He shook his head, smiling but concerned. I looked at Haylee. Was Mother right? To anyone watching us, it did look as if we liked the same foods, the same flavor of ice cream, the same candy. It was true that when we were very young, anything one of us liked, the other did, too, and anything one of us hated, the other hated. Maybe we felt we were supposed to or we would lose our mystical powers. Nevertheless, Mother was shocked Daddy didn’t realize that.
“I think you’re exaggerating,” Daddy told her.
“Exaggerating? Are you in the same house, Mason? Do you see your own children?” she asked him in what, even as a young girl, I thought was a terribly condescending tone. She sounded more like she did when she chastised us.
Mother also had a habit of smacking her right fist against her right thigh when she started her responses to things that upset her this much. Sometimes, she did it so hard that both Haylee and I would flinch as if we felt the blows. After one of her more dramatic outbursts, I saw her thigh when she was getting ready to take a shower. It had a bright red circle where she had pounded it. Later it turned black-and-blue, and when Daddy mentioned it, she said, “It’s your fault, Mason. You might as well have struck me there yourself.”
Finally, Daddy always managed to stammer an excuse, but he still couldn’t ever get away with “I’ll buy the other one something tomorrow.” Whatever it was that he had bought one of us and not the other, it was gone that day, no matter what he had promised. Sometimes he would take it back and have his secretary return it to the store, but most times, after Mother had destroyed it or thrown it out, he would go back when he could and buy two this time, so he could give both of us whatever it was he thought one of us had wanted. He never looked happy about it. That satisfied Mother, though, and brought what Daddy called “a fragile armistice where we tiptoed on a floor of eggshells.” We were all smiles again. Our pounding hearts relaxed and the electric sizzle in the air disappeared, for a while anyway.
In our house, stings, burns, and aches ran around just behind the walls and just under the floors like termites. Haylee and I were in the center of continuous little tornadoes. Sometimes I thought Haylee did things deliberately so she could see these storms brew between Daddy and Mother. It was one of the differences I sensed early between us. Haylee had an impish delight in causing little explosions between our parents.
But she was far from the main cause of it all in the beginning. It wasn’t difficult to understand why this turmoil was happening around Haylee and me. In our mother’s mind, a minute after we were born, all thoughts about one of us had to be about the two of us simultaneously. She claimed it was practically blasphemous to do otherwise, because the biggest danger for any parent of identical twins was that somehow, some way, he or she would favor one over the other and destroy the confidence of the one not favored.
It was one thing to praise one of your children because he or she had done something spectacular. Everyone knew stories about fathers who favored one son over another because he was a hero on the football field or got good grades. The same was true for a daughter who might please her mother more by being more responsible, being talented in music or art, or maybe just being prettier.
But none of this could apply to identical twins, not in our mother’s way of thinking.
According to Mother, Haylee had no talents that I didn’t have, and I had none that she didn’t have. Certainly, neither of us could be prettier than the other. Our voices were so similar that people never knew which one had answered the phone. Even Daddy was confused sometimes when he called. There was always a question mark in the air first. “Haylee? Kaylee?”
When we were a little older, Haylee often pretended to be me on the phone. I think she worried that Daddy liked me more and wanted to see how he would speak if he thought I was the one answering the phone. I suspected he did like me more than he liked her, and she knew it. Once she said, “If he doesn’t know which one of us it is, he’ll say your name because he hopes it’s you.” I didn’t know if she was right. I didn’t keep as close a count as she did.
Maybe it was simply because he wasn’t around us as much as he should have been, but if I suddenly came upon him while he was reading or if Haylee did, Daddy would look at whoever it was, and his eyes would blink for a moment as his mind settled on which one of us was there. Anyone could see that he was struggling with it because Mother had him terrified about calling me Haylee or calling her Kaylee. Mother insisted that he must know which of us was which.
After all, how could our own father not know us? He agreed, and when he did get it wrong, he blamed himself for not concentrating or paying attention enough. However, he admitted that there were times when he was actually mistaken even though he was concentrating.
“They’re so alike!” he cried, hoping to be excused when Mother blew up at him for it, but all that did was prove her point and make her even more obsessive about how we were supposed to be treated.
“Of course they’re so alike. That’s always been my point. You have to try even harder, Mason, and be more careful about it,” she told him. “You never liked it when your father called you by your brother’s name, and you weren’t even twins. He is two years older than you are, but how did you feel, Mason? Go on, confess. You felt he was thinking more of him than he was of you, right?”
Daddy had admitted that to her once, so what could he do but retreat with the look of a punished puppy? I always felt sorrier for him than I did for us. Sometimes I pretended I was Haylee if he called me that, just so he would get away with it, but if Mother was there, that was impossible. She never made a mistake. I never knew why not, except to think that it was true that mothers knew their children better.
There were so many rules of behavior toward us that Mother laid down, with the power and importance of the U.S. Constitution, our own Ten Commandments:
Thou shalt not call Haylee “Kaylee,” or vice versa.
Thou shalt not buy one a gift you do not buy the other.
Thou shalt not take one somewhere and not the other.
Thou shalt not kiss one without kissing the other.
Thou shalt not hug or hold the hand of one without hugging or holding the hand of the other.
Thou shalt not say good morning or good night to one without saying it to the other.
Thou shalt not ask one a question you do not ask the other.
Thou shalt not introduce one to someone without introducing the other.
Thou shalt not tell one a story without telling it to the other.
Thou shalt not smile at one without smiling at the other.
Because of all the rules, I often thought our house was more of a laboratory than a home. I think Daddy di
d, too. Even Haylee admitted to feeling as if we were under observation in a glass bubble while strange new experiments on bringing up identical twins were being conducted. Many of Mother and Daddy’s friends often also seemed to believe that. I once heard someone whisper that maybe Mother was giving reports to a special government agency. I know that, like me, Haylee felt this all made us seem strange to anyone who witnessed our upbringing. There were other twins in our community, even on our street, but they were not identical, and they seemed no different from kids who had no twins. They were permitted to wear different clothes and do different things, and their mothers weren’t so uptight about potentially devastating personality complexes.
But our mother would point or nod at them and say, “Look how competitive their parents have made them. They enjoy making each other feel bad. You’ll never do that,” she would add with a confident smile. “You will always consider each other’s feelings first.” She had no idea about what was coming, crawling along on the tails of shadows toward our home and our family as we grew older.