One and the Same (3 page)

“I was under five pounds,” Walter adds morosely.

“We both have keratoconus in the left eye,” David reports. “We've both got neuropathy in our feet.”

“And we both have diabetes,” Walter pipes up.

And they always dress alike?

“We wear the same clothes every time we go to a twins gathering,” David explains. “It's sort of an unwritten thing that all twins do.”

The Olivers are suddenly joined by Janet and Joyce, seventy-six, in matching blue tops, who also hail from Michigan.

“We met Joyce and Janet at the International Twins Convention in Toronto, Canada,” David explains. “Nineteen eighty-two.”

Janet and Joyce, who have different last names by marriage, are distinguishable only because Joyce seems more frail.

“I'm the young one,” announces Janet, who wears her white hair cropped exactly like her sister's. “We're five minutes apart. She's older. I'm married fifty-five years. She's divorced.”

Joyce pipes in: “When you're that close to your twin, you have to make sure that the husbands are into the twin thing. Otherwise, the marriages will not work.”

They went to their first twins convention in 1946 in Muncie, Indiana, and they've been coming to Twinsburg for decades. When I admit it's my first time, they tell me what to look forward to, including the research tents in which twins sign up for studies comparing twins' teeth, skin, sense of taste, and hearing.

Janet: “Last year, one of the tents offered us twenty dollars to smell things.”

Joyce: “It took too long.”

I ask these four elderly twins why they keep coming back.

“IT'S FASCINATING TO MEET TWINS!” David almost shouts. “And we've been trying to find females for the last fifty years.”

So they've never been married?

“Never.” David shakes his head. The smile vanishes.

I ask if they think they never married
because
they are twins; maybe their unique intimacy prevented other kinds.

“No,” David says, dismissing my armchair analysis. “Females have ignored both of us all our life.” (I notice his use of the singular: “life.”)

I ask David why he thinks women take no notice. “I have no idea,” he says. “It's
very
painful. To live an entire lifetime without having
a loving relationship.” He seems abruptly bereft. “Every year we come here to find twins for us to marry.”

David asks me where my twin is and I fumble a quick explanation.

“It's hard to be a twin here without your twin,” he declares, reading my mind.

I make my way out to the fairgrounds, which are set up for those families with young twins: there's a bouncy castle, a beanbag toss, and monster basketball. The toddler twins look more at ease than the adult pairs, who meander awkwardly in their matching ensembles, not saying much to each other, just being twins, side by side, observing other specimens. It's as if they'd gotten into costume too early, and now that they've walked out onstage, they're impatient for the show to start.

More twins arrive. They're everywhere now: twins on benches, twins on bleachers, twins on blankets, twins sitting under trees, standing in the sun, flipping absentmindedly through their welcome booklets. At first, it diminishes the rareness, frankly, this twin saturation. I thought the whole point of us is that we're unique, that there are so few of us. But I begin to see that saturation is exactly the point: when else, and where else, can twins find each other in such large numbers, revel in their unusualness, swap war stories? This is a refuge, a mecca, a commemoration of difference (the oddity of twinship) and sameness, too (even the fraternals dress alike).

So why do I mulishly seem to see the underside of a happy scene? What's wrong with a little kitsch, a little revelry? These multitudes aren't overthinking the coordinated outfits, the clever slogans on matching T-shirts
(IT'S NOT YOU; IT'S ME.)
, the inherent randomness of strangers thrown together just because they share one anomaly: They were born alongside someone else. For these folks, concurrent birth confers an unspoken fellowship. It's not only that these twins want to
see
other twins; they really want to
be
with them. As the evening progresses, I notice people seem to like one another without
knowing one another, to be predisposed to warmth simply because they're pairs.

I think I feel alienated, in part, because of where my twinship sits these days. There's a closeness that's sui generis, but also a certain detachment. Robin doesn't seem to savor our twoness, nor is she particularly nostalgic about our history. I can't say I parade it, but for me, it's still potent, still a point of pride. I don't question her devotion; but I know now that a lifetime with a double made her feel less singular in the world.

When the line dancing kicks off with “Y.M.C.A.,” I'm reminded of how simple our simultaneity used to be. We were always quick to enter the line dance at a party. During our family vacations, we aced the Hustle or whatever Silly Signs routine was being taught by the pool. People watched us because of the kick of seeing double—replicas moving exactly in time. I remember feeling a charge not only in the ease of our synchronicity but in the tangible comfort of having her near.

As kids, we often joined the joke on our twinship, performing “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” from
Annie Get Your Gun
, and “Why Am I Me?” from
Shenandoah
. In the middle school musical—a revue of old vaudeville tunes—Robin and I feigned a quick-change act, quickly popping out from behind a screen in different costumes, each of us emerging to sing a song from a different culture (I warbled a Hawaiian “Hicky-Hoy” in a grass skirt; then I disappeared and Robin instantly materialized in a Chinese costume to belt out “Chong”). When I played Velma in a college production of
Chicago
, Robin made a brief appearance as my character's dead sister. We danced a duet to the song “I Can't Do It Alone.”

We used to embrace collaboration. In college, Robin wrote the lyrics to a musical I directed. When I choreographed
Anything Goes
, Robin was one of my front-row dancers. We cowrote a song for the commencement musical and sang duets on cabaret nights. But I was actually the first one to back off from the sister act. It became clear to
me that some people chafed at the Pogrebin Show. There is something redundant about performing twins. Being identical is already a performance—you're drawing attention to yourself before you open your mouth. To dance and sing is kind of milking the point; it left us open to eye rolls.

I learned in college that some saw Robin and me as too brash, too visible, too
much
. I'll always recall freshman year, when a junior who'd known me in high school had a “heart-to-heart” talk with me in the courtyard of my dorm. He suggested that my sister and I were too audacious, said we'd “taken over” the theater community and he resented it.

I was stung; it plagued me that we might be viewed as puffed-up. I told Robin we had to fix the perception, modulate ourselves somehow. Her response was, essentially,
screw them
. She has never cared what people think the way I do, and I'm sure it has saved her hours of torment. But I learned in that moment that our twinship can be intrinsically showy, even before we set foot on a literal stage.

“There were bumps in the road,” my father recalls when I interview him, “but I think the twinship was like a golden thing. You were used to a world that adored you from the beginning. That might make it tougher later in life when everyone is not so adoring.”

As the line dancing gathers steam (along with progressively loosened participants), I notice a pair of women who stand out, not easy to do in this crowd. They're dressed in pink sequined cowgirl hats and hot-pink tank tops that say
I'M THE REAL MCCOY
. People seem to recognize them—they're quickly surrounded, hugged, kissed, and photographed.

I'd heard about the Ganz twins—several people I'd called during my early research had asked, “Have you met the Ganz twins yet?” In Twinsland, it turns out, these sisters are legendary. Self-dubbed “ambassadors of twins,” they run a twins talent agency out of New York. In the 1990s, they founded and operated Twins Restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where all the waiters were twins
and Debbie and Lisa Ganz were usually on hand to greet patrons. I introduce myself (it turns out they know my brother from the restaurant business), and they chastise me for not booking myself at the Holiday Inn, “where everyone stays.”

“We come every summer,” Debbie exults over a fitting song, “‘Same Time Next Year.'”

Lisa chimes in: “The great thing about it is, you could be coming here for twelve years, and you might know everything about the twin part of people's lives, but I wouldn't know if they live in a trailer park or a mansion. In Twinsburg, you can literally have two politicians sitting next to two pig farmers next to the prince of Saudi Arabia twins, and they're all having a blast. Now in normal society, outside of this weekend, they wouldn't be together. In Twinsburg, it's our
identity
that's actually in common. Not our demographics or our careers … I know twins that I've been spending weekends with for twelve years and I still, to this day, don't know how many kids they have, don't know if they're married. But I can tell you everything about the two of them together.”

Debbie adds, “I also think that people are fascinated by twins because they don't realize they grow up. They think twins are little, and then we grow up and go to another planet.”

“We're like Disney films,” Lisa says. “We're timeless!”

That night, back in my Courtyard Marriott, I flip through the hotel's movie menu and one description catches my eye in the “Adult” selections: “Nympho Twins.” I tell myself it's a valuable research tool and click “purchase.” The hotel's summary of the film shows up on the screen, and it's priceless: “Over 90 minutes long, this title is a great value. They're real twins and they love to screw the same guy at the same time. Light story line.”

“Light story line.” (Not like some porn movies, known for their complex narratives.)

Lacey and Lyndsey Love (actual twins—I checked later) play the
nympho twins; one is more sexually inhibited than the other, and the shier twin has a crush on her coworker. The more confident twin offers to get him warmed up while her twin waits in the bathroom; after a dose of foreplay, the twins switch places. As can be expected, there's the inevitable confusion: When the timid twin replaces her sex-savvy counterpart, she asks the man to give her oral sex. “But I already ate you!” he says, confused—and then obliges.

Believe it or not, I didn't watch the whole film.

By nine the next morning, a brilliant Sunday, the village green is crammed with cars and onlookers waiting to see the Doubletake Parade. Twins in sunglasses, flip-flops, even large butterfly wings, gather on the dew-damp grass. The smell of the soil reminds me again of Robin: how we used to gather on the muddy baseball field on Fire Island for day camp on summer mornings, how she and I always won the three-legged races on that field because we instinctively knew how to move as one person.

So many photographs from my mother's scrapbooks remind me of Robin's and my physical proximity, and how natural it was. One image shows us at eight years old, in a summer costume festival: We're in bright clown makeup and identical red shirts, each of us stuffed into one leg of a pair of oversized yellow overalls. Another shot shows us making an arch with our arms, in matching white tutus before a ballet recital.

As the Twinsburg parade assembles, twins climb into vintage roadsters, pickup trucks, and an El Dorado convertible. Some carry parasols for the sun. One mom proudly wears a button:
GOD GAVE ME TWINS
.

A male pair in their fifties, Dana and Greg, are dressed in custom T-shirts that say
NATURALLY CLONED IN 1956
. Greg points at the wives. “They're still mixing us up!” He smiles. “Yesterday my wife grabbed my brother's butt in Wal-Mart!” Greg says that despite his perfect health, when Dana had a heart attack four years ago, Greg
went immediately to the doctor. “The doctor said, ‘You look fine, but because of your brother's heart issues, we're going to CAT you.'” It turned out that Greg had exactly the same blockage. “I ended up getting four stents!” he marvels.

Dana and Greg drive off to join the parade line.

There are maybe twenty twins under age five in matching T-shirts and black masks on a float meant to evoke the movie
The Incredibles
. A large sign on the front blares
OUR TWINS ARE TWINCREDIBLE!

The pageant proceeds down Main Street, which is lined with spectators along the curb or sitting on porches. Some marchers toss candy to the waving children. Some sing “When the Twins
Go
Marching In.”

The two-mile route ends at the fairgrounds, which are set up with food booths featuring frozen bananas and chicken teriyaki on a stick. Nearby the science tents advertise their research projects: Genetic Basis of Skin Disease in Twins Pairs; Twins Day Gum Study; Facial Changes in Identical Twins.

I wander over to the crafts tables and start to interview random twins among the displays of bandannas, wind chimes, sandstone coasters, and crocheted hats.

Jessica and Jennifer, from New Orleans, are twenty-three and ebullient about Twinsburg. “It's INSANE!” Jessica exclaims. “I LOVE it! All the TWINS! It's just the COOLEST thing. I'm like a big
o
l' tourist!”

“I was thinking, I feel less odd now,” says Jennifer, “because there's so many others like us. You immediately have something in common with someone else. You're huggin' someone, and you don't even know them. You say, ‘Hey I'm a twin! Where you from?'”