And it is as if I slept peacefully all the way until my mother spoke to me on my sixteenth birthday.After that day I never looked at the Rumbaugh twins the same again. I didn’t think of them as evil, just peculiar—as I said earlier—they were idiosyncratic variations within a breed. Still, all of the Rumbaugh history and this evidence of their blood-cursed relationship with their mother and mine did affect me. I never looked at myself the same again either. I had to admit, I was one of them through and through, and I had the evidence to back it up—it was in my genes. One of them was my father, and I resented that because it meant I wasn’t entirely her duplicate—a perfect little mini-Mom. Of course I had known all along I had a father, but since I didn’t know who he was, I didn’t consider the shadow of his presence within me.
But now I did. And which shadow was it? It could have
been either of them. And I knew it would always bother me if I didn’t find out which one. Not knowing would be worse than knowing. Mom couldn’t get a straight answer out of them, so now it was my turn to “clear up a few things,” as she said.
So when Mom went to work that following Monday, I did as I had when I was seven. I marched right over to the pharmacy. I opened the door and went downstairs into the taxidermy room, where I knew they would be.
I put my hands on my hips and said, “I need to have a serious talk with you two.”
I looked over at Dolph, who was arranging THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, where a skunk in a tuxedo and top hat was staring bug-eyed at the pickled, wrinkled face of a decaying skunk mounted within a little golden picture frame.
“Yes,” he said, and looked up at me.
Ab, who always did the lettering, was putting the title on the frame with a calligraphy brush and gold paint. He stopped in the middle of the G and looked over at Dolph.
“I need to know which one of you is my father,” I said directly. There was no other way to say it but to blurt it out.
“Well, let’s not be hasty here,” Dolph said, looking as startled as when I had announced that the bear in the basement was their mother. “Slow down for a moment. Your mom told us she told you what all she knows, and we think it’s time you know some things from our vantage point.”
“No,” I said. “This isn’t about you! Now tell me, is it you?”
I pointed at Ab. “Or you?” I pointed at Dolph. “I want to know.”
“We’ll get to the father part,” Dolph said, gesturing with his red hands for me to calm down, “but first just realize it’s not an easy question to ask because in a way we are both your father—in a way you have to think of us as one person.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, suddenly stumped. In my mind I had thought one of them would just step forward and confess, but now they’d added a new twist I hadn’t anticipated, and I was taken aback.
“Being a twin is both spiritual and physical,” Ab said. “When Father had us adopted by those eugenics people, being a twin was a blessing. I was unhappy, but I knew what was going on inside of Dolph. I could feel what he was about. We liked the same food, and what he ate I could taste in my own mouth as he could with mine. We had toothaches at the same time. Sang the same songs. Had the same favorite colors. Same handwriting. Same grades in school. Same dreams. Same pets. Same names for the pets. I tell you, it was a comfort having him so vivid inside of me. And because it was my preoccupation to stay in tune with him like he was my shadow, my adoptive parents got angry with me for being so distant with them. One day they came to me wringing their hands and wiping kerchiefs across their faces and saying they had bad, bad news, that Dolph had died in a terrible mining accident. At first the tears shot out of my eyes, and then I just stood motionless
and the next thing I knew I felt his arms wrapped around me, and so I knew he was warm still. It was as if we were one person and I could feel him next to me as sure as my heart is beating. Not true! I spit back at them. You’re lying. You just want him to go out of me, but all the lights in Pittsburgh will go out before he ever will. I think that’s when they lost interest in me, which was fine because I could just think more about Dolph. I always knew Mother would come get me, and of course she did.
“The eugenicists were wrong,” Ab said. “It’s not that certain genes are superior. All that selective breeding nonsense is rubbish. But twins do have a mysterious genetic bond. How twins can be so alike while being so far apart is the biggest challenge facing science. If all people are unique, how is it that we are so alike? Well, it means that there is something in the genes that controls behavior.”
“Yes,” Dolph said, stepping in. “We’re the guinea pigs of the human race. First we were part of the eugenics study, then later we did the Minnesota study.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Another attempt to prove a point,” Dolph said scornfully. “All the eugenics and Nazi hooey about Nordic and Aryan genes rising to the top of the food chain was wrong, but they were right in thinking that genes determine who we are more than our upbringing. The Minnesota study contacted us for their separated twin research on nonverbal communication and behavior similarities, but we declined to go—as if we
could just close the store and go up and be lab chimps for a week. So they came here and gave us a bunch of tests and physical exams and asked about a million questions.”
“And they didn’t give us no answers,” Ab said.
“But they did say we were not a good sample,” Dolph added, “because we’ve lived together so long we may have just imitated each other from proximity.”
“But it’s more than that,” Ab said. “When we were apart, we were more in harmony than we are now. Now we argue. Then, we only wanted to be like each other.”
“True,” Dolph said. “Being a twin can be more of a curse than the family curse. Think about it,” he said directly to me. “We can’t feel without the other one of us feeling the same. We can’t laugh without the other having a tickle. We can’t have pain without pain in the other. Anger begets anger. Desire, desire. If I take a drug, he too feels the results.”
“Think of the burden of being cursed with a double,” Ab said. “You haven’t a life of your own—no thought, no pain, no love, no secret is safe between us. We know the insides of each other maybe better than we know ourselves. There are times when I ask, how does Dolph feel today? And the answer is often clearer than if I asked myself how I felt. Some days we don’t even have to talk. We can just mind-read each other.”
“Do you feel sorry for nontwins?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” Dolph said, dropping his voice down low.
“It’s like having an extra conscience, and there is a guilt, too. The guilt of knowing I’d never be free to fully be myself unless he died.” He pointed at Ab.
“Or he died!” Ab pointed back.
“Until then, we live only half lives,” Dolph said.
“And so that struggle to be alone,” Ab continued, “to be just one individual self, is akin to some desire to murder the other. I’m telling you, it’s not healthy. He’s both jailer and companion. I could kill him at times.”
Dolph smiled. “We take turns at feeling that,” he said.
“We’ve worked so hard to just be ourselves we don’t pay attention to what everyone else thinks,” said Ab. “You must draw a bold line between who you are and what you do. If you sit around all day arm-wrestling with yourself about what you should be interested in and what you should say and how you should behave, then you’re going to wear yourself down to nothing. You’ll be as worthless as spit.”
“He’s right,” Dolph said. “We disagree on a lot, but not on this. You have to live your life from the inside out, not from the outside in.”
“What about me?” I asked. “After what Mom told me, I’m beginning to feel like two people. One of me is just playing out my heredity, and the other me is some thinking person who wants to forget about who I am on the inside and just do anything I please.”
“You are different from us,” said Dolph. “But your Rumbaugh affliction is like a twin self, and the older you become
the stronger you’ll find the fight between who you are and what you want to be.”
“But I’m so upset,” I said. “I never used to question any of this, and now that’s all I do.”
“You’ll adjust,” Ab said. “You’ll find a way to just be yourself and drop all the questioning.”
“But I’m not sure I want to be who I am,” I said. “I’d like to become something else. Something I do invent.”
“Hide the truth of who you are and you’ll live a fiction,” Dolph cautioned. “This is what most people want. A life made to fit a mold instead of a life that breaks it. That’s why we live in the shadows.”
“People don’t always like us,” Ab said.
“They find us odd,” said Dolph.
“We are odd,” Ab said irritably, “but that’s not what I mean. I mean that we threaten them because we are so alike. Everyone believes that they are individuals and that their lives have been shaped through their experiences. But that’s a charade, and they know it when they take one look at us because we are who we are through our genes. They believe in nurture, but we represent nature, and for most people nature is untamed and primitive and too dark and unpredictable. We live out our lives as the actors in a genetic script—that’s nature’s path.”
“Think of it this way,” said Dolph. “If you had to choose between being bullied around by your genes or bullied around by your environment, what would you do?”
I hesitated for a bit, thinking about the question. Neither choice seemed quite right. But they were too eager to allow me time to answer.
Dolph jumped right back in. “I would choose genes-one hundred percent of the time. At least I’d be self-determined instead of having who I am be beaten into me by someone else.”
“What about free will?” I asked.
“A sham,” Dolph said emphatically and scoffed. “Free will is just a conscious struggle to manipulate your own destiny—the destiny that you end up fulfilling despite all the fussing and fighting with yourself. So you might as well let free will go the way of the dinosaur and just develop into who you are.”
“And how do you know who you are?” I asked.
“By doing precisely what you feel like doing, and once you’ve done it then you have the concrete evidence in hand.”
“Mother always called it bliss,” Ab said. “She always said there was more intelligence in a drop of blood than in your entire brain.”
“Said she never saw a person whose brain didn’t get in the way of their behavior,” said Dolph. “And I tend to agree with her.”
“We fully believe in it,” Ab said.
“But I’m not that way,” I protested. “My brain is not in the way of my behavior.”
“Exactly,” Dolph said. “Because look at you. You’re under the curse. You’re part of this place. You can’t leave. You love
your mother like we do. Like all us Rumbaughs do. You’ll never go away. That’s a fact. You can’t get away from who you are, from your bloodline.”
“I can,” I said defiantly. “And I will.”
“Be careful,” Ab said. “It’s more than a curse. It’s science. It’s in your blood; the curse is part of your biology. Some people like hard work and it’s passed on through the family. It’s in the blood. Some people all have blond hair. That’s passed along in the blood. Some people have asthma and so do their kids, so you know it runs in the family. So why can’t a curse run through a family? The truth is that behavior is passed along through our genes, too.”
“I don’t know if that is totally true,” I said.
“In your blood flows a bounden duty,” Dolph said solemnly. “You can feel that it is up to you to pass on the curse of mother love.”
“That’s right,” Ab said, reaching out to hold my arm. “You are the next generation.”
“I thought your mother wanted to stop all this,” I said, stepping away. “Isn’t that why she kept you from getting married and having children? But didn’t one of you have me?”
“Mother was wrong,” Ab said. “She—”
They had taken over my conversation once already, but I wasn’t about to let them do it again.
“You’ve made this all about you,” I replied severely, “except for when it comes to owning up to the truth. So which of you
is my father? It seems animals know more about their origins than I do.”
Ab looked at Dolph, who in turn looked at Ab. A moment passed and they nodded toward each other, then both turned toward me.
“We’ll get to that answer in a minute,” Ab said. “But first we want to say something. We’ve been thinking about this for a long while, and we think that right now is the best time to bring it up.”
“What’s that?” I asked, stunned that there could be anything more important to discuss than who my father was.
“We want to offer you a full one-third ownership of the pharmacy and building,” Dolph said. “To make you a partner. But in order for us to do so, you have to not leave here and go to college like your mother wants.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” I said, determined to press the issue. “I still need to know which one of you is my father.”
“It doesn’t matter which one of us it is,” Dolph stammered. “We both planned it. We both have the same genes. We’re the same. But just one of us could do it, and that was decided only with a coin toss.”
“A coin toss?” I repeated loudly, and I could feel my blood rising in anger. “A coin toss?”
“Yes,” said Ab, and poked himself in the chest. “I was heads and he was tails.”
“So who won?” I asked.
Ab turned toward Dolph. A moment passed. As they read each other’s minds, they shook their heads back and forth like a pitcher shaking off the sign from a catcher.
“Just call it a tie,” Dolph said, breaking the silence. “And leave well enough alone.”
“I need to know,” I said. “It wasn’t important before, but it has become important. If you won’t tell me, then just show me. Pull down your pants and show me which one of you has the A.”
They stepped back, and simultaneously their hands clutched their belt buckles. “We can’t do that! Just think of both of us as your father,” Ab said, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. “It’s better left this way.”
I was furious. “Then it’s better I left this way,” I shouted, and pointed toward the door. I grabbed my purse and marched right out.
“What about your taxidermy projects?” Dolph called out.
“That’s over,” I hollered back.
“What about preparing for your mother?”
Anger is a curse of an entirely different source. In a court of law they say: Ira furor brevis est: “Anger is a brief insanity.” As I doubled-timed it up the steps, I felt insane.
When I reached the top, I turned around. “You know,” I shouted angrily down into the basement hole, “it wouldn’t be so bad if you’d get out from inside yourselves and see what’s going on in the real world!”
“Think about our business offer,” one of them hollered back. “Just let the idea sink in a little bit.”
Before he could say another word, I slammed the basement door. Too much had already sunk into me. I closed the hasp over the ring and snapped the padlock into place. I remember thinking, Maybe now they can flip a coin and see who is going to taxiderm the other.