And Robin was almost certainly imprinted by those years when she entered a new school late (tenth grade) and had to break into established cliques, warm up to students who simply weren’t as warm, find a niche despite the fact that her interests didn’t match the majority’s.
Mom recalls the changes in both of us: “You were full of self-doubt,” she tells me, “and easily deflated.” And about Robin, she says, “She used to be much more of an open book, more vulnerable and expressive, but she eventually got defended and distrustful. Along the way, somehow she learned that she couldn’t just be herself and thrive in that school.”
I ask Ms. Harris for her take on my own situation: “I think all the things you described for you and Robin—different sorts of groups, and different experiences within these groups—played a role in widening the differences between you.”
And the differences led us here, to where we both have some sense of deficit: I want more of us; she needs more of herself. The peer theory might indeed explain the outcome—why I, who handled my adolescent disquiet by connecting with others, should feel so betrayed when Robin disconnects; and why Robin, who withdrew from others in acquired distrust, now challenges herself to “claim” new relationships, while pulling away from her oldest friend.
THE RESULTS ARE IN: TWIN STUDIES
Aggression: mostly genetic
Alcohol dependence among adolescents: largely environmental
Alcoholism: identical twins 50 percent concordant; fraternal twins 28 percent concordant
Alcohol use: mostly genetic
Allergies: mostly genetic
Alzheimer’s: 80 percent genetic
Anorexia: mostly genetic
Antisocial behavior with psychopathic tendencies (lack of empathy, remorse): largely genetic
Anxiety: moderately inheritable
Attention deficit disorder: mostly inheritable
Attitudes toward sex and religion: more environmentally influenced than genetic
Autism: identical twins between 80 and 90 percent concordant
Back pain: mostly genetic
Baldness: mostly genetic
Bipolar disorder: identical twins more concordant
Cholesterol: mostly genetic
Cocaine abuse: Identical twins are more concordant than fraternal twins.
Cognitive abilities: Identical twins are more concordant than fraternal twins.
Communication: Identical twins who stay more in touch live longer than identical twins who don’t.
Criminality: Identical twins are more concordant for property crimes (theft, vandalism) than fraternal (not necessarily true for violent crime, however).
Depression: strong genetic component
Extroversion: strong genetic link
Happiness: 50 percent genetic
IQ: Identical twins are more similar to each other than fraternal twins and become more alike in intelligence as they age. Dr. Nancy Segal cites the finding that “identical twins are nearly as alike in IQ as the same person tested twice.”
Job choice: Identical twins choose more similar careers than fraternal twins.
Job salaries: A married twin makes more money than his or her unmarried twin (also true of nontwin siblings).
Left-handedness: more frequent among identical twins
Loneliness: 50 percent of identical twins and 25 percent of fraternal twins shared similar characteristics.
Menopause: happens earlier among twins
Moliness: mostly genetic
Multiple sclerosis: mostly genetic
Nearsightedness: mostly genetic
Obesity: Lifestyle, more than genes, impacts insulin-resistance and thus obesity.
Phobias: more likely to be concordant in identical twins than fraternal twins—therefore presumably genetic
Sleep patterns: Identical twins are more similar than fraternal.
Sleepwalking: substantial genetic effects
Smoking: between 50 and 70 percent genetic
Social life: The identical twin who has a tight-knit social circle is in better overall physical health than the one who doesn’t.
Stuttering: mostly genetic
Voting behavior: Identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins.
10 CRUEL DNA: THE LORDS
Twins with the same DNA can have different fates. But sometimes DNA encodes a common heartbreak.
Identical twins Charlie and Tim Lord assumed that The Big Coincidence in their twinship would be that they had fallen in love with—and married—two college roommates who were best friends. They could never have guessed that they would also share in common a devastating event: Within six months, each lost a baby.
It’s the fall of 2006 and Charlie and Tim Lord are sitting in my living room in New York, looking handsome and disconcertingly duplicate. Lanky and sandy-haired, they’re sipping glasses of diet Coke. Tim lives just blocks away from me on the Upper West Side, with his wife, Alison, and their two grade school–age daughters, Annie and Mary. Charlie is visiting from Boston, where he lives with his wife, Blyth, and their two daughters, Taylor and Eliza.
As we start talking, I make my first mistake, asking Tim if he had any misgivings about attending the same college as his twin brother. “I didn’t,” he replies, correcting me. “I went to Brown.” Oh, right. Twenty years after college, I’m still convinced that Tim was also in my Yale class, when, in fact, only Charlie was. Probably it’s because Tim visited so often.
I do remember thinking the Lord boys were interchangeably winning in those days: Rangy and smart, with a kind of poetic aspect, they exuded a kind of authenticity and kindness. But the truth is, I never got to know them all that well, as my early fumble clearly shows.
The Lords grew up in various countries because their father opened pharmaceutical plants for Squibb, then switched to being a school headmaster, first in Ohio, then in Baltimore, then in Washington. Their mother, a teacher specializing in art history, taught at Washington’s Sidwell Friends School.
“One of my first memories at age four is of being just walloped in the playground when we were living in Guatemala City,” Tim recalls.
“I was trying to get to you and they were holding me down,” Charlie adds.
“The two of us tried to protect each other,” Tim continues. “There was this intense realization even then that it doesn’t really matter what all else is going on, because the two of us are a team.”
The Lord boys were never dressed alike, but Charlie often wore brown so friends and relatives could tell them apart by remembering the comic-strip character Charlie Brown. Tim wore blue.
The Lords say they can’t distinguish themselves in childhood pictures. “I actually pretend I can,” Tim admits. “Like when I’m with my daughter, I’ll make something up, just because it’s too weird not to know yourself in a picture.”
The Lord parents didn’t do cutesy, twinny things with the boys, but Tim admits, “They did some stuff that was a little icky.”
Like what?
“We had to perform a song together at one of their cocktail parties.” He remembers the lyrics: “‘Everybody knows I look just like my brother, but I just want to be me.’ It was a rewrite of something.”
They shared the same room, same birthday party. Charlie says sometimes they had to share a present.
“I don’t remember that; really?” Tim is incredulous.
Charlie nods. “There was only one plastic Tarzan knife with a sheath and we had to take turns.”
Tim recalls fighting over clothes. Both agree that they were not fashionable youngsters.
“We were not well dressed,” says Charlie.
“We were not well groomed.” Tim laughs.
I ask them about their earliest awareness of being twins.
“I do remember actually realizing that not everybody had one,” Charlie says, “but then feeling sorry for the people that didn’t. I had a realization when I was probably six or seven that not everybody had this person whom they
were this close to and whom they played with all the time.”
“And later, I just remember that distinct feeling of ‘I’m at my most relaxed and happy when the two of us are together,’” says Tim.
“I don’t have a memory that doesn’t include you,” Charlie interjects.
They will do this a lot—step on each other’s sentences—but neither seems to mind. In fact, they seem used to relying on one another’s memories to tell a complete story.
“It’s very interesting, as you get older,” Tim continues. “Because you absolutely love that you have this great closeness, but sometimes it’s almost scary.” He turns to look at Charlie. “Sometimes it’s one of those weird things when you don’t let people see that, because it’s almost too much for people to understand.”
What exactly does he hide?
“How totally close you are,” Tim answers. “You do reveal it when it’s just the two of you. But when you’re out and about, you don’t necessarily share it.”
I remember that impulse: to downplay our connection in public, so that people didn’t feel there was some impermeable fence around us. I know some friends still felt there was no getting close to our closeness.
“I don’t remember anyone being frustrated by our friendship,” Charlie says, “but I do know that my closest friends in the world recognize that my relationship with Tim is in a totally different category.”
I ask how they each deal with being mistaken. Robin has a much lower tolerance than I do. “I went through a phase where I really couldn’t be bothered with people who mixed us up.” Tim laughs almost apologetically. “I’d just say, ‘I’m not Charlie,’ and walk away.”
Charlie, on the other hand, was never irked by being confused; he says he knows a mile away when it’s about to happen. “I know the Look,” he says. “And if I see the Look—the perplexed look—I always go up and say, ‘You must think I’m my twin brother.’ But there’s plenty of times when I don’t see the person noticing, and people have later said, ‘Why didn’t you say hi to me?’”
“I had one incident recently,” Tim chimes in, “where a woman came flying down a subway car, and I said to the two guys I was talking to, ‘You’re about to see a Twin Moment.’ They said, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘Just watch.’ The woman threw her arms around me. So now, she was going to be embarrassed not only about the fact that she got the wrong twin but that she’d given me this big hug. I said, ‘I’m not actually Charlie; I’m his twin brother.’ People’s faces just rearrange. Because there’s a reality shift.”
I tell them that it can be particularly awkward for me when an acquaintance at a cocktail party compliments me on my writing in the New York Times, where Robin is a reporter. It’s not that I can’t accept the praise on her behalf; it’s that the person usually looks stricken when I explain that the Times writer is my twin, and tries to recover by quickly offering me a similar compliment. Except that they don’t necessarily know what I do. And if they have to ask, it makes them feel even worse when I tell them I’m a writer, too. They clearly think they’ve hurt my feelings because they don’t know what I’ve written. So then they ask me what I’ve written, and suddenly I’m in the pathetic position of having to recite my résumé so that they feel better about having made me feel bad, which they truly haven’t. If they only knew how many times I’ve endured this particular moment; it’s fleeting but strained every time. So nine times out of ten, when someone compliments the Times articles I haven’t written, I just say, “Thank you so much,” and head for the bar.
Charlie recognizes this scenario. “There will be people in my parents’ life,” Charlie says, “who remember us vaguely by—’There’s the twin who’s an actor [Tim] and then there’s the one who does … Something else.’” (They both run nonprofits at the time we talk.)
Charlie recounts how painful it was years ago when Tim seemed to be on top of the world, studying acting at San Francisco’s prestigious American Conservatory Theater, while Charlie was floundering in law school, unsure whether he wanted to be a lawyer.
“That was the hardest time,” Charlie tells him. “The one time that we were each at very different places.”
Did they talk about it?
“We didn’t really.” Charlie seems surprised to say it.
“In some ways, that was probably the least communicative we’ve ever been.” Tim nods. “It was too weird to have a moment where I was worried about you, where I couldn’t help you.”
They do this a lot during their interview: address each other instead of me, really look at each other, without self-consciousness. It’s noticeable because it’s so relaxed, and even tender.
“That Christmas I was in this really dark time of not knowing what I wanted to do. And here’s the funny part: To exacerbate the whole thing, I evaluated every Christmas present—probably, I think, rightly—through this lens of ‘Tim is the California Cool Actor Guy and my parents don’t really know what to do with me. And then of course Tim got cool luggage and I got a matching set of Samsonite.” They both laugh.
“It’s a family story we tell to this day, about the time Charlie kicked over the Samsonite, yelling, ‘What do they think I am? Some little uptight fucking guy?’”
Alison Lord (née Smith) remembers meeting Charlie back at Yale in 1986. “He seemed cute, smart and ‘cool,’” she says, but she wasn’t interested in him. Her roommate, Blyth, was.
Blyth and Charlie started dating, which meant the girls soon met Tim, who visited from Brown. Charlie says the “Tim Introduction” was always significant for any of his relationships. “Most of my girlfriends who didn’t know Tim well,” Charlie says, “were always nervous to meet him. They knew it was a momentous occasion.”
“The approval of Tim still really matters to me,” Blyth acknowledges.
Alison says she didn’t consider Tim romantically because he was Blyth’s boyfriend’s brother. Not to mention the fact that she wasn’t Charlie’s biggest fan. “I don’t know that Charlie knows that I think this, but Charlie and I actually don’t get along that well.”
Charlie says the same thing in his own interview with me: “The funny thing is that Alison and I never really got along.”
Tim agrees: “They are like oil and water.”
“We’re better now,” Charlie says. “But at the time, it was always very complicated.”
“We rub each other the wrong way,” Alison says. “Which is so bizarre, when you think about it, but we do. My general inclination in the world is to be extremely organized, helpful to everyone, and I am a control freak by nature. I think Charlie views me as a meddler in other people’s business.”
Alison’s efficient personality is glimpsed even in our short meeting. She speaks very quickly, in articulate, economical sentences—no word wasted—and betrays no self-doubt.
Blyth Lord, on the other hand, has a laid-back demeanor, and seems more ruminative. I interview her at her office at WGBH, the Boston public television station, where she’s a producer. She’s wearing a black V-neck T-shirt and green corduroys with a soft fabric belt. “I posed this to Charlie, actually,” she says, “when he was telling me about his interview with you. I said, ‘Perhaps all the ways that Alison works for Tim are where you and Tim differ.’ And he thought that was very interesting, and then we got distracted and never analyzed what those things were.”
Would Blyth say that one twin is closer to the parents?
“I think Charlie was always the more intense child and he had more of a temper and engaged with his parents more than Tim did. Charlie felt that was almost his role—to be more of the challenger, and Tim was more of an appeaser.”
Charlie, in his interview, agrees: “I think I got more of my mother’s volatility. So two volatile people will inevitably collide. … I was pegged as the wild man, which I never liked. I really hated it. I got pigeonholed as the temper guy, with Tim as the gentle one.”
Blyth goes on: “I think because of that history, Charlie’s p
arents have a more easygoing relationship with Tim. Charlie believes that his father is more comfortable with Tim.”
Interestingly, when I ask Charlie and Tim who is closer to their mother, they each point at the other twin. They have the same response when I ask who is closer to their father.
Blyth is certain the twins’ differences explain why the four spouses are not interchangeable. “Charlie could never be married to Alison,” she says. “I have no idea if Tim and I could be married. I have not truthfully ever thought about that one.”
Never thought about it? I certainly have at least thought in passing about whether I could be married to Robin’s husband, Edward, but, yes, it feels too taboo to even contemplate.
Blyth continues: “Since I know that Charlie is really annoyed by parts of Alison, I have asked myself what parts of me must annoy Tim. And I don’t know the answer to that. I will say that I have moments of insecurity around Tim; I get uncomfortable because I do feel the need for him to think I’m bright. I know he likes me, but I do have these moments of thinking, Does he think I’m interesting? Does he think I’m smart? Could he sit on a desert island with me for two days? And then I’ll also say, Does he think I’m attractive? You think these things, inevitably.”
Has she asked herself whether she’s attracted to him?
One and the Same Page 23
