Connecticut. The trail is strewn with yellow leaves. The photo was probably taken the year our father died, around Thanksgiving.
I’m wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt with the tails untucked over blue jeans; George wears a green linen shirt and white chinos. He walks a few yards ahead of me, arms flung out, head lowered. He’s laughing – at something I’ve said or one of his own jokes. I look more serious, my eyes downcast, my mouth parted in speech, uttering – or having just uttered – the witticism at which my brother laughs, or a repartee to his witticism. Making each other laugh was something George and I did a lot. Even when not in the same room or even in the same part of the world, we could make each other laugh. We’d wake up laughing at something the other said in a dream. It happens to this day.
In the snapshot George has a few pounds on me. He always did. He was always bigger, more robust. From the beginning, through the birth canal, George took the lead, born two minutes earlier, my older brother.
United States Patent # 3,518,441.“OPTICAL GAUGE FOR MEASURING THE THICKNESS OF A CONTINUOUS WEB,” Filed January 24, 1968.
VI.
My Brother, My Prototype
Love is assuming the other’s burden of fate.
HERMANN BROCH
IN TIME YOUR VISITS WITH THE TEACHER AT HIS COTTAGE became routine. From them you would arrive home to find your brother in the bedroom you shared, reading a book or listening to his latest Columbia Records Club purchase – to Phil Ochs, the Beach Boys, Schubert.
George wouldn’t ask where you’d been. He knew. And you wouldn’t say, since it would only have inflamed his jealousy. And you knew that your brother was jealous. You were glad of it. It pleased you to have something your twin didn’t have, something you weren’t forced to share.
One problem with being a twin: you had to share everything. Your birthday, your bedroom, your books, your toys, your looks, your friends, the love and affection of your parents (who treated you, annoyingly, as equals). While others were free to shape their own distinct destinies, as a twin yours was cut out for you in the shape of a sibling.
On the windowsill in her corner room Nonnie kept a miniature version of the Capitoline Wolf, the bronze Etruscan sculpture of a she-wolf suckling the infant twins Romulus and Remus, mythological founders of Rome. With you or your brother in her room she’d point to them one at a time and say, Questo e Giorgio, e quello li Pierino.
* * *
YOUR MOTHER HADN’T EXPECTED TWINS. SHE ONLY found out after you were born. When the gynecologist put his stethoscope to your mother’s chest, he heard what he assumed was one heartbeat, but was really two hearts beating in unison.
Having no names prepared for two children, while our mother recovered from the anesthesia they’d given her for the cesarean section the hospital authorities named you Selgin Boys A and B. You were Boy B.
And though no tests were ever performed to determine zygosity, your mother always insisted that you weren’t identical, that your bodies were formed from separately fertilized eggs. Still you shared the same rare blood type (A-), and until you were well into your teens most people couldn’t tell you apart.
You also fought. Some twins bond, meeting life’s challenges in joyful tandem, like the tennis playing twins in the old Doublemint chewing gum commercials. Not you and George. You both hated being lumped together, bound in a perpetual three-legged race with this other person who happened to share your looks and last name. As far as both of you were concerned, being a twin was no bounty. On the contrary, it was a handicap tantamount to being born with a clubfoot.
At times your rivalry felt ageless. It wouldn’t have surprised you to learn that you and your twin brother had kicked, punched, and insulted each other in the womb. Your entry into the oxygenated world only fanned the flames of antipathy, with taunts turning to fists and projectiles and ending, more often than not, in a visit to the emergency room or Dr. Randolph’s office for stitches or butterfly enclosures.
As you grew the fights only got worse, with frequent forays into the public sphere. When you were twelve, at a backyard party at Karen Finklestein’s boxy little house at the end of a cul-de-sac, as the other guests formed a circle and egged you on, you and your brother wrestled each other down a weedy embankment into a shadowy stand of pine trees. When it was over – as the others looked on, laughing – you and your twin emerged basted in blood, tears, and snot, coated with pine needles.
This inspired a recurrent nightmare. In it you found yourself looking up at a circle of faces laughing, pointing, and jeering at you as you lay on the ground, having presumably fought a pitched battle with your twin, only in the dream your twin is nowhere to be seen, the inescapable conclusion being that you’ve just beaten the crap out of yourself. It was like beating up – or being beaten up by – your own reflection.
GEORGE DID EVERYTHING first. He was the first to collect minerals and postage stamps, the first to read books, the first to embrace what became your favorite TV shows, The Wild, Wild West, Diver Dan, Flipper, Sea Hunt, The Aquanauts, any television show featuring water or scuba divers.
The Aquanauts was George’s favorite. Unlike Rick Nelson in Sea Hunt, who used an old-style, double-hosed regulator, the star of The Aquanauts used a modern, single-hose job. From when he was six, your twin dreamed of being one of Jacques Cousteau’s divers on the Calypso. While watching The Aquanauts he’d wear a pair of pretend scuba tanks your mother made from twin empty aerosol cans. With the spray cans attached to his back with a harness George would scuba dive on the living room floor.
He was the first to wear glasses, a novelty forced upon him in second grade by his astigmatism. The glasses gave him a bookish appearance that, though it may not have determined his scholarly future, foretold it. Because of them, the glare of camera bulbs made him squint in photographs, giving him a put-upon aspect that seeped into the rest of his personality and made him the perfect target for your father’s roguishness.
Like all families, occasionally the Selgins dined out. Among your favorite restaurants was the Ho Yuen, the Chinese restaurant in nearby Danbury with a pagoda-style roof and a flashing neon sign of ersatz Chinese letters over its otherwise humble brick facade. The waiters wore white shirts with thin black bowties and showed no emotion while committing orders to memory. Everything on the menu was brown, gooey, and salty. Your father ordered pork fried rice. Your mother liked the fatty sweet spareribs. You favored egg foo young.
George alone was adventurous. He would put on his double-hosed regulator, scuba dive to the deepest, darkest corner of the menu, and point to some item as unpronounceable as it was enigmatic.
What is this? he’d ask your father.
Ah, yes, your father responded enthusiastically. Get that! By all means!
But what is it? George insisted on knowing.
Oh, it’s much too complicated to explain, your father answered. Ah, but it’s very, very good. I promise you!
Your brother always fell for it. The selected dish would arrive, murky and mysterious in reality as in name. Under your father’s solicitous gaze, George would pick up his chopsticks (he alone dared to use them) and eat – tentatively at first, then more enthusiastically, nodding and making sounds of approval,
