One and the Same (32 page)

Physical likeness is what most people focus on when they encounter identical twins, but doubleness manifests itself more ambiguously from inside the twinship. It gives some twins a kick and
enervates others. It can make you feel proud or shy. It can also muddy your clarity of self. When you look like someone, spend all your early years with them, are assumed to resemble them, and are compared to them, you have an ingrained sense of being not just one, but two.

The title of this book is no accident: I found that unpacking twin-ship means exposing the tension between being one and the same. I've tried to explore what it takes ultimately to forge individuality, but I also set out to examine sameness, because it's integral to every twin-ship and how it is perceived.

Author/neurologist Oliver Sacks opened a 1986 book review in the
New York Times
as follows:

Hillel Schwartz affirms in his book
Culture of the Copy
that whether replicas are considered a blessing or a hex, freakish or adorable, varies by culture. Some civilizations have been spooked by twins; others have venerated them. At one time, Nigerians killed their twins, then did an about-face and exalted pairs as near deities. Brazilians thought multiple births were a product of adultery; sometimes the mother was executed. Hindus thought twins protected them
from bad weather. On some Pacific islands, it was thought that opposite-sex fetuses had had an incestuous relationship in the womb.

Today, Schwartz points out, society attaches great importance to copies and the idea that replication is verification. We require two signatures, make duplicate documents for security in case the original is lost, or to prove the original exists. “Think of a backup drive on your computer,” Schwartz says. “Well, how does that play out with
living
copies? Is one twin there as a security for the other twin? For example, if one twin needs a bone-marrow transplant, his or her twin is a perfect match. It's a wonderful security to have a twin.”

That idea appeals to me. Robin is my backup copy. My hard drive. She's proof that I exist, my documentation. She shares my blood-type, is my marrow match, my stunt double. I auditioned for her once when she got sick (and lost the part). We can use each other's passports in a pinch. On a mundane level, it reminds me how easily I walk past her doorman—he just nods when I walk by, never questions why I'm entering a home that isn't mine. The larger idea of my twin as insurance resonates for me because I have so often experienced her as a refuge, my protection, and also the verification of me.

Schwartz says nontwins' judgment about whether twinship is enviable or disconcerting depends on how we feel about the notion of counterfeit and the fear of being tricked. The anxiety of not knowing what's really genuine can color a person's response to a twin. I've experienced this when one of our relatives sees me at an extended family event and hesitates before calling me by name, or when a stranger looks stricken after hugging me on the street before realizing I'm not Robin, the person she knows. Just as someone might worry whether the designer bag they buy on eBay is the real thing or a fake, there's a wariness about being duped or embarrassed when people aren't sure which twin they're talking to.

And there's an unease on a twin's part, too: Maybe this person doesn't really know it's me. I often greet someone by adding, “I'm Abby,” and they'll usually reply indignantly, “I
know!”
But it's my way
of removing the anxiety of doubleness in that situation—the uncertainty of identity.

Some twins are still tickled by—or at least accustomed to—the “who is who” scrutiny. I'm aware that I do enjoy the quirks of being Robin's replica, making people's heads turn when we walk into a restaurant, knowing people confer on us a kind of intimacy and intuition about each other that indeed I know we have; we are our own secret society. But for other twins, it exposes a deeper disquiet: the idea that they might be transposable: not one and the same, but just the same. There's a silent exasperation: “Don't you know me by now?”

Schwartz speaks frankly about the ambivalence of sameness. “One aspect of how we all think about twins is our fear of identicals, fear of copies; our fear of losing our own identity in another. And the twins themselves express both of these, right? Loss of identity in the other, and on the other hand, this great complementarity. Both of those are there.”

And yet, it has to be acknowledged that there's power in doubleness. There's impact. You stand out; you're remembered. It's that “star power” that Joan Friedman said was so insidious, but can also feel like a steroid. When I was growing up, my twinship conferred something extra, something fizzy, unique. Francine Klagsbrun thinks the glut of doubles today mutes the spotlight. “It used to be that twins were almost magical,” she tells me. “In some ways that made it harder to be twins, because people were always watching, but in some ways it was easier, because either way they were
stars;
they were the center of the world. Today there are so many more twins around, it's just not unusual. I think that changes the equation to some extent. They don't grow up feeling so special.” It's a true oxymoron: Being a copy of someone made me unique. With the novelty reduced, maybe twins today miss out on that jolt of originality. But conversely, maybe they'll be better for the normalcy.

I would say that Robin and I are definitely less similar now than we once were. Our alikeness persists mostly in our faces. It makes me
wonder what it means to me to be a
copy
of Robin today. How are we still replicas?

What I find most moving is that our identical DNA makes her children and mine not just cousins but half siblings. (Or as Nancy Segal puts it in her book
Entwined Lives
, “Identical twin parents are equally related to their own children and to their twin's children.”) There's a potency in that, as if our twin connection is sealed in our sons' and daughters' bodies.

But at the same time, I know that Robin's kids never see me as a replacement for her; when they sleep over at my house and I tuck them in, they miss their mom and I'm no substitute. They know our voices, our different scents. As memorable as it was to hear Kathy Giusti describe her sister, Karen, as a ready understudy if she succumbs to cancer, parents definitely cannot be copied, no matter how much we look or act alike. Robin's children will marvel sometimes, saying, “Mommy says the exact same thing!” or “Mom makes the same expression!” But they've never mistaken us.

Doug and Mike Starn, identical twins who are forty-seven when I meet them, have focused their life's work—photography and collage—almost entirely on what they describe as “questions about our distinctness.” Their art sums up the conundrum of twinship: how we are both particular and alike. The Starn brothers, who shot to prominence at the age of twenty-four, when they were hits at the 1987 Whitney Biennial, work together virtually every day in their scruffy, vast studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. (Their most public work is on view inside the rebuilt World Trade Center subway station, renamed South Ferry Terminal.) Every image or diptych of theirs is a collaboration—dual authorship over a lifetime.

On the morning of our interview, both are dressed with similar inattention—Doug in loose jeans, Mike in a faded T-shirt and lace-less sneakers. Mike's long salt-and-pepper hair is shorter than his brother's, but otherwise they're hard to tell apart. Both five seven, they have the same slim build and slouchy posture, same goatees and
sleepy eyes. I notice Doug's voice is a little softer, which is an almost meaningless distinction, since both Starns speak
so
quietly.

Though they admit that early in their careers they used their twinship to get noticed, billing themselves as the Starn Twins, now they hate the moniker. And yet their art, even by their own admission, has
everything
to do with their twinness, and their photographic projects revolve around images of doubleness, mirroring, or repetition.

On the day I visit, Mike surveys their framed and unframed work—large rectangles and squares, which seem to deserve a more pristine space than the crowded walls and dirty floor strewn with cables, nails, and bubble wrap. “Everything you see here—nothing is individual,” he explains. “Everything is made up of pieces; everything is sectioned. And that is something we can't help; we just do it.”

It's no accident that their subway installation is titled
See It Split, See It Change
.

“One of the major themes that drives us,” Doug says, “is:
the same but different
. Parts within parts … this is who we are.”

It's also how they work, how they speak. Everything is seamlessly cooperative, with no clear ownership of a collage they create or a sentence they utter—the doubleness is their system, and it's effective for them. “When we're out shooting,” Doug says, “and it's been this way since we first started, back when we were thirteen years old, we have one camera that we share and we trade it back and forth. We don't usually know who took what picture.”

“Or how we decided what to photograph,” Mike adds. “It's constant talking between each other.”

Any conflict between them erupts solely from the “art making,” as they put it.

“Because we get so passionate about something,” Mike explains.

“If here's an individual viewpoint that the other one is not picking up on,” Doug interjects, “we argue. There was a time when I had to leave the studio for a few hours while Mike continued to work on a piece we'd started, and when I came back, I didn't like it at all; I hated
what he had done. And then after we got through our fight, we sort of started working backward and then ended up at the same place anyway. … So we basically know, even if I do some work that he didn't do, he'll look at it and say, ‘Yeah, that's actually what I would do, too.'”

Doug points to the wall-size study of moths, titled
Attracted to Light
. The insects were photographed at night, fluttering around the porch of one of the Starns' homes in Putnam County, New York. (The brothers have country houses minutes from each other.) “You can see that serial image there. It's a moth, just replicated—I forget how many times—140 times or something. Each one is the same image, but each print is different because of the chemical process we used.”

“That is … us,” continues Mike. “We both start out as that same negative, but then what happens to us makes us each unique.”

Their snowflake series is a jewel-like example of this persistent theme: similarity and uniqueness. The Starns took photographs of snowflakes as they fell, then magnified them so massively that the clarified details look too luminous to be real. Many of the snowflakes are in pairs, and Doug explains that often it's the same snowflake printed differently. “In all of our work, there's a common thread that has to do with how we look at ourselves.”

“The snowflakes are about the individual,” Mike says. “The unique individual. And yet they all are the same.”

The symbolism may be too obvious to restate, but standing in their Brooklyn laboratory it hits me how many twins return to this refrain of being one and yet not one: We're particular, we're analogous; we're singular, we're similar; we're an original and a copy, solitary and combined. We're alone, but we never are.

Whatever the conflicting forces may be, twinship, Doug acknowledges, is usually the organizing principle of a twin's life. “It permeates it,” Doug says. “That's all.”

“It's an interesting thing to think about,” Mike says. “Who would I be if he never existed? I can't imagine.”

Though they don't come across as sentimental guys (when I ask if
they ever tell each other “I love you,” they both immediately answer no), the Starns do buy into the notion that their unshakable union can be traced to the womb.

“Years ago, we photographed some Siamese twins in a formaldehyde jar,” Doug tells me.

“At the Harvard medical museum,” Mike adds.

“And it was really shocking,” Doug says, “because these babies were holding hands. And that really sort of was important to us, to recognize how far and deep this is.”

“If not for her, I wouldn't be here.”

Helen Rapaport declares this in a heavy Yiddish accent, looking over at her identical twin sister, Pearl Pufeles.

The two eighty-six-year-olds are sitting side by side in a Chicago hospital lounge on a patterned sofa. Helen is wearing a green floor-length hospital gown and medical bracelet—unexpectedly, she was kept overnight for some cardiac tests, so our interview has to take place here. She is frustrated that we're not meeting in her home in Buffalo Grove, as planned. “I cooked all day yesterday,” she says ruefully.

“She made kugel,” offers Pearl, who is dressed in a purple ensemble—purple polyester pants, purple top with flower appliqué on the left shoulder—and cream-colored orthopedic sneakers.

Both twins fold their hands in front of them when they talk. They don't look nearly as identical now as they do in the black-and-white pictures from their youth; in those, they are indistinguishable, wearing identical outfits well into their twenties. What remains similar about them today is their thinning hair, their drooping eyelids—which give their faces a soft kindness that reminds me of my late grandma Esther—and the blue numbers tattooed on their arms: Helen is 5080; Pearl is 5079.