One and the Same (20 page)

“I'm aware of it,” David agrees, “but Crystal and I have lived in mostly white places through most of our time together. So we really don't pay attention.”

David and Crystal's relaxed approach affects Steven's. “They're better for Sarah and me,” Steve says. “Because they don't pay attention.”

Though as twins they felt they needed to let each other go, their parallel marriages reunited them in some way, since as couples, they face many of the same issues and situations—like walking into stores or boutiques. “I'll be the one to return any gift in our family,” David says. “Because Crystal's sister was almost arrested for returning something. And she had a receipt! I never used to take the receipt out of the store when I bought something, but I quickly learned that you always keep the receipt
until you get home.”

“That's why Sarah just sits in the car sometimes while I go inside.” Steven nods. “I'm like, ‘Let me just do this.' For instance, if we're in the Catskills and there's a Yankee-looking country store—”

“Oh, totally.” David nods.

Both brothers have given thought to having mixed-race children.

“I just hope they're dark,” Steven says, smiling. “That's the joke with all the mixed couple friends we see: Pray to God the kid doesn't come out too white. Because the black women don't want to look like they're the nannies.”

“It's also a black-pride thing—having a black baby,” David interjects.

Steven nods.

The summer I meet the Colmans, they've been spending a lot of relaxed time as couples—a noticeable contrast to the time when they were too busy to attend each other's weddings. (They don't have great explanations for that: “2001 was a crazy time for us,” Steven says. “It
was probably another one of those moments when we weren't talking,” says David.) Now Steven and Sarah have rented a house in the Hamptons, which David and Crystal often visit. They all went to South Africa together when Sarah and Steven were booked to perform there; David and Crystal did academic work in the region. “It's really a foursome now,” Steven says.

He says it's taken work to get back to the closeness everyone always assumed was there all along. “Biology determines a lot of your relationship,” says Steven, “but it's what you do with it that makes it real. Or makes it work. And if you don't do anything with it, then it just becomes a fantasy.”

Psychologist and identical twin Joan Friedman insists the idealized fantasy of twinship—which both the twins and their parents buy into—ends up forcing, or reinforcing, a togetherness that ill serves twins in the long run.

“Twins are completely crippled by the fact that they had this other person
with them
all the time,” she says. “So they were always fine socially, comfortable in school; they always got a lot of attention. But they didn't have to
work
for anything. Without doing much, they were always ‘so cute, so special.'”

My father bears this out. “You always were special, kind of a gimmick. That had its good side and its bad. … Think back on all the things you got together; I don't know if you would have gotten any of them apart.”

Friedman continues: “Resilience for children comes out of mastery of a challenge, or facing a fear. And twins, with their ridiculous star power, lose out on mastering some of life's challenges. That's why parents simply have to spend separate time with each of them, have to separate them from each other regularly, let them fall on their faces and deal with it. Twins should have separate friends, separate teachers, separate teams. Parents should say essentially, ‘Deal with the fact that you're in different preschool classes, or your twin brother gets
invited to a birthday party and you don't. Yeah, it hurts your feelings and it's hard. But you're two different people and he's going to the party alone.' And that's life.”

Her example strikes a chord, because that exact scenario happened to Robin and me: In seventh grade, she was invited to a big Halloween party that I wasn't. It was a crisis in my house. My parents' reaction was outrage; why would Becky, who was friendly with us both (though clearly closer to Robin), do us such an injustice? Dad encouraged me to confront Becky, and it's hard to believe I did, but to no avail. Robin skipped the party in solidarity.

“In my estimation, that was wrong,” Friedman says when I recount the story. “Twins aren't equal just because they look alike. … Twins need to get the message early that ‘You aren't the same. And that the two of you will end up in very different circumstances, just like you would if you were plain siblings.' It's never fair with siblings: Someone ends up with more kids, smarter kids, more money, a better marriage, more sex. It's never equal. And yet I think twins expect that when things aren't equal, their sister or brother is the winner, and then they're caught up in that old vortex and they're resentful and confused and they push the other one away.”

Ainslie underscores this point: “On the one hand, some of these twins articulate an ideal fantasy of twinship. … On the other, they suggest a sense of dislocation. They seem to feel that they themselves have become disconnected from that utopia.”

Once you start talking to the experts, it's clear that achieving individuation is an obstacle course. There's so much in the way: the incessant message to twins that they're equal and therefore one shouldn't exceed the other; the fact that twins spend so little time apart and therefore lean on their closeness and miss out on separate attachments; the romanticization of the twin ideal, which parents and twins swallow and even fake if necessary.

Eileen Pearlman, who runs TwInsight, a counseling resource for twins and parents of twins in Santa Monica, says the separation muddle
starts even before cognition. “With twin babies, they have to learn what's me and what's not me,” she explains in her serene office. “So when they're very young, you'll sometimes see that one twin infant has their hand inside the other one's mouth, or their foot. … There is this kind of confusion. Eventually they touch up against one another and they learn there's a separate person. … This separation/individuation process continues through life. From birth to three years old, there's one stage. Another one is around the adolescent stage, when the child is trying to figure out more of an identity, and then when graduating from high school or in early adult life. There may be a little more bumping up against each other then. Some twins do it earlier; some twins do it later. And the bumping up—or the individuation—may be gentle, but some could be quite volatile. … Maybe one is ready to separate before the other one. Maybe one feels good about separating but feels bad about leaving their twin. So there is that feeling: I don't want to hurt or abandon my twin, but I need to find out who I am. And the twin who is left behind may feel abandoned.”

Thinking back, I realize I did my severing from Robin when I switched schools in the ninth grade. Finally I had an alternative universe, a new crew that was all mine. It was the first year of my life when people met me as a singular person, not as a set or as part of a spectacle.

At my new high school, I found a social cocoon surprisingly fast—maybe because, as psychologists have told me, I was built for companionship: Twins know how to do intimacy. When my school friends eventually met Robin, it was like meeting a stranger; she was Abby's similar-looking sister; not Abby all over again. She was just an additional interesting fact about me—a sister I was undeniably proud of—but she was not people's initial introduction to me.

My new friendships were intense: Rachel's apartment became my second home, Daisy knew as many show tunes as I did, Julia lived exotically on Avenue A and wrote tortured poetry, and hazel-eyed Julie made me feel oh-so-much cooler than I was, though I still
dressed in denim pantsuits and Danskin turtlenecks. I didn't feel lost without my sister; I felt new.

The shift in me was a challenge for Robin. After watching the excitement of my fresh experience, she decided to apply to different schools the following year. But her new home didn't turn out to be the same cushion or haven. She had friends, but she didn't feel they really knew her. She performed in theatrical productions, while most of her new friends were athletes. She worked hard but got fewer pats on the back. Where my high school hoisted me up while I tested singleness for the first time, Robin was on her own.

I don't want to oversimplify. It's not that I was always on a cloud while Robin was under one; I spent plenty of nights in teen angst, putting on my Janis Ian record and writing overheated journal entries about the “raw truths” I confronted while rehearsing
No Exit
and about how Jason would never love me. But for me, high school was emboldening; Robin wouldn't say the same.

Until now, I don't think I've ever appreciated how hard it must have been for her when I left “our” school and suddenly seemed recharged. It didn't matter that until then she'd had the easier, happier social life; the point is that once I left, I was in many ways
gone
, distracted by my intense schoolwork, rushing off to weekly sleepovers or to rehearsals for shows she wasn't in.

I don't recall our relationship changing at that time. But it must have.

One diary entry from December 1979 affirms that there was tension:
“Argument with Robin … Accuses me of not caring for her anymore …”

Only now do I appreciate how generous she was to let me go, without making me feel guilty. Only now do I wonder if her retreat from me in these last few years was a mirror of my earlier break.

Despite all the evidence that a split is inevitable and essential between twins, I have been stubbornly unsympathetic to what Robin needs, in part because it feels like an odd time to need it. No matter
how many “experts”—Pearlman, Friedman, Ainslie, Rothman—tell me that disentanglement is crucial, and often occurs later than one would think (not during adolescence, when typical fissures happen, but deep into adulthood), I keep feeling impatient for this “stage” of our twin development to be over.

Is this distance really necessary? Robin and I are fully functioning, self-reliant adults. Isn't that “good enough”? Who determines how separate separation has to be? In our interview, Robin said, “I'm not rejecting you; I'm claiming something.” But that “claim” has been a genuine deficit for me. It's the “hole” Robin assumed I feel sometimes. Aren't we apart enough? We have separate families, neighborhoods, schedules, work, friends, vacations, yoga classes. I don't need more space. Her boundaries feel artificial and confining; they fight the pulse of our earlier relationship—which wasn't to be joined at the hip, but to be unfettered in our nearness, our prioritizing of each other. When did the twinship get in the way of the friendship?

Joan Friedman almost scolds me when I ask her to decode this dynamic. “Your sister simply wants to have her own sense of self. She doesn't mean to hurt your feelings, but of course it does, because it's not something you identify with, or are feeling right now, so it demands that you be this bigger person, to recognize that she's needing space, not because she's upset or resentful, but so she can grow apart from you, which will ultimately enable her to be close to you.”

Friedman says Robin's choice has nothing to do with me, but I balk at that. Of course it's personal; I'm the one who complicates her identity.

“It's not you,” Friedman insists. “It's in
relationship
to you, by accident of birth. She's dealing with issues of the twinship and, yes, you happen to be her twin.”

Ricardo Ainslie noted this dichotomy in his book: “One striking feature in many twinships was that the twins seemed to be differentially invested in the relationship. In these instances, one twin appeared
more committed and involved, whereas the other was more disengaged, more willing to de-emphasize their twinness. …”

“One twin feels more needy; one doesn't,” echoes Eileen Pearlman, who grew up calling her identical twin “Sister” and admits that she only made her break years after she was married. “It's hard to resolve the fact that, even though this is going on, it may not be permanent … Some twins get scared, thinking, If I'm separated from her, does that mean that we're never going to be close again? Realizing that it's a process takes away the fear and the sting of losing someone. It's seeing that the other person is individual and you are, and then how do we find our togetherness, our
we-
ness again?”

Robin maintains that our “we-ness” is still there, and considering it dispassionately, I see she's right. It shimmers in our daily phone calls and in each rendezvous: the spa getaway my husband gave us one year, where we lounged in robes side by side in “the Quiet Room,” and braved a “Challenge Course” which required climbing—harnessed—to the top of a twenty-five-foot pole and then leaping off into nothing. It's been there in the four days we've spent the past two Augusts at her summer rental without kids or spouses, making tomato salads, leading each other in yoga, working on our laptops under quilts. It's in the vivacity of our children's play dates and the fact that they've grown up so close. Of course there's we-ness.

When I look at us from Robin's perspective, I see that it's not just a matter of individuation; it's a matter of breathing, getting enough air. Decades of being grouped, lumped, and mistaken for someone else could be oppressive—not ever being sure of what is wholly, exclusively yours. “With identical twins,” Burlingham wrote in 1954, “the similarity in looks and the confusion this creates may eventually make them feel that nothing is personal or unique about them. They have therefore every reason to feel misunderstood … and angry.”

When I reunite with Belinda and Gretchen Langner, thirty-two years after we were classmates in fifth grade, they are living together again—after years spent on their own. My childhood memory of the
Langner sisters is of two exotically beautiful, willowy sisters, urbane beyond their years; they are still luminous today, with broad smiles, dark eyes, and dancer's frames, but they seem somewhat weathered by their mother's death three years ago, by Belinda's severe bouts with environmental illness (she eats only two types of food at every single meal), by Gretchen's six-year rocky romance, and by their own twin tensions, now that they're under the same roof again.