I'll Be You(8)

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That was the summer that my sister built us a dollhouse out of scavenged boxes and old wallpaper samples. Elli had a creative eye even then. She meticulously crafted furniture out of bottle caps and bits of cardboard, and painted miniature art for the dollhouse walls. She fashioned a tiny Sam and a tiny Elli out of paper, and our proxies took up residence there alone: no parents, no friends or neighbors or other children, just the two of us in a world of Elli’s creation.

The dollhouse had grown to take up most of our room, each new shoebox expanding our domain: an elementary school and an ice cream stand, a hospital for when the dolls got hurt, an amusement park with a Tinkertoy merry-go-round that spun. Our mother had offered us summer camp and gymnastics classes, but we weren’t interested. Instead, we spent our days blissfully imagining a life with just the two of us, and everything we had ever desired, in it.

But something broke open after we met Harriet. That night, as we played with the dollhouse—Elli had just built us a swimming pool, and our paper twins were learning the backstroke—my mind kept drifting to other things, bigger places, a life I hadn’t imagined wanting before. Through the vents, I could hear our parents talking furtively in the kitchen. Phrases like Sam has talent and pay for a college education and it just seems karmic echoed through the heating ducts, until finally some consensus was murmured and I could tell that they were going to cave. Elli’s gaze kept drifting over to me, even as she cut our dolls’ swimsuits out of old wrapping paper. For the first time, I couldn’t quite meet her eyes.

Later, as Elli and I lay in our twin beds, the ceiling fan lazily churning the humid summer air, I felt my sister’s hand reaching for me across the gap. There was a hot smack as her sweaty palm met mine.

“Sam?” she whispered. “Are you OK?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just thought for a second that maybe you weren’t.”

I wondered how she knew. That under my giddiness—we’re going to be stars—I felt some thrilling dread, like when Elli and I went hiking with our parents in Rattlesnake Canyon and got to the part where the path crumbled off into a precipice and I’d feel a terrifying tug compelling me to step over the edge. But Elli always knew things, even when I didn’t tell her. I’d wake up from a nightmare and find that she’d already crawled in bed with me. I’d touch my forehead because I was hot and discover that she’d already walked in the room with a cold washcloth. Did she know these things because she felt them, too, or just because she could read me so well?

“I don’t know how I am. I feel strange.”

Her hand let go of mine, and I heard her rustling in the dark and then she was in bed with me, her body in its cotton nightgown paired to mine. “Let’s imagine all the fun things we can do once we’re Hollywood stars,” she said. The enthusiasm in her voice was a little overly bright. It occurred to me that she had never once expressed interest in doing theater with me before; but of course, this was Hollywood, why wouldn’t she love that? “Like, we can meet other stars. Britney Spears.”

“Stay up as late as we want.”

“Eat dessert for breakfast.”

“Quit school.”

“I like school.” Elli pondered this a little. “Maybe just quit math.”

“Travel around the world. Like Japan, and France.”

“Africa. I want to see elephants!” A long silence, the sound of her sucking on the ends of her hair. “I can’t think of anything else. I never thought much about anything outside of Santa Barbara.”

I hadn’t, either, and maybe that’s why the vast unfurling vista—the world beyond our dollhouse life—suddenly terrified me. Considering what was to come, I probably should have been even more scared than I was. But at that moment, with Elli’s breath in my face, her body so close that it was hard to tell where she ended and I began, I felt safe. Elli would take care of me. Everything would be fine as long as we were together.

How was I to know what was to come?



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Harriet labored for months to get us ready for the screen—prescribing haircuts, headshots, acting classes—and then, once we’d been deemed acceptable, our mother took time off from her job as a dental assistant to drive us to auditions down in Los Angeles. It took almost no time at all for us to book a Cheerios commercial. A few months later, we were cast in a tiny role on a children’s variety show, followed by an even smaller role in a comedy movie starring Mark Wahlberg. Two months before Elli and I turned ten, we hit the jackpot: a regular supporting role on a detective series that was premiering on network TV.

The thing that Harriet knew, and that we were quickly learning, was that identical twins are a precious commodity in Hollywood. Strict labor laws prevent child actors from working more than a few hours a day. But with identical twins, you can get two actors to play the same role, and voilà, you suddenly have twice as many shoot hours. Thanks to our big break, my sister and I were to inhabit the same character: that of little Jenny Maxx, the beleaguered daughter of hard-talking detective Marci Maxx, on the primetime TV show To the Maxx.

Elli typically played sensitive Jenny—the scenes where she got tucked into bed by her mother or cried when she got a bad report card. I liked to be Jenny when she was tough and resourceful, like the time she was kidnapped by her mother’s criminal nemesis and had to escape by crawling out an air-conditioning vent, or when she shot a serial killer with her mother’s gun. To the Maxx ran on network TV for six years, just long enough to make it into syndication, winning a handful of Emmys in the process. For four of those years, my sister and I moved in and out of Jenny’s singular body, and only those people who paid close attention to the show’s end credits would have noticed that “Jenny” was played by two identical child actresses, not one. But there were bulletin boards, in the deep recesses of the Web, where the show’s superfans argued about which twin was in which scene, debating the exact shape of our ears and whether Elli and I could be identified by the quarter-inch difference in our height.