“It’s easily explained. They have the same DNA,” Mother told these friends, nodding at us sitting side by side, dressed in the exact same outfits and shoes. Our hair was brushed the same way and kept the exact same length. “Monozygotic twins develop from a single egg-and-sperm combination that splits a few days after conception. Their DNA originates from the same source. They were a total surprise because no one in either my husband’s family or mine had twins, much less identical twins. I began to learn about twins as soon as I could. I mean, to raise identical twins properly, you have to go deeper than Dr. Spock.”
“I love the way you know so much about it,” Mrs. Letterman said.
“They’re my children. Why wouldn’t I?”
Whenever Mother explained us to someone, the other person was always very impressed. Once Daddy told us, “As soon as you were born, your mother went after the research on identical twins as if she were about to argue a case before the Supreme Court. I really do believe your mother has become a nationally important expert on the subject.” He often said something like that when he was tired of arguing about anything she did with us, but he really didn’t sound proud of her. He sounded more annoyed. I even thought he believed she knew too much, if that was possible.
But who else could question anything she did? We didn’t have our grandparents nearby to help Mother care for us when we were young. Daddy’s parents were living in a Florida development for retired people. Mother’s father died when she was in college, and her mother, our grandmother, Nana Clara Beth, had remarried and lived in Arizona. Her new husband had grandchildren of his own, and we sensed early on that Mother resented how our grandmother doted on her new husband’s grandchildren more than she did on her own. Mother was an only child. She told us that only children were normally spoiled. “But not me. Your nana Clara Beth spoiled no one but herself and criticized my father for doting on me too much. She drove him to an early death,” she said, her eyes like hot coals.
I actually imagined my grandfather sitting in the rear of a car and my grandmother driving him to a dark place where death waited, smiling with teeth as sharp as razors.
Daddy had two brothers. The older one, Uncle Jack, went into the military and was stationed in Germany. He had a wife and two children, a boy, Philip, who was now eight, and a girl, Arlene, who was ten. Daddy’s younger brother, Uncle Bret, was a salesman for a drug company, married with three children, all boys, ages five, six, and seven—Tim, Donald, and Jack. They lived in Hawaii, so we saw little of them.
We didn’t see our paternal grandparents much at all, either. Daddy’s parents refused to do much traveling anymore, and Mother hated going to Florida, especially where they lived. She called it “God’s waiting room, full of bingo games and grandparents with ungrateful children.”
“Don’t even think about us ever retiring there,” she warned Daddy, but I thought the real reason she disliked going to Florida was that our grandmother Mary was always trying to get Haylee and me to be different from each other. She bought us different things, things Mother confiscated as soon as we returned home and then hid somewhere in the basement or threw out. Haylee claimed she saw Mother literally bury two different watches our grandmother Mary had given us. Mine was blue with a silver band, and Haylee’s was silver with a blue band. I didn’t think Daddy ever knew what she had done with them. When he asked about them, she told him she didn’t know.
“They’re probably somewhere. The girls weren’t that fond of them,” she said. “They must have misplaced them.”
He didn’t pursue it. He asked us, but neither of us would ever tell him something bad about Mother. It was better to just say we didn’t know. He looked suspicious, but he didn’t keep asking.
Daddy was very much into his own work by this time anyway. He had helped start what was becoming an international software company, Capture Software, and shortly after our birth, he was appointed president of the company. Because we were such a full-time job for her, Mother didn’t complain about his long hours, the weekends he had to give up, even the holidays he had to cut short, leaving her alone with us. I always thought she would rather have him busy with his own things than involved with our upbringing. He often apologized for not doing more at home or with us, but he was in the middle of a big expansion with his company by the time we were twelve. He said they were going public and would be on the stock exchange. He wasn’t even home enough on weekends to play tennis very much.
When I was twelve, I once heard Mother tell him, “Ordinarily, I would accuse you of committing adultery with your devotion to your work, Mason, but I’ll let it go for now because I have so much to do.”
Yet, in the early days at least, there were times when they were together and we weren’t the subject of their conversation or the focus of all their attention. They seemed to be back to being college sweethearts, at least from the way Mother had described herself and Daddy back then. When Daddy graduated from high school, he was a chamber of commerce award recipient. Mother said t
he big joke about him was that he was destined from birth to be the hero in a movie. Listening to her talk about Daddy or hearing them reminisce about their childhoods and their romance was like listening to one of the fairy tales Mother read to us. Who could foresee that it would all shatter like Humpty Dumpty?
Speaking about Daddy, she once said, “He made me feel safe wherever I was and whatever I was doing. Neither of you can get married until you both find a man like your father. Promise?”
Of course, we promised. We were only nine at the time, and neither of us realized that Mother was being literal. She actually expected that we would fall in love at the same time and have a double wedding, and even get pregnant at the same time. On afternoons when the three of us were together in the great room, she drew up all these fantasy scenarios for us, detailing how she would plan our marriage ceremonies and receptions and how she would help set up our nurseries.
I felt like reciting, “Once upon a time, there were identical twins who found identically perfect husbands and had identical marriages and identical families. They died on the same day at the same time and were buried side by side in the same cemetery.”
Mother was so good at performing what she saw as perfect stories for us, taking our hands and pretending to walk down the aisle at our wedding. She said she would always throw big birthday parties for us, even when we were mothers ourselves. We’d sit at her feet as she waved her hands like magic wands and drew up the scenes before us. It was as if we were in a movie called The Perfect Twins.
Normally, Mother exhausted us daily with her attention to every detail of every aspect of our lives. Neither of us could have an inch of space more than the other, whether it was in the car or in the house or even in the yard and the pool. I thought she imagined a yardstick when she told one of us not to crowd “your sister.”
For years, even though there were other bedrooms we could use, Mother kept Haylee and me in the same room. We slept in the same king-size bed. We had identical dressers for our clothing, and we shared the closet space equally. Just mentioning that some of our classmates had their own rooms was enough to fire up her eyes.
Then would come that familiar answer. “You’re not ready.”
It was Daddy who nagged her about it more than either of us, because if we complained, it would seem that we didn’t want to be with each other, and Mother wouldn’t tolerate that.
“How can they not be ready, Keri? They’re becoming young women, aren’t they? They need their privacy.”
“They are not young women yet, Mason. It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t know that.”
He especially didn’t argue when she referred to anything feminine. It wasn’t until we were nearly thirteen that Mother finally gave in to our having separate bedrooms.
However, in order to make things as perfect as she wanted, she had our original bedroom redone with the exact same flooring materials, fixtures, and paint for the walls to perfectly match the second bedroom. All our old furniture was given away, and doubles of everything were ordered and installed. We even had the same number of closet hangers. Why wouldn’t we? We had the same exact clothes, the same amount of underwear and socks, the same number of shoes, hats, and belts.
Daddy complained about the waste of good furniture. “This is too much,” he said, looking at the work being completed. She had ordered everything new while he was on a business trip. “Why does it all have to be exactly alike? Don’t they have to feel like something’s their own?”
“Not yet,” she declared. “I know what I’m doing. One might think the other has better furniture.”
“They could pick out their own, Keri.”