “The twins business is what we do; it’s also who we are. To divide the two is difficult.”
And they f
eel lucky for it. “Why does everybody want to be a twin?” Debbie reminds me. “We’re all looking for that relationship that twins were born with. Everybody wants to be loved that much.”
“It’s definitely a universal wish or aspiration,” affirms psychologist Ricardo Ainslie, who has treated twins, is the author of The Psychology of Twinship (1997), and whose mother is an identical twin. A Mexican-born forty-eight-year-old who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, Ainslie explains the idealized twin connection by invoking one of the prevailing theories about child development: that primary relationships are “symbiotic”—between baby and parent, or baby to baby in the case of twins. “There’s an experience of self and other as being one,” Ainslie tells me. “A complete closeness. A sense of immersion in another person that feels whole and complete and almost ideally satisfying. That’s at least one reading of what early childhood development entails. It’s a powerful experience that, in some ways, twins, because of the nature of their closeness, aspire to and sometimes feel: We understand each other better than anyone else does. We are closer than other brothers and sisters are. It’s a kind of magical intimacy. And it’s what we all look for in partners.” In his book, he writes about the common “wish to return to a symbiotic relationship—that is, a relationship characterized by a lack of self-other differentiation in which one’s needs are magically understood and met.”
Twins researcher Nancy Segal, a fraternal twin who has studied twins for three decades, affirms the mythos of twins: “For singletons especially,” she tells me, “I think you look into that world, and especially for people who are missing something vital in their relationship—you see a certain closeness and camaraderie. And you’re envious of it. Some people might be put off by it because they see it as a claustrophobic closeness, almost too much, a lack of independence. But I think that’s basically what we all crave: We all want to have somebody who knows us as well as our identical twin would have if we’d had an identical twin.”
Twins in love. It actually flashed through my mind more than once during my interviews—with the Barbers, the Ganzes, and with others: These two have a romance. Not in a queasy, freaky way, but in the sense of uncomplicated devotion and delight in each other. They weren’t careful. They flaunted their identicalness like a trophy. They prioritized each other without reserve.
Liza and Jamie Persky, friends of my oldest friend, Jane, live in different states—when we meet, Jamie runs a bakery with her husband in Stowe, Vermont, and Liza is single and a television producer in Manhattan—but they are in touch in a way that makes the miles irrelevant. We talk in one of Manhattan’s ubiquitous Pain Quotidien cafés one summer afternoon.
“We’ve never had a fight,” Liza confesses sheepishly. “We’ve never screamed at each other.”
Jamie says the only thing that maddens her about Liza is her lack of confidence. “It annoys me when she doubts herself. That gets so frustrating for me. Because for me to be happy, she needs to be happy. If I feel that she’s in a bad place, it’s hard for me to be in a good place. It never feels better to be doing better than she.”
The only thing they don’t tell each other is when they’ve been complimented.
“Like if someone says I’m pretty,” Jamie says.
“She is prettier,” Liza insists. (I stay neutral.)
Dr. Ainslie describes how twins recoil when people point out disparities: “There seems to be a feeling that the recognition of differences is experienced as a loss to oneself when one’s twin is being acknowledged,” he writes. “This sense of unequally distributed characteristics only exacerbates the feeling that one has lost something important. Recognition or demarcation of certain abilities or talents feels like a taking away.”
“If someone compliments me in a way that will make her feel worse, I won’t tell her,” Jamie says.
Similarly, when seventy-three-year-old Larry Gordon, a childhood friend of my mother-in-law, tells me that he and his identical twin, Gerry, both applied to University of Michigan, he won’t tell me which one didn’t get in. “What you’re asking is who didn’t make it,” he says without smiling, “and I don’t want to answer that.”
The Persky girls are often holding hands in childhood photographs. They shared one room, one best friend—”It was always awkward because this friend knew she could never be closer than we were to each other”—and they didn’t reach out to other people. “To make friends, you need to be lonely,” Liza explains. “There has to be a need. … We don’t need anybody else.” I notice she used the present tense. “Which is probably why we were single for so long.”
They lived together both in college and after graduation, and they joke about being so protective of the other that they will suffer if necessary. Liza tells the hilarious example of when their expensive haircuts went awry. “Jamie sat in the chair first,” Liza recounts. “The stylist says, ‘What do you want?’ We’re like, ‘WHATEVER!’ I’m sitting behind her—she can see me in the mirror—and he cuts her long beautiful hair so it looks chopped off, like Stockard Channing’s in Grease. It was awful. I’m sitting behind her and the tears are welling up, like, I can’t believe this is happening!” She mock sobs. “I’m not saying a word. And then he’s done; he styles her and he’s like, ‘So, what do you think?’ I’m like”—she makes her voice meek—“‘It’s great.’ And I get in the chair like I’m going to the gallows. He says, ‘Same thing?’ I’m like”—more stage sobs—“ ‘Yes, please.’ ”
“She got the same terrible haircut,” Jamie marvels.
“I couldn’t let her go through life looking like that alone,” Liza adds.
Their first real “individuation” was when Liza moved to New York. “We were twenty-six and I’d never been on a plane without her,” Liza confesses. “Jamie wasn’t even going to drive me to the airport, because we thought we might have panic attacks in the car. I said to people, ‘I know what it’s like to leave my parents; I know what it’s like to leave home. I don’t know what it’s like to leave Jamie.’
“I will never forget saying good-bye. Oh my God! It was like Dead Twins Walking. We were both thinking, When are we going to actually say it? I remember getting out of the bathroom stall, looking at each other, and just crying.”
I ask when that was, and they both blurt without hesitation, “September 20, 1992. 8:01 P.M.”
Jamie says her marriage could only have happened because Liza left. “I wouldn’t have met him if she’d still been living in the same city,” she says.
“Jamie and I didn’t date much before that,” Liza admits.
“Because we didn’t do anything apart!” Jamie explains. “No one knew us differently. We didn’t know each other differently.”
“I think there’s something about being twins,” Liza ventures, “where you stay younger longer in a weird way. It’s infantilizing.”
“Growing up, we didn’t develop, boywise,” Jamie adds.
“Nor did we want to,” says Liza, clarifying. “We had no desire.”
“My husband’s only the second person I’ve slept with,” Jamie admits. “Literally, if Liza had stayed in L.A., I wouldn’t have dated my husband. I’d have rather spent time with her.”
The hardest moment in their twin romance was when Jamie got engaged—on their birthday, no less. “I didn’t even tell Liza right away when it happened,” Jamie admits.
Liza remembers it was a blow. “I was trying to figure out what the feeling was; it wasn’t jealousy. It was that this was the first thing that was so different between us, the first time there was something separating us. When I went to get fitted for my bridesmaid’s gown, I sobbed in the Vera Wang dressing room. And then I said to myself, Pull it together. I didn’t want to bring her down or have her be worried about me.”
“Cut to my wedding.” Jamie smiles. “It was literally like WE were getting married: Liza and I.”
“I told my mom before her rehearsal-dinner toast,” Liza recalls, “‘Mom, don’t forget this
is about Mark and Jamie. Not Jamie and me. Seriously, Mom, you have to mention Mark.’”
Jamie laughs. “There are more wedding pictures of Liza and me standing together than there are of me and Mark together. I swear.”
“All the speeches became a roast of our relationship,” Liza adds. “And it didn’t even seem weird.”
The Perskys are in Manhattan to celebrate their fortieth birthday the night after our interview. Jamie has flown in for the party, leaving her husband back in Vermont to tend to the bakery. (He ends up coming and surprising her.)
“When I travel, I don’t have to pack anything,” Jamie boasts.
“Her entire birthday outfit tomorrow night? All my clothes,” Liza says proudly.
“Her moisturizer, her socks, whatever I need—” Jamie says.
“—I’m going to have it,” Liza says, finishing for her. “And we can even sleep in the same bed. My apartment is small and I don’t have a sleeper sofa.”
“We play games,” Jamie says. “‘Confessions.’ We do ego boosts: ‘You looked SO good the other night.’”
“‘Tell me what you love about me,’” Liza adds. They both laugh.
• •
Like the Perskys, my sisters-in-law, Fern and Sharon, have a twins romance, which they believe may have stunted their social life. Though they both ended up happily married, Fern didn’t find someone till she was forty-six (thank you, Match.com), and she does believe their twin interdependence hindered her confidence and nerve.
“I remember in grade school not talking to other kids and actually pretending to talk to someone,” Fern recalls as we sit in my parents-in-law’s apartment in a Chicago suburb. “So if someone was looking at me from a distance, I wanted it to look like I was talking to someone, but I wasn’t. It makes me sad just thinking about it. I remember not knowing what to say to anybody.”
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