One and the Same (10 page)

“I guess I do have visions of us, at some point, just doing a me-and-you trip,” Paul says.

“That suggests your carving time out from your family,” George challenges him.

“Yes—let's say, going on a trip to Moscow together,” Paul replies.

“So the effort on your part would be carving time out from your family.” George is pushing the point, it seems, to make sure he's hearing Paul correctly, or maybe to hold him to a promise.

“But we all know that that trip would be impossible right now.” Paul appears to back down.

“It's not impossible; it just requires effort. People do it.”

“They do.”

“It just comes down to: What are your priorities?”

“It's true. In other words, would I like to do a trip with you to Moscow? I would fucking love it. I think it would be totally hilarious and fun.”

“I see a more realistic scenario where my family could get closer to your family: I could bribe you with real estate.” (George has been making more money.)

Paul smiles. “You could.”

“For example, if I was to rent a house that would have room for your family, you would find time to spend with me, because of the functionality of making
your
kids happy.”

“Done.” Paul slaps the table. “In fact, you said you were going to get a ski house upstate. I'm all over that, baby.”

Dr. Joan Friedman, an identical twin and mother of fraternal boys, who counsels twins in Los Angeles, published a book called
Emotionally Healthy Twins
in 2008. She says part of what backfires for twins is the idealization of their intimacy. “If you buy into the romance of twins, you don't give the twins any capacity to feel ambivalent about it. In my relationship with my sister, there was no room for us to articulate any negative feelings. We twins are supposed to have ESP, telepathy, be soul mates since birth. That's what people project on twins. It's almost like if you tell people you're not best friends, they're disappointed. If you don't have ESP, they're disappointed. When you're thrust into that kind of closeness with someone, in order to safeguard a sense of self, you can't be completely intimate. Because being open and honest would mean you'd be willing to be mad, or say ‘I hate you,' or ‘I don't want to take care of you.' Twins are socialized very early to get along. So you can't really be authentic. Parents are told that twins aren't supposed to fight, hate each other, get angry. Because they're twins. That label is so laden with all these stereotypic ideas.”

Robin confirms this burden when I ask her how she feels when we argue. “I hate it. I feel like even as close as we are, we don't totally tell the truth. And that's really hard. You'd think we could say the hard, horrible thing, and we kind of can't. There's a protecting of each other. There's so much tiptoeing, and you'd think we wouldn't have any.”

On the other hand, we go full throttle in our pep talks when one of us feels down or anxious. Nancy Segal explains this pattern in
Entwined Lives:
“An identical twin may be the best source for most
types of assistance for which we would normally rely on other people, such as emotional sustenance. … This is because, genetically speaking, helping an identical twin is like helping oneself.”

Even if my turning to Robin actually counts as self-help, it looked pathetically like overdependence when Robin pointed out that the pep talks typically go one way.

[I felt silly and predictable.
Robin knows my fractures so well, she can simply plug in the right sermon and patch me up in a phone call.]

What struck me during that interview with Robin is that I may be in our love story by myself. Of course I know she loves me, but she doesn't sentimentalize us, while I'm still mushy about our history. I was surprised to watch her sit through three hours without once choking up. I outwardly maintained a reporter's neutrality, but I was waiting for emotion to get the best of her. When it didn't happen, I noticed something inside me switch off.

Writing this book forced me to confront the degree to which I retain a fantasy of our twinship, which is probably, on some level, immature. Some part of me is simply unwilling to accept the fact that
our friendship today doesn't resemble its twelve-year-old version. Maybe it's not that Robin gives me too little; it's that I expect too much. What three-handkerchief movie am I living in?

The experts seem to believe that ardor logically cools—or that it
should
, in the interest of both twins' healthy development as adults. But when does the love story actually begin? Could it really start in utero? My gut says yes, just because it feels like it should be true. Robin and I were smushed together for nine months; I can't believe there's no emotional trace of that snug cohabitation. But there's no science yet to back up this theory.

There are, however, pictures: sonogram films that show twin fetuses bumping up against each other, kicking, touching, stroking, and what looks like kissing—their lips pressed together. The pioneering research came from German obstetrician Birgit Arabin, a serious-seeming fifty-five-year-old with bangs, who currently works in the Netherlands. In the late 1990s, Arabin studied twin behavior in the womb in the earliest weeks of a pregnancy, when the two fetuses were still small enough to be observed side by side in one video frame.

“She showed us twins kissing years ago,” recalls OB-GYN Dr. Louis Keith, former president of the International Society for Twin Studies. “She also showed us twins punching each other. But to say that you could follow these twins for twenty years, and that twenty years later, they are going to be kissing or punching each other in the nose, I don't think she wants to say that. She won't go that far.”

He's right. When I met her in the hotel room where she was staying before delivering a lecture in New York, she refused to draw any conclusions about whether inuterine activity predicts twins' interactions later in life. “Let's say I don't know, and I don't have the scientific proof,” she said carefully in her quiet German accent. “I asked pediatricians to follow it, but they didn't. … In the videos, you're seeing incidental reactions of one twin toward the other when they touch each other,” she said, sipping a beer she'd retrieved from the hotel kitchenette. “You can maybe observe and describe some kind of
reactions to one twin's touch. The identical twins' reactions are definitely more similar than the fraternal twins'. And we found differences dependent on gender: In males, these kinds of reactions were faster; I wouldn't say ‘aggressive,' because that's an interpretation, but the reactions were faster and they were more enduring in males.”

Arabin's work was also groundbreaking because of the length of time she kept the camera trained on the twins' activity. Child psychotherapist Alessandra Piontelli had done similar studies earlier in the decade, but for shorter periods of time.

“The Italian studies from Piontelli,” says Keith, “were more like a peep show than some scientific view. You make a scan: ‘Oh, look! They're kissing. Oh! They're punching!'” Piontelli did conclude that twins, in their infancy and toddlerhood, exhibited similar behaviors to those shown in utero.

While Arabin is loath to read twin bonding into the fetal behavior she captured on her tapes, Israeli obstetrician Isaac Blickstein is not so reticent. When I talk to him and Keith together at the 2007 International Twins Conference in Belgium, Blickstein says Arabin's films changed his mind about early attachment. “When I saw the first images, I said, ‘Birgit, this is rubbish. This is just a chance event. The faces of the babies are in front of one another and their lips come together for a second. And you happened to be there in the moment.' But if you follow her videos—and I have them at home, so I look at them from time to time—you
see the pattern. …
So maybe these weren't chance events. There is, for instance, one video when you see both twins and the membrane between them. They are sleeping like two fetuses. All of a sudden you see one twin wakes up and goes up to the membrane. And makes some vibrations with the membrane, and the membrane moves. And the other twin wakes up. And you see them coming closer to each other, face-to-face. And then they are happy. One of the twins makes a circle. The other twin does the same, turns the same. Like dancing. One moved, then the other moved. Sure, everything can be chance. But there is another explanation.”

Which is what?

“Which is that there are some
connections.”

Keith looks at me curiously. “Why do you question that for one second?”

Because it's such a touchy-feely, amorphous idea.

“No, it's not,” he counters.

But Keith himself acknowledged, as did Blickstein, that there is no scientific foundation for it, no studies.

“You are telling us what you
feel,”
Keith says.

What's that worth?

Blickstein takes over this lesson. “Not everything can be evaluated scientifically by randomized controlled trials. They're good for medications, intervention. But not for things like this. We cannot prove it.”

“And no one will ever prove it,” Keith stresses. “What you have experienced with your sister is
yours
. None of us can argue with your feeling.”

Keith regales me with stories about how he and his twin brother, Donald, have felt each other's pain, sent each other mental messages.

“We have been sending messages for years,” Keith tells me. “Donald would go into some kind of self-trance and say repeatedly to himself, ‘Louis, call me. Louis, call me. Louis, call me.' It had never worked outside of the United States before. But one time when I was driving from Berlin to Rostock, Donald had to get to me and he did.”

(Two months later, when I'm back home in New York and Robin is on Shelter Island, I actually decide to try sending her a telepathic message. Up until that day, Robin and I had been sending each other e-mails daily, but not talking much on the phone, so it would have been unlike her to call me at noon on a summer weekday. But I tried to enter the focused, meditative state Keith had described, saying over and over, “Robin, call me. Robin, call me.” The phone rang, and I jumped out of my chair. I asked Robin why she was calling me at that moment, and she said she wasn't sure herself, that she had been making
lunch for her kids and she suddenly felt compelled to. Chalk it up to chance, but it freaked me out.)

“We are doctors,” Keith summarizes. “And we are telling you these stories, knowing full well that you have a tape recorder on, that you can quote this in your book. And what do I care if you quote it? I'm not lying. I'm telling the truth. So your feelings with your sister: perfectly normal.”

I tell them I just keep imagining the skeptics.

“There are always going to be skeptics,” Keith says with a wave of his hand.

“Abigail.” Blickstein smiles. “I am very well known. Louis is very well known. Suppose we stand up in a meeting like the one you saw today and we give a talk entitled ‘Intrauterine Experience.' They'll start throwing tomatoes at us.”

Were Robin and I ever in love? Before I started interviewing other twins for this book, I pored over old scrapbooks, and reread Robin's notes and cards to me, which were especially copious in college and then postgraduation, when we shared apartments. Taken together, they made me feel both tickled and wistful. Tickled because her affection was so open then; wistful because her expression hasn't felt that pure, that profuse in so long. It may be melodramatic to say that our romance couldn't survive adulthood, but it certainly isn't unbound anymore. Somewhere along the way, we buttoned it down.