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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.”
Jean and Callie Garnett photographed outside Jean’s home in June, 2023.Photograph by Justine Kurland for The New Yorker
Paris, 2002: An American woman living alone in a rented room gets in touch with the agency from which she was adopted thirty-five years ago, seeking information about her parents. The agency’s director of post-adoption services informs her that, by the way, she has an identical twin. Her sister is married, has a child, and is living in Brooklyn. One twin calls the other and is startled by the sound of her own voice. They arrange a time and place to meet. Before long, one is touching the other’s earlobes. They discover they sucked the same two fingers as children, and that both sometimes mime typing out words while thinking them. It is a kind of whirlwind romance, but haunted: Who might they have been together? One twin calls the director of post-adoption services. Why, she asks, was she separated from her sister?
It is by now an infamous case: over the course of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the prominent New York City adoption agency Louise Wise Services divided at least eight pairs of identical- and fraternal-twin babies (and at least one set of identical triplets), placing them in separate homes to be reared as singletons without informing the adoptive parents. The renowned psychiatrist Viola Bernard, who recommended the policy, said by way of explanation years later, “We were of the opinion that the placement of twins who were identical in separate homes had advantages for the children,” allowing each of them “to develop more of their own identity rather than a shared one.”
Of course, this arrangement was also a behavioral geneticist’s wet dream: “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” as one research assistant put it, “to put to rest the dilemma of nature and nurture forever.” Viola Bernard’s colleague Peter Neubauer, a psychoanalyst whose family had escaped Nazi-controlled Austria, seized the opportunity to study the separated twins, collecting data on some of them for years under false premises.
Maybe Neubauer and Bernard felt that the ends of this study justified the means, a proposition we can’t fully assess since Neubauer’s research is sealed at the Yale University archives until 2065. What we do know is that, by the nineteen-nineties, when the circumstances of the study came to light and prompted outrage, Neubauer essentially chalked it up to different times. As he told the journalist Lawrence Wright, Bernard had been acting on “the information available,” which showed that “twinship was a burden.” It’s tempting to dismiss this defense as a convenient excuse. According to the twin researcher Nancy Segal, there was no child-development literature advocating permanent twin separation. But it’s also true that Bernard wasn’t the first in her field to raise serious concerns about identity confusion and codependence in twins.
One text that almost certainly influenced Bernard’s work was Dorothy Burlingham’s 1952 study “Twins,” which tracked three sets of identical twins in a residential war home for children in a quiet part of London during and after the Blitz. (Burlingham had founded the home with her partner, Anna Freud.) Hailed by D. W. Winnicott as “probably the most comprehensive work of its kind in existence,” the study was credited with helping to demystify the twin relationship, in part by disabusing us of the notion that it is “an untroubled and unchanging one,” as Burlingham put it.
Institutionalized, observed, and seeing their parents only sporadically, Burlingham’s twins sometimes turn on each other. Bill bullies Bert. Jessie taunts Bessie. Mary calls Madge “a shitty bum.” Inevitable conflict and rivalry between the twins do not seem to raise undue alarm, but other behavior does. For example, “When Jessie played she was a dog, Bessie would stop whatever she was doing and was a dog too.” In Burlingham’s analysis, such copying is maladaptive and suggests a “contagion of feelings” that may distort a twin’s natural destiny. “Separated from Jessie,” Burlingham writes, “[Bessie] might have been able to develop her own characteristics which were those of an active, original and concentrated child.”
Burlingham, who herself had older twin sisters, never advocates rearing twins apart; indeed, she dismisses this as “an inadequate method of solving the situation.” But she suggests in all three cases that her subjects might have fared better singly. It’s a striking choice, considering how vividly her observations capture the anguish and bewilderment of parted twins. Sometimes, during the months that four-year-old Madge was in the hospital with ringworm, Mary “sat on the floor, rocked and cried, saying over and over again, ‘My Madge, my Madge.’ ” When one-and-a-half-year-old Bert was briefly separated from Bill owing to illness, he began to say “all gone” for the first time, despite having a vocabulary of only about five words. One night Bill said “all gone” continuously from 10 P.M. to 3:30 A.M.
Mom is worried now about the bugs. She has had the area by the pond sprayed, but it’s no guarantee. Maybe the fans will help. Your man’s eight-year-old niece has spent the morning on the couch with cream-colored paper strewn about her, folding up fans and tying each one with gold or silver ribbon. Ever since we arrived, my daughter has attached herself to this niece, following her wherever she goes. I, too, find myself drawn to her, especially when I need a task. There is something in her presence, her interest in every detail and eager, unquestioning faith in the whole enterprise, that gives her a kind of authority here among the scattered grownups.
The kegs have arrived; the caterer will be here soon. The niece and I are out on the road cutting Queen Anne’s lace for the bouquets, trailed by N., who carries our daughter on his shoulders. Mom and Dad are down at the tent with your man and his brothers, setting up the bar. We all stop what we’re doing to rehearse.
Starting at the large gray rock near the pond, the girls will walk first, hand in hand in their dresses. Then, when the music changes, I will walk you. We will go about twenty paces, across a clearing of moss and roots, past the rows of white chairs, to the edge of the pond, where your man will be waiting with his brother and an officiant named Bob. When we reach Bob, we will separate.
Jean and Callie Garnett (foreground) photographed by Justine Kurland for her book “Girl Pictures” in 2000.Photograph by Justine Kurland
Right up until it is time to do your hair, I keep sneaking away to mutter to myself, experiment with different phrasing and emphasis. I want to win over your man, impress his family and ours, and make you proud of me. I want them all to think, The sister is vulnerable, but intact. I know the thing by heart, but still something isn’t right; maybe the knowing by heart is the problem. “Just speak to her,” Mom keeps saying, as if I should be able to forget the eighty plates of salmon and potatoes.
Just speak to you. We could talk about new infatuation, these sweet, dopey symptoms that must still be fresh in your memory, the wakefulness in bed beside his sleeping body, the loud sound of swallowing in the dark, the getting quietly dressed in the morning to step outside and rip a giant fart.
I have been afraid to call you, afraid of the distance between us, how differently we define “marriage” right now, and “love,” and everything. Most of all I am afraid of your unavailability, the sound of it in your voice, how it makes me want to break something down, force myself in somewhere. Sometimes, when I want to reach out to you, I make myself sit down at the computer and write instead, commanding myself, mantra-like, “If you have to spill, spill here, not into another person.” Spill yourself into something that is at least partly yours, into something that you at least partly keep.
Maybe that’s what I am doing here, fashioning a little statuette of you to carry with me. I am not ready, have never been ready, to give you away.
Which is funny, because we have rehearsed this so many times, from that original fission event by which we were made, to the first time I called you by your name instead of my own, right up to this practice procession toward Bob.
People these days casually refer to a person’s “attachment style”—a distressing phrase, since “style” is so unaccountable. But one doesn’t hear about “separation style”; maybe they’re the same thing.
I’ve noticed with you lately how intimate the language of separation can be, the candor of our distance, how we smile and sigh at each other. I’ve noticed it with N., too; in fact, as soon as he and I began to seriously entertain “separation” as an option we crossed into a new, disarming closeness. Today, our therapist screenshares an image with us, a diagram she has made of our “destructive loop,” and when we see it a current of recognition flashes between us; we laugh. It is as if we are momentarily in cahoots over our own downfall, as if this whole thing—the sex, the tears, the vows, the breakfast, the birth, the pleading and shutting down, the house, the table with its mess of bills and crumbs and toys, the standing for minutes at a time just holding each other and swaying—as if all of it were a bunch of hilarious mischief we got up to once and are now surveying together from “after.” Maybe this cycle will go on forever, separation acquiring a slapstick quality through repetition: these two bodies keep trying to part, but the joke’s on them; they’re attached!
Our therapist explained attachment in terms of a small child who sees a shiny object on the other side of the room. Knowing that her mother will not disappear when she turns her back, the securely attached—and therefore securely separable—child can venture toward what shines. The new man is what shines to me now; is it safe to investigate? If it is, maybe N. makes it so, our long-standing attachment serving as the stage for this fresh one, whose premise is its containment from the rest of my life.
I know you are on guard against me asking you what I should do, how I should proceed, and I have tried to resist. But, sitting at the kitchen table one night after you have been drawing with my daughter, I do ask, in my own way. You are quiet, looking at me, and when you speak you speak slowly, from far away. “I think you. Have to find a way. To locate this decision. In yourself.”
I’m reminded of a chapter in “The Lone Twin,” Joan Woodward’s study of bereaved twins, which includes testimonials from people whose twins died as infants. A woman who lost her twin at birth said she felt “that I had something missing the length of my body”; another who found out at age eleven about a twin who had died in infancy described “for the first time getting an inkling of why I felt so alone.” Are these people making narcissistic use of the lost twin, or do their bodies really remember and mourn? I seem to believe both. I can’t quite let go of the essentially romantic fantasy that our bond is “special,” that it predates everything and will go on after everything, and that in some fundamental way I am “about” you.
It is time to get dressed. Dad, who will speak before me, is standing at the computer, a little flustered. “Why won’t it print on both sides?!” Finally he takes his three pages of large text into his bedroom and closes the door. Your man’s niece marches in carrying a little purse filled with different-colored bottles of nail polish, and you sit in the living room under her serious gaze, trying to keep your hand steady as you draw the brush across. Mom is wondering if her top clashes with the silk scarf she is tying around her neck. Dad comes out in his untucked dress shirt and wanders through the quiet rooms. “Do I need to go mingle now?” he wonders.
Down the hill, cars have begun to pull in. Your bun keeps bursting out of the brown claw, so I put a hair tie in as well. Mom gives you a touch of makeup for under your eyes, and you try my lipstick. We press one of my daughter’s bedazzled blue stickers onto your arm.
We are standing before the mirror, me behind, with our eyes on you. It looks right, you being covered in huge scarlet flowers; a purely white dress suits the blank of youth, but now you are more specifically you, an intricate piece of work. So am I, in my black suit and white sneakers. (Later you’ll joke that we look like we’re marrying each other.) You seem remarkably brave to me right now. I am reminded of the expression and bearing you assume just before reciting one of your poems: shoulders back, chin up, nostrils flared as though squaring off against a frightening, triumphant happiness.
You are ready early, and there is nothing for us to do but wait. Our bouquets are in the fridge. A glazed, giddy, “What now?” trance descends on us. Guests are arriving in greater numbers, clustering by the bar and milling about the tent. We will go down as soon as they make their way to the rows of white chairs.
Our cousin comes bounding up the driveway with his camera to tell us it’s time. We stand for a few shots, your man’s niece staying very still and smiling, my daughter just starting to stiffen around cameras. You sigh and straighten up and say “All right” and I say “All right” and we say a few more variations on “All right.” Then my daughter takes off running and the niece chases after her and our cousin chases after them both, and we look at each other and link arms and start, matching our steps, grinning at the air, tumbling down the hill. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
