Ghost in the Machine

"Are you guys identical?"

"We don't know."

"Do you feel each other's pain?"

"I don't think so. I guess I don't know."

"Do you ever like wake up and forget which one you are?"

"what?"

"I've always wanted a twin!"

That last one always gets me. Everyone says it. I wait for it at the end of every conversation that starts with "I'm a twin." I ask them why. They say it would have been nice to have a friend growing up, someone their own age that they could talk to. Inside their heads, I imagine they are watching The Parent Trap, cute skinny blonde girls dancing and singing in unison, convincing their parents with identical smiles to let them stay together forever. Having a twin means having someone who is always there for you, someone your age who will want to do everything you want to do. It means being exciting and different and having the world be in love with you. Some of these things are true.

One of my earliest memories is waking up and looking through the yellow bars of my crib. My twin sister's dark eyes were staring at me. Our bodies were lying in the same position on our separate white mattresses and somehow I knew that we had opened our eyes at the exact same moment. I also knew what would happen next. We stood up and stared at the door through which we expected our mother to appear. After a few moments Meredith looked at me and I understood. At the same moment, we screamed as loud as we were able to. I don't know if this is something we did every morning or if it was just the one time, but I remember our natural unity. I remember this unique connection, and this is the connection that most people crave. This is the story they love to hear, and so when they look at me with familiar delight in their eyes, I offer them stories like these rather than the more complicated truth. I tell them about the one and only time we switched classes in the third grade, about our matching hats with the different colored roses, and swallow the truth that I fear no one will understand, the reality that being a twin was in many ways painful for my sister and me, and still is.

For me, being a twin meant knowing from an early age that the people around me, even the ones I loved the most, would not always know who I was. Though my parents generally got our names right, there was the occasional mishap, and if our babysitters or relatives called us by our given name it was generally no more than a good guess. By elementary school, I took it as a personal insult when someone called me Meredith. "I'm Rachel!" I would snap indignantly. The perpetrator would smile, oblivious to my outrage. "Sorry!" they would say, "wow, you guys look so much alike!" Sometimes I would smile to be polite. Sometimes I would say nothing at all. I was disappointed and angry that they got to have a unique appearance that went with their unique soul, angry that I was powerless to control the way I was perceived by others, frustrated that my body had so much power to define me. I could become Meredith in an instant. I could become no one. I could become anything anyone told me I was.

Being a twin didn't seem to have the same effect on Meredith's sense of self. Though it annoyed her slightly, she didn't seem to need outside validation the way I did. While I was desperate to have friends over, Meredith was content to spend time by herself. Once I remember looking for her in the yard. She was walking the edge of the forest and staring ahead, humming softly to herself. There was a power about her, even then.

"What are you doing?" I asked as I approached.

She shrugged.

"Want to play a game or something?"

She shook her head.

"I kind of just feel like playing by myself right now." She said.

As children, our mother tried to encourage the development of our own identities by insisting that we be put into separate class rooms at school. She also recognized our interests, and encouraged us in separate directions to pursue them. This is how Meredith became the artist and I became the actress. There could be no overlapping. I could not be good at drawing, Meredith could not audition for plays, and the three of us respected these boundaries in secret alliance. Despite my mother's attempts however, despite the clues we scattered on the surface, I still felt like a shapeless mess beneath it. While I still depended heavily on the correct interpretation of my outside, for the world to know I was Rachel because I was acting and not drawing, Meredith had an inside that she alone controlled.

As we became teenagers, I continued to admire and envy this force in my sister. She seemed ready to fight the unfairness of our world single handedly. In the wake of our parents divorce, Meredith was the hero. I stood behind her, nodding as she made demands for us. She stood up to our father when his hands shook and his eyes bulged. She asked our mother why the prayer book had been taken down from our doorway and why we weren't celebrating Hanukah. At school, it was the same. There was a pride in my sister that I witnessed hungrily. When a group of popular girls threatened to beat her up (through me actually because they thought I was her) she rolled her eyes and smirked.

"How do you do it?" I asked her one day when she was doing her homework at the kitchen table. "How do you not care what other people think?"

Meredith thought for a moment.

"I justtell myself I'm strong," she said, "and I believe it."

Once, I actually tried this method to no avail. In the girls' bathroom I remember staring angrily at my reflection in the mirror. Tears blurred my vision and I could barely see my reflection. I'm strong, I thought, I'm strong. I don't care what anyone says about me. I hoped that some kind of magic would take place; that the sureness my sister seemed to embody would course through my veins and make me different, make me a beautiful, proud, apathetic warrior like she seemed to be. Nothing changed though, and somewhere inside of me I understood that it was because the words were only half of the spell. I had to believe them, I had to give them permission to represent me, and I wanted to. I wanted to give myself permission to be Rachel whether people knew I was or not, to be good enough regardless of competing definitions, but I didn't know how.

By high school, I had given up my pursuit for a solid identity and instead spent my time trying to make myself as invisible as possible. The strength I had observed in my sister throughout middle school I now accepted as an impossible goal. I could not avoid the altering of my sense of self by others, and so I would take it away from them completely. I would be nothing and there would be nothing to manipulate, nothing to hurt. This is how I would get control. I found that if I stopped talking or moving or making eye contact, most people would ignore me, and this seemed like a pleasant alternative to the uneasiness I had experienced throughout middle school. Obsessed with erasing myself, I would devote entire classes to fantasizing about living in a magic bubble that no one could see inside. I began to experiment with hunger. Exactly when, I don't remember, and then, it happened. Like the magic I always wanted, I had a name. Everyone seemed to know I was Rachel, the skinny twin, an identity that no one could argue with. And suddenly I felt a pride that I had never felt before and a relief I had never known.

I never meant for my new identity to hurt Meredith, but when it did, I couldn't bare to give it up. I knew what was happening to her even before people said things like "the fatter one?" because I understood, as all twins understand, what happens when one twin stands out. The comparisons begin and worth gets distributed accordingly. If I was the thin twin, Meredith was the fat twin. If I was the worthy twin, Meredith was the unworthy twin. The fact that she was not fat or unworthy was inconsequential to the masses. They would label us as they always had in an attempt to tell us apart and we would be powerless to stop them. This bothered me. I knew what it felt like to be on the uncomfortable end of these comparisons but I refused to let it dilute my newly generated confidence. After all, Meredith had never had any trouble holding on to herself. She could handle this, I thought, and it seemed only fair that I get to experience the sense of self she had always known.

As long as I ignored Meredith's pain, I thought, I could keep my new thin identity, but soon other challenges arose which threatened its survival. My math tutor Joan was the first person to say anything to me. When I sat down in my usual chair in front of the dry erase board, she turned to me.

"Your face looks green." She said slowly, staring right at me, "Are you eating three meals a day?"

I left that day feeling terrified. Seeing how long I could go without eating was probably a little worse than your average diet, but no one until that moment had forced me to confront this realization. My behavior was probably not normal. Some part of me understood this, recognizing simultaneously that if anyone really knew, they would try to stop me. This didn't mean I was Anorexic, I told myself. I wouldn't let myself think that. Anorexics were beautiful ballerinas and "A" students who starved themselves for weeks on end. I put food into my mouth every day, I thought. It wasn't the same. I could keep going. I could keep the identity, at least for a little longer. She would have to go instead, I resolved, along with anyone else who threatened to expose my behavior for what it was, or influence my decision to keep the identity I had worked so hard to attain.

"I don't think I need math tutoring anymore," I lied to my mother in the car on the way back to our house. "I think I get everything now. Besides, at this point, you either get it or you don't, right?"

There was a long line of awkward conversations following the one I had with Joan. I also left Nanette, my cello teacher of seven years, after she said I looked too thin, and avoided being alone with my friend Shauna after she told me that my hands looked like a starving person's.

Meredith was also one of these attempted sacrifices, though my break from her was reluctant and would never be fully complete. The day she confronted my weight loss, we were walking in a circle around the neighborhood. Meredith was walking next to me but I kept pushing us to go faster. "C'mon," I laughed, "Gotta get in shape!" Suddenly she stopped.

"What?" I asked without stopping or turning around. I was concentrating on the burn in my calves, on the sound of my sneakers scratching the pavement.

"Are you still trying to lose weight?" she asked from behind me.
I stopped and after a moment, I turned to face her. The suspicion in her eyes I recognized from countless arguments with our mother, but what startled me was her uncertainty. She was being careful as they all had been. She was afraid of me, I realized. I couldn't remember ever feeling more powerful than her.

"I guess," I said, "Why not?"

My words seemed to cause her immediate pain. I watched her open her mouth and close it once before she finally spoke.

"Becauseyou're already skinny!" she said, "and it won't look good on youour body type isn't meant to look that way."

I smiled.

"Whatever," I said. Her mouth was still open slightly as I began to walk away from her and I knew instinctively as I had once, as a baby in a crib, that she was watching. For the first time though, I didn't care if she followed me, if anyone followed me. I didn't need friends over or Meredith to play with me or anyone's permission to define myself. I had taken back the night, I thought. Now I would look in the mirror and feel that magical strength which seemed to come so naturally to my sister.

A few months later, my mother picked me up from play rehearsal. I was one of the dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and I had just removed the goat hair beard which had been glued to my face. There was still a red mark on my cheek when I got into the car and looked at my face in the rearview mirror. "I'm taking you to see a nutritionist," she said. Staring at the windshield in front of her, we started to drive. Terror rushed through me and I said nothing, convincing myself that worst case scenario, I would get a talking to. A few weeks earlier, she had taken me to the doctor for a check up. He had stared at me and talked, but in the end, nothing had come of it. "Just keep an eye on it," he had told my mother while I sat on tissue paper and stared at the wall. I figured the same thing would happen here.

I still wasn't convinced that I was Anorexic, but when the nutritionist, whose name was Melody, told me that three consecutively missed periods was criteria for a diagnosis, I wasn't surprised. There was a seriousness about her which made me feel that dishonesty, at least direct dishonesty, would be useless, and I had told her the truth about my missed periods the moment she asked. When she went out into the hallway to ask my mother to come in, I knew I had been caught. I had been given a diagnosis and a new name which both comforted and frightened me. It was good to know I was something concrete, but being discovered also meant I would be given other things, things I didn't want, demands for example, and instinctively I felt that the best way to derail these demands, to maintain my identity, was to make the authority think I was ready to play nice. Maybe I even wanted to at first. I told her about Meredith and how good it felt to have people know who I was. She told me that it was fairly common for twins to develop Anorexia, and complimented me on my ability to be so articulate.

I started to see Melody twice a week and a social worker who worked down the hall from her. For the most part, my family was relieved. They had been told my prognosis was a good one. There was hope. It had been caught early and there was a chance I could recover without medical intervention. Despite my earlier plans for sabotage, however, I temporarily felt forced to comply under the new pressure of my diagnosis. Everyone was watching me and I had been given a meal plan which left little room for my own interpretation. I was miserable and heart broken, unconvinced that life without my new identity was worth returning to. I was terrified and terrible, and Meredith got the worst of it.

I hated the sight of her. She was a walking reminder of the lie I was telling myself. Her normal body taunted me, told me that mine was unnatural, that mine would go back and when it did, the powerlessness which had reigned throughout my earlier life would return. If the weight returned, I feared, I would go back to having no control over my worth. Without cold hard numbers to represent me, I would be forced to ride the tide once more, sliding up and down with praise and punishment, the subjective, messy interpretation of others. It angered me that Meredith didn't seem to understand what that feeling was like. How could she expect me to give Anorexia up when she had never experienced the selflessness I had endured? Not only would giving up my skinny identity mean losing a sense of worth, but gaining the weight would also mean returning to the powerless world of being a twin. Sharing an appearance with her would mean sharing my identity once more and I had grown attached to my new independence. For all of these reasons, Meredith became a symbol of the painful reality I was determined to outrun, and I treated her in many ways like the enemy. I ignored her pain and used her loyalty to my advantage.

Meredith's presence also bothered me for one last reason. I loved her, and this love connected me with a vulnerability I had taught myself to hate. My sensitive nature, my neediness, had made me defenseless once, and so I had grown to despise it, along with anything else that made me feel, and it turned out, even in the zombie-like throes of my eating disorder, Meredith continued to make me feel.