28
Being a Twin
It’s funny, the response I get when I tell people I have a twin brother is almost always “Are you identical?”
“No, he has something I don’t have,” I say. Then I watch their face register what that something is. I explain that identical twins share the same egg, whereas fraternal twins each have their own egg.
They usually say, “Oh, I knew that.” Then they ask if we have “that twin thing” where I know what he’s thinking or can sense when he’s in trouble. We’re more “opposite sides of the same coin” is my rote response.
But there was one time, on a trip to Monroe, where we were silent for a good while and then I brought up the name of a girl we were in second grade with and he said he was just thinking of her. That happened once. There’s a mole between my pinky finger and ring finger that he shares, but it’s on his opposite foot. He got most of the potent DNA, like skin pigment, thicker hair, and eyes that are a deeper green. He’s also taller than I am, which shouldn’t surprise you.
When I told Mildred all this, she directed me to Freud’s theory of penis envy, but I never liked the sound of it. I suppose the thought that a man came up with this idea made me jealous. She’d explain that Freud’s idea says that boys view their penises as gifts, like a birthday present for boys only, which lasts for the rest of their lives. And girls wait for their gifts to appear when they hit puberty, in the form of breasts. I didn’t buy into this because I never looked at my breasts as presents. I wonder if Mildred or Freud would say my penis envy castrated my breasts, in order to have my own figurative penis. My mother summed it up nicely when I’d ask her if she wanted one: “I never wanted any of that stuff between my legs.”
This conversation’s ridiculous.
My analyst Mark would say to just “drop it,” and so I will. No, that wasn’t a castration joke. Or was it?
Let’s take a break and look at the SkyMall catalog; it’s fun to look at all the weird home stuff you never really see in people’s homes. There should be a word for the fear of opening one’s own mail. There should also be a phrase besides “excuse me” for when someone is standing in front of the very thing you want—it should be something funny that would make you both laugh. These solar-panel footprints that light up at night in your backyard are funny. I’ll order these for my funeral. If you want me again, look for me above my solar-panel footprints.
I wonder if there will ever be an “off the grid” airline? Maybe I’ll finally get to Burning Man and pitch that idea to some Silicon Valley types.
If they’re going to make body pillows, they should make them look more like bodies—give the pillow a face.
Being a twin is confusing. When you’re a baby, you’re not aware of being in your own body yet, so you identify and think of yourself as the other person: the me, myself, and I comes later. That’s why a mother’s nurturing gaze into her child is so important, so when the child grows up, the nurturing mother will live inside. If not, it’s up to the individual to create her. But if you have a twin, you have this melding of the other person from the get-go. My mom said she’d watch us “speaking” in mumbles and gestures while we played for hours, passing toys to each other. “Goo gahgahgah,” Chris would say.
“Mlah mlah,” I’d reply. It was mostly pleasant and reciprocal.
Who knows what fantasies and promises were agreed upon then—what was promised and wished for and was then granted in my imagination. And then the disappointment or confusion with what wasn’t granted. I recognize a particular loneliness and confusion when I meet other female twins—a puzzled disillusionment. We talk about the desire to have another person’s eyes see like yours, their mind think like yours, their heart beat like yours—how easily the other comes alive inside.
It’s nice that we’ve kept these maps on the screen.
I made a twin friend in Vancouver named Anna. She had a vintage clothing store in Gastown, just blocks from me in Chinatown, called Duchesse. Anna was down the street getting her hair cut when we met at Nicole’s one-chair hair salon. Nicole is pop-art chic, with a bobbed haircut, Liza Minnelli eyes, and red lipstick that never smears. She wears art smocks, loose mom-pants, and jazz flats. She’s cool but nice and ready to laugh. She also carries a Narcan pack, in case she sees an addict dying on the sidewalk, which she’s used a few times.
I liked her immediately and we became fast friends. I respected how she manifested becoming her own boss at a one-chair hair salon and asked how she tore herself away from the drama of the many-chair-hair-salon world, which can be fraught with personalities and unnecessary “hairarchy.” She told me at my first haircut for Dr. Smith that I had something to do with it.
Her first and only boss suggested she change her name to attract more clients, and so she went by Parker for a while. She was laughing and freaking out a little that she was about to give her double a haircut. Then she said she knew I liked her haircuts because years ago, when I was doing Best in Show, I’d complimented one of her clients’ haircuts on the street. We riffed on the idea of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Haircuts, connecting stories through strands of hair . . . braids of hair, hair in drains, hairballs in cats. I liked watching her hands as she cut my hair—the scissors an extension of her fingers, more like an artist and less like a haircutter. The scissors were Japanese, gold and small, and she’d flip them easily into her palm and then out, like a card flying out of its deck.
Being a twin is a predicament you’re born into. Wrapping your head around being a twin, the idea that you can’t be one without the other, is confusing enough. The answer is simple, though: I don’t know anything different. I was shooting a short film in Watford, England, and I don’t remember much about it. The director wore cow-print pants the first day, I remember that much. One of the locations was in a mental hospital that was still functioning. I think they shot some of Harry Potter there—it’s a ghoulish and beautiful old building, a historic landmark. A bunch of us actors were hanging out under a tree when a schizophrenic patient, shirtless and carrying a wooden branch as a staff, walked toward us, smiling like a figure come to life from a tarot card.
He was gorgeous and happy—blond, blue eyed, and tan, barefoot and in cutoffs. I was lying down as he approached. “Look at ya . . . you’re a Porsche car,” he said. He had a thick Scottish accent. I had never been called that but liked the sound of it.
“My dad has a car dealership,” I said.
He liked this connection very much. “You’re my sister,” he said. I told him that I have a twin brother. “I have a sister. You are my twin.” Then, the strangest thing, he started counting. “One and one is two. You are my twin!” He was excited, saying all of this in singsong. “Two threes are six and two threes put together make an eight and eight is DNA and it connects us all.”
“Whoa, you just said the numbers of my birthday,” I said. “Eleven eight sixty-eight.”
“You are my twin, you are my sister, we are connected . . .”
I was taken with him at this point, we all were, but there was a woman behind us, waiting for him. He pointed upward. “There’s a string connecting, that goes up to the sky and into my head and through to the center of the Earrrthhh . . .” He’s gesturing this. “I listen to Tina Turner music and I shake.” His knees were pumping to a song. He also had a yellow Walkman clipped to his pants, and headphones around his neck, remember those? “You’re a car . . .” he said, his r’s rolling in that Scottish accent, “you’re a Porsche car . . . two threes make eight, eight is DNA and it connects us all! It connects us all!” He threw his arms up in a grand gesture, as if on his way to the king’s court, and walked to his therapist—his lady- in-waiting.
I covered my face when he left and cried into my hands. We all just looked at each other, with our mouths open, like, “What was that?”
One of the extras that day, who was with us under that tree, had known someone who went to college with me. His friend was the girlfriend of a film student who had drowned, and I had dated that film student’s friend, who committed suicide a few years later. I’d learned of his death from a friend of his, who told me in a Chinese restaurant in Chelsea. I had been away, filming, when it happened, and he dropped the news in passing, which was cruel. I was famous, so what could hurt me? I covered my face with my hands and cried in the same way I did after talking to that schizophrenic patient.
Simon was the name of the man in Watford. I’m just remembering this because I remember thinking of the game Simon Says. I asked about him later, to his lady-in-waiting. Against protocol, I’m sure, the lady told me that he had murdered his sister.
In The House of Yes, I played a young woman, a twin, so obsessed with Jackie O and the JFK assassination that she’s made a game of it with her twin brother. It was writer Wendy MacLeod’s Yale thesis and was a filmed play, really; it’s all contained in one house over Thanksgiving. I played Jackie, a young woman who isn’t taking her meds and freaks out when her brother, Marty, the love of her life, brings home a date. The sublime Josh Hamilton played my brother and Tori Spelling played his fiancée—she was terrific.
Geneviève Bujold, the French-Canadian actress, played my mother, and she presided over all of us. Her vibe had the intensity that only comes from being French (or half French). Did you see Dead Ringers? It’s the movie where Jeremy Irons plays twins and Geneviève plays his love interest. Jeremy Irons—do they make men like that anymore? Anyway, I was twenty-five and she was around the age I am now and after saying I was talented she said to wait until after my forties, when I’d be more grounded, because that was when it would get “really interesting.” I’ve never forgotten that and she was right, of course.
In the movie, I kill my brother, shoot him, while reenacting the Zapruder film one last time. The night before filming began I took one of those razor callus removers and dug too deep, gashing my foot to the point that it hurt to walk in Jackie’s pumps. After filming, I was pretty freaked out, so I called Mildred and she talked me down. When I talked to my real brother about all this, Chris said something like “Don’t worry about it. Jesus, that’s crazy.”
We couldn’t be more different. He practices law down south and, with my sister-in-law, does my accounting and contract stuff; they manage my business. They swept in after I’d gotten screwed by Kenneth Starr, accountant to the stars, who ran a Ponzi scheme and went to jail. You’ve Got Mail was more like “you’ve got my money,” so they flew in to help.
Ha, this is funny: a mai tai–scented men’s T-shirt. I should get that for Chris. A John Lemon T-shirt? Are you serious? They should make a bananas T-shirt that smells like bananas. I’d wear that. Or one with an airplane that smells like this. Ew, gross.
Speaking of smells. Anna, the vintage clothing store owner, took me rag-picking at one of the rag yards about thirty miles from Vancouver; it’s where she gets clothes for her store. It’s in a warehouse space run by an Indian family where these oversized post office bins, the size of a dining room table, were full of other people’s discarded clothes. The stuff came from America, as far away as Utah, as well as from Canada. There was some kind of system or arrangement with all the other “pickers,” but Anna asked if it was okay for me to come and they said yes.
You climb into the bins wearing a surgical mask and you rummage. It smells, but you get used to it—it’s a colorful place. The workers use forklifts to pick up packs of smushed clothing in plastic wrap, as big as a refrigerator, and then load it into bins, where they separate it into categories: dresses, shirts, T-shirts, kids’ clothes . . .
I took my shoes off and sat in the dresses and chatted with Anna’s friend, a fellow scavenger named Megan. She was wearing a toque knit cap—the standard wear for damp rainy days in Vancouver. We had loose and laid-back chatter, not as much of the ambitious “nonversation” work stuff you can get in the city.
I know that jumping into a giant bin of smelly hand-me-downs is not for everyone, but when people ask what it’s like being a twin, my trip to the rag yard is a good analogy. How fun and satisfying it was to sink into the mass of clothing and think about the lives people led in those garments. All the different sizes, fabrics, and trends: this person size, that person size, this age, that age, that decade, this decade. The special-occasion dress, worn maybe just a few times; the housecoats of the sixties and seventies; the muumuus. Millions of people’s lives were lived in those clothes.
I like being on the hunt and hope that even a conversation comes to life and there’s a sense, even just a thread, of feeling connected. Those threads shoot out and tangle tightly or loosely and take form inside as a whole—it’s also fabricated. I make a twin for myself whenever I play a part.
