Late in my senior year of high school, my sister Abbie posted a photo album to
Facebook labeled “Family.” The cover photo was a family portrait taken that
fall, which seemed to indicate that the album would only contain those proofs,
all of which I had pre-approved for public viewing. Nervous anyway, I clicked
through the images to make sure there was nothing humiliating lurking in their midst.
To my relief, while there were other events included in the album, none were
offensive. The last few were from a road trip my sister and I took to
California with my best friend, Sahara. “I love that I am in an album of yours
labeled ‘Family’!” Sahara commented on a shot of the three of us. We could pass
for sisters in our identical poses, pasty skin, and dark hair, but I know
better and can spot our myriad tiny differences. The last picture is just Abbie
and me, hugging on the beach, our cheeks pressed together, a bonfire in the
background, our hair windswept and curled with salt water. With the camera so
close, all the differences in our faces are clear to me—my green eyes against
her brown ones, the roundness of her nose and cheeks in comparison to my
pointiness, her thick eyebrows and long hair dwarfing the absence of my
eyebrows and my fluffy Shirley Temple curls. Our smiles are not even the same
shape, yet, right there, in the comments, a friend of Abbie’s has posted “I can
never tell you two apart…!”
I curbed my impulse to
reply, and instead looked forward eagerly to the end of the summer when I would
be in New York, a place Abbie had never even visited, and she would still be
home, and, finally, no one would be mixing us up. I would be Laura and she
would be Abbie, and there would be no name tags or clarifications or
confusions, just miles and miles of individuality.
It wasn’t until a brisk
Sunday morning in October that I began to suspect that it was perhaps not my
sister that was the problem in these misidentification scenarios. Standing in
the entry way of my small New York City church, a well-meaning, friendly woman
greeted me: “Good morning, Abigail!” I smiled and returned the sentiment,
giving her my usual one-or-two mix-up grace period. So used to this type of
encounter, it slipped my mind that she had no reason to call me Abigail. I got
called by Abbie’s name all the time, even by my own parents; it’s a hazard of
sharing genetic material with someone only nineteen months younger than you. What’s
more, sixteen years of this particular event had taught me that correcting the
mistake is never a graceful situation.
“Morning, Abigail, good
to see you again!” Another parishioner commented as he walked by us. Then it
hit me: I was in New York City, a place
my sister had never been. These people didn’t even know I had a sister, let
alone a sister named Abigail whose bone structure bore an uncanny resemblance
to mine.
“Um, my name is Laura,
actually.”
“Oh! Of course! I’m so
sorry dear! It’s just, you look just like— Tom, doesn’t she look just like
Abbie?”
He nodded. “Just like
her, you could be sisters.”
The statistical probability
of me bearing a resemblance to multiple women in my age demographic with the
name Abigail is probably very high, but the probability of me crossing paths
with two of them in such a short span of time seemed a little impossible. Was I
experiencing a cosmic improbability? Or was there something else? Gradually, it
dawned on me that this was not the first time something like this had happened,
nor would it be the last. I don’t just look like Abbie; I look like everybody.
Shopping with Sahara,
more often than not sales girls would assume we were sisters. “It’s so sweet
the way you two get along!” they would croon, or “I wish my sister were so much
fun to hang out with! Ya’ll are sweet.” Dinner parties with my parents’ friends
posed an interesting phenomenon. My father’s friends would see me and proclaim
“You look just like your father!” while my mother’s declared I more closely
matched her, but then when the three of us stood together, I was suddenly a
perfect blend of both, their physical average. It wasn’t just family members
and close friends, however. My ballet teacher’s husband used to tease me,
calling me Margaret because I looked “just like that kid from Denis the
Menace,” and one of my supervisors at work calls me Emily for reasons I still
do not fully understand. I had always assumed that when my parents addressed me
as “Ab-Laura” it was a moment of confusion, a mistake, the same way it was when
they addressed Abbie as “Laur-Abbie,” but now another idea was forming. Perhaps
I was a chameleon, showing the face of my surroundings instead of my own.
The start of my second
semester of college began to reaffirm this theory. Approaching my first class confidently
in a cute new sweater, I was faced with a mirror image. Riley matched me
completely, from the sweaters on our bodies to the black boots on our feet. We
had met early in the previous semester through a series of bizarre coincidences
and mutual friendships, and had quickly become inseparable. Since then, we had developed
a tendency to accidentally buy the same tops, have simultaneous ear infections,
and perform a plethora of mild practical jokes.
Standing in that
hallway, she got this evil glint in her eye when she saw my sweater, a grin
spreading on her face. Whipping her bangs out of her eyes so that her hair now
matched mine, she beckoned me into the classroom. We sat side by side, our
hands holding identical pens listlessly over identical notebooks, right leg
crossed over left, heads cocked slightly to one side. When our professor
arrived he tried not to look at us, but we were drawing attention. The first
thing we were asked to do was introduce ourselves, naming our majors and an
interesting fact about ourselves. Riley glanced at me, her eyes sparkling
again. I nodded as briefly as I could, feeling a laugh bubbling up already.
“My name is Laura, I’m
an English major.”
“I’m Riley, a BFA
Acting major.”
“We didn’t plan this.”
“But this isn’t the
only thing about us that matches.” We volleyed matching facts rapidly; we had
plenty to choose from. Eyebrows began to rise around us warily, and mouths
began to sag open anxiously.
“We both grew up in
Utah, about 45 minutes apart.”
“But we’re not Mormon.”
“Then we both moved
away, but we miss Café Rio.”
“Our moms grew up in
North Carolina, about 45 minutes apart.”
“Her brother used to be
in the same fencing league as my childhood best friend.” I concluded the list,
and we resumed our initial posture, waiting patiently for the next girl to
introduce herself.
By this point, the
class had dissolved into uncomfortable giggles, but our instructor was still
staring, as though trying to determine whether or not we were playing some
elaborate joke. Riley and I were solid, not a single giggle escaping. After
all, we hadn’t told a single lie; unlikely as it sounded, our speech was built
entirely upon reality.
“So, did you know each
other before you got here? There are an awful lot of similarities!” The
professor gestured between us with his pen, clearly confused.
“Oh,
no,” we answered together. “We’re just freaky life twins.”
It
took that poor man about a week and a half longer than it should have to figure
out which one of us was Riley and which one was Laura. Meeting Riley in the
first place was another cosmic improbability, but cosmic improbabilities are a
specialty of mine. I had managed to meet on my second night of college a person
who shared not only my history, but also my sense of humor, my low tolerance
for social interaction, an insatiable reading habit, and my guilty love of
child-exploiting reality TV like Dance Moms. We
even owned the same two American Girl dolls; the similarities are endless if
you know how to look for them. The more time Riley and I spent together, the
more we began to realize that we were probably the same person from different
dimensions, and our worlds were colliding which in all likelihood meant
something absolutely terrible was going to happen. Or perhaps we were just
separated at birth.
That was when I
realized that perhaps it wasn’t my face that was confusing people, but
something about my behavior. There had been camp counselors who didn’t believe
Abbie and I could be related, and strangers who were convinced we were twins. Sahara
and I have the same color hair and we’re both skinny and pale, and our
interests collide in many of the same ways my interests collide with Riley’s
(Sahara is in fact the girl who fenced with Riley’s brother). The more sameness
there is, the more sameness people see. From birth we are trained to find
things that match, and then weed out the things that don’t. By age five we’re
all tiny little sorting machines which can tell red from blue and circles from
squares, and we group them according to their similarities not their
differences. The blue squares would never be sorted into the same pile as the
red circles—there’s nothing there that matches. When I’m with my sister, people
aren’t looking at our eyebrows; when I am shopping with Sahara they aren’t
looking at our height difference or the radical variances in ear shape. Riley
and I didn’t become friends because she rides horses and I do ballet. We are
drawn to similarity like magnets, and when we find it we stick to it. It is not
so much that I am a chameleon; it is more that all of my colors are on display
at once and people see the ones they recognize.
Last
weekend Riley and I went to the Strand Bookstore, then bought giant chocolate
chip cookies from one of those dessert trucks that drive around Union Square.
As we were standing on the subway platform to go home, chocolate smeared all
over our teeth, a couple of skeezy looking guys looked us up and down
appreciatively.
“You
sisters?” One of them lurched a little nearer to us.
“No!
What the hell?!” Riley turned to me with the question written all over her face.
“Why does everyone always think that?”
The
train pulled up and I laughed. “It’s because I’m everybody’s sister.” She
raised an eyebrow, secure in her individuality. “I’ll explain on the way home.”
