I'll Be You(65)

But even as I recoiled from her accusation that day, I knew that she was right. Even then, I knew what GenFem was, even if I hadn’t yet assigned it this particular label. I’d known it for months by then, hadn’t I? The truth I couldn’t voice out loud, couldn’t even acknowledge as a passing thought, even when the mounting evidence grew undeniable.

Yes, yes you did. You joined a cult. You did, you fool. You did you did you did.





20




WHEN MY SISTER AND I were nine years old, Sam performed in our elementary school’s production of Mary Poppins, playing the role of Jane Banks. On opening night, I sat in the second row of the auditorium, sandwiched between my mother and father, the room thick with the scent of Twizzlers and unwashed hair. In the dark, chewing furiously on my cuticle, I watched my sister—her face caked with makeup and the too-big costume hanging loosely off her torso—turn into a complete stranger. Much to my surprise, Sam was good, so transfigured that I found myself forgetting that the girl onstage was my twin sister, and not a love-starved child in need of a proper British nanny.

It terrified me.

We were at that stage of twindom when parents start worrying about issues like differentiation and overreliance, and so my mother had recently retired our quasi-identical outfits and was no longer encouraging us to do the same after-school activities. Sam got acting and I got soccer, we had separate homeroom teachers, and if that meant less convenience for my mother—now carting us in two directions instead of one—it also meant that we were going to be developing our own “unique personalities.”

This, at least, was what I gleaned from the heavily underlined sections of the parenting books that sat on my mother’s nightstand next to her incense and cardamom hand lotion. Sometimes, when she was preoccupied in the kitchen, I’d sneak in and read the notes she’d jotted in the margins. Things like Elli needs her own confidence instead of relying on Sam’s and separation = individuality and, most terrifying of all, what to do if they end up hating each other.

I didn’t know what to make of all this. But even at nine, I was already aware that the tether between myself and Sam had begun to fray. I had only faint memories of the secret language that we had once spoken, back when we slept in the same crib. My mom described it as our “funny twin babble” but Sam and I couldn’t remember the words at all anymore. When we lay in bed at night now—separated by a moat of peach pile carpet—we would still sometimes try out nonsense sounds on each other (Squenchie! Febabal!) to see if the other could figure out what it meant. It never worked.

We needed real words in order to understand each other now; words, and maybe even more. Even though I’d sometimes still look at Sam and sense exactly what she was thinking, feel this awareness as a warm spot somewhere underneath my belly button and know exactly how to assuage her fears, there were also moments when I gazed into her eyes and saw something frighteningly strange there. A blind being pulled down, flat and blank. I didn’t like it at all.

And so, as I sat there that night at Mary Poppins, watching Sam the Stranger up onstage, her face red with exhilaration as she took her bows and soaked up the applause, I didn’t feel happy for her at all. Instead, I mostly felt sick. I didn’t want Sam to be feeling things that I didn’t understand. I didn’t want us to end up hating each other, like my mother’s book warned we might.

This might explain why, when Harriet discovered us building our sandcastle on the beach just a few weeks later and wooed us with her promises of fame—I’ll turn your girls into stars—I didn’t balk. I didn’t tell Sam that I had no desire at all to be onstage, with the whole world looking at me, that I didn’t want to pretend I was someone else entirely, or to play at being famous. Because she wanted it, and so if we were to be close again, I was going to have to want it, too.

So when Harriet walked away from us and Sam grabbed my hands and squealed with excitement—“We’re going to be famous, Elli! We’re going to be in movies, together!”—I gripped her hands and squealed right back.

“I’m so excited,” I trilled as we swung each other in circles. Our bare feet trampled the castle that we’d so carefully constructed, until it collapsed into soggy piles of sand.



* * *



—

Twenty-two years later, Dr. Cindy Medina and I would reenact that day—one of my Trigger Moments, she called it—over and over and over and over again. I sat with her in one of the curtained rooms at the back of the GenFem center—our knees pressed against each other, eyes closed, fingers woven together—as I recalled out loud every detail that I could remember from that day. The way the elastic in my swimsuit was cutting into my leg, the feeling of the sun against the peeling skin of my shoulders, the stubbornness in my sister’s voice as she insisted that our sandcastle be square instead of round.

“We’re going to be famous,” Dr. Cindy said in a mock little-girl voice that was nothing like Sam’s, her face so close to mine that I could smell the lunch on her breath (a scoop of tuna on lettuce, no mayo, black coffee). Her hands gripped mine—it felt like my bones would be crushed—as I took her prompt. This time, instead of saying, “I’m so excited,” I responded with the truth.

“I don’t want to,” I whispered, and Dr. Cindy squeezed my hands harder until I answered more loudly, more assertively. “I don’t want to. I’m not going to go to Hollywood with you. No.”