Iam a twin. My twin sister isdead. - Dorothy Foltz-Gray

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I am a twin. My twin sister is dead.
The beginning went like this: We sat
fused, we said, in our mother's womb.
We sat shuffling cards. We bent each
other's fingers and kneed each other's
spines. We spoke another language and
gave each other nicknames: Ciscus and
Carus, two words from our netherworld.
Two words that end in us.
In the beginning we were each other's
mother. More than our mother. We swam
to each other in our watery world and
clung, waiting to be born, arguing over
who would go first. I won. First into the
world. Eight minutes later my sister arrived. My father vaulted through the hall
of the hospital and asked to see the doctor. He accused the nurse of lying when
she told him he had two babies. He held
us, four pounds each, in the palms of his
hands, bending over the bed where my
mother lay. Name them Tomasina and
Tomasona, our Uncle Tommy suggested,
the first of a lifetime of jokes about the
bafflement we posed. Give them names
almost indistinguishable. Like they are.
Two people, one face.
But I never believed we were identical.
Deane's face was round, soft, and open;
mine was longer and sharper. And it
wasn't just features that set us apart.
Next to her I was querulous, fiery, impulsive. She was quiet and observant,
sensual and thoughtful.
Our mother never thought we were
identical either; she was the only person
who never mixed us up. She loved us to
the eclipse of our brother, Jeff, older by
four and a half years. He became, un-
100
HEALTH
MARCH
1999
intentionally, a shadow. In early pictures
he stands behind us, his face no longer
grinning. Deane and I sit in white baby
chairs, their backs shaped like oyster
shells. Our mother sits' beside us in
starched full skirts. She talked of two
babies as constant work, feeding one and
then the other, dressing one and then the
other. And then starting over. But the
pictures show something else-her white
crisp blouses and full red lips, her unruffled happiness.
Our mother could keep the stories
about us straight. I was the one who
always said no, Deane yes. I stuck my
tongue out at strangers. Deane smiled.
But my early memories are rarely of two
people. What happened to whom? Did I
cut myself with the razor as my parents'
friends came' racing up the steps to find
me bleeding at the top? Did Deane smear
the cold cream all over my mother's satin
dress? Was it me who crawled into the
corner away, from the fierce dog who
wanted to eat me?
Separating my acts from Deane's was
like pulling gum from a shoe; the threads
come out in all directions, but they can't
exactly separate. But we didn't mind.
Because it was useless to mind. We were
in a lump. And this is any twin's secret.
Our cells float separately in the world,
but the first encoding stays.
When people asked us, "Can you tell
yourselves apart?" we would tell them
the story of the house of mirrors. One
summer our parents took us and some
friends to an amusement park. Into the
I
it
r
DEANE
(left)
DOROTHY
AT AGE 22.
AND
FOLTZ
•
~_
NO \V
house of mirrors we went. Like everyone
else, Deane and I lost each other among
the reflections. But unlike the others, we
repeatedly bashed into the mirrors,
thinking we had found each other. People loved that story because it confirmed
what they perceived: a likeness so profound it could confuse anyone, even us.
T
of my sister's death
is hard to tell because it is so
horrible. If I mention that I am
a twin, my listener grins and
begins to ask questions. "Are you identical?" We were. She died. "At birth?" No,
when she was 32. Now the person is
alarmed. "Was she sick?" And when I
answer, I lose Deane again because my
listener will not want to talk about her.
On August 14, 1981, I wake early, go
downstairs, and set a bottle of champagne
in the refrigerator. I wrap a belt I bought
for my sister, the card addressed to
Dr. Deane. This morning she will be
handing her doctoral thesis in psychology
to a typist, finished at last. And then she
is flying to Knoxville, where I live, to
spend ten days with me. We are going to
celebrate. I sit down at my desk to write.
In eight hours she will be here. The
phone rings.
HE STORY
I
A M
ON
E
terrible secret. Is it so terrible? In a hushed
voice he told her he dressed in women's
clothes. The next week he did not show
up for his appointment-or
the week
after. Deane was glad. He scared her.
Palmer gets out of his van and walks
to the door of the counseling center. He
walks past the secretary's desk to Shields's
office and opens the door. Shields sits
at his desk talking to a social worker,
Barbara Kaplan. Palmer lifts a .357 Magnum handgun and shoots the doctor in
the head. He shoots Kaplan in the eye.
He goes out of the office and continues
to Deane's office. He opens the door. He
shoots Deane in the side of the head as
she swivels in her chair.
and Deane's
roommate is on the line. "Something bad has happened." I see
Deane in a car accident. "She's
been shot." I see her arm shot. "She's in
critical condition. At Lowell Hospital."
I get off the phone and begin to scream.
I run to the bottom of 'the stairs and yell
for my husband. Dan calls the hospital.
They tell him only that Deane is considered critical. I lie down on the kitchen
floor as if I cannot get up. I roll on the
floor away from terror. I am terror.
I
ANSWER THE PHONE,
"Something bad has happened," Deane's
roommate tells me. "She's been shot."
I get off the phone and begin to scream.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Deane
packs her bags. She puts in two T-shirts
for me and a box of our favorite almond
pastries. She gets in her Volkswagen Rabbit and drives to her typist's. She gets back
in her car and sings on the way to the
counseling center where she works parttime as a psychologist. She walks in and
teases the secretary about eating at her
desk. She pours herself a cup of coffee.
She walks down the hall to her office.
Outside, in the center's parking lot, a
young man named James Palmer sits in a
van. Palmer wants to be a policeman. In
January he visited two doctors at the center, a psychiatrist named Alan Shields
and my sister. He told my sister he had a
Once, four years before, when Deane
and I both lived with our husbands in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was walking
home from work, a route that took me
past Deane's house. I decided to stop.
The doors were open, and I called. No
answer. I called again. Where was she,
with the doors wide open like that? And
then I saw her climbing the steps from
the basement with the laundry. Oh,
Deane. I was so scared something had
happened to you. We went inside, and
she set out sodas and snacks, and we sat
for a while in her living room. What was
too frightening to think we did think.
That August day I call my mother,
who also begins to scream. She hangs up
to call my father at his office, an office
he never returns to. Deane's best friend,
Sarah, calls me. She says for me to come
and to pack a lot of clothes. "Where was
Deane shot?" I ask. In the head, she
answers. "Can they operate?" No.
I pack my clothes, but I pack thoughtlessly. Dan has made plane reservations.
We are having our front door refinished,
so we prop a fake one in its place and get
in the car. I cannot speak or read or think
or cry. I sit through two plane rides.
Friends of Deane's whose names I recognize pick us up at the Boston airport.
Their faces are frightened. I ask them
nothing. I do not even try to speak. An
hour later we pull up in the dark in front
of a huge stone hospital.
When the elevator doors open, I see
my parents leaning against the wall.
Their faces tell me. My brother is walking down the hallway. I want to see her.
She doesn't look like Deane, my father
says. We walk into a room, and I lean into Dan's shoulder. Deane's face and head
and body are swollen-her chest from the
ventilator working her lungs, her head
from injury. We go back to the hotel, and
in the night I wake and begin rolling on
the floor again. It can't be true.
The next day we go back to the hospital. I put my purse down and throw my
arms around Deane, and the nurse begins
to cry. The smell of the hospital stays
with me for months, a smell that nauseates me still.
On August 22 Deane's heart stops,
although her brain died the moment
Palmer shot her. The .357 Magnum exploded her brain into bits, the doctor tells
us. I call him an obscenity; my polite southern mother gasps, but she hates him too.
ORNINGS AFTER Deane
died, I opened my eyes and
for a moment I was mindless. The world seemed unchanged: a blue sky, a bright sun, a bird
at the window, a day to rush into. And
then, the world with a piece out. Which
was it-the bright sun or the one thing
that couldn't be true? The silence was her.
The air was her. The time stopped and
started was her. The pink sky, the dead
squirrel, the awful fact of my eyes open.
What haunted me was that I hadn't
been with her the morning she was shot.
M
(continued
102
HEALTH
MARCH
1999
on page 124)
NOW
I <"A, M
0 N E
(continued from page 102)
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Over and over I replayed the moment,
mixing us up and calling us Twinny. So
knocking her out of the way or stepping in the next year we transferred to different
front of Palmer. It was not possible that
schools. The night before we separated,
Deane had faced her death without me. I we split up our belongings, weeping like
wanted to save her, and I wanted to die. . a divorcing couple.
Both things out of reach and unalterable.
Living apart wasn't easy. Both of us
I did not give up being a twin for a went into therapy, trying to stop feeling
long time. I whispered to Deane that I hollow and afraid. It was then we realwould take care of her, and I did. At first ized how different we were from other
I focused on her burial. I picked her cas- people, that not everyone moved in lockket, her clothes, her music, her flowers. I step with another. Gradually we built
picked what to send with her: her fav- more separate lives, and six years later
orite chocolates, her favorite blue jeans we both married. Still, we spent the first
and sweater. I sent her a letter telling her two years of married life in the same town
we would always be together.
and consulted each other about everyFor the next five years I looked at my thing. Our relationship was not unlike
life as a shredded puzzle. For a long time
another marriage. Even after Dan and I
I played both parts, mine and Deane's.
moved 500 miles away, Deane and I talked
What would Deane say now? What would
on the phone several times during the
she think? And it was comforting; it kept week and always on Saturday mornings.
me with her. It kept me from abandoning
Once when I was visiting Deane in
her. It kept her alive and lessened my Boston, she was late to pick me up at the
guilt for being so. For life had become
airport. She came scurrying toward me.
oddly vivid. The sun had never seemed
"Oh damn," she said when she saw me
brighter, each season's colors never
already sitting there. "I didn't want to
sharper. That first autumn I sat outside
miss a single minute." On our visits we
eating my lunch, feeling almost happy,
sat up in our robes, cross-legged in bed.
and then reprehensible. How could I still We talked about the things that scared
be alive? Even now, 18 years later, when
us, about who we wanted to be, about
something wonderful happens to me,
who we were. We were each other's hisguilt is there first.
tory and the story of our happy futures.
Deane had been a good listener. What- " ..
For months after Deane died, my parents called me Deane. Other people did
ever seemed unmanageable acquired
too, people who had known Deane betsome of her composure and became less
ter than they knew me. They didn't do overwhelming when told to her. She prothis to be cruel. They did it because they vided perspective and humor. After her
had always done it, called that face
death I struggled to do this for myself. I
Deane. I did it too. When I looked in the
had to learn to be still with thoughts and
mirror, I saw not my own face but Deane's. feelings that were mine alone.
I lay on the bed and tried to think who
At first I turned to my husband. But he
had died. To answer, I had to understand
had no wish to be my twin. And I had
the person I had been: all Deane, part
chosen him in part because he was so
Deane, part Dorothy, all Dorothy. What
clear about where he began and I left off.
was confusing was that I had both died Now that clarity rankled me. I wanted
and remained.
Dan to behave more as Deane might have.
At 32, I began life as a singleton, a life I wanted him to tell me how I'd live
most people take for granted but one as without her and when I'd heal. I rememmysterious to me as my twinship was to ber a daily terror: The world seemed vaothers. I remember feeling as if I'd been
cant; the span of years ahead, endless. I
set down in an enormous empty space
wanted Dan to erase that picture.
Sitting in our living room months after
without signposts. Until our junior year
in college Deane and I had never been
Deane's death, I began to cry, and Dan did
separated. We had the same classes, the
nothing. My tears turned to anger: How
same friends. We even shared our first
could he not console me? Why didn't he
say something, anything? That he had
boyfriend, alternating dates. But by our
his own grief for me and about Deane,
sophomore year we wanted more indethat he wanted our old life back, didn't
pendence. We wanted people to stop
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I
AM
ONE
enter my thoughts. My open expression
of sorrow clashed with his restraint,
exaggerating a tension that had always
existed between us.
But our relationship changed in positive ways as well. Before Deane's death
no one could have accepted my twinship
with more grace and generosity than Dan
had. He knew my intimacy with Deane
didn't squeeze him out; it never included
him. And he was willing to share me. Now
my allegiance to him was undivided, as
his had always been to me. We became,
if these things can be measured, more
equal. Dan and I have never talked about
this, but we have both known it since the
moment I slumped against his shoulder at
Lowell Hospital. I thought many times
that first year that my love for him
helped me decide to survive. His the foot
on earth, hers the one in heaven. And
survival was an issue. I remember sitting
in the kitchen, sipping a glass of wine,
and saying to Dan, "If I feel this way
a year from now, I will want to die."
When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat
was assassinated that fall, all I could
think was how lucky he was.
Dan stayed close to me the first year
and kept up our daily routine. That autumn I spent mornings in the library
going through Deane's papers and crying
in bathroom stalls. When I met Dan for
lunch, my eyes would be red, but we
would talk about the soup or our work
or the evening ahead. Although his insistence on the present sometimes made
me angry, it was also his gift.
Deane's death changed my relationships with women, too. Deane had made
these connections count less. Ours was
the perfect friendship, and anyone who
was ever close to us knew that. Now
friendships were crucial, but I knew only
how to be distant (you are less important
than Deane) or intimate (you are Deane).
So they were burdened and unsatisfying.
Many of Deane's friends wrote to me
for a long time after her death, out of
kindness but also searching for the Deane
in me, the possibility of the sisterly
friendship she was so good at. For a
while I answered all their letters. I even
tried becoming friends with Deane's
best friend, a hurtful project for both of
us. I railed against limitations and reality.
Oh, why couldn't anyone, for just one
NOW
I
moment, be Deane?
In each new friendship I rejoiced, but
eventually I grew too intense or began to
feel neglected. I wanted someone who
never tired of my company, whom I
could pop in on or weep with at any
moment, who accepted what Deane and
I called our "weeny" side-the part of us
that admitted failure without shame: My
stomach is too big, my report sucks, my
place in the world is too small. By comparison, most friends seemed distant
strangers. No, I was after that airport cry
"I don't want to miss a single minute."
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OR MONTHS I was privately
obsessed with wild and embarrassing schemes for getting her
back. Maybe it wasn't too late
for my parents to conceive. Maybe I
could undo the invention of gunpowder.
I could find Deane in my sleep or in my
own death. Finally, as the shock and
insanity receded, I understood that I
would never love anyone again as much
as I loved Deane or in the same way. And
then I remembered genetics.
Before Deane died both Dan and I had
been full of ambivalence about parenting.
Dan had helped raise a much younger sister and already knew the psychic demons
such demands could produce. I feared
children would doom me to a life of domestic toil. Still, I felt the need to remake
my world. And that need, born of grief
and fear and loneliness, found its way to
a wish for children.
It's not the wisest way to decide to
have a baby-to assuage your own grief.
But I wasn't thinking about that. I was
thinking about love and genes-that
Deane would be as much a part of my
baby as I was. My husband's ideas had
shifted too. He felt more vulnerable, older. Our first son was Dan's gift to me, of
life after so much death.
Of course babies, it turns out, are
themselves only-and with a vengeance.
I had my first child two years after Deane
died. I stared into his face for a glimpse
of another world and couldn't find it.
Those first few months I was so busy
looking for Deane that I almost missed
Jacob. I was too unhappy, too numbly
pessimistic, to understand the way my
life had reopened. And then I took him
to the doctor for his six-week checkup.
AM
ONE
When they pricked his toe for a blood
test, he clung to my chest and my soothing stilled his sobs. He had made me his
mother, in spite of my grief, and I remember the thrill of that moment.
Two years later I had another son,
Matthew Deane, a snuggly baby who
liked nothing better than to sit on my
lap. Although by then I had no expectations of bringing Deane back, that is the
wonderful surprise I got: a child who
looks and acts like Deane, with the same
gentle nature, the same soft smile and big
eyes. And when we are together I am
thankful for every second-for Matthew
himself and for the echoes he carries,
echoes that no longer hurt but delight.
Surely the best way to keep Deane close.
So I find myself unexpectedly lucky. I
am often lonely, but I am not unhappy.
Sometimes I still believe I live for both of
us, but it is not an idea I allow to grow
too vivid. It is easier to imagine, as Deane
and I always did, that my part and hers
continue to intertwine, exchangeable, my
story or hers. That is denial, but it is also
the shared life I have always known.
Whatever happens to Deane happens to
me. I am alive, but, like Deane, I do not
live the life I started.
My friends ask if her loss is with me
every day. It is a hard question to answer.
The day she was shot marks a line down
the center of my life. It changes the way
I see those two redheaded girls who rode
wooden stick horses and slept in blanket
forts. It changes the way I'd pictured us
as old ladies, toting cookies in one hand
and grandchildren in the other. But I get
to live, and life does grow back-or at
least forward.
Four years ago a red oak in our front
yard began to die. To save it, a tree surgeon lopped off huge branches 30 feet
above the ground. After the surgeon left
I wondered if we'd done the tree a favor
to leave it so scarred, the round sawedoff places reminders of how lush it had
been. But now the tree's remaining
branches are thick and green with leaves.
In several places it has grown fuller. I sit
on the front porch and study the tree, its
scars still visible but the body nonetheless
alive, and I realize I am that tree. I understand now why I went so far to save it. H
Dorothy Foltz-Gray is a contributing editor.