My twin sister Elise and I were born eleven minutes apart, and for thirty-four years those eleven minutes had been, in our mother’s accounting, the most significant thing about us.
Elise came first.
I know this because it was mentioned at birthday dinners, holidays, graduations, and on at least three occasions during ordinary Tuesday evenings when the subject had not naturally arisen. It was mentioned with the specific warmth of a detail that has been given ceremonial status, the way certain families elevate a particular story until it becomes the family’s official version of itself.
Elise came first, and she was the easier baby, and she walked at ten months, and she had always known what she wanted.
I came eleven minutes later, and the story of my arrival was softer and less defined, because the story of my arrival was not the story anyone was most interested in telling.
None of this destroyed me. I want to be clear about that, because the story I am about to tell can read like the story of a damaged person seeking justice, and it is not that. I was not damaged. I was a woman who had grown up in a specific arrangement and had, somewhere in my mid-thirties, begun to understand the arrangement clearly enough to name it and then to decide what to do about the naming.
The arrangement was that Elise was the remarkable one.
She had been remarkable at school and remarkable at sports and remarkable in the specific social way that some people are, the way that generates warmth in rooms and makes strangers feel immediately comfortable and produces the impression of effortless competence that is, in fact, the product of genuine competence combined with a particular personality type.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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