But, anyway, what he’d also say, I know it, is: don’t we have two beautiful kids?
We decided on no marker, no silly, cat-proportioned memorial. Just the lilac itself. In both our heads, perhaps, was the unavoidable funeral music, incongruous as the sound of waves in Herne Hilclass="underline" “Sit-ting on the dock of the bay…”
We planted lily-of-the-valley and grape hyacinth over the grave. We were already thinking, perhaps, that you should never know. Otis belonged, firmly, to a world before you. But it seems, Nick, that you might have guessed. In any case, it occurs to me that, as a matter of simple, incontestable fact, you were there, both of you were there, even as we buried Otis. You were there, inside me. You couldn’t see a thing, but both of you were undoubtedly present and in attendance at Otis’s funeral.
Both of you. And that was simply the most wonderful, crowning fact of all, that had made me impervious to sorrow and tears, and would make even your father very soon forget his grief for Otis — as they say, if I wasn’t quite ready yet to put it to the test, a mother’s birth-pains are instantly forgotten once birth occurs.
If we’d ever doubted this thing that we’d done — I mean, that I’d done, with your father’s assent and cooperation — if we’d ever questioned, even after the point of no return, the strange bypassing path we’d taken, then didn’t nature, in the end, simply reward and approve and exonerate and congratulate us? Nature — and science. Including that wonderful and still young then science of sonography, which enabled us to see you, even before you were “there,” even before that day by the lilac tree.
If we’d had no doubts at all, there still might have been an awkward follow-up. Suppose all went well and, yes, we acquired a child. Then suppose we wanted another one. What exactly would have been the procedure then? To go back and ask for the same “Mr. S.,” to ask him to oblige once again? But that delicate question would never require an answer, and all doubts, quandaries and compunctions were resolved. One November day we both looked at a strange, blurry, magical screen and saw two little pulsating blobs. Forgive me, but the image stuck: two little floating shrimps. The whole complete and entrancing set all in one go and, as it proved, a boy and a girl. A nuclear family. Twins.
27
GEMINI. On the tenth of June, 1979. And, as we have told you, without any fraudulent invention, at more or less two in the morning. Something we certainly couldn’t specify, but it was what we got. What an extraordinary, world-transforming little word it suddenly seemed to be: two.
And how did your father feel, even months before — when he looked with me at that wobbly screen? Doubly excluded, doubly dismissed? It’s important for you to know, it’s of the utmost relevance for tomorrow. I was there — I had to be — to see you for the first time, but I also looked at your father. And what I saw, for the first time, was that it was real for him. Whatever he may have expected, whatever reactions he may even have prepared, he was smitten from that moment on, as smitten as I was, by you. Quite simply, I saw your father swoon, I saw him tip into love all over again — excuse me for saying so, but I think I could recognise the spectacle. I could almost see the train of thought in his head. Not his? No — not really? Mine, certainly. But none of that was the point. Ours, ours.
A strange, rather chilly contraption (but thank heaven for it) was resting on my belly and I was trying to keep as still as possible, but I wondered if the rush of emotion passing through me, and, for all I know, through you, was making that little screen wobble and judder—“dance” perhaps I mean — so much the more.
On the way back in the car I was genuinely worried your dad’s mind might not be on the road. “Mikey, the lights have turned green.”
Truly, we’d never supposed, in all our suppositions and imaginings, that you might be two — if I can put it like that. Was that thoroughly short-sighted of us? In all our calculations, and how absurd it seems, we’d used only basic arithmetic, we’d never got beyond the simple addition of one. But for sixteen years now, whatever else they may amount to, we’ve been living in the binary system. This strange equilibrium: a family of two couples. There’s always been that bond and that division between us. I don’t honestly know how it will affect tomorrow. Suppose there were just one of you now to inform. Poor thing. Suppose there were two of you, but with the usual sort of gap. How would that have affected our sixteenth-birthday principle?
You’ll sit side by side on the sofa. You’ll have each other.
And as for your twinness in itself: I bow to it. I don’t pretend to fathom it, even if I am your mother. You’re well aware by now that your parents, this other couple here, consist of two “onlies.” A completely different route into life, a completely different grounding. When we first knew you were two, we had only the usual jumble of uneducated notions. We know a bit more now. But in sixteen years of being the mother of twins and of observing you even more closely perhaps than the average mother, I can’t say I’ve got beyond the conclusion that only twins themselves know what it’s like.
They say you’re a race apart, a separate lore. You’re not like the rest of us, either in your dealings with the world or in your dealings with each other. Do you think that’s all hokum? A special understanding surely gets formed in that double confinement in the womb. It’s not, at least, like the standard experience when there’s only room for one and our arrival on the scene is a big, bawling solo act. Me! Me! Me!
They say you’re less selfish, you’ve learnt to share. They say you’re the opposite: you’re selfishness times two. There’s nothing you won’t do for each other in the eternal struggle with non-twins. Or, then again, behind your interchangeable smiles (but I’ve never thought your smiles were identical), you’re really at war with each other: sibling rivalry without limits.
We’ve seen you slip in and out of almost every version, every interpretation of twinness, play it up, play it down, play against it. Oh you know how to perform. But the truth is, and you both must know it, you were living proof of the harmony principle. You tug against each other now, as if you know that life, for you, will mean the difficult art of separation, but underneath there’s still that sweet solidarity, that glue that you came with. Will tomorrow just bring you together again? Bind you? Thwart you? Delay you?
Nick and Kate; two little balancing sounds. We just liked them. It works the longer way too: Nicholas and Katherine. Apart from that wonderful wobbly image on the screen, I’ve always had the picture in my head of a seesaw. Nick-and-Kate, Nick-and-Kate, a seesaw, your two monosyllables riding up and down. A seesaw can be a grim confrontation: one can give the other a hell of a ride. Or it can be an instrument of swaying delight. And that’s how it’s mostly been, with the occasional rhythmic agitation: swaying delight — in you yourselves, and swaying delight in us, your almost jealous beholders.
What had we done to deserve you? But we knew exactly what we’d done or, in Mike’s case, not done. Was it in some weird way because of that? Or was the trick of it that you were boy and girl? It’s only with boy-twins or girl-twins that the trouble starts? But a boy and girl born together is like a perfect piece of matchmaking. You even used to say (deny it though you will) that you wanted to marry. So in that way too you took after your parents. A seesaw for four — boy-girl, boy-girl — that’s rocked and swayed away for sixteen years.