One and the Same

by Abigail Pogrebin

  Gretchen says their recent prickliness is in large part because they’re unused to bunking together; up until recently, they lived two hours apart. “This has been really challenging,” she admits.

  “I think it’s been a strain on our relationship,” Belinda says bluntly. “I’m walking this tightrope between being the one whom she turns to, the one she really wants unconditional love and understanding from, but also feeling the need to tell her the truth. … I’m finally in a good relationship now, and I’m about to be engaged.”

  “She’s my role model.” Gretchen smiles.

  “Even with my white hair,” Belinda says, touching her locks, which she won’t dye because of her illness. “I’m going to be a bride finally. So now I just want to shake her. I want us both to be happy now.”

  Belinda called me four months later to tell me her engagement was off. She didn’t want to reveal the cause publicly, but she did talk about the difficulty of once again having to move back in with her twin. “Neither one of us wants to be still living together in our forties, not married and not mothers,” she says quietly. “We’ve always encouraged each other to find someone, and wanted so desperately to be married.”

  In the same Langner spirit that I remember from childhood—always finding the deeper meaning of things—Belinda said she and Gretchen have chosen to see mystical signs of optimism around them. “One of the roads that intersects ours is called ‘Twin Ridges,’” Belinda tells me when we speak again, months after our first interview. “There’s a beautiful pond there where Gretchen and I go to sit. And on the same sign that intersects Twin Ridges is a road called ‘Crossways.’” The symbolism of those street names obviously resonates with her. “We almost have this spiritual idea that we’re meant to be here in this house together,” Belinda says. “To have each of our lives begin again.”

  Psychotherapist Dale Ortmeyer believes twins have distinct but harmonizing traits that combine to create one shared self, so it follows that twins would need to be physically together in order to feel complete. As Ortmeyer puts it, “The need to be with each other is heightened.” He elucidates further by citing a myth in which one twin is absent. Though Narcissus is generally believed to have fallen in love with his own reflection, second-century Greek geographer, Pausanias, hypothesized a different explanation: that, in fact, Narcissus had a twin sister, whom he loved totally and who died, which is why Narcissus gazed endlessly at his own reflection—to remind himself of her.

  “What was Narcissus mourning?” Ortmeyer asks in his 1970 paper. “Could it be that the youth was not searching for his own reflection, but for the complementary attributes of his twin?… His loss, then, would not be the loss of an identical person, but of a different person, his twin, the two of them making a unity.”

  One result of a “unity” identity—or a unified one—is that it makes each twin lazy about developing the attributes they’re missing. This may be because twins aren’t aware of their “identity fusion,” as Ortmeyer calls it. I can’t say I was, but now that I’ve been forced to think about the idea, it’s intriguing. Maybe it’s too pat, but it’s possible that Robin brought to the twinship self-possession, while I brought mirth; that she made me more intrepid, while I made her more buoyant. Robin told me in our interview that when we’re in social situations, she’ll defer to my talkativeness. (No wonder I lost my voice.) “You say what you think a little more,” she said; “you’re more comfortable jumping in with your thoughts about what’s going on and can hold the table in a dinner situation. I have felt that in family gatherings especially, I end up receding a little bit.”

  Similarly, when I’m with Robin, I find myself becoming more inept, absentminded, dependent. I’m the one who loses an earring, forgets the lunch date, leaves my purse unzipped in the subway. I let her be the grown-up.

  Ortmeyer suggests that only later in life do twins even realize they have a deficit; it usually happens when the twin isn’t by their side anymore. “In adolescence, when twins can no longer have the same degree of intimate contact,” Ortmeyer tells me, “the we-self becomes a handicap. Twins unconsciously may mourn the absence of the personality traits of the other, yet not see the need to develop those traits.” Diane Setterfield, in her novel The Thirteenth Tale, captures this perfectly: “You could view the twins as having divided a set of characteristics between them. Where an ordinary, healthy person will feel a whole range of different emotions, display a great variety of behaviors, the twins, you might say, have divided the range of emotions and behaviors into two and taken one set each.”

  Joe, who prefers a pseudonym, says he misses his twin brother, Peter, but their separation has calcified to the point of estrangement. “What does one do?” Joe asks over coffee at a tiny bakery in lower Manhattan. “I guess one starts picking up the phone or writing. Stuff like that. But the habit of avoiding has been a lot easier than breaking it.”

  Their individuation can be traced to high school, when Joe got immersed in the math team and Peter fell in love during sophomore year. “This is not a great psychological insight,” Joe says, “but I feel like he replaced me with his girlfriend. … He spent all his time with her and they were weirdly bonded.”

  Joe went to an Ivy League college and never returned home to California.

  Peter attended a local university with his high school girlfriend, and they’re together to this day—married, with one child.

  “I remember making a point of going over to their house for dinner and telling my brother, ‘You’re really important to me; I want you in my life,’” Joe recalls. “Peter seemed really moved by that, but the evening ended with his girlfriend getting really upset. Maybe she felt defensive or threatened. … I know that she always looks irritated when people would remark upon our twinness at family parties. I don’t think the fact of our being twins was a delight to her.”

  When Peter and his wife had a child, Peter changed his last name to a new surname that his wife and baby would all share. Maybe it was another attempt at separation, but Joe took it personally. “I thought it was a strange, hostile gesture,” he says now. He never told Peter how he felt. “I should have. But part of me feels very guilty—like I abandoned him; I went off to college and didn’t come back. It wasn’t a priority for me to live near my twin.”

  Ultimately, Joe married, too, then divorced after seven years. At thirty, he came out as a gay man. “My mother said she could see it in our baby pictures.” He smiles. “She was very into it—’Rah, rah!’ She immediately started marching in PFLAG parades.” (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.) “My brother was intelligent about it, sensitive to me.”

  I ask Joe what he makes of the fact that he and Peter have the same DNA but different sexual orientations. He tells me that losing his closeness with Peter made him seek closeness with other men. In other words, his twinship and homosexuality are linked not because of some genetic blueprint, but because of Peter’s disaffection.

  “I don’t have the sense of my sexuality being this thing that I was born with,” Joe says. “It felt much more circumstantial. Because, who knows? If Peter and I had been really close friends and been twinlike, I just wonder—would that have somehow freed me to explore different kinds of relationships, to be in the world differently? There was always a profound sense of insecurity in my friendships in my teens and twenties, which was wrapped up with him. … When I would typically enter into relationships, they had the dynamic of my expecting too much and being disappointed; the person I loved, who wasn’t a twin, would see me as obsessive or needy. So I’m wondering if having a twin who’s actually there, who’s always checking in with you, that must be pretty nice. That must make you pretty secure and confident. Right?” He really seems to want an answer: “Don’t you have that?”

  The cashier in the three-table café is giving us dirty looks because we’re nursing our coffees, which barely meet the minimum charge. Before we leave, I ask Joe if I can contact Peter. “I’ll have to find his nu
mber,” he says, appearing surprised himself that he doesn’t know it by heart or even where he keeps it. “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  I relate to Joe’s story in this way: I think I, too, may have sought out—or gravitated toward—more intense female intimacy in my adult friendships because of what’s absent from my twinship. I have longer, weightier discussions with Rachel, Marcia, and Dani than I do with Robin, partly because my friends probe deeper and draw out the minutiae of whatever I confide. Our exchanges are in many ways more tender, more comprehensive than mine with my sister.

  My husband falls into a category of his own: He is the person who undoubtedly knows me best, whom I trust the most. But Dave is not a gooey girlfriend. He doesn’t fill that place I may be wired to need filled. I have what feels like a congenital clarity of what it is to be wholly close to another human being—what poet Karl Jay Shapiro, in his 1942 poem “The Twins,” called “the instinctive partnership of birth.” Twin after twin described the same primal sureness. Once you’ve had it, it’s hard to let it go, or to settle for anything less. Dave is unfailingly patient with this need, partly due to his equanimity, partly because he grew up with identical twin sisters himself.

  Robin, on the other hand, hasn’t so much collected new intimacies as found it tricky to tend them. She said in our interview that our closeness made her “sort of a lazy,” then added, “When you have a twin, you don’t really need friends or a best friend. All through my youth, I wasn’t that open to close friendships. You were enough. Now I feel like my eggs are in one basket a little bit and I resist that.”

  Eggs in one basket—that’s just the phrase Joan Friedman used when we spoke in Los Angeles: “Twins understandably, genetically, put all their love in one basket. For some reason, you were more capable of spreading it around. She’s had to shut off the love that she has for you in order to feel as if she has enough love for others.”

  Separating from one’s twin can require more conscious effort than we expect, and multiple attempts before the individuation sticks. Some move to different cities, some go to couples therapy, and some extricate themselves gradually. Others mark a line in the sand by the striking clarity of their self-definition.

  Perhaps the most extreme example of this is offered by Clair Farley, who, thanks to a sex-change operation, is no longer Alex Farley. Her identical brother, Mark, is still male, still Mark, and a homosexual. They both live in San Francisco because lately they want to be near to each other. Clair is, when we meet, the transgender economic development coordinator for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center; Mark is still mulling career paths after coproducing a highly praised documentary, Red Without Blue, about his and Clair’s story. (The title refers to the colors their mother dressed them in as babies—Mark in red, Alex/Clair in blue.)

  When I meet them for dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Mark is somewhat underdressed for the stuffy restaurant, wearing a white long-sleeved T-shirt under a short-sleeved one; Clair, on the other hand, is turned out in a black-and-white herringbone jacket, black top, skirt, and heels. She’s pretty—softer-looking now than when I watched her on film a year earlier. Their voices are the only feature that is still identical about them, which, Clair admits, sometimes gives her away as a former man.

  Both twins answer my questions in measured tones; neither reveals any feeling, despite the intensity of their story. Clair is more overtly at ease than Mark, more talkative. Mark seems chary, despite the fact that their story has already played nationally on the Sundance Channel—or perhaps because of it.

  “I wouldn’t say that surgery fixed everything or solved all my problems,” says Clair, “but definitely I feel like I was reborn in many ways and can start fresh. That’s the most powerful part of it: I’ve been given the opportunity to start over in a new body.”

  They spent their childhood as inseparable playmates in Missoula, Montana. The film includes home movies of the boys dancing merrily together. At one point, Mark says on-camera, “We were just in love with each other from the day we were born,” and their mother adds, “They know each other in ways you and I will never know.”

  In seventh grade, Alex came out as a homosexual. Mark was still in the closet, but their classmates assumed he was gay, as did their mother. The twins were going through an angry phase, fighting with each other constantly; Clair admits she was physically abusive to Mark. In the film, Mark says their sameness magnified their adolescent awkwardness: “We were definitely really self-conscious at that point in our life, and having each other as a mirror of what we didn’t like about ourselves.”

  At fifteen, they decided to commit double suicide. It was Mark’s idea. “I asked Alex to make a promise,” he recounts on film. “I told him he had to say yes before I told him what it was. I started telling him that I didn’t feel anyone really loved us and that we had a place in this life. Things had to be better somewhere else.”

  Alex agreed to Mark’s plan. “We both had been depressed and suicidal,” Clair recalls. “Why wouldn’t you end your life with the person you began it with? Why would you want to live on without him?”

  They drove to a bluff overlooking Missoula. Both did a large amount of cocaine; then they directed the exhaust pipe into their car and turned on the ignition. “We closed all the windows and started breathing in the fumes. He kept kind of shaking me and we were both in the backseat. He wanted me to get up—‘Get up, get up.’ You know, ‘You can’t die yet. No, we have to die together; wake up, wake up, wake up.’”

  “We stayed in there for hours,” Mark recalls, “and I remember at one point saying, ‘This isn’t working; we’re not dying.’ And so we talked about driving the car off the cliff.”

  “‘I don’t want to drive off the side of the cliff,’” Clair recalls saying. “‘Please let’s not do this. I just want to go home.’”

  “So I got out of the car,” Mark continues, “and took the hose out of the exhaust and drove us home.”

  When they got home, drugged and sickened, they confessed everything to their dad, who rushed to the hospital; they were sent from there to a mental facility, then for four years to separate drug rehabilitation centers, Alex in Oregon, Mark in Idaho. They saw each other twice during that entire time.

  “This came after a fifteen-year relationship of spending every single day together,” Clair says now over her salad. “Suddenly we had to survive without each other. For the first time, we created an identity that was separate.”

  Though their phone conversations were monitored, Alex did tell Mark at one point that he had decided to become a woman. Alex also told his mother, who, in the film, offers her own take on Alex’s choice to change genders. “[It was] his attempt to not be a twin. To be totally isolated from us. And it worked. Do I think it’s real? Yeah. For the time being.”

  I ask Mark if there was a point where he asked his twin not to go through with it.

  “Never,” he replies firmly.

  Today, Mark minimizes the question of whether Clair’s decision was a reaction to their twinship, but in the documentary, he tells Clair he was somewhat offended at the time. “It’s still hard for me sometimes,” he tells her on-camera, “because we were born as twins; we were born as boys. That’s part of our identity; it’s part of my identity. You said you don’t like what you’re like—your physical body—and you don’t like me because we look so much alike. I explained to him that I don’t look at you [now that you’re a woman] and see myself. Part of who we were was lost in that transformation.”

  Their relationship, which had been so intertwined as children, suddenly felt annulled.

  Mark: “It was almost like you were cutting this cord that we had: this twinship. This identical identity. I just couldn’t imagine you desiring to be someone else because it was who I was and who you are. You didn’t want to be like me and that’s why you hated yourself and hated me at times.”

  Clair: “But I’m still the same person.”

  Ma
rk: “You’re the same person, but it’s not Mark and Alex anymore.”

  I tell Clair it’s difficult not to see her sex change as a repudiation of Mark—at least to some degree. “I would say that growing up, I did have some resentments about him because I saw those qualities in him that I didn’t like in myself,” she explains. “But to say that it was because of him is not the case. It was more a rejection of the person I had been.”

  “I do remember feeling just a kind of abandonment in a sense,” Mark tells me, barely touching his entrée, “because Clair had told me that she didn’t want to be my brother any longer and she wanted to transform her body into something else. And to me, not understanding what that process is all about, it felt like a rejection and it felt hurtful.”

  Clair concedes: “I think there was probably some unconscious desire to have individuality or space. When I was separate in boarding school, I was able to explore these things for the first time and say, ‘I have to have a personality that’s not connected as a twin.’ I think that’s when I started to realize that I really did want to transition.”

  I ask Clair if today she feels like a woman.

  “For me, gender is not as simple as ‘I’m a woman.’ Yes, biologically now my genitals are female, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that my expression and behavior and spirituality are female. I feel like it’s evolved past those qualifications or those labels. My spirituality is nongender. … We’re all much more than a woman or a man. None of us is based on these inherent stereotypes; we’re all much more than that.”

  Does Mark consider Clair his sister or his brother?

  “She’s my sister,” Mark replies. “There’s no hesitation at all. … I could say I’ve stopped using ‘Alex,’ but at the same time I don’t feel bad about using ‘Alex’ when I’m speaking about Alex and a memory of my brother. Because that’s still real and it existed. But I never make the mistake of calling Clair ‘Alex’ today.”