One and the Same (11 page)

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Tiki and Ronde Barber described their brand of competition as almost too good to be true: They've always driven each other to excel, but they've never felt an ounce of schadenfreude.

The more typical example of twins and competition is much less generous. And it seems to have its roots in ancient texts.

Rabbi David J. Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles has taught classes about twins in the Bible. There are only two sets in the Torah: Jacob and Esau, born to Isaac and Rebecca, and Perez and Zerah, whose parents were Judah and Tamar. What their stories have in common, Wolpe says, is one central idea: “They're all about who gets to come out first.”

Jacob holds on to Esau's ankle as Esau exits Rebecca's womb—presumably to hold his brother back from being the firstborn. (The Hebrew root of Jacob's name, Yakov, actually means “heel.”) Similarly, during Tamar's labor, her son Zerah sticks his hand out of the womb, and just as the midwife ties a red string around his wrist to
signal that he'll be the firstborn, Zerah's hand suddenly retreats back inside and Perez actually comes out first; it's as if Perez pulled his brother back and charged ahead. His mother remarks, “You broke through,” or “Wherefore hast thou made a breach for thyself?”—thus the origin of his name, Perez, which means “breaking” or “breach.”

“The stories are both about the younger usurping the older,” Wolpe says, pointing out that in each parable, the twins struggle, as if to suggest that they're born already in conflict. “In both cases, the natural order is overturned by deception or by force.”

English professor Hillel Schwartz, in his book
The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles
, has a different take on why Zerah in Genesis began to surface, only to pull back and have Perez go first. “Commentators describe the two struggling for primogeniture,” Hillel writes, “but the episode can also be read as expressing Zerah's reluctance to leave the perfect twinship of the womb.”

Rabbi Wolpe echoes the same idea in discussing why Jacob grips his twin's ankle. “You actually could read it as saying that Jacob was frightened that Esau was leaving him, so he grabbed hold,” Wolpe says. “Because he didn't want to be abandoned.”

It reminds me immediately of the Yoruba tribe—the African clan I've been researching because it has such high rates of twinning. The Yoruba believe that the older twin is actually the one who emerges
second
. Their conviction is that the older twin protectively stays back, holding down the fort, as it were, while sending the younger twin out to safety.

I personally prefer this African interpretation to the biblical one, because it suggests the intimacy and gentleness of twins' first moments in the world, not the violence of grappling to be first or the notion that twinship, even in its incubation, is a clash. My twin experience has not been contentious like that.

The Yoruba give every second-born twin the same name, Kehinde, meaning “arriving after the other,” while the first to come
out is always named Taiwo, meaning “having the first taste of the world.”

Birth order matters, according to Louis Keith and his identical brother, Donald, who together started the Center for the Study of Multiple Birth in 1977. (“We were the first to study twins academically in the United States,” Louis tells me.) The Keiths are seventy-two and dressed all in black when I meet them. Donald wears his gray hair curly; Louis wears his slicked back in a short ponytail. Donald sports a silver bracelet, Louis a gold necklace. They're hip and they're ornery. Every response is offered somewhat begrudgingly, as if it should be obvious to me already, such as the fact that the firstborn will always be dominant.

“I was Twin A,” Donald begins.

“It's a fact,” Louis interjects, “that Twin B is Twin B, and Twin B will never become Twin A. No matter what. So Twin B better just adjust to that.”

What does that mean?

“Well, were you Twin A or Twin B?” Louis asks me.

I came out first. (But I would have been second were it not for Mom's C-section.)

“You're Twin A,” Louis pronounces. “Legally—”

“And emotionally,” Donald adds.

“First born,” Louis says solemnly. “You have the rights of the firstborn. You're older; you're smarter; you're whatever society gives to the firstborn as opposed to the second-born. The second-born is always sucking on the hind tits, as they say.”

Even if few people were even aware that I'm a minute older?

“This is between you and your sister,” Louis says.

I tell them I don't feel like Robin defers to me—maybe because my taking the cesarean shortcut canceled out my advantage. “I'm not sure there's
deference,”
says Donald. “But it's bragging rights.”

That's nonsense, according to psychologist Joan Friedman, an
identical twin and mother of fraternal twins, who counsels twins and their parents. “No one knew anything about me just because they knew I was two minutes older,” she insists. “But they focused on it, made much of it, drew conclusions because of it. It was defining even though it was meaningless. That's why we did not tell my boys which one was older until their bar mitzvah date. Because I spent my entire life being asked and being differentiated by ‘Who are you? Who is older?' My husband and I blocked out the time of birth on their birth certificates, and we told our sons, ‘When you're thirteen, you can find out who is older.' Of course by the time they were thirteen, they didn't care. But at least they weren't organized their whole life by their stupid birth order. Because this is what I lived with, and I hated it: the presumption that someone understood me because I was born two minutes before my sister. God. That made me crazy.”

I have always told people, much to their skepticism, that Robin and I were not competitive. It seems the first thing nontwins assume about twins is that we collide or try to outdo each other. But that misses the nuance. We saw each other's triumphs as reflective, if anything, and our stumbles were suffered vicariously.

It is true that, like the Barbers, Robin's feats prompted me to try harder—not just to match her but because she showed me it was physically possible. If she can do a tripod headstand in yoga, I should be able to. If she loses five pounds, I should be able to. When she gave birth naturally, just two months before I went into labor, damn if I was going to have a C-section, though my son was a whopping nine pounds, twelve ounces. I channeled Robin and pushed that baby out.

I did realize, however, during the interviews for this book, that the knee-jerk presumption of rivalry isn't entirely wrong. Crudely stated, I found there were two schools of twinship: the kind that begets a kind of interconnectedness that means one twin's success is shared, and the other kind, which yields a kind of zero-sum equation—one
twin's trophy is the other's defeat. Either way, the simultaneity of twinship—always being in the same place at the same time, always fodder for endless comparisons and checking, like a mirror you can't help looking into—can spur twins either to great accomplishment or to massive frustration, to a firm confidence or to a pesky insecurity.

Twins Avi and Gil Weitzman, thirty when I meet them, are like poster twins for hyperachievement and hostility. Avi is now a federal prosecutor at the U.S. attorney's Manhattan office; Gil is, when I meet him, New York Presbyterian Hospital's chief resident for the Department of Medicine and an attending physician in gastroenterology. “I hope my kids aren't as bad to each other as we were,” says Gil, having to shout to be heard in the loud seafood restaurant.

“I don't remember it being that bad, Gil,” says Avi.

“Yeah, you do,” Gil says, correcting him.

“Part of it,” Avi tries to explain, “was because people would mix us up. So when Gil would do something, it would embarrass me. If something made him look bad, I felt it reflected poorly on me, because people would mistake me for him. It truly is the case that you are your brother's keeper when twins are together. The actions of your brother so pervade everyone's perception of you that it forces you into a box. We didn't have separate identities. From elementary school on, no one called us ‘Avi and Gil.' They just called us ‘Glavi.'”

The Weitzmans admit they weren't the hippest boys during their adolescence. But unlike today, where they're distinguishable because Gil has more girth and less hair—”I used Propecia in high school,” Avi says, smiling; “it works”—they used to look exactly, maddeningly identical. “I was so much cooler than you.” Gil smiles. “It was unfair that you were bringing me down.” He tries to explain the Twin Trap: “It's like seeing yourself in a video throughout your entire life.”

“We all have a skewed image of ourselves,” Avi explains. “But for those of us who are twins, what our twin brothers or sisters do is bring
truth to the reality. They shatter the hopeful misperceptions we have about ourselves.”

Their father, an Israeli-born manufacturer, demanded high achievement, and their mother, a French-Israeli teacher at Manhattan's Lycée Français, did make an effort to keep them in separate school classes but couldn't help but compare them at home. “If one person's grade was better than the other's, they'd say, ‘Your brother did better than you,'” Gil recounts. “I think they had some insight into the psyche of being a twin, but not the same that you or I would have had.”

“My dad was a lot worse,” Avi says. “He fostered a lot more competition between us.”

“He's a pressure cooker,” Gil affirms. “I don't know how many Israelis you know, but there is no such thing as ‘You tried your best.' There is only perfection.”

The friction between the twins detonated when they became debating partners in tenth grade.

“Our debate coach thought it would be a good idea,” Gil recalls.

“We opposed it,” Avi declares.

“It was good for our success as debaters, but not good for the success of our relationship,” Gil says. “There's so much competition in debating as it is, even between debate partners, because every round involves a judge who ranks the various participants. Debaters even fight for which speech they're going to deliver—one is more prestigious or more fun. I would outrank my brother in a certain debate round, and then he would outrank me.”

“We both had a strong drive to achieve, and every time we didn't, we would blame each other,” Avi says. “It was completely obnoxious, because we would delicately curse each other out in Hebrew so that nobody else in the room would know we were calling each other idiots and morons.”

Avi believes he had the harder road because Gil was slightly more impressive academically. “My dad desperately wanted us both to be
doctors,” Avi says. “Desperately. Undeniably. And Gil excelled in math and sciences in a way I never was able to. He was in all the AP classes and I was struggling to keep up, and at some point in time, I had to withdraw from the honors classes and go into the regular classes because I just didn't have that excellence. It was a real sore point for me.”

It's hard to conceive of Avi's insecurity, since the differences between the brothers were minimal. “I was so proud of my SAT scores,” Avi recalls, “because I did fairly well—I got six ninety math, six ninety verbal. Not bad. And I showed my scores to my dad, and he said”—Avi imitates his father's accent—” ‘Theese is good.' And then Gil showed my dad
his
SAT scores, and Dad sees that Gil got an eight hundred in math, which is what he would have expected from us both, and he says, ‘I don't understand why Gil, who has your genes, can get an eight hundred in math and you can't.'”

Tough love.

“I did get therapy.” Avi smiles.

Gil jumps in to suggest that his father was not entirely to blame: “I think we're genetically driven to be highly competitive personalities.”

“I don't know if I'd let Dad off the hook that easily,” Avi counters. “I think there's clearly a level of competition that's
fostered
by parental treatment of twins. It's different with friends: the competition that friends foster is in things like sports, girls, who's the more fun twin. No one knows what grades you get. My father demands a high level of success, which trickled down to tremendous ambition. We would have been perfectionists whether we were twins or not, but what our twinness did was magnify that—in a way that hurt our relationship.”

Gil again disagrees: “I think my parents tried to breed friendship and sharing and niceties between us, but I think we were very resistant to that. I don't think it stems from Dad's desire to make you better.”

But Avi is less sanguine: “Our parents are really much prouder of Gil,” he says simply. “He's the doctor. When I was in college in the nineties, my dad would tell me over and over again, ‘You shouldn't go to law school. There's no recession for doctors; people always need doctors.' He sent me articles. It was always clear that there was medicine, and then there was law. There's nothing like being a doctor in my family.”

Dr. Ricardo Ainslie, author of
The Psychology of Twinship
, describes how a twin's feeling of being underappreciated can be powerful, whether it's true or not. He writes, “The fact that each twin might have different areas of talent that are reinforced or acknowledged by the parents does not necessarily mitigate the feeling that the other is favored or that the other's characteristics are the preferred ones to have.”

Francine Klagsbrun, who doesn't specialize in twins but wrote a 1992 book about siblings called
Mixed Feelings: Love, Hate, Rivalry and Reconciliation Among Brothers and Sisters
, found that “a whopping 84 percent” of the 120-plus people who answered her questionnaires felt that one parent had shown partiality. “Parental favoritism,” Klagsbrun writes, “when it has been keenly felt… can remain not only a cause for underlying tensions, but an open sore, picked at again and again.”