One and the Same (8 page)

“I think that anybody who marries a twin,” Debbie says, “has to understand that they're marrying two people. Men who marry twins get all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of marrying two women.” She says it can be unsettling. “Two years ago I went out with a gentleman who was forty-seven, single, never been married, an only child. And we had one of the best dates I ever had. But afterward, he never called. Okay, so that could be a typical girl story. My girlfriend looked into it—she happened to be dating his buddy—and she said, ‘That's odd that Jim didn't call Debbie.' And Jim said, ‘Yeah, I thought she was hot, but you know what? She's a twin.'”

Lisa sums it up gravely: “He couldn't handle that.”

Debbie: “He couldn't handle the
‘We'
world.”

Debbie admits that her confidence as a desirable woman is shaken when Lisa's not at her side. “I'm so used to being looked at, I could walk into a huge trendy restaurant with Lisa and I'd be fine. If I walk into that same restaurant and someone looks at me, and I'm by myself, I get very insecure. I think, What are they looking at? Sure, I could say to myself, Maybe they're looking because I'm pretty or something. But I can't. I am telling you, with Lisa next to me, I will dance on a bar; I can stand in front of a thousand people and give a speech. I could have stuff hanging out of my nose, or my zipper could be open, but when I'm with Lisa onstage, I'm in my element. Because they're not looking at
me;
they're looking at
us
. A guy once said to me, ‘I don't
want to know about your twin thing; what are
you
like?' I froze and started to feel upset. Because I couldn't answer him.”

Lisa underscores this: “The twins business is what we do; it's also who we are. To divide the two is difficult.”

And they feel lucky for it. “Why does
everybody
want to be a twin?” Debbie reminds me. “We're all looking for that relationship that twins were born with. Everybody wants to be loved that much.”

“It's definitely a universal wish or aspiration,” affirms psychologist Ricardo Ainslie, who has treated twins, is the author of
The Psychology of Twinship
(1997), and whose mother is an identical twin. A Mexican-born forty-eight-year-old who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, Ainslie explains the idealized twin connection by invoking one of the prevailing theories about child development: that primary relationships are “symbiotic”—between baby and parent, or baby to baby in the case of twins. “There's an experience of self and other as being one,” Ainslie tells me. “A complete closeness. A sense of immersion in another person that feels whole and complete and almost ideally satisfying. That's at least one reading of what early childhood development entails. It's a powerful experience that, in some ways, twins, because of the nature of their closeness, aspire to and sometimes feel:
We understand each other better than anyone else does. We are closer than other brothers and sisters are
. It's a kind of magical intimacy. And it's what we all look for in partners.” In his book, he writes about the common “wish to return to a symbiotic relationship—that is, a relationship characterized by a lack of self-other differentiation in which one's needs are magically understood and met.”

Twins researcher Nancy Segal, a fraternal twin who has studied twins for three decades, affirms the mythos of twins: “For singletons especially,” she tells me, “I think you look into that world, and especially for people who are missing something vital in their relationship—you see a certain closeness and camaraderie. And you're envious of it. Some people might be put off by it because they see it as a claustrophobic closeness, almost too much, a lack of independence.
But I think that's basically what we all crave: We all want to have somebody who knows us as well as our identical twin
would
have if we'd had an identical twin.”

Twins in love. It actually flashed through my mind more than once during my interviews—with the Barbers, the Ganzes, and with others:
These two have a romance
. Not in a queasy, freaky way, but in the sense of uncomplicated devotion and delight in each other. They weren't careful. They flaunted their identicalness like a trophy. They prioritized each other without reserve.

Liza and Jamie Persky, friends of my oldest friend, Jane, live in different states—when we meet, Jamie runs a bakery with her husband in Stowe, Vermont, and Liza is single and a television producer in Manhattan—but they are in touch in a way that makes the miles irrelevant. We talk in one of Manhattan's ubiquitous Pain Quotidien cafés one summer afternoon.

“We've never had a fight,” Liza confesses sheepishly. “We've never screamed at each other.”

Jamie says the only thing that maddens her about Liza is her lack of confidence. “It annoys me when she doubts herself. That gets so frustrating for me. Because for me to be happy, she needs to be happy. If I feel that she's in a bad place, it's hard for me to be in a good place. It never feels better to be doing better than she.”

The only thing they don't tell each other is when they've been complimented.

“Like if someone says I'm pretty,” Jamie says.

“She
is
prettier,” Liza insists. (I stay neutral.)

Dr. Ainslie describes how twins recoil when people point out disparities: “There seems to be a feeling that the recognition of differences is experienced as a loss to oneself when one's twin is being acknowledged,” he writes. “This sense of unequally distributed characteristics only exacerbates the feeling that one has lost something important. Recognition or demarcation of certain abilities or talents feels like a taking away.”

“If someone compliments me in a way that will make her feel worse, I won't tell her,” Jamie says.

Similarly, when seventy-three-year-old Larry Gordon, a childhood friend of my mother-in-law, tells me that he and his identical twin, Gerry, both applied to University of Michigan, he won't tell me which one didn't get in. “What you're asking is who didn't make it,” he says without smiling, “and I don't want to answer that.”

The Persky girls are often holding hands in childhood photographs. They shared one room, one best friend—”It was always awkward because this friend knew she could never be closer than we were to each other”—and they didn't reach out to other people. “To make friends, you need to be lonely,” Liza explains. “There has to be a need. … We don't need anybody else.” I notice she used the present tense. “Which is probably why we were single for so long.”

They lived together both in college and after graduation, and they joke about being so protective of the other that they will suffer if necessary. Liza tells the hilarious example of when their expensive haircuts went awry. “Jamie sat in the chair first,” Liza recounts. “The stylist says, ‘What do you want?' We're like, ‘WHATEVER!' I'm sitting behind her—she can see me in the mirror—and he cuts her long beautiful hair so it looks chopped off, like Stockard Channing's in
Grease
. It was awful. I'm sitting behind her and the tears are welling up, like, I can't believe this is happening!” She mock sobs. “I'm not saying a word. And then he's done; he styles her and he's like, ‘So, what do you think?' I'm like”—she makes her voice meek—
“‘It's great.'
And I get in the chair like I'm going to the gallows. He says, ‘Same thing?' I'm like”—more stage sobs—
“ ‘Yes, please.' ”

“She got the
same terrible haircut,”
Jamie marvels.

“I couldn't let her go through life looking like that alone,” Liza adds.

Their first real “individuation” was when Liza moved to New York. “We were twenty-six and I'd never been on a plane without her,” Liza confesses. “Jamie wasn't even going to drive me to the airport,
because we thought we might have panic attacks in the car. I said to people, ‘I know what it's like to leave my parents; I know what it's like to leave home. I don't know what it's like to leave Jamie.'

“I will never forget saying good-bye. Oh my God! It was like Dead Twins Walking. We were both thinking, When are we going to actually say it? I remember getting out of the bathroom stall, looking at each other, and just crying.”

I ask when that was, and they both blurt without hesitation, “September 20, 1992. 8:
01 P.M.”

Jamie says her marriage could only have happened because Liza left. “I wouldn't have met him if she'd still been living in the same city,” she says.

“Jamie and I didn't date much before that,” Liza admits.

“Because we didn't do anything apart!” Jamie explains. “No one knew us differently. We didn't know each other differently.”

“I think there's something about being twins,” Liza ventures, “where you stay younger longer in a weird way. It's infantilizing.”

“Growing up, we didn't develop, boywise,” Jamie adds.

“Nor did we want to,” says Liza, clarifying. “We had no desire.”

“My husband's only the second person I've slept with,” Jamie admits. “Literally, if Liza had stayed in L.A., I wouldn't have dated my husband. I'd have rather spent time with her.”

The hardest moment in their twin romance was when Jamie got engaged—on their birthday, no less. “I didn't even tell Liza right away when it happened,” Jamie admits.

Liza remembers it was a blow. “I was trying to figure out what the feeling was; it wasn't jealousy. It was that this was the first thing that was so different between us, the first time there was something separating us. When I went to get fitted for my bridesmaid's gown, I sobbed in the Vera Wang dressing room. And then I said to myself, Pull it together. I didn't want to bring her down or have her be worried about me.”

“Cut to my wedding.” Jamie smiles. “It was literally like WE were getting married: Liza and I.”

“I told my mom before her rehearsal-dinner toast,” Liza recalls, “‘Mom, don't forget this is about
Mark
and Jamie. Not Jamie and me. Seriously, Mom,
you have to mention Mark.'
”

Jamie laughs. “There are more wedding pictures of Liza and me standing together than there are of me and Mark together. I swear.”

“All the speeches became a roast of our relationship,” Liza adds. “And it didn't even seem weird.”

The Perskys are in Manhattan to celebrate their fortieth birthday the night after our interview. Jamie has flown in for the party, leaving her husband back in Vermont to tend to the bakery. (He ends up coming and surprising her.)

“When I travel, I don't have to pack anything,” Jamie boasts.

“Her entire birthday outfit tomorrow night? All my clothes,” Liza says proudly.

“Her moisturizer, her socks, whatever I need—” Jamie says.

“—I'm going to have it,” Liza says, finishing for her. “And we can even sleep in the same bed. My apartment is small and I don't have a sleeper sofa.”

“We play games,” Jamie says. “‘Confessions.' We do ego boosts: ‘You looked SO good the other night.'”

“‘Tell me what you love about me,'” Liza adds. They both laugh.

• •

Like the Perskys, my sisters-in-law, Fern and Sharon, have a twins romance, which they believe may have stunted their social life. Though they both ended up happily married, Fern didn't find someone till she was forty-six (thank you,
Match.com
), and she does believe their twin interdependence hindered her confidence and nerve.

“I remember in grade school not talking to other kids and actually
pretending
to talk to someone,” Fern recalls as we sit in my parents-in-law's
apartment in a Chicago suburb. “So if someone was looking at me from a distance, I wanted it to
look
like I was talking to someone, but I wasn't. It makes me sad just thinking about it. I remember not knowing what to say to anybody.”

“I'm sure that somehow stems from the fact that we were never separated,” Sharon ventures, “and didn't know how to be social on our own.”

Sharon, in fact, says she “hated” the effort of talking to other kids.

What about friends?

“What friends?” Sharon replies.

“Yeah, really,” Fern affirms.

Ainslie writes that extreme twin dependency can entail “a degree of anxiety associated with functioning as a separate, autonomous individual.” He elaborated on this in our interview, explaining that twins are socialized from infancy to need each other, partly because they're pushed together by two major forces: their parents and their twin. When parents are overwhelmed with exhaustion, as most parents of multiples are, they feel relieved when their twins can occupy and entertain each other, and they often plop the twins together to give themselves a break or because they think it's good for the twins. The twins meanwhile gravitate toward each other because of an instinctual familiarity and comfort. “So the world around twins may have a way of pushing them together and accentuating their connection,” Ainslie says, “and twins themselves, because maturation is inherently stressful in some ways and anxiety-provoking, may turn to one another to ease that stress.”

The result is that twins often grow up leaning on each other, reliant on the constant company, feeling at sea without the other. So when life throws the curves of adolescence, independent friendship, or romance, twins can worry about whether they're equipped. Ainslie gives an example: “Any kid is going to feel ambivalent about going away to college. That's a normal anxiety any adolescent may have. But for twins, it's compounded or made more complex because you're
separating not only from your family but from your twin. So some twins manage that by trying to forestall the separation: ‘Let's go to college together. Let's be roommates at college.'” (Fern and Sharon did both go to the University of Illinois and lived together their last two years.)