Giving Away My Twin

You are getting married, and of course I have feelings about that. I think I might go watch some TV.

I am just beginning to know your man. He’s from another country, a carpenter with quick eyes under sleepy lids. I like his way of glancing off to the side and drawing out the first syllable, and the slow chuckle that breaks out of him at dismaying turns. You met that first summer of COVID, through the friend whose place you were staying at to get a break from staying at mine. “Batshit in love” is how you described it a few months later, standing in my kitchen. He built you a bed.

Ten years ago, at my wedding to N., Mom and Dad walked me down the aisle together, one on either side of me. I had assumed you would want the same. But no: you have asked me to give you away.

I need to write my speech. Keep it lively and simple, people say. Be funny, but don’t overdo it; be heartfelt, but don’t get too heavy. Earlier this year, I gave a toast at an old friend’s wedding. I was anxious about standing up in front of people, but the actual writing of the speech was not difficult; I was able to see, clearly enough, my friend and our shared history, the shape of it, and the words came easily in the hours before the rehearsal dinner. Whereas this task is gnawing at me.

Brief, bounded, securely valedictory, as a form the wedding speech is perhaps not well suited to the twin relationship, which is both totalizing and ambivalent. But, really, what form could be? We could look to the “oblong terracotta object with rounded angles and two cavities at each end” that Alessandra Piontelli, an Italian psychotherapist, observed a pair of five-year-olds holding in a West African village in 2000. It was the custom there, Piontelli claims, for sets of young twins to carry one of these at all times, using it as a leash to each other and eating their meals from its cavities until the age of seven, when the object would be broken in two and each twin could go their own way.

Piontelli also observed the expressive gesture of a Papuan man who held a cigarette between his thumb and ring finger, having severed the pointer and middle after the death of his co-twin. In the West African Vodun tradition, when a twin dies, the surviving one is expected to carry around an effigy of her, feeding, washing, and putting this little statuette to bed every night, lest the dead twin become angry at being excluded and pull the surviving one to join them.

In other words, something busted, truncated, surrogate. Something a little blue.

Batshit in love. I can see that you are. I have seen it almost from the beginning. After your second date, you told me a thing he’d said in passing. I don’t remember the context, but he’d said, “You can’t let your nervous system run your life.” I remember thinking, with a touch of alarm, What else would run our life?

Now you and he are building a house together, just like Mom and Dad did. When you fall in love with somebody, you create a new world, and then, if you’re lucky, you live in it. N. and I are still living in the world we made, though we opened its borders a few years ago, started seeing other people. Even before that, I think there was something porous about our marriage, a guest room where the bed was always made, a place for you.

I went on a date recently, my first in a while. We met on an app, but by a strange—or maybe not—coincidence, he had met you many years ago. In the car, there was a certain way he touched my ear that made me go still. On our second date, at a nondescript midtown hotel, we stepped naked out onto a tiny balcony with the brown buildings and yellow windows looming up close, and he started to sing “Something’s Coming,” from “West Side Story.” I sang with him, and it reminded me of when we were younger, the way we used to sing together. It’s been a while, but have you noticed that, when we do a harmony, one of us will usually reach out and touch the other on the arm or shoulder or knee or foot, and remain touching there until the song is over? To anyone watching, the touch must seem sweetly affectionate, and it is, but it is also practical, a way of steadying the instrument and keeping it in tune.

I’ve been reading “Cassandra at the Wedding,” Dorothy Baker’s 1962 novella, in which Cassandra goes to her identical twin’s wedding hoping to “stage a last-minute rescue.” If she can just get her sister, Judith, alone and find her way back into that perfect understanding they sometimes share, “we’d know again who we are and how it has to be and what a fool’s game it is to try to split.” Cassandra envisions a life with her sister, just the two of them, somewhere abroad; she will write while Judith plays piano. “No other way felt right,” she concludes, and how could it, when Cassandra thinks of herself as “half of whatever we are”?

Judith, on the other hand, wants out of this devouring “we,” and her wedding is as much the ritual severing of one attachment as it is the consecration of another. Once married, Judith looks at Cassandra and thinks, “Whom God hath split asunder, let nothing join together. Ever.” In her mind—as, perhaps, in the Western cultural imagination—the codependence of twinhood (as opposed to that of marriage) is incompatible with adult life-making. A contingent, unformed, futureless state of being not unlike childhood itself, the twin identity must be put away with childish things. Otherwise, Judith fears, “people like us can’t really be people and live happy lives.”

This reading of twinhood as a potentially fatal liability echoes through the small but remarkably consistent twin-psychodrama genre, in which adult twin subjects cannot survive as a pair. Poor twin (Bette Davis) murders rich twin (Bette Davis) and impersonates her (“Dead Ringer,” 1964). Conniving twin (Bette Davis again) dies in boating accident after seducing man who rightfully belongs to deserving twin (Bette Davis again, “A Stolen Life,” 1946). Good twin (Olivia de Havilland) finds love with a psychologist who discovers, via Rorschach tests, that bad twin (Olivia de Havilland) is bad and needs to go to jail (“The Dark Mirror,” 1946 again). These films split one beautiful movie star into two and then tell a story that makes her one again, dispensing with her double. One twin must rise from the ashes of the other, or both will go down in flames.

The identical-twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons in David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” (1988) have never really separated; they share lives and lovers, slipping in and out of each other’s names like jackets hanging by the door. Until one of them falls in love with the woman they have both been fucking and she falls in love with him—that specific twin. Their sex, which incorporates surgical accoutrements like latex tubing and forceps, is a kind of singleton birth. The twin in love finally “splits” from his brother by killing him in a violent but consensual surgical ceremony, but the procedure does not liberate him; he cannot bear singularity, and the film’s final shot shows their two bodies lifeless and entwined.

Twins are a horror trope because they accost us with what we already, uneasily, know: none of us is discrete. But, if twin closeness conjures fear and confusion, it is also aspirational, a common singleton child fantasy. In “The Parent Trap” (1961), two girls are reunited as twins, a separation narrative in reverse, and, with the power of twinship (“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”), they also reunite their parents, repairing divorce.

“The imaginary twin represents a partnership that is not threatened with separation,” the psychologist Dorothy Burlingham wrote. The real twin, of course, offers no such assurances, but what a beautiful, comforting idea. A partnership not threatened with separation: it is what we invoke and celebrate at a wedding.

Yours is tomorrow, and you can’t decide between two dresses. One is boxy and diaphanous, white with a pattern of red flowers; the other is black linen. You are wearing the white one now, the one you originally chose for the occasion. “I can’t figure out what I saw in this dress,” you say, craning your neck. You seemed so sure when you came home from buying it, and I was so sure because you were. Mom worries that you will be too hot in the black one. “The white is more summery,” she says, looking to me, and I think maybe she wants me to try to convince you. “See what mood you wake up in,” I say.

Tonight, when I arrive at the rehearsal dinner, an old friend of your man’s whom I have never met greets me eagerly and wishes me joy, mistaking me for you. You do seem joyful tonight. When the tent is full and the dinner is laid out, you stand up and thank us, all of us who are with you at this crossing. I like your word; it makes me think of stepping into a dinghy on choppy water, of the day I was induced, bobbing up and down on that blue medicine ball like a drunk on a raft. You were there then; you asked about the pain, your cool hand on my neck. Knife in my anus, I grunted, and you nodded, breathing with me. Hours later, just as the doctor was telling me to go ahead and shit myself, N. holding up one of my legs and the doctor the other, you came running in from the corner bodega with a white plastic bag swinging on your arm, out of breath, shouting “I’m the doula!” to the staff who tried to stop you on the way. They reached in and brought out my daughter, and then you reached into the white bag and brought out a box of lime popsicles. They were giving me that medicine that makes you thirsty, and I’ll never forget the first touch of that pale, smooth popsicle to my tongue, the sweet sting of the lime on my lips and teeth after all that carnage at my other holes; it made me want to put one down there, and I asked the nurse for some ice to sit on.

Now, as darkness falls and the lawn gets bluer, my daughter is disappearing and reappearing, an apparition darting among standing bodies, scalloped tent edges, tables with cake. It’s her first time at a party as a significantly autonomous person, a being who walks with a certain kind of purpose. I am standing apart from the dim hybrid forms, affectionate chatter wafting around me in the dusk, remembering my own wedding. Looking back, I wonder if it was partly a signal to you, or, no, to myself: Now I will cleave to this other. See how I do it? I do it like this.

Listen to this and just tell me what you think. I have texted the man I’ve been seeing, “Good morning,” and sent a picture of myself half naked. That was more than an hour ago. Do you think he’s still asleep, or is he enjoying his advantage, making me wait? This “open” arrangement is supposed to liberate me, but I keep getting detained, wondering what he could possibly feel. One marries in part to renounce forever this particular kind of not knowing, this protracted misunderstanding.

It is early, and I hardly know him, but I’m struggling with this familiar urge—maybe you’ve had it? It is the urge to give my whole self away, immediately and completely. Just, like, “Here, take it.”

“Don’t lose your power,” N. says as we are folding laundry, as if my power were the car keys or the hairbrush or some other object I tend to misplace. Or maybe what he says is “Don’t give your power away.” N. is wary of me lately, disturbed by the trance I am in, how I forgot to give our daughter her medicine the other night, how I am, as he puts it, “on one.” I am wary of myself, too, and of the man, who seems the type to float away on the next breeze, the type to look deep into my eyes and, when I ask with a shy hope, “What?,” to solemnly whisper, “chicken butt.”

“You’ll be O.K.,” N. says. “You just have to fortify yourself.” “How?” I ask him, and he says, “Don’t need.”

It’s good advice. I will contain myself and ration my availability, however unnatural it feels. Ever since I met him, I have been laughing at odd times, a dangerous and incontinent kind of laughter. On the street the other night, he leaned in as though to kiss my mouth, then blew a giant zerbert on my cheek instead, and I was seized by a fit of silent laughter so ferocious that I seemed to be groping in the dark along an uncertain wall. I am used to legible bodies, familiar bodies. He is absolute nonsense to me.

Nonsense, to be falling so quickly for this stranger, and even the way I fall feels related to you, how I want to mix with him, tip over and spill on him, press my maimed part up against him.

“You want to be able to remain standing,” a therapist once told me. “You walk into a room, and no matter what happens, no matter who enters or leaves, no matter what anyone does, you remain standing.”

Keep it together, I think. Remain standing! But it’s like what a twin named Toni said in Ricardo Ainslie’s book “The Psychology of Twinship”: “To be just one person, it really is kind of scary.”