One and the Same (19 page)
Authors: Abigail Pogrebin
I interviewed our childhood friend Pamela Koffler, a film producer, who first met Robin and me at age twelve at a summer camp in New Milford, Connecticut. Though she lived in Tenafly, New Jersey, and we lived in Manhattan, we stayed in touch after camp, and then we all ended up in college together
.
PAMELA:
I was thinking, as a mother who's had an infant recently, what a profoundly different experience it is to have two infantsâfor the
infants
. Usually you have this
baby and you are just gushing loveâand you're just this dyad: mother and baby. But with twins, there are two babies. You just don't get an undivided mom ever. You never got that. And how does that feel? How does that change things? How is it better or worse? It never occurred to me to think about that until I had a child. It's such an intense bonding experience, being alone with a baby. It actually made me want to find out: How does the attachment process happen with two babies? How is it different? Does the physical contact of those babies create that attachment with each other when it can't happen with the mother?
ABIGAIL:
What is it like to be friends with identical twins?
PAMELA:
I was friends with you and then I was friends with Robin. And I don't remember the in between. But I remember that your mom did kind of call a meeting about it, to talk about “Why are you now better friends with Robin?”
ABIGAIL:
Who was there?
PAMELA:
The two of you, your mom, and meâin your living room. I think her intention was to kind of negotiate what had occurred among the three of us. It was a separate discussion from the question of who was going to light a candle at my bat mitzvah. I think Robin did.
ABIGAIL:
What do you remember about the meeting?
PAMELA:
Just somehow Letty wanted to manage the expectations, to head off hurt feelings. And I remember feeling uncomfortable, a little on the spot, not at all mature enough to cope with it, but also wanting to be good and to say the right thing.
ABIGAIL:
Do you remember thinking, This is too much to ask of meâto navigate their twinship?
PAMELA:
No. I felt so privileged to be a part of such an intimate
dynamic. I remember thinking, This is ground zero of a family's stuff, and
I
matter. It was a little bit heady, I guess. I can't speak to why I was friends with you and then I was better friends with Robin. I feel like some triangulation happened and that's it. I can't honestly say at twelve or thirteen, there was more of a kindred spirit in Robin. But I do remember noticing you were different from other twins I had known. There was one set of twins at my public school, and the identicalness of them was irrelevant; nobody thought of it. They were shy; they were quiet; they just were. There wasn't a
thing
about them being identical twins. But when I met you guys, you already had, at twelve years old, a sophisticated sense of “We are individuals; but we're also twins.” And it was this culmination of the power of the twinness, but the distinctiveness, too. The effort to be distinctive.
ABIGAIL:
And you remember that?
PAMELA:
Yes. Plus, you were dynamic and theatrical and performative. And the combination was big and alluring. ⦠It was almost like the identical twinness wasn't even a good-enough gimmick for you two. You were going to be interesting, fascinating, exciting friends, and oh, there's this other cool thing too, which is that you're identical twins.
ABIGAIL:
Do you remember that we played on our twinship?
PAMELA:
No. It was the opposite. You had almost settled into the identity of “We're sisters, we're twins, but we're going to be so much more.” I had to catch up to that, because identical twins by themselves are so incredible. It's such a huge, crazy thing to see two people who look exactly alike who aren't the same person.
ABIGAIL:
Do you remember meeting us for the first time?
PAMELA:
Yes. I remember you had really long hair and Robin had short hair, and I thought that was already so ballsy, like “We're young twins, but we're going to have different hair.”
ABIGAIL:
And then collegeâdo you have memories of us there
?
PAMELA:
I feel like I was finding my social footing freshman year and you guys weren't a part of it. For some reason, my identity there needed to be separate from what came before. I think it had to do with the ease with which you guys socially found yourselvesâor I perceived it that way. ⦠Then I really noticed how you and Robin found different social strata, and I often thought about it because yours seemed more interesting to meâthe theater people who were sexually ambiguous and all of that. And Robin's was “square,” “jock.” That seemed not true to her somehow; but back then, we were in college, and I made an allowance for itâlike, We're not all ourselves quite yet. But it seemed a little unfair that you got that crowd and she got the other crowd. And then Robin and I reconnected junior or senior year.
ABIGAIL:
Did you feel the twinship complicated your friendship with Robin?
PAMELA:
I don't feel like it was complicated, because I feel like somehow the environment of friendship with one of you instantly creates an ease with the fact that you can't be best friends with both. So it was really uncomplicated. It was just an absolute given: At a certain point I was Robin's friend and that's the friend I had. It felt like a force field. A magnet goes hereâyou just don't go to the other pole, because of maybe some rules that you guys wrote between each other that got communicated nonverbally. But a nice artifact of that is, I always felt de facto friendly toward you
and that there was a loyalty because of my friendship with Robin. Like, Okay, there's some refracted friendship here. ⦠Maybe it has to do with a nice aspect of being a twin, that you double your circle of friends because of the closeness.
ABIGAIL:
Tell me as honestly as you can, even though I'm sitting in front of you, since I know some people in college felt “the Pogrebin twins,” as we were sometimes called, were just too
much
, too visible and self-satisfied, did you see us that way?
PAMELA:
I think it's unavoidable; I think it has to do with your personalities. You guys were a force. It had to do with your interests; even at twelve years old, you liked to perform. You were creative; you made up clubs. ⦠While I sat and read Archie comics. It didn't occur to me to be in a dramatic, interesting fantasy world. I think it was that, combined with the twinness; I don't think they can be separated. Because there were other twins who didn't have that effect. You guys were dynamos. ⦠And there are two and you're identical.
ABIGAIL:
Do you think our twinship made us cocky?
PAMELA:
Not cocky at all. You were generous, inclusive people. There was also a kind of naïveté mixed in with your self-possession. You guys weren't edgy. There was a sweet innocence to how worldly you were. It was an interesting combination. There was a guilelessness to how you guys were just “Ta-da!” about yourselves. And I think what people responded to is the jealousy of being that young, mixed with the lack of guile, because I think a lot of people don't have that.
ABIGAIL:
How do you see Robin and me now when we're together?
PAMELA:
I would have said it's an ideal relationship, except that I know from discussion with Robin that nothing is perfect. I would have said there's a fluidity of intimacy that is special: how well you know each other, a lack of the discomfort that I sometimes feel with my siblings, that I imagined you didn't have. Very normal, very close, very at ease, supportive. And when we were younger, I imagined a secret intimacy.
ABIGAIL:
Is there anything you have wondered about in terms of Robin and me?
PAMELA:
I guess, not having had a sister myself, I wonder: Whatever isn't perfect about your relationship, you still have to admit that it's an extraordinary closeness, right? It has to be.
ABIGAIL:
It is.
PAMELA:
That, to me, is the precious thing.
⢠â¢
MAKING THE BREAK:
SEPARATION
The “pushing away” and “holding on” â¦
âRicardo Ainslie,
The Psychology of Twinship
On April 22, 2008, Carl Zimmer wrote a
New York Times
science article about how genetically identical
E. coli
bacteria differentiate themselves. In the article, entitled “Expressing Our Individuality, the Way E. Coli Do,” Zimmer explained that despite the bacteria's exact likeness at the moment they split in half, they ultimately go on to display their own personalities and behavior. He addressed society's assumption that when two beings are genetic copies, that must mean they're the same. “We put a far bigger premium on nature than nurture when it comes to our individuality,” Zimmer wrote. “That's one reason why reproductive cloning inspires so much horror. If genes equal identity, then a person carrying someone else's DNA has no distinct self.”
In my nonscientific, lay-twin opinion, this hits upon the core twin anxietyâespecially for identical twins:
If I'm the same, how can I be distinct?
Zimmer answered this, albeit unwittingly, in his analysis of the microbes: “A colony of genetically identical E. coli is, in fact, a mob of
individuals. ⦔
(Italics added.) “At the very least, E. coli's individuality
should be a warning to those who would put human nature down to any sort of simple genetic determinism. Living things are more than just programs run by genetic software.”
Ah, so science affirms that individuation
is
possible. Yet, for so many twins I've talked to, identical or fraternal, establishing separateness seemed to be
the
primary stumbling block.
Steve and David Colman, handsome, assured thirty-seven-year-olds, say they needed to live closer together to be able to pull apart.
Gretchen Langner, forty-three, balked at one attempt by her twin, Belinda, to put some distance between them; she told Belinda that a decision like that couldn't be made unilaterally.
In the case of the identical Farley boys, twenty-five, one of them went so far as to become a woman in order to differentiate himself from his twin.
I meet Steve and David Colman for lunch during an August heat wave. Both have blue eyes, smallish ears, and pink complexions, although Steve's lips are thinner, his nose wider, and he has longer, downtown sideburns. (He's a performing artist.) Both have freckles on their arms. Both order panini sandwiches.
The Colmans grew up in New Jersey; their dad was a Presbyterian minister and their mom was a feminist activist in their church. They have an older brother, John, with whom they tried to downplay their twinship so he wouldn't feel left out. They say it wasn't until they were adults living in the same metropolitan area after ten years in different states for school and work that they were able to make an emotional break. “I think the physical separation prevented us from getting to a point where we could separate in our relationship,” says Steven, younger by eight minutes and a performing poet who cowrote and costarred in
Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway
and won the National Poetry Slam championship as a member of the Nuyorican Poets Café slam team.
“We couldn't separate until we started talking,” says David, who,
at the time we talk, teaches labor history and African-American history at Ramapo College in New Jersey.
“And with the distance we weren't talking as much,” Steve continues.
“When you get closer, then you can separate,” says David.
“I think there was an
assumption
of closeness before, which inhibited real communication,” Steven says. “Because we made these assumptions that we didn't need to communicate verbally. Where maybe we did.”
David nods. “Honestly, it's really been in the last couple of years that we're actually talking about all this. ⦠There aren't a lot of models and frameworks for helping twins navigate this territory. Society glamorizes or fantasizes twinship and assumes all sorts of things about the relationship.”
Despite their newfound division, one commonality unites them: The two white brothers married black women. David's wife, Crystal, is finishing her Ph.D. in history at the time we talk. Steven's wife, Sarah Jones, is a poet/performer, with whom Steven often collaborates, as he did on her highly acclaimed one-woman-show,
Bridge and Tunnel
, which was coproduced in 2004 by Meryl Streep.
I ask the Colmans what they make of the fact that they both ended up in interracial marriages.
“We grew up in a predominantly black community in New Jersey,” David replies, “and there was a lot of cross-cultural dating because that was just what happened in that context.”
“It just became what we were familiar with,” Steven adds.
They do admit that it is “striking for people,” as David puts it, to see both Colmans and their wives together.
Steven smiles. “When people see us sitting at a restaurant, they totally react. They'll look first at Dave and me, and think, They look alike. Because identical twins are already weird to see. But then, seeing people who look like us, they're obviously thinking, White twins with two black women: What's going on? Do they have some ⦔ He doesn't finish the sentence.
“Fetish?” I ask.
“Exactly,” Steve says. “You notice that people are trying to figure it out; I would be, too. If I saw twin guys walk in with two black women, we'd be like, âWhat's the story there?'”