Free One and the Same by Abigail Pogrebin

go shopping?’”
    Speaking of shopping, Lisa does it for both of them. “I buy two outfits of everything,” she explains. “Debbie doesn’t come with me. So unless a store has two, I won’t buy it. I’ll walk in the store and say, ‘Can we try this on?’ And I see the saleslady look around, like, ‘Who are you referring to? Who is the
we?’
I’m the only one standing there.”
    How did Lisa become the designated shopper?
    â€œBecause I don’t like it,” Debbie says. “I haven’t gone shopping in twelve years.”
    Do they relate to the many twins who have difficulty being seen as a set?
    â€œThey choose to be considered separate. We choose to share what we are.”
    Debbie: “To answer your question—”
    Lisa: “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I was.”
    Debbie: “We believe that the people who have a problem with it are not the twins themselves; it’s society. Everybody our entire life”—she uses the singular—“since we were five years old, has been trying so hard to find the differences between us: Who’s taller, who’s skinnier, who’s prettier, who’s smarter, who’s sexier, who’s better. If everyone left twins alone, then you wouldn’t see all these talk shows with twins who hate each other.”
    â€œEvery day you’re being picked apart,” Lisa confirms. “Every day you’re being compared. People feel the liberty to say whatever they want, like we’re a circus.”
    â€œIt’s sort of like we always have to be
on,”
Debbie says.
    â€œBut you
are
always on,” I point out.
    â€œFor us, it works,” Lisa says simply. “We know we’re always going to get attention and people are going to stop us on the street, and we use it to our advantage because our business is related to twins. But for a lot of people, the attention is just annoying. They think, Yeah, we’re twins, whatever.”
    Lisa wants to make it clear that they have existed apart—once. “When I lived in Australia for a year in 1990.” Debbie concedes that was the first time she got a serious boyfriend. “I ended up living with him, but it didn’t last.”
    Has the twinship generally gotten in the way of romantic relationships?
    â€œNO,” they answer in unison, as if anticipating the question.
    Lisa now has a long-term boyfriend, Bill, who, she says, “embraces our twinship. He gets it. He leaves us alone. My boyfriend is very quiet—obviously because he wouldn’t have room to get a word in. So for him, he’d be happy sitting at home reading a book, while we want to be off doing our twins stuff and being
on
. Debbie and I had a fight in Paris on the Champs Elysées—a screaming fight in the middle of the street, while Bill’s walking along, ‘La, la, la,’ and we’re screaming, ‘FUCK YOU!!!!!!’”
    They agree that any man who dates one of them has to know that the twinship takes precedence—no matter what hour of the night. “Lisa would call me at one A.M.,” Debbie says, “and after we spoke, my boyfriend would say, ‘Why didn’t you tell her it was too late to call?’ I’d say, ‘Because it was Lisa. She had to tell me something.’ ‘What did she have to tell you?’ ‘She wanted me to turn on Channel 2 because there was something on.’”
    â€œWilly Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,”
Lisa remembers.
    â€œâ€˜Why does she need to tell you that?’” Debbie continues quoting her boyfriend. “‘Because it’s important.’ It’s a twin thing.”
    Lisa tries to explain it with another anecdote: “We know a man who has been married for fifty years to an identical twin. He said to me, ‘Let me put it to you this way: If, God forbid, I had to stand on a cliff with my wife and her