“Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun?”

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—4/12/10—Has anyone else noticed that twins seem to be everywhere these days? In the Anchorage Airport, where I work part-time in the bookstore, I have seen more double-strollers being pushed by harried-looking moms than I ever recall seeing before. One young co-worker of mine, perusing a recent issue of “People Magazine,” said: “How come all these celebrities are having twins? There must be something weird in the water in LA.” I told her that I didn’t know about the water, but I suspected fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization were perhaps the culprits.

“Huh?” said my co-worker and, not being a scientist, I decided to elaborate no further.

But I think those are among the reasons now given as explanations for what some people see as a sudden epidemic of multiple births in recent years. Also, some think that multiple births may be linked to growth hormones in food. I don’t know. All I know is that I seem to see more twins nowadays. I even saw triplets a few months ago—and I must say that it was the first time I had ever actually seen triplets in the flesh in all my 60-something years.

Everyone knows that there are two types of twins: identical (actually monozygotic or single-egg twins) and fraternal (dizygotic or two-egg twins). According to our friends at Wikipedia, there were, between the years 2004 and 2006, about 32 live multiple births out of every 1000 births. There are about 125 million twins in the world, roughly 1.9 percent of the world’s population. That doesn’t seem like so many, does it? So why do I keep seeing so many?

A few years ago, when my wife and I were in Las Vegas, we shared our hotel with a convention of identical twins. Everywhere you looked, there were two of everybody. It was a little disconcerting. Identicals of all ages, dressed alike, walking alike, talking alike, pulling slot machine handles side-by-side, and screaming in unison at the craps tables. In the restaurants, there were two of everybody at every table. In the men’s room, there were two identical guys standing at two identical urinals. It was just weird. Or so it seemed to a poor lonely singleton such as myself.

But I have always had a fascination with twins. Some researchers suggest that one in eight fertilizations result in multiple fetuses but that, early in gestation, one of the fetuses dies and disappears, creating what some refer to as “the vanishing twin syndrome.” If that is true, then many of us may have started out as a twin and then lost our twin along the way. That might explain some of my fascination with twins. I was a lonely only child and always wished I had an identical twin brother. Maybe I missed my vanished twin.

I used to gather information about twins, just for my own amusement. I was intrigued to learn that identical twins may indeed be nearly identical in every way; yet they never have the same fingerprints. So, if you have an evil twin, take heart: he can’t frame you for his crime, since he will leave an entirely different set of fingerprints on the cracked-open safe.

Also I learned that the children of identical twins always test genetically as half-siblings rather than first cousins. So when Patty Duke, in her old 1960’s sitcom “The Patty Duke Show,” played “identical cousins,” that wasn’t nearly so far-fetched as we all thought it was.

I suspect my fascination with twins may have started in the first grade. There was a set of twins in my class—Jerry and Joey—and I wanted to be them. Or, at least, one of them. Either one of them would have sufficed. They were exactly alike. I could never tell them apart. And, of course, they dressed alike (it was the 1950’s; that wasn’t so weird then). They carried identical Lone Ranger lunch boxes.

(“How do you know which lunch box is whose?” I remember asking. “It doesn’t matter,” they replied.)

Jerry and Joey fired my imagination. They had wonderful stories of swapping identities and fooling their parents. I remember that, once, they sat in each other’s desk in class and fooled the teacher for nearly the whole day. I remember that the three of us walked home together after school. At one point, our paths parted, and I would go on alone while Jerry and Joey went off together. I remember how I could hear them laughing and chatting to each other long after I had turned the corner and walked on alone. How I envied them!

As an only child who moved a lot, who changed schools a lot, I always longed for that twin brother who would be a constant companion. I would never be lonely or alone.

It may have been because of Jerry and Joey that my first and only imaginary friend as a young child was an imaginary twin brother. I remember having long conversations well into the night with my twin. Once, when my twin and I were playing in my room, my mother called out: “Who are you talking to in there?”

“My twin brother,” I answered back.

“Oh,” she said. And that was that. She accepted my peculiarities as only a mother can.

Oddly enough, even unbelievably now, I don’t recall that I ever gave my imaginary identical twin brother a name. He should have been Shane or Zane or Dane or Lane or something, but I don’t think I ever named him. Somewhere between first and fourth grade, I think my imaginary twin did just vanish.

When my wife was pregnant with our last child—34 years old now—we thought for a brief time that we were having twins. That was before ultrasounds, but the doctor told my wife that he thought he might have heard two heartbeats in there. Needless to say, I got ridiculously excited. Twins! I couldn’t wait. But, just a few weeks later, it was confirmed that, no, there was only one baby in there. My wife was, I think, relieved, but I was decidedly disappointed. Another vanished twin.

Later, in high school, I actually dated an identical twin for a while. She was beautiful and (obviously) so was her sister; the two of them caused quite a stir when they went anywhere, two identical blonde beauties. In my unabashedly horny adolescent way, I used to wonder exactly how identical they were. (Yes, I know: men are pigs. But teen-age boys are even worse.) I think I came to realize after a few dates that, lovely though this young lady was, my real interest in her had more to do with the fact that she was a twin than anything else. We parted as friends.

Many twins, I have learned over the years, seem to resent (and rightfully so) the aura of weirdness that surrounds twinship. One friend of mine, who is an identical twin, said that she particularly resents the notion that twins are somehow “cosmically linked” or psychically connected in ways that other people are not. She and her sister, who are certainly two peas in a pod, live in different states (one in Alaska, the other in California) and have very different lifestyles. One is married with kids; the other is divorced without kids. And they claim to have no supernatural knowledge or bond brought about by twinning.

Writer and book reviewer Lev Grossman, himself a twin, has recently said, in his review of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel about twins, Her Fearful Symmetry, that he finds it annoying that books about twins always portray the twins as somehow disturbing and eccentric in the extreme.

There seems to be an entire literary genre devoted to Weird Twins. Niffenegger’s book contains two sets of Weird Twins. Then there are books, such as Thomas Tryon’s bestselling The Other and Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, that present the Weird Twins as more than just weird, but as downright creepy. Fraternal twins, such as the Bobbsey Twins, seem to escape this freak label, but you can pretty much be sure that in any novel featuring identical twins, those twins are going to be really strange.

But, in truth, there is something weird about identical twins. (Not that that is a bad thing.) It is just so unusual to find a carbon copy of yourself staring back at you across a room that it certainly does set the imagination flying. It must surely open the door for all kinds of speculation in storytelling. I mean, you can watch your identical twin’s face and body age and can really see how the world sees you. (But actually I do know a pair of identical twins, now in middle age, who bely that statement: one is now thin and the other is fat. So much for identical.)

A psychologist friend of mine, many years ago, had a patient who was an identical twin. This twin, then in middle age, had lost his brother in a car accident and was having a very difficult time adjusting to the world without his twin. He confessed to his psychologist that he and his brother had been inseparable for the first 30 or so years of their lives, had slept in the same bed, had eaten every meal together, had gone off to college and roomed together, had taken their first jobs at the same business, etc.

He even revealed that he and his brother had, for many years, been physical lovers, and that their passion had included penetration and orgasm. The psychologist, setting aside for a moment the issue of our culture’s view of incest, said that he had not realized that the man and his brother were gay. Indignant, his patient vehemently denied that he or his brother was gay. The twin said that the siblings equated their mutual sexual encounters with masturbation. Had they had other male sex partners, they would have perhaps seen themselves as gay but, twin on twin, it was, to them, simply a kind of stereophonic masturbation.

Could this be another reason to lament the vanished twin? I told you there was some justification for the Weird Twin syndrome.

Nevertheless, I continue to be fascinated by twins. And I’m not alone. I remember an issue of “Playboy Magazine” that featured identical twin centerfolds. That was certainly a popular issue and not just with me. And remember the Doublemint Twins? I suppose that anything good that you double is even better, isn’t it? I don’t know. I can only imagine. But I think that I am now, at long last, over my need for an identical twin. I mean, two paunchy, bald, old guys staring at each other across the dinner table would only be depressing now. At last, now, I can learn to embrace my singleton status.