I THINK IT’S inarguable that Mom, Dad, and Lowell were more shattered by Fern’s departure than I was. I fared better simply by virtue of being too young to quite take it in.
And yet there were ways in which I was the one who carried the damage. For Mom, Dad, and Lowell, Fern had arrived in the middle of the story. They’d gotten to be themselves first, so they had a self to go back to. For me, Fern was the beginning. I was just over a month old when she arrived in my life (and she just shy of three months). Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.
I felt her loss in a powerfully physical way. I missed her smell and the sticky wet of her breath on my neck. I missed her fingers scratching through my hair. We sat next to each other, lay across each other, pushed, pulled, stroked, and struck each other a hundred times a day and I suffered the deprivation of this. It was an ache, a hunger on the surface of my skin.
I began to rock in place without knowing I was doing so and had to be told to stop. I developed the habit of pulling out my eyebrows. I bit on my fingers until I bled and Grandma Donna bought me little white Easter gloves and made me wear them, even to bed, for months.
Fern used to wrap her wiry pipe-cleaner arms around my waist from behind, press her face and body into my back, match me step for step when we walked, as if we were a single person. It made the grad students laugh, so we felt witty and appreciated. Sometimes it was encumbering, a monkey on my back, but mostly I felt enlarged, as if what mattered in the end was not what Fern could do or what I could do, but the sum of it—Fern and me together. And me and Fern together, we could do almost anything. This, then, is the me I know—the human half of the fabulous, the fascinating, the phantasmagorical Cooke sisters.
I’ve read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss occurs in utero, some survivors respond with a lifelong sense of their own incompleteness. Identical twins suffer the most, followed by fraternals. Extend that scale awhile and eventually you’ll get to Fern and me.
Although it had had no immediate impact on the cut of my jibber-jabber—in fact, it took many years to truly sink in—finally I came to understand that all of my verbosity had been valuable only in the context of my sister. When she left the scene, no one cared anymore about my creative grammars, my compound lexemes, my nimble, gymnastic conjugations. If I’d ever imagined I’d be more important without her constantly distracting everyone, I found quite the opposite. The graduate students disappeared from my life the same moment Fern did. One day, every word I said was data, and carefully recorded for further study and discussion. The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone.