One and the Same (7 page)

The model twinship of Ronde and Tiki Barber manages to combine an unquestioned primacy with a sturdy independence. Which is no easy feat. Two of the fundamental questions psychologists ask about adult twins are “When did they separate?” and “How did they individuate?”

So it's interesting to meet identical twins who haven't; twins who celebrate—and accentuate—their sameness nearly every day of their lives, or who have a kind of love that clearly defies the idea that twins must, in a sense, leave each other to grow up.

Debra and Lisa Ganz are the empresses of the Twins World. They're brassy, buoyant, foul-mouthed replicas who have made a career of their twinship. They amass twins on their Web site,
Twinsworld.com
, boast an international twins database, raise money for terminally ill twins and twins in tsunami-like disasters, and run a twins talent management company (child labor laws prevent infants from working more than two hours a week, so twins and triplets are essential to keep the cameras rolling). As mentioned earlier, they
opened the first Twins Restaurant in 1994 in Manhattan (which employed only twin servers and closed after a successful run in 2000), and they have attended virtually every twins gathering, conference, or festival that exists around the world.

Soon after I arrive at Debbie's modest Manhattan apartment with its orange walls and no windows in the living room, Lisa bounds in the door, announcing, “I COULDN'T FIND THE RED SHIRT!” I get it. They had agreed beforehand on what they'd both wear, but Lisa fell short. Except for the red shirt, they are dressed exactly alike in jeans, black boots, black velvet jackets, high ponytails, and big sunglasses on the tops of their heads. It strikes me suddenly that here are two near-forty-year-olds playing dress-up, unapologetically cornball, and kind of joyous. Both have husky, assertive voices, both drink take-out coffee, and both constantly, ruthlessly interrupt each other—and me.

“Abby's not only here to get our expertise,” Lisa tells Debbie. “She's getting
our
story.”

Debbie looks at me. “Does Lisa not think I speak English?”

Lisa leans in to me. “Debbie's the slower half. She came out six minutes after me. I got six minutes more of the brain.”

Lisa continues: “We say we are ‘the ambassadors of twins.'”

I confirm to them that nearly every place I go, people say to me, “Have you met the Ganz twins?”

Lisa jumps in: “I have a question for you.”

They both bellow, unprompted, in unison:
“HAVE YOU MET THE GANZ TWINS?”

I tell them that their identical costumes at annual twins events (I saw them in Twinsburg in rhinestone cowboy hats), and their unreserved gregariousness, make them appear larger than life.

“She's not talking about our butts,” Debbie says, clarifying for her sister. “She's talking about
us.”

“To start from the beginning,” Lisa says, “we always say—”

In stereo again: “WE'RE LIVING IN A ‘WE' WORLD AND EVERYBODY ELSE IS LIVING IN AN ‘I' WORLD!”

Lisa: “That's what set us apart from everyone else.”

Debbie to Lisa: “Talk about the twinship first.”

Lisa to Debbie: “Well, no. I'm talking about what
I
want to talk about.”

The irony is that when they were growing up in Long Island, they stopped dressing alike as soon as they could dress themselves; but in their twenties, they decided to dress the same again. “Why do we do this as women?” Lisa asks the question for me.

“Because it's part of our business and that's part of our twinness,” Debbie replies. “We're marketing ourselves. It's like airline flight attendants. They have a uniform; so do we.”

“Everyone says, ‘Don't you twins want your own identity?'” Lisa says.

“We
have
our own identity!” Debbie announces. She turns to Lisa. “What do we say?”

In unison again: “WE'RE TWO VERY INDIVIDUALS THAT MAKE ONE HECK OF A WHOLE TOGETHER!”

Oh my God. I feel like I'm watching a comedy routine. Is any of this unrehearsed?

“We mean that,” Debbie insists, as if reading my skepticism.

Debbie clarifies that they're not joined at the hip. “We don't live together. We could
never
live together!”

Why not?

“We need to be alone,” Debbie says without irony.

“That said,” Lisa adds, “there are times when someone will walk into my apartment and I have the phone to my ear without talking, and they'll say, ‘What are you doing?' And I say, ‘I'm watching a movie with Debbie.' They'll say, ‘Where's Debbie?' Debbie's on the phone. Neither of us have said a word for two hours. But we're watching a movie together. I know that's not normal.”

But Debbie insists they're still separate beings. “People who don't know us think we're so twinny that we're one person. No. We're not like those twins out there that believe they're one person in two bodies.
There are twins we know that have to live together, sleep together; they count how many rice pilafs are on the plate before they eat the same amount.”

“We've seen old ladies who have never been married,” Lisa says, without seeming to realize that might ultimately describe them. “They walk out to the mailbox together. They turn out the light at the same time. They're one person in two different bodies. We're two different people in one body.”

But when I ask them
how
they're different, they seem stumped. Which Debbie doesn't apologize for. “If you ask our five best friends, including our younger sister, Lisi, ‘Are Debbie and Lisa the same?' they will say, ‘Absolutely not.' And then you ask them, ‘How are they different?' They can't tell you.” She doesn't accept the conventional wisdom about twins—that differentiation is always optimal. “We speak at all the state conventions, and parents often say to us, ‘I have five-year-old twins and I just got them their first separate birthday cakes.' And we devastate them, because Lisa and I say, ‘We're thirty-something years old. We have
never
had our own birthday cakes!”

“Ever,” Lisa confirms. “We celebrate the twin thing every day.”

“Someone came up to us about eleven years ago,” Debbie recalls, “and said, ‘I knew you two in college. I now have my own twins and I sent them to different preschools, because I don't want them to be like you two.'”

“We laughed,” Lisa says defiantly. “Parents who don't know what it's like try to do everything in their power to make their identical twins different, instead of celebrating their twinship.”

“We don't tell parents to dress their twins alike or to treat them as one person,” Debbie explains. “What we're saying is, ‘It should be an individual decision.'”

The Ganzes shared friends growing up and still do. “It's come to the point now,” Debbie says, “where if someone that Lisa knew better got married tomorrow—”

“They'd still invite Debbie,” Lisa says, interrupting. “Do you know how sad it is that at thirty-nine years old, we get invited to weddings
together without dates?” Lisa laughs. “Like we're the twin entertainment: Rent-a-Crowd. ‘Let's invite the twins.' I'm like, ‘Debbie. They want a three-hundred-dollar wedding gift and I don't even know the girl's damn last name!'”

“What about that wedding six months ago?” Debbie asks Lisa. “Was it Kristen or Kirsten?”

“See! We don't even know!” More laughter.

Though they complain about being everybody's favorite mascots or diversion, they clearly revel in their popularity. “We were blessed with the gift of gab,” Debbie says. “We're the icebreaker. Most people may think that's overwhelming and exhausting, but the truth of the matter is—”

“We're visionaries,” Lisa says.

“We have an infectious enthusiasm for life,” Debbie continues. “We
infect
people. I can't name someone who's met us in our lives who doesn't remember us. Not me alone—there's
plenty
of people who forget about me alone. But together, I don't know anybody that forgets meeting us together. And that's a twin thing.”

Lisa: “And that's our twin slogan. …”

In unison: “YOU CAN ONLY MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION ONCE: WE MAKE IT TWICE.”

Debbie: “We exhaust ourselves.”

And sometimes, despite their effusive intimacy, they come to blows. “There's a lack of respect that goes on between twins,” Lisa explains. “Because it's like fighting with yourself. I could say curse words—things that truck drivers would say—but we don't hold it against each other.”

“You know how you say the meanest things to those you love?” Debbie asks me.

“Vicious,” Lisa adds.

“It's worse than being married,” Debbie says. “Because you—”

“Push buttons,” Lisa says.

“You can say anything you want,” Debbie says, “because we know in our relationship, it's over in a second. If I say, ‘F YOU! DROP
DEAD!' two seconds later it's like, ‘Are you going to meet me in a half hour to 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?

“Because 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?

“They 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.”

“Every 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.”

“It's sort of like we always have to be
on,”
Debbie says.

“But you
are
always on,” I point out.

“For 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?

“NO,” 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.'”

“Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,”
Lisa remembers.

“‘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 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 to
people, ‘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.”