One and the Same (13 page)

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 Caroline, 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.”

The Pauls no longer strive to distinguish themselves; in fact they are invested in the idea that officially, they're genetically the same, so much so that they were reluctant to find out they might not be. “We took the DNA test,” Alexandra explains, “because people always asked us if we were identical, and my mother would say, ‘No,' because she wanted us to be individuals, while Dad would say we were. A few years ago, we decided to offer ourselves up for sexuality studies, since she's gay and I'm straight—we thought it would be a help to figure out whether it's nature versus nurture—so we took the test by swabbing our cheeks, and the results were to be mailed to me, and we were so afraid that it was going to be fraternal, we didn't open the envelope for two and a half years. My sister said, ‘If you open it and it says we're fraternal, don't tell me. Say you lost it.'”

What were they afraid of?

“That we wouldn't feel close,” Alexandra replies. “That it would break a bond. But one night at midnight, my husband was away and I thought, You know, the truth is in that envelope and I'm going to open it up. And of course it said we were identical—seven out of seven markers. … We were thrilled and relieved. And we entered into twins studies. They've never called us, but they do send us a birthday card every year.”

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