One and the Same

by Abigail Pogrebin

  “Exactly.” Ronde nods. “And I don’t know if that was self-conscious or intentional. I don’t know if I was saying to myself, I don’t want to be like him, or, I want to be exactly like him. Tiki always did everything so easily in school, and I felt like I was the one that had to work at it. Somewhere along the way, he became the smarter twin.”

  How many twins could say that without bristling? Very few. There’s this odd sanguineness when the Barbers describe their flaws and strengths, while other twins I spoke to seem to dodge and weave about who does what better. Maybe professional sports breeds bluntness; there’s no whitewashing whether you’re good enough to make the team, good enough to play (at first neither Barber made the starting roster), average or exceptional. The Barbers fling their compliments and gibes without seeming worried that it will color the larger picture—that they think the world of each other. The only time Ronde recoils at an adjective is when I offer one that might sound negative.

  I asked Ronde if he’d call Tiki more “ambitious,” and he seemed to stiffen. “Depends on how you use the word,” he cautioned, clearly protective of how I might label his brother.

  I clarified that by “ambitious,” I meant “itchy, always reaching for the next thing.”

  Ronde softened. “I could see that, yes; judging by the fact that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing next, whereas he knew exactly what he was doing and he put a lot of thought toward it.”

  Tiki tells me why one day he was finished with football. “This wasn’t about ‘I hate my coach,’ or this or that; this was about quality of life. The year before I retired, when my wife asked me to play with my kids, and I didn’t want to, nor could I, I knew it was time to do something else. … I said, ‘If I’m fifty-two, like Earl Campbell in a wheelchair, who’s going to be cheering for me then?’”

  “He didn’t talk about quitting all the time,” Ronde recalls, “but you could just feel it. Same way as when you play Ms. Pac-Man a thousand times and you’ve beaten it a thousand times and you’re like, All right, either Ms. Pac-Man 2 is coming out or I’m going to put in Galactica. That’s what it felt like. Not that he was bored by what he was doing, because our sport’s unique: It’s exciting when you play. But I think he was just bored with the routine of that part of his life and he was ready. He knew it wasn’t going to last forever, so he made steps to move on. Whereas I’m more along the lines of ‘It will end someday, and when it does, I’ll decide what to do then.’ Eventually your body just can’t do it anymore and then you have to do something else.”

  “Physically I was much more beat-up than Ronde is,” Tiki says. “Being a running back, I get hit forty times a day, where Ronde gets hit maybe four or five. It starts to take its toll.”

  “I feel great,” Ronde tells me. “I swear to God, I would never know that I’m thirty-three if I didn’t read it every day in the paper or in every magazine article written about me: ‘He’s thirty-three; he can’t do it forever.’ Eventually in the back of your head, you start thinking, Is this true?”

  Why does he think he’s still thriving at the older end of football age? “I think it’s something in my makeup; I refuse not to be successful. Take that back to my youth: I refused to be a failure in comparison to Tiki. And I’m sure my mom told you this—last year she was thinking I felt guilty because I was still playing football when Tiki quit. And I don’t know if I put that much thought on it, but I could see that being the case, because we always did everything together, and now, how do I judge my success? I never judged it against anybody else’s. … That aspect of my motivation was suddenly lacking, and I honestly had used it a lot. It was definitely a void I had to fill, and I don’t know if I did or not.”

  I ask if Tiki drove him in a competitive way or a motivational one. “More in a motivational way. I was just excited to see him be successful. … It made it worth doing, above anything else. Even if the game stank and our team stank, it was, ‘Hey, we may have lost today, but I’m going to see how Tiki did.’ And that element completely disappeared last year, and in my mind, it was all on me. I had to find a way to adapt to the new structure of it.”

  “There is no doubt in my mind,” says Tiki, “that we are both successful because we refused to let the other one down. It was partly ‘I have to keep up with him; he has to keep up with me.’ But it was also ‘Don’t dare be a failure, because then you drag me down.’ So we competed against each other’s successes. And we were always fortunate—actually, it may have been intentional, even subconsciously—that we never did the same thing. So when we wrestled in seventh and eighth grade, he dropped weight so he could wrestle at one thirty-six, I wrestled at one forty-two. When we ran track, he learned the hurdles while I was a sprinter and did the long jump. When we played football, he was defensive back, wide receiver, and I was a running back. We never did the same thing, but we always had success. It was kind of like, ‘If you’re going to win, I’m going to win. If you’re going to be good, I’ve got to be good.’”

  Doesn’t it bother Tiki that Ronde’s the one with a Super Bowl ring? “It was probably the greatest moment of pride I’ve ever felt,” says Tiki of Tampa’s victory over Oakland in 2003. “Cynics will say, ‘Oh, you’re jealous.’ But those same people have no idea what we have.”

  The press loved the twin versus twin angle whenever the Giants played the Bucs, but the Barbers viewed it as “more talk and hype.” Ronde says, “At the end of it, he was just another opponent.”

  Tiki tells me Ronde was playful during those match-ups. “One time, I was getting tackled out of bounds and he wasn’t even close to me, but he comes over and just elbows me like this.” He shows me. “I’m like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ He says, ‘I’m just trying to make it look good.’” He especially loves one particular photograph of Ronde tackling him near the goal line in 2006, because he’s enveloping Tiki just as he must have in utero.

  “Someone told me this great quote yesterday,” says Tiki. “‘Life is a crack of brightness between two eternities of darkness.’ My first eternity of darkness with my brother was me on top of him—because he came out first. And when we were babies, my mom would put us on opposite ends of the bed and before you know it, we were lying on top of each other like we were in the womb. And here we are again in this photograph.”

  I wonder where the wives fit into this duet. Tiki’s striking wife, Ginny, a former publicist who comes from Korean and Vietnamese lineage, has known the Barber twins since college, when she started dating Tiki. (They married in 1999.) Ronde’s equally attractive wife, Claudia, who now works with Diabetic Charitable Services, is of Filipino descent and married Ronde in 2001. All three Barbers I spoke to tiptoe around the question of how the wives handle the twinship. “Let me answer it this way,” says Geraldine. “Do they understand it? I’d say, ‘Not totally.’ Do they respect it? Definitely.”

  “When we’re all together, it’s a great foursome,” Ronde says. “When we’re not, it is what it is. …” He smiles, clearly not wanting to expand further, then takes a different tack. “You know what it is? And they’ll never admit this: They’re both control addicts; they want control. And neither one of them can have it, especially when Tiki and I are the ones who are really in control, if that makes any sense. It’s not intentional; they have the appearance of control and they do a lot of things for us. But at the end of the day, we all know who’s making the decisions. It will come down to what Tiki and I want to do, because that’s the Relationship. So you figure out the psychodynamics of that. … When you’re married to a twin, essentially, whether you like it or not, you’re married to the other one, too. Tiki’s as much involved in my life now as he was back when we were in college.”

  Does he think that bothers their spouses? “Of course. Absolutely. And they’ll never talk about it; they probably don’t even necessarily recognize it, but, yeah, that’s what it is.”

  Tiki echoes him: “I think our bond is the strongest it’s ever been and the strongest bond
that there possibly is. Greater than marriage. I’m closer to Ronde, without a doubt. And that will never change.”

  So many married twins told me the same thing. And it always moved me to hear it, but it’s not how Robin and I feel. Our husbands know us better. They get more of us now—not just in terms of time spent but in what we tell them and whose counsel we seek. When Ronde told me their spouses don’t always embrace their closeness, I thought of my brother-in-law, Edward. He’s accustomed to my relationship with Robin, but I wouldn’t say he facilitates it. He and I have a warm friendship, but it’s been clear over the years that he doesn’t believe that a twin should get special treatment. When Robin first got pregnant, for example, Ed didn’t think she should tell me the news ahead of his family or the rest of ours. She told me anyway, but it was hard to learn she’d had to overrule him to follow her impulse. It seemed self-evident to me that she would rush to share something so momentous. To thwart that reflex was to obstruct the normal blood flow of our relationship.

  Days later, I asked Ed to meet for coffee to discuss it, and he explained matter-of-factly that he didn’t see any reason why I should get particular consideration, any more than his younger brother or older sister. I was stymied; I couldn’t sit across a table and make the case for the Twin Exception. It felt like if it wasn’t obvious to him, it wasn’t defensible—my argument for twin precedence was basically “It just is.”

  I tell each Barber that some twins’ relationships have struck me as a kind of love story and I wonder if they find that’s a fitting analogy. Ronde nods, “We see beyond who we pretend to be. I know who he really is, he knows who I really am, and if you were writing a love story, that’s what it would be. All those romantic ideals—‘conquers all,’ ‘stands the test of time’—yes. That’s certainly the case with us.”

  Tiki agreed that twinship is “a perfect intimacy.”

  “It starts from the zygote splitting and one destined person becoming two,” he continues. “And while we go our separate ways in life and our experiences vary, at the end of the day, we’re still one.”

  ABIGAIL: Have you ever felt excluded by us?

  LETTY POGREBIN (MOM): Always.

  ABIGAIL: What makes you feel that way?

  LETTY: You just talk to each other and you close everybody else out. You’re not aware that people are there and listening and don’t know what you’re talking about, and feel sidelined. You still do it now and then.

  ABIGAIL: Is it what we say to each other or how we look at each other?

  LETTY: It’s just that you don’t see anybody else. You’re just talking to each other and it’s like no one else is there. And you don’t care about anyone else.

  ABIGAIL: And you think that we’re aware of it?

  LETTY: Obviously not, or I don’t think you would do it.

  • •

  3 IDENTICALS: A LOVE STORY

  Each is the other’s soul and hears too much

  The heartbeat of the other. …

  —Karl Jay Shapiro, “The Twins,” 1942

  The model twinship of Ronde and Tiki Barber manages to combine an unquestioned primacy with a sturdy independence. Which is no easy feat. Two of the fundamental questions psychologists ask about adult twins are “When did they separate?” and “How did they individuate?”

  So it’s interesting to meet identical twins who haven’t; twins who celebrate—and accentuate—their sameness nearly every day of their lives, or who have a kind of love that clearly defies the idea that twins must, in a sense, leave each other to grow up.

  Debra and Lisa Ganz are the empresses of the Twins World. They’re brassy, buoyant, foul-mouthed replicas who have made a career of their twinship. They amass twins on their Web site, Twinsworld.com, boast an international twins database, raise money for terminally ill twins and twins in tsunami-like disasters, and run a twins talent management company (child labor laws prevent infants from working more than two hours a week, so twins and triplets are essential to keep the cameras rolling). As mentioned earlier, they opened the first Twins Restaurant in 1994 in Manhattan (which employed only twin servers and closed after a successful run in 2000), and they have attended virtually every twins gathering, conference, or festival that exists around the world.

  Soon after I arrive at Debbie’s modest Manhattan apartment with its orange walls and no windows in the living room, Lisa bounds in the door, announcing, “I COULDN’T FIND THE RED SHIRT!” I get it. They had agreed beforehand on what they’d both wear, but Lisa fell short. Except for the red shirt, they are dressed exactly alike in jeans, black boots, black velvet jackets, high ponytails, and big sunglasses on the tops of their heads. It strikes me suddenly that here are two near-forty-year-olds playing dress-up, unapologetically cornball, and kind of joyous. Both have husky, assertive voices, both drink take-out coffee, and both constantly, ruthlessly interrupt each other—and me.

  “Abby’s not only here to get our expertise,” Lisa tells Debbie. “She’s getting our story.”

  Debbie looks at me. “Does Lisa not think I speak English?”

  Lisa leans in to me. “Debbie’s the slower half. She came out six minutes after me. I got six minutes more of the brain.”

  Lisa continues: “We say we are ‘the ambassadors of twins.’”

  I confirm to them that nearly every place I go, people say to me, “Have you met the Ganz twins?”

  Lisa jumps in: “I have a question for you.”

  They both bellow, unprompted, in unison: “HAVE YOU MET THE GANZ TWINS?”

  I tell them that their identical costumes at annual twins events (I saw them in Twinsburg in rhinestone cowboy hats), and their unreserved gregariousness, make them appear larger than life.

  “She’s not talking about our butts,” Debbie says, clarifying for her sister. “She’s talking about us.”

  “To start from the beginning,” Lisa says, “we always say—”

  In stereo again: “WE’RE LIVING IN A ‘WE’ WORLD AND EVERYBODY ELSE IS LIVING IN AN ‘I’ WORLD!”

  Lisa: “That’s what set us apart from everyone else.”

  Debbie to Lisa: “Talk about the twinship first.”

  Lisa to Debbie: “Well, no. I’m talking about what I want to talk about.”

  The irony is that when they were growing up in Long Island, they stopped dressing alike as soon as they could dress themselves; but in their twenties, they decided to dress the same again. “Why do we do this as women?” Lisa asks the question for me.

  “Because it’s part of our business and that’s part of our twinness,” Debbie replies. “We’re marketing ourselves. It’s like airline flight attendants. They have a uniform; so do we.”

  “Everyone says, ‘Don’t you twins want your own identity?’” Lisa says.

  “We have our own identity!” Debbie announces. She turns to Lisa. “What do we say?”

  In unison again: “WE’RE TWO VERY INDIVIDUALS THAT MAKE ONE HECK OF A WHOLE TOGETHER!”

  Oh my God. I feel like I’m watching a comedy routine. Is any of this unrehearsed?

  “We mean that,” Debbie insists, as if reading my skepticism.

  Debbie clarifies that they’re not joined at the hip. “We don’t live together. We could never live together!”

  Why not?

  “We need to be alone,” Debbie says without irony.

  “That said,” Lisa adds, “there are times when someone will walk into my apartment and I have the phone to my ear without talking, and they’ll say, ‘What are you doing?’ And I say, ‘I’m watching a movie with Debbie.’ They’ll say, ‘Where’s Debbie?’ Debbie’s on the phone. Neither of us have said a word for two hours. But we’re watching a movie together. I know that’s not normal.”

  But Debbie insists they’re still separate beings. “People who don’t know us think we’re so twinny that we’re one person. No. We’re not like those twins out there that believe they’re one person in two bodies. There are twins we know that have to live together, sleep toge
ther; they count how many rice pilafs are on the plate before they eat the same amount.”

  “We’ve seen old ladies who have never been married,” Lisa says, without seeming to realize that might ultimately describe them. “They walk out to the mailbox together. They turn out the light at the same time. They’re one person in two different bodies. We’re two different people in one body.”

  But when I ask them how they’re different, they seem stumped. Which Debbie doesn’t apologize for. “If you ask our five best friends, including our younger sister, Lisi, ‘Are Debbie and Lisa the same?’ they will say, ‘Absolutely not.’ And then you ask them, ‘How are they different?’ They can’t tell you.” She doesn’t accept the conventional wisdom about twins—that differentiation is always optimal. “We speak at all the state conventions, and parents often say to us, ‘I have five-year-old twins and I just got them their first separate birthday cakes.’ And we devastate them, because Lisa and I say, ‘We’re thirty-something years old. We have never had our own birthday cakes!”

  “Ever,” Lisa confirms. “We celebrate the twin thing every day.”

  “Someone came up to us about eleven years ago,” Debbie recalls, “and said, ‘I knew you two in college. I now have my own twins and I sent them to different preschools, because I don’t want them to be like you two.’”

  “We laughed,” Lisa says defiantly. “Parents who don’t know what it’s like try to do everything in their power to make their identical twins different, instead of celebrating their twinship.”

  “We don’t tell parents to dress their twins alike or to treat them as one person,” Debbie explains. “What we’re saying is, ‘It should be an individual decision.’”

  The Ganzes shared friends growing up and still do. “It’s come to the point now,” Debbie says, “where if someone that Lisa knew better got married tomorrow—”

  “They’d still invite Debbie,” Lisa says, interrupting. “Do you know how sad it is that at thirty-nine years old, we get invited to weddings together without dates?” Lisa laughs. “Like we’re the twin entertainment: Rent-a-Crowd. ‘Let’s invite the twins.’ I’m like, ‘Debbie. They want a three-hundred-dollar wedding gift and I don’t even know the girl’s damn last name!’”