After twenty-years I should be used to it by now. It starts
with a glance and usually turns into a dead stare. I feel their eyes move from
my sister, to I, then to my sister again. We both blush simultaneously knowing
what is coming next. The same conversation over and over, occurring ever so
commonly in pretty much any place my sister and I travel to together. Whether
it is in grocery store lines, at the bank, in the hair salon, even in restaurants,
I recite the same answers to every curious bystander.
Are you sisters? As if our identical
strawberry blonde hair, exact same height, identical nose, and matching
freckles didn’t give it away. You girls
look EXACTLY alike! Well, we are twins…Are
you identical or fraternal? Identical.
Technically a lie but I don’t want to bore you trying to explain the actual
science of how we are fraternal but look exactly identical. Do you like being a twin? If I had a
dollar for every time I’ve been asked this, I would never have to work a day in
my life. Is twin telepathy real? Can you
really feel what she feels? No, just because we’re twins doesn’t mean we
are magically psychic. Do you play tricks on your
friends and teachers? Tried it, but
our teachers found out and threatened to give us detentions so it never
happened again. Do you guys fight a lot?
Don’t all siblings fight? Do you ever
dress alike? Please don’t remind me of the identical terrible outfits my
mother dressed us in as babies. She dressed me as a cow and Lauren as a cowgirl
for Halloween once; it gave a whole new meaning to disgustingly cute.
Don’t get me wrong, when I am in a rush the conversation can
be slightly annoying, but overall I can’t say I am bothered by this
interaction. Since having a twin is part of who I am, I feel as if the
conversation allows a simple bystander to entertain the idea of what it’s like
to have a twin, even if it is just for a minute. An ice breaker in disguise, I
suppose.
I love the sassiness, here. As someone who has a distinctive birthmark that is mostly visible, I'm well aware of the stock answers that you might give to someone asking about you and your twin. Your use of dialogue carried me through the main body paragraph quickly, similarly to how Eggers employs his train-of-thought ramblings.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I thought the last paragraph was a bit forced or out of place. The ending sentence about the conversation being a good ice breaker is a fine ending, but I got so much snark from the essay that it hit me oddly when I got to the part that you actually enjoyed the conversations most of the time. I'd work on perhaps introducing the ending paragraph's message differently — you know, with more sass.
As a twin myself, I really related to this essay. I've been in the exact same situation - a bombardment of questions that have very simple answers and, after a while. they get really annoying and I get that.
ReplyDeleteGoing off of what Jim wrote, I think the last paragraph could have been more about the annoyance of those questions. I don't fully feel the annoyance. I want to feel the anger and annoyance in your words and I didn't fully feel that.
I do like the dialogue though. It's what carried the work for me as well. Maybe you could end on a conversation between you and your sister that is super sassy and keep that flowing. I think that would take this to the next level.
I want you to blow this up! In a good way, I mean. Eggers basically gives you an invitation to go wild as a writer. Remember what he says about the onlookers to his pain and what he wants to do to them? Well, I'm not advocating that you fantasize about hitting someone with a baseball bat the way he does, but I'd love to see some super-honest argggghhhhhiness here. Give me the dialogue. Show that these kind folks who mean no harm really drive you crazy sometimes. Exaggerate--why not try it?--the responses you'd like to give.
ReplyDeleteDW
I totally agree with everything above--more dialogue, even more sass, and I definitely think the ending paragraph could be more in keeping with the tone of the rest of the piece. But this is great--I have a sister who is four years younger but looks enough like me that for one summer people kept asking us if we were twins. It annoyed me more than I thought it would, and I got even more annoyed because I knew I was being ridiculous by being offended; do you ever feel like that in these situations?
ReplyDeleteI really liked this post. All of those questions are very spot on the what most of us non-twins would like to know. And actually reading your initial reactions to these questions, and actually being able to see them, does make the questions seem redundant and rhetorical. Of course you wouldn't have telepathy but I'm very interested in finding a set of twins that do though, so I'd still ask. I don't have siblings so I've always been fascinated and a little jealous of sibling relationships. I like to see siblings that actually really love each other and don't bicker and have playful relationships. LOL "are you sisters?" Such a believable yet idiotic question to ask a twin. Spot on.
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