“They’re a wonder to me no matter what,” he would say, but she would shake her head as if he was too thick to understand.
Sometimes he would try to seem more excited just to please her. Then he would reach to hug us. I saw how he always looked to Mother first so she would see that he was going to lift us both, hold us for the same amount of time, and not favor one of us over the other with his kisses and hugs. That pleased her. She would smile and nod as if he had passed some sort of test. Keeping the peace was obviously the most important thing to him, even more important than standing up for Haylee or me if either of us did something different, something original.
When I was old enough to understand him more, I realized that he wanted his home to be a true sanctuary, a place he could come to in order to escape the pressures and conflicts he had to endure in his work. Sometimes when he came home and I was there to see him first without him knowing, I would see him close his eyes and take a
deep breath, as if he had finally reached fresh air. No wonder he let Mother get away with as much as she did when we were younger.
Of course, we had been too young to know what they said about us when they were alone, but later, when we were older, I understood that right from the beginning, Mother often instructed Daddy about how we were to be treated, especially how he was to talk to us, hold us, walk with us—in short, love us. Loving your children was supposed to be something that came naturally to a father or a mother. It wasn’t something that had to be taught. I knew he thought this, but he never came out and said it, at least not in our presence.
Daddy never stopped trying to get Mother to loosen up when it came to us. For our first birthday and every one thereafter, Mother made us each a cake so we would have the same number of candles and one of us wouldn’t blow out more candles than the other.
“Don’t you think you’re carrying this too far?” Daddy would ask from time to time, especially about the birthday cakes. That could set her off like a firecracker and threaten to ruin our birthday celebrations. Those hands of surrender would go up, and he would step back like someone asked to step off the stage and become simply an observer, maybe a student in a class on how to treat special twins.
In fact, when we were old enough to understand some of what she was telling him, we would also listen at the dinner table or in the living room when she was reading to Daddy from books about bringing up identical twins. She did sound like a teacher speaking to a student. It wasn’t as clear to us when we were very young that she was talking about us, of course. Sometimes, even after we realized it, it still felt as if she was talking about other children. We would sit there listening and when she paused, Daddy would look at us closely as if to confirm that we were the girls she was describing.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at how accommodating Daddy was when it came to her instructions regarding us. It wasn’t easy for anyone to challenge her. Mother was an A-plus student in high school and college. Like Daddy, she had graduated with honors. When they first met, he was majoring in business, and she was heading to law school. Daddy admitted that no one could research anything better than our mother. That’s why she would be a very good lawyer. In those early days of our upbringing, she simply overwhelmed him with facts, statistics, and psychological studies of children. She’d hand him the books or the articles she had culled and tell him to read them for himself.
“That’s all right, Keri,” he would say. “I’ll take your word for it. I’ve got plenty to read as it is.”
Even so, I caught him gazing at articles from time to time, reading the sentences Mother had underlined. She left them around the house deliberately, I thought, especially near where he sat. When I was older, I tried to read them, too, but Haylee thought they were boring. After all, they didn’t have her name in them. Mother knew Daddy was glancing at them at least and would make references to them when he started to question something she was doing. It was enough to stop him, even in mid-sentence.
However, they weren’t always arguing about us. No matter what Daddy really thought about how she was raising us, both Haylee and I were always impressed with how much Daddy respected Mother and how much she admired him, at least when we were younger. When she wasn’t angry at him for something, she treated him as if he were a movie star who just happened to be living in our house. He was a handsome, light-brown-haired, athletic six-foot-one-inch man with what Mother called “jewel-quality crystal-blue eyes, eyes that help his smile stop clocks.”
I didn’t understand what that meant, and when I didn’t understand something, Haylee certainly didn’t, either, although most of the time she would pretend she did just to make Mother happy and pile up those love-me-more points.
“How could a smile stop a clock?” I asked.
“Yes, how could his smile stop a clock?” Haylee quickly repeated. She didn’t like me being first with anything, especially questions.
“It means he is so stunning that even time itself has to pause to appreciate him,” she explained, but we both still had puzzled expressions on our faces.
Haylee looked at me, worried that this had helped me understand but not her. It hadn’t. We were too young yet, but Mother didn’t elaborate any further, except to say, “That’s why I fell in love with him. I was always very particular about boyfriends.” She laughed and kissed us and said, “Don’t worry. Someday you’ll know exactly what I’m saying. Both of you will have lightbulbs go off in your heads simultaneously.”
That was her big word for us, simultaneous.
Everything we did had to be done at the same time, and she literally meant the exact same moment. She was so positive about this and made it so important to us that we both worried that we were doing something terribly wrong if one of us did something without the other, even when she wasn’t watching us.
“I’m warm,” I might say, and indicate that I was going to take off my sweater. I could see Haylee thinking about it. Even if she wasn’t warm, too, she would nod and start to take off hers. And the same was true for me whenever she began to do something I hadn’t thought of doing. If Mother happened to see this, she would smile and kiss us as if we had done something wonderful.
“My girls,” she would say. “My perfect twins. Haylee-Kaylee, Kaylee-Haylee.”
Were we really perfect? In the beginning, Haylee liked to believe it, but gradually, as we grew older, Mother let go of “my perfect twins” and replaced it with “my perfect daughter,” which made it sound as if we were halves of the same girl.
It was reasonable to accept that every young girl would want her mother to believe that she was perfect. What Haylee never understood was that it was true for every mother except ours. Ours didn’t see one of us as perfect without the other.
How sad and troubling was the realization that substituting one word, daughter for twins, would bring about so much pain and unhappiness for Haylee and me.
And eventually, even for Mother herself.
But by then, it was far too late.
2
Whether it was for our love-me-more points or not, it was always very important to both of us that we please Mother and win her approval of everything we did. She never stopped telling us that she loved us both equally and that everyone who knew us did as well. However, both of us knew in our hearts that someday someone, maybe many people, would love one of us more than the other. I believed Mother when she told Daddy that was going to be the most painful thing of all for us. In fact, because of the way she described it, it frightened me a little.
Would Haylee hate me if I was eventually more popular than she was? Would I hate her? Was envy more deadly in identical twins than it was in anyone else, as Mother believed? From the way Mother brought us up and the things she told us about ourselves, it was easy for us to believe our emotions were different from those of other girls our age. We supposedly felt everything more deeply because we shared so much in our hearts. Therefore, our emotions were doubly strong.
“No one could ever be as sad or as happy for a sister or a brother as you are, and this will be so forever and ever. The things you do to and for each other will always be unusual compared with others your age. But don’t ever let the others make you feel weird. Most of the time, they’ll wish they had inside them what you have.