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 sca
rs. “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.”
Caroline Paul, forty-one, said she and her twin gave up trying to be special or to surpass each other; they just wanted to keep up. “We didn’t want to fall behind, because we were constantly judged against each other,” she says, cuddling her cat, Femur, in a temporary apartment in San Francisco’s Protero Hill District. “Somebody who is born single doesn’t have a measuring stick next to them. But twins always do. So either you don’t stand next to each other and you have totally different lives or when you do stand next to each other, you make sure you’re just as good.”
Caroline and Alexandra Paul were legendary beauties and athletes in their small town in northwest Connecticut; both are still striking, lithe, intelligent, and fit—and each often felt she was none of those things next to her sister. Both women have been rescue workers. Caroline actually was one—she was a firefighter for eight years—while Alexandra played one for five years on TV: Lt. Stephanie Holden on Baywatch.
“I was only athletic because she was athletic,” Alexandra says when I interview her in L.A. at the sun-filled condominium she shares with her husband. “I’m twice the person I would have been if I were a singleton because I strove to be more like her—my whole life. If she wrote a poem, I’d go write one. I never played with dolls because she didn’t dig dolls and I didn’t want to admit that I did. And I would practice and practice swimming, but I would never be as good as she.”
That’s not how Caroline remembers it: She recounts the story of how, when both girls were training in their hometown lake, Alexandra outdid her by doing the butterfly stroke across the entire two-mile expanse and back. “She probably didn’t tell you that,” Caroline says.
She didn’t.
“Don’t let her tell you I’m more athletic,” Caroline continues. “We were very good swimmers, and part of it is we were ridiculously focused. We used to do extra laps. We used to have fights in the middle of the lake, because if she started zigzagging, it meant she was getting more of a workout, and I’d have a fit and scream, ‘STOP! You’re zigzagging!’ Because that would mean I’d have to zigzag, too. And you were not allowed to stop; if you stopped, you were a total wimp. That’s how highly competitive we were.”
Psychologist Nancy Segal says twin competition is not so much about beating the other as matching her. “I see identical twins competing not to outdo one another but to stay abreast,” she tells me. She has researched elite twin athletes who are born with comparable physical prowess and drive. “When I read about how they feel when the other one wins, it’s such selfless behavior,” Segal says. “It struck me the first time that this can’t be real, but I’ve seen it repeated over and over again.”
Dr. Ainslie writes that “competition can also be a source of differentiation.” In other words, twins compete to stake out their own personas. And, he says, they know instinctively that by honing separate skills, they might be able to avoid going head-to-head in the same sphere. “Carving out different interests or areas of expertise,” he says, can be “a means of avoiding competing directly with each other.” So one twin decides he’s going to be the math/science twin, the other, the English/history twin. “So I can get straight A’s in my area, and you can get straight A’s in your area,” Ainslie says. “But if we’re both in math together, one of us is going to get a better grade. If we’re both in swimming together, one of us is going to be in first place, one of us will be in second. It’s easier for me to be independent, to do something else, and just let you keep swimming. At least that’s what you tell yourself. Although there will inevitably still be activities both of us do, and if I’m on the B team in tennis and you’re on the A team, then I still feel like shit.”
The Pauls were not particularly close when they went off to different boarding schools, and Alexandra wrestled with acute anorexia.
“I was devastated by it,” Caroline recalls. “But we didn’t confide in each other at the time. … It’s funny, because I started mimicking anorexia later, while she was still struggling. I was losing weight and doing the same food issues. It almost felt like it was a learned thing, like, Woah, she’s doing it; I’ll try it.”
Dr. Joan Friedman tells me she frequently sees anorexia in teenage twin girls, she believes, because identical twins are expected to be equal and harmonious, not encouraged, or allowed, to be overtly competitive the way normal siblings are. “That’s the only way they can be competitive with each other: Who can get thinner than the other one?… It’s this silent competition that filters through their relationship. But there’s such a need to say, ‘I want to beat you. I want to be first. I want you to find out I did this ahead of you or better than you.’ That’s what regular siblings do: They’re overtly competitive and everyone knows that’s the nature of the game. Parents are comfortable with that because it makes sense: Siblings are genetically different. But identical twins are forced into this perspective of being absolutely the same, and the way they keep their relationship stable is by having the competition and the comparison as a subterfuge, under the surface.”
Alexandra admits she hid the worst of her illness from her twin, the same way the two never really discussed how they’d always privately measured their academic and athletic achievements by each other’s. Caroline writes in her 1998 memoir, Fighting Fire, “What you could be walks right next to you all the time.”
It wasn’t until much later that they started to share the truth about themselves. In fact, Alexandra was not the first to learn that her twin was a lesbian.
“I told my brother before I told her,” says Carol
ine, who came out at twenty-four. “I don’t know why; because I wasn’t settled in it. For me, it was just going to be a big secret, and then it kind of leaked out.”
Was she nervous about Alexandra’s reaction?
“Yes,” Caroline replies. “It mattered a lot.”
“She’d had boyfriends,” Alexandra tells me. “But it turns out that in high school and college she also had girlfriends; I just didn’t know it. So one day I called her in the morning in her dorm and her friend Simone answered the phone and sounded groggy, and I knew. Caroline got on the phone and I said, ‘Are you gay?’ And she said, ‘Yup.’ And I said, ‘Oh,’ trying to be incredibly open-minded. … I know I had a therapy session later that day, and I didn’t talk about Caroline; I talked about me—because I’ve always had issues about whether I was feminine enough. And so I was equating the fact that if she’s gay, I’m not feminine. It was all about me, of course.” She chuckles.
Alexandra has since become a committed gay rights advocate and relishes the chance to play lesbians on camera. “Actually, I’ve played two gay parts and I’m hoping to play a third soon,” she tells me. “I always tell people I’m half gay because my twin sister’s gay, so I have gay genes.”
These days, both Paul women get choked up when discussing each other—a far cry from when they were racing each other feverishly in their hometown lake. Talking to them individually, what comes through more than anything is how delighted they are to be so close at this point in their lives. “This is probably the most important thing about being a twin,” Caroline says. “You have a confidence in the world that no one else does. And that’s because you know you’ll never be abandoned.”
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