Free One and the Same by Abigail Pogrebin Page A

twin, and make a decision which one of us was going to be pushed, I might as well jump.’”
    Donald Keith, seventy-two, a former army major who cofounded the Center for the Study of Multiple Birth with his twin, OB-GYN Dr. Louis Keith, is unapologetic about the seniority of twinship. “I say topeople, ‘You as a mother or father are not going to get between those two people. You, as a spouse, will have your own place, but you’re not going to get between those two people. However, if you get between the two, look out. Because you may lose.’ My second wife couldn’t stand the relationship. She was against my being that close to Louis and talking to him every day. I could talk to him from my office but not from home. It hurt me and he knew it, and he was hurt. I’ve now been married to my third wife twenty-two years, and we’ve tested our patience with each other on many occasions because of what I did
with
Louis or
for
Louis. Because it came before what
she
wanted.”
    â€œI think that anybody who marries a twin,” Debbie says, “has to understand that they’re marrying two people. Men who marry twins get all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of marrying two women.” She says it can be unsettling. “Two years ago I went out with a gentleman who was forty-seven, single, never been married, an only child. And we had one of the best dates I ever had. But afterward, he never called. Okay, so that could be a typical girl story. My girlfriend looked into it—she happened to be dating his buddy—and she said, ‘That’s odd that Jim didn’t call Debbie.’ And Jim said, ‘Yeah, I thought she was hot, but you know what? She’s a twin.’”
    Lisa sums it up gravely: “He couldn’t handle that.”
    Debbie: “He couldn’t handle the
‘We’
world.”
    Debbie admits that her confidence as a desirable woman is shaken when Lisa’s not at her side. “I’m so used to being looked at, I could walk into a huge trendy restaurant with Lisa and I’d be fine. If I walk into that same restaurant and someone looks at me, and I’m by myself, I get very insecure. I think, What are they looking at? Sure, I could say to myself, Maybe they’re looking because I’m pretty or something. But I can’t. I am telling you, with Lisa next to me, I will dance on a bar; I can stand in front of a thousand people and give a speech. I could have stuff hanging out of my nose, or my zipper could be open, but when I’m with Lisa onstage, I’m in my element. Because they’re not looking at
me;
they’re looking at
us
. A guy once said to me, ‘I don’twant to know about your twin thing; what are
you
like?’ I froze and started to feel upset. Because I couldn’t answer him.”
    Lisa underscores this: “The twins business is what we do; it’s also who we are. To divide the two is difficult.”
    And they feel lucky for it. “Why does
everybody
want to be a twin?” Debbie reminds me. “We’re all looking for that relationship that twins were born with. Everybody wants to be loved that much.”
    â€œIt’s definitely a universal wish or aspiration,” affirms psychologist Ricardo Ainslie, who has treated twins, is the author of
The Psychology of Twinship
(1997), and whose mother is an identical twin. A Mexican-born forty-eight-year-old who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, Ainslie explains the idealized twin connection by invoking one of the prevailing theories about child development: that primary relationships are “symbiotic”—between baby and parent, or baby to baby in the case of twins. “There’s an experience of self and other as being one,” Ainslie tells me. “A complete closeness. A sense of immersion in another person that feels whole and complete and almost ideally satisfying.