Twins, Again

Christine Lehner

I had always wanted to have a twin—even before Catholic school—so the results of the laparotomy did not surprise me as much as they did the others: my family, my friends, strangers on airplanes. Perhaps I should rephrase: I would have liked to have been one of a pair of twins.

Mary and Maud O’Kelly were twins in a family of eleven, and for six years they were my most envied classmates at St. Paul’s School. I first attempted to be friends with Maud, but finally only Mary would have me. And that was not what I really would have liked: what I wanted was to be inside one of them, to have an other who knows the best and worst of you, and still has to like you. One or the other of the O’Kelly twins was usually chosen to be the Queen of May in our annual May procession honoring the Blessed Virgin. We all wore pastel dresses and had flowers in our hair, but they held bouquets and were carried aloft, and no one doubted their aptness for the role.

They were not identical twins, and as such were not perfect. Maud O’Kelly was larger than Mary, but they were both very cute—they were freckled and had curly strawberry blonde hair, they were stylishly chubby and wore matching smocked dresses with puffed sleeves. Later, Maud grew large and powerful, and might have become one of those Boediceas on the battlefield of field hockey, had her provenance been Scotland—where such terrors proliferated—rather than Ireland. Mary grew at the generally approved rate, and developed all the generally approved protrusions. I knew I was an outsider because I was neither a twin nor Irish; but in retrospect I can see that there were plenty of other good reasons for my isolation. Mary and Maud did not have pale blue glasses that attenuated with pathetic menace just above their eyebrows; nor did they have legs like bleached pipe cleaners; no one would ever have referred to them as carpenter’s dreams; and their mother did not speak with a French accent or wear French bikinis at the yacht club.

Now, when I recall the O’Kelly twins, it seems I knew them not at all, that they were vessels for my fantasies of an other. I had assumed that if I had a twin she could know the worst things about me, the things I cannot utter for fear the earth beneath me will groan and crack open to swallow me up; my twin, however, would naturally know these awful things and therefore they could not, by definition, be ineffable. For I have come to assume that without all those unspeakable images and unknowable memories that clutter my brain, I would be a mentally healthier individual, a model of openness, untroubled by nightmares, unafraid of the confessional.

Because of the dearth of novices and younger teaching nuns, most of the Sisters of St. Joseph at our school were ancient. In their multilayered habits of black and more black, they shuffled through the halls like lost hippopotami struggling to emerge from funereal laundry piles. They were always hungry, and always forgetting where they stashed their secret foods. In the farthest reaches of Sister Jerome’s desk drawer could often be found a rotting banana, and Hostess Cupcakes, and all the insects who had come to attend upon them. These Sisters ruled our little parochial school like insecure despots: arbitrarily, illogically, imagistically. (Years later in Istanbul, when I heard the story of the slightly demented Sultan Mehmed II, who sat upon his upholstered window seat in a tower of the Topkapi Palace and shot at passersby for target practice, thereby proving to himself, again and again, that he was all-powerful and not to be contradicted—when I heard that story I suddenly remembered Sister Jerome, who of course didn’t shoot anyone, but in her eighties had that same perverse need for reassurance that in her dementia lay her power.)

Fourth grade in parochial school was a watershed year for me. It was the year of Sister Jerome and the year I learned the exact location of our immortal souls. It was also the year I abandoned my ambition to achieve sainthood through becoming a nun. It was the beginning of the abandonment of saintly ambitions altogether, but I didn’t realize that yet. My researches up to that time had been primarily in The Saints and Your Name, an inspirational book for children describing the lives and often gruesome deaths of the saints for whom the book’s readers had been named. The book described 66 saints, of which 28 were women, and of those 28 women, eleven were martyred. The clear advantage of martyrdom was the instant sainthood it conferred upon the martyree; but the Emperor Diocletian and his cohorts were no longer feeding Christians to wild beasts, and besides, I was squeamish about pain. More so back then than now, but that’s another matter. In later years I consulted the red-spined condensed version of Butler’s Lives of the Saints which listed exactly 365 saints, one for each feast day of the year, and came up with 53 virgins and 15 widows and only 4 female saints who were neither widows nor virgins. Of course, Butler’s was not exhaustive: he’s very reticent about unverified or undocumented legends of martyrdom; for instance, he doesn’t even include St. Ursula and her 11,000 maidens, all gloriously martyred by the Huns on account of their adamant Christianity and virginity. In Attwater’s compendium, a full third of the listed female saints are martyrs, and there is also a good proportion of mystics and visionaries. Anybody who knew the story of Bernadette of Lourdes, which was so popular at my school, had to at least consider the possibility of visions.

Still, in my most careful reading during the fourth grade, it became clear that there were really only two routes by which a girl achieved sainthood. She either stayed a virgin, did holy works, had visions and died young (or perhaps was cruelly martyred trying to keep her maidenhead); or else she married, and her husband died so that she could be a holy widow, and preferably found a religious order, such as the Daughters of the Cross, or the Handmaids of Mary, or the Discalced Carmelites, or the Congregation of our Lady of the Retreat in the Cenacle. To confuse the issue, there was always my favorite, Joan of Arc, who—although she technically qualifies as a virgin-martyr—was an exception in that she got to dress as a man, go to war, and make a nuisance of herself to both the court and the clergy. But she is the exception that proves the rule. Sainthood appeared farther and farther beyond my reach.

Among the many misdemeanors (known to us as venial sins) available to us in our classroom, were gum swallowing and hair sucking. One particularly egregious sinner was a chubby girl named Kathleen Halloran. One day, on the occasion of chastising Kathleen yet again for chewing on her long brown braid in class, Sister Jerome undertook to illustrate for us why this habit was so pernicious. She drew an extremely vague outline of a sexless human body. More or less where the uterus is located in the female (although I was clueless about anatomy at the time, and am only marginally better now) she drew a circle (or an approximation of a circle: Sister Jerome was no Giotto), and she proceeded to decorate the circumference with blobs at fairly regular intervals. Then, more or less between the blobs she drew tiny lines that extended about a quarter of the way into the center of the circle—they were slightly wavy and undulated like cilia. We watched in silence as she drew. Some of us—myself among them, it must be admitted—copied down in our notebooks whatever Sister Jerome created on the blackboard, because it was much easier to keep our mouths quiet if one or more of our extremities could be engaged. I didn’t question then, nor do I doubt now, that Idle Hands really are the Devil’s Work.

We waited to be told the meaning of these shapes, which represented the apex of Sister Jerome’s artistic abilities. But there was more to come. Next to the larger and now decorated circle, she drew a smaller figlike shape. A startled silence settled over the classroom like the smell of rotting fruit—for once she did not press the chalk heavily on the board, for once there were no squeaks or raspings; she drew as lightly as was possible to draw and still make a mark. Then she told us. The larger circle was a stomach, and the blobs were chewing gum and the cilia were pieces of hair, and her point was that once ingested the gum and hair remained forever affixed to the stomach lining, and as we could imagine, the more gum and hair ingested, the less room there would be for food. That was one problem, but a far greater one was that the Host—which we all knew was the Body of Christ—also had to visit the stomach, and it would be sacrilegious for the Host to ever touch chewing gum or hair. How could we question that? Wasn’t it the most painfully obvious thing we’d seen all day?

The smaller figlike shape, she explained, was our immortal soul, and she had drawn it with a light touch because, as we knew, when the life had long gone from our earthbound bodies and they were buried in consecrated ground awaiting the Last Judgment, our immortal souls would be hanging out in hell, purgatory—the most likely—or heaven. (Limbo, at any rate, was not a possibility for us, because we were all baptized Catholics.) To further elucidate, Sister Jerome made small dots all round the soul, and declared them to be our venial sins; and then, to our great dismay, she turned the chalk sideways to the blackboard and smudged certain largish dark spots inside the soul: these were our mortal sins, the absolution for which was stringent and essential, if we wanted to avoid the flames of hell.

She did not explain the relationship between the misplaced stomach and the soul, and so we were left to assume it was the obvious one: proximity.

In 1979 I published a story called “Twins.” It was about female identical twins, whose parents die and leave them moderately well-off, but clueless. One of them marries a man called Victor, who clearly is in love with both twins; the other attempts suicide five times, and writes a series of notes which are increasingly less arch, and the last one is true enough to explain away her life; so she succeeds in dying. It’s very sad, of course, but there’s also a lot of funny stuff, about garden tools, and sex, and topiary figures on the lawn, and lecherous young uncles, and marriage, and marsupials. But when I reread it, all I see is how much I wanted a twin, any twin. I was having more and more trouble being just me.

Twenty-eight years after the fourth grade I was home one evening with my family. We were eating pasta for dinner; in my daughter’s nutritional pyramid pasta occupies all levels; Ariel does not like the sun to set on a day without pasta. That evening I had in fact planned a more varied meal, and had poached some shad; but upon tasting it I detected an overstrong metallic flavor, a whiff of sulfur, and in a panic had removed all the fish from my family’s plates and wrapped it in tinfoil—to mask the odor and thus protect Felix, the neighbor’s cat, from his own greed and gluttony, although I don’t know why since I loathed the slinking, smug, self-satisfied creature who often taunted my precious bulldog, who of course could not climb trees—and put it all in a garbage bag and took it outside, placing it securely inside the garbage can under the back porch. I have a not entirely irrational fear of poisoning my family with my culinary mistakes; and who knows what nuclear waste was being spewed into the river just as that particular shad was having its dinner. There is always with me the memory of the summer when the horseshoe crabs died en masse and backfloated all over Duxbury Bay. I knew very well just how ancient and resilient were the horseshoe crabs. Hadn’t I been brought up knowing how they cohabited the earth with dinosaurs (now mercifully extinct), and how Limulus polyphemus remained: unchanged, unrepentant? That was the summer before Plymouth II—our own malfunctioning nuclear facility—was forced to shut down because it had been releasing its circulating coolant water into the bay. That was all, just warm water, they said.

It was a Friday evening, and it had been a long time since the Church demanded of the faithful fish on Fridays; but no matter, sometimes toward the end of the week something would swim up inside me, and I would crave that flaky, smelly pelagic-flesh, the sour lingering taste of Galilee. It seems very unlikely that the craving for fish had anything to do with the bizarre medical tests I had undergone that morning, painless but still bizarre, and from which I expected to learn nothing that I didn’t already know: which was that I was unable to get pregnant again and that there was no organic reason that any doctor would acknowledge—which allowed them to describe my complaint as idiopathic, which characterization I tried not to take personally—although they might hint that a botched emergency appendectomy performed on April Fools’ Day a few years earlier might, just might, have spewed out some flotsam and created anatomical obstacles.

But the panic over a possible poisoning banished all desire for fish, and pasta was the comfort food of choice. When the phone rang we were arguing about the meaning of apocryphal. For a merely semantic argument, it was beginning to turn nasty. I was telling, or more likely retelling, a story about the time my grandmother took me to Belgium when I was twelve and I learned of her first, and passionate, and doomed marriage. And my husband referred to something in the story as apocryphal. Until very recently in my life, I had misused the word apocryphal (which I now know means of questionable authorship or authenticity, or erroneous or fictitious—from the Apocrypha in the Bible). I had confused it with apocalyptic (which, by contrast, means great or total devastation, or doom, or a prophetic disclosure, or a revelation—this also, and not surprisingly, from the Apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation). I had done this with other words, such as tepid and torpid, or what is worse, delinquent and deliquesce, making more or less of an ass of myself on occasion, depending upon how desperately I wanted to seem intelligent. But that evening I knew most definitely what apocryphal meant, because, having made an especial ass of myself in a certain situation to remain unnamed, I had looked it up and impressed it upon my right brain, and thus I realized that I was being accused of a falsehood, a prevarication, at best hyperbole. I asked my husband if he knew what apocryphal meant, and if that was what he meant to say.

And he answered Yes, of course, he knew what it meant, and he had said just what he meant.

Then I asked, So what does apocryphal mean? (because I was pretty sure he was making the same perfectly understandable error I had made all those years), but he balked at being asked for a definition. And I got quite huffy and implied he didn’t know what he was saying, and he got huffier, and indignant that I should ask him to define terms, and so on.

Until my son produced the OED (of which we have all thirteen volumes ranged on a nearby shelf in the pantry, because of just this sort of inevitable prandial conflict), whose definition somewhat mollified us both, although, as I couldn’t help pointing out, mine (of doubtful authenticity, spurious) was listed first, while his (mythical) was last. By that point the argument no longer had anything to do with semantics (if it ever had) and was clearly yet another version of our marital discord and our mutually exclusive needs to own the authorized version of life as we lived it. As such, it was an exceptionally silly thing to argue about—or was it? It was perhaps not entirely a red herring—and we might have come to blows, or at least hurled dictionaries, and further damaged our children’s psyches and any hopes they have for emotional well-being in later life, had the phone not rung.

With immense relief to be rescued from her parents’ bathetic need to win arguments, my daughter answered the phone. She was silent—in such a way that we knew it wasn’t for her—and then she said, “It’s someone with an accent for you, Mom.” I had no idea who it was, but I was sure that whoever it was had heard her comment, and I wasn’t pleased. And since when were accents something we commented upon in this house? I took the phone and went as far from the kitchen as the twenty-five-foot cord would allow. It’s the longest curlicue cord you can buy at our hardware store, and it’s what I have installed on all our telephones.

Dr. von Kestner was on the phone, and he indeed has an accent, as he is from Hamburg, and I am immensely fond of his accent. He didn’t seem to have noticed Ariel’s comment. I was not displeased to hear from him, mostly because of the accent, which was the trait I sought out most consciously in doctors. Because of it he had become for me a cross between Goethe, my beloved grandmother, my Chilean psychiatrist with one leg, and my gynecologist, which he was. But just then he went so quickly into what I think of as his Reassuring Mode, that I became a bit anxious. Not overly anxious, because back then I still believed he could fix whatever might ail me, although there didn’t seem to be anything that did. But, as he was saying and as I finally had to listen to after stopping my admiration for his accent, there were rather large tumors attached to my ovaries and, if I understood correctly, if they were not removed posthaste, I would most likely die next time they decided to shift their weight and make themselves more comfortable.

No matter what the topic, this conversation would have been difficult on account of the susurration in the kitchen and the lingering animosity of apocryphal, but Dr. von Kestner is remarkably kind and so repeated very slowly for me a diagnosis that sounded mythical, perhaps even apocalyptic. In my uterus were two dermoid tumors known as teratomas. A teratoma is a teratoid tumor, teratoid meaning: Having the appearance or character of a monster or monstrous formation. It comes from terat-: the Greek for monster, or marvel. Of course at the time I didn’t know this etymology (which study I had frequently confused with entomology—the fascination with creepy-crawlies). All I heard was that there were two of these large growths, growing inside me; one was characterized as larger than grapefruit but smaller than a watermelon; it is my limited experience that doctors analogize the size of any mass to citrus fruit. At some point I must have said something vaguely alarming, because the chatter in the kitchen abruptly ceased and my family began to listen, mostly to my silence as I listened to the doctor. He explained that teratomas were congenital tumors due to inclusion in one fetus or another. What? That the cells had been there all along, that the cells from which these things grew were there when I was born, and before, when I free-floated inside my mother. What the doctor told me was that these tumors usually contain tissue from other parts of the body, tissue that might have been part of another fetus altogether: hair, teeth, bones, or skin. I was having a bit of trouble understanding the medical terminology; but no trouble at all visualizing the tumor—and it looked remarkably like my immortal soul besmirched with a lifetime of unconfessed sins.

Two days later I was dressed in a dingy blue johnny; as instructed, it was tied to open in the front—this was not much of a palliation to my modesty. And although it seemed to me I was perfectly capable of walking, I was wheeled into the operating theater; my glasses had been removed prior to this, so the bile green walls and metallic instruments diabolically blurred together to become a vision of a spring morning tinged with frigid dew, and potent with death. Even without my glasses, I could tell that the doctors and nurses were all masked. So I was wheeled through the door of the operating theater, and two voices from within called out: “Not yet. We’re still mopping up in here. The last one was difficult.” And I felt myself being wheeled backwards into the sickly green hallway. “Mopping up?” I asked to no one in particular—because without my glasses it was hard to make eye contact, or any contact whatever—“What are they mopping up?” Then Dr. von Kestner came along and we spoke and I felt completely safe. Before counting backwards for the anesthesiologist, I replied to someone that No, I wasn’t particularly scared. In retrospect, it is clear they must have thought me a nitwit.

The surgery didn’t take the scheduled one hour. It didn’t take two or three hours. For six hours Dr. von Kestner scraped away at my inner organs. (Later, his beloved Algerian wife told me—in French—that he had such remarkable stamina because he lifted weights every day after office hours, no matter how late it was. “He can do what is generally considered impossible, or not worth the trouble,” she told me. I envied them their mutual admiration.)

The next day—I think it was the next day—when they were kind enough to remove the tubes from my nose and throat, and give me more than an ice cube to suck on; and while I was still in an extremely pleasant morphine fog, and certainly that was the way I wanted to stay, given the alternative, Dr. von Kestner came, as ever a vision of Teutonic elegance in his dark blue suit, and sat on the end of my hospital bed to describe the operation. After hours of picking his way through the scar tissue from the botched appendectomy of April Fools, he had found and removed the offending teratomas.

“The size of melons,” he told me, ratcheting the size up the fruit-scale. We had left the citrus analogies behind.
“May I see them?” I asked.
Sorry, they’d already gone down to pathology.
Well, then, what did they look like?
“Just gloppy melon-sized masses filled with blonde hair,” he told me.
“Blonde hair?” I repeated, somewhat idiotically, because the morphine was remarkably good at altering perceptions as well as pain.

“Blonde hair,” he repeated. He said he’d never actually seen one with hair before; teeth were slightly more the norm as teratomal inclusions. At this point I became acutely aware of my own post-op disarray, my unwashed scraggly quasi-blonde hair, the wrinkled hospital johnny, the pool of blood in which I seemed to generally recline, and of course, the industrial-strength staples that bisected my abdomen. I did not feel at all lovely or even barely decent, and Dr. von Kestner was so well-groomed and charming that I felt ashamed for not having made a greater effort, or any effort at all. Instead of which I lay there, pained and sanguineous, waiting for the next morphine shot.

“Just how did it get there?” I asked, in a whisper, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer, and I hoped he would whisper in reply.
“Ah,” he said, “The cells were always there, from the time you were a fetus. They’re quite rare, and as to what causes them to start growing, we really don’t know.”
“Could I have...?”
“No, there’s nothing you could have done to make them grow. Or stop them, for that matter.”
“Well, where did the hair come from? Could that hair have been for a twin?”

“Oh not really, since it comes from undifferentiated cells, but it is the sort of anomaly that leads to headlines in the National Enquirer like...oh like, WOMAN SHOCKS DOCS—LOOKING FOR APPENDIX THEY FIND HER FORTY-YEAR-OLD BLONDE TWIN.”
“You’re kidding?” I said.
“Not entirely. I don’t really read those papers, but I see the headlines. They can make anything sound outrageous—but see, here you are, and it’s not so amazing.”
I had to think about that: Why not so amazing?

I said, “How about SIBLING RIVALRY IN THE WOMB LEADS TO MIDDLE-AGED OVARIAN HAIRBALL, or TWIN SISTERS IN THE WOMB—ONLY ONE IS BORN—THE OTHER DISCOVERED FORTY YEARS LATER WHEN HER TWIN’S APPENDIX BURSTS; SHE’S STILL A BLONDE WHILE HER OLDER TWIN GOES TO BEAUTY SALON ONCE A MONTH; or....”

We laughed, but of course it’s not particularly comfortable to laugh when there are needles sticking out of your arms and staples marching up your middle. So I made one of those proper smirks which made me think of headmistresses, and then it wasn’t very funny anymore.

Sharing the room with me was an older woman who spent her entire time on the telephone with her parish priest and a certain Sister Felicity; with the priest she tended to be unctuous and grateful for all his prayers, such as they were; with Sister Felicity she went into raptures of descriptions of her symptoms, and in particular she enumerated every bowel movement she’d had since entering the hospital three weeks earlier. And there were many. And every effort was counted as well. When my sister came to visit we had to cover our mouths with pillows we thought it was so funny. Sophia’s bloodstream was not flowing with morphine, and she also thought it was funny, which conciliated me somewhat. I was remembering the time my son Clovis had meningitis in Costa Rica, and of course we were terrified because we were up in the coffee-growing mountains quite far from what is commonly referred to as modern medicine, but at the same time we didn’t know quite enough to be all that terrified, and Clovis, in terrible pain and unnervingly bluish, kept track of every time he threw up, even when he could only swallow a quarter of a teaspoon of Jell-O, so that every time he dribbled out pathetic amounts of vomit, he would say weakly, That’s the seventh, or eighth time, just in one day, and he might add, Have you ever thrown up so much? and all not without a certain amount of pride, as he has always been a child who enjoys quantitative information, statistics, and especially, world records.

Daily, I was bleeding less and less, and the staples were beginning to itch. One day after my sheets were changed I found this list written upon the new sheets, obviously in indelible ink:
1. GORK
2. Bad Outcome
3. Gastronomy
4. Go Home with P-Barb
5. See Joanie
6. Sleaze Ball
7. No She can’t have cabfare to Yonkers

I spent a lot of time reading and memorizing that list, because I knew that sooner or later my sheets would be changed again, and it would be gone. The night nurse explained that Gork meant brain damage, that it was not really slang, but quite technical. Everyone in the hospital referred to a certain loss of brain functions that way. I was grateful for the definition.

Pathology, apparently, quite greedily uses up all one’s tumors so there is nothing left to bring home for the mantle or the vitrine. Thus, I went home empty-handed, unless one counts the staples—which I did, and there were sixteen.

Weeks later I fell into a deep depression. It was as if I’d moved into a house that had only sharp angles, and there wasn’t a single place to sit or lie down comfortably, and the only things to read were instruction manuals for appliances, and the light bulbs were never stronger than twenty-five watts. I was bereft, because I knew that there had been a twin, and I had lost her somewhere along the way. I was mourning her. I was also madly in love with my doctor, because I realized that, there on his feet for hours in the operating theater, he had surely seen my immortal soul—wasn’t it right there, somewhere amidst the organs and tubes and flotsam and teratomas?—he had seen it and he had not rejected me out of hand.

I had many fantasies about Dr. von Kestner, this purveyor of my soul; most of them involved his presence and assistance as I bravely gave birth to twins, twins who emerged already fluent in their private language.

In a book called Curious Tales of Twins, which Dr von Kestner would surely not have read because there is nothing at all scientific about it, and in fact it is somewhat akin to a hardcover National Enquirer, I found this under the heading “Twin Abnormalities”: “Still rarer than these circumstances, fortunately, are the occasions when a twin lies dormant within a body for many years, undiscovered and then has to be surgically removed. These growths are called teratomas and in ancient times were prized for divination. At least some authorities speculate that teratomas are twins; others consider them tumors derived from germ cells.” I didn’t like the use of the word “fortunately” in the first sentence; I took it rather personally, and so I didn’t show this book to anyone.

Then one day, while browsing through the eleventh edition of French’s Index of Differential Diagnosis, that delightful compendium of disease and abnormality, which boasts no less than 280 color illustrations, I found something else quite remarkable. For me, it was almost a gift, and almost a booby prize. “At the turn of this century a hair ball or trichobezoar was frequently encountered as an epigastric mass in hysterical girls who chewed and swallowed their hair, which then formed an exact mould of the stomach. Hairballs are only rarely encountered in these days and modern textbooks hardly mention them; however as fashions and hair styles change they may reappear on the clinical scene.” These two sentences out of thousands were graced with not one, but two color photographs, in which the hairball looked to me more like a meteor or volcanic rock. I wanted to send it to Sister Jerome at the Home for Retired Nuns, but she had been dead for decades; and I thought and thought about sending a copy to Dr. von Kestner, accompanied by some witty comment by myself, but in the end I never did.


Visit Christine Lehner at Image Artist of the Month for March 05

Image #15• Fall 1996