I, FORMER TRIPLET

I was six years old, in first grade, when I met the identical twins in my classroom.  They were a wonder to behold — two towheaded, milky-skinned, freckled-nosed little princesses who were always dressed in fantastic dresses, swirl skirts and pantsuits their mother made.  They were luminous, and I was in awe of them.

Their differences were plain to me — Shakti, the dominant twin, was confident and outgoing but not particularly funny.  Rachel, the beta twin, was painfully introverted but quietly hilarious.  All three of us hated a boy named Brigham who tormented me constantly, and told me that he was a special police agent and had a bomb that could blow up “half the world.”  I believed him and was genuinely terrified.  Adults laughed and didn’t believe me when I warned them about Brigham’s bloody plans. One day, apropos of nothing, when we were doing a construction paper project, Rachel looked dead at Brigham and said,

“Brig- HAM.  You’re HAM. So I could eat you.  But I won’t. Because you’re dumb.” 

When I was six years old, this was like apex Richard Pryor material to me.  It was a sick burn.  A black kid named Dee said “Oooh!  That’s COLD,” and everyone screamed laughing.  I was achingly jealous of Rachel’s advanced wit, which put even the apocalyptic tyrant Brigham in his place. 

The twins and I arranged for them to come home with me to the houseboat and play one day after school.  My mother described our walking up the gangplank as her first mistaking one twin for me, then the next twin. 

“It wasn’t so much that you looked like you could be triplets,” my mother said much later. “It’s that you looked so much alike, nobody would believe that you weren’t triplets.”  

Suddenly there were three of us, and it was magical and weird.  (I apologize for not providing photographic proof, but this was the seventies and all the pictures are in at my mom’s house, in some large vinyl album with gold script on it.) 

The twins’ mother was a very buxom British woman named Paula.  She and my mother immediately took a liking to each other. Their father was a prosperous psychiatrist, and they all lived in a massive Sausalito Victorian mansion called Three Gates.   Within a few weeks of knowing each other, Pauline and my mother started defiantly wearing noticeably shorter skirts, and laughing together in a way which made me nervous.  Within a few months, Paula filed for divorce.

  I spent all of my time with the twins in the various homes Paula would rent. In retrospect, I practically lived with them, and marveled that my mother seemed only too happy to surrender me entirely to be the third wheel in Shakti and Rachel’s lives.  I was never able to successfully penetrate their twin bubble, but when the three of us were out together, we were treated with amazement from the general public— “Triplets!  Wow!”   It was quite a reaction. We were always getting free ice cream, or snuck into the front of the line to see Santa Claus, or given front row seats to see the Wiz, or otherwise being curiously ogled.  Our two mothers began to scheme about how to maximize our triplet potential. 

First they put us in a local stage production of “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” where the three of us, playing British schoolboys, were featured for an entire song and dance.  (We ended up having to sing “Brookfield is Brookfield” every Christmas together for years, in matching red velvet nightgowns that Paula had made for us.)  

Then our mothers decided that we needed to be on television, and that they were going to do something about it…themselves. 

So they started to write us a TV special.   Since nobody in the immediate family knew how to operate a TV camera, the show was shot entirely in still photography by my Dad.  The premise of the show, which was called “The Secret of the Old Ferry,” was that two identical twins befriend a houseboat girl named Julie (me) and then go on some kind of absurd caper that I can’t remember.  It ended when a creepy old man we thought was evil suddenly played a giant calliope.  This makes us suddenly love him.  (My mother, being a pianist, imagined that a mighty Wurlitzer would entrance us kids to the point of disregarding our personal revulsion.  We were unclear about this logic.) 

The show ran one night on our local PBS station, and was really terrible, so our moms decided to really pull out all the stops, and shoot ANOTHER all photographic-still drama featuring the three of us - a sequel, entitled “Secret of the Nutcracker.” They were poised to really push us forward with this holiday ordeal. 

Our mothers were completely unhinged behind the creative process. 

“What do you think is really, really scary?”  My mother asked me, during the writing of the script. 

“Eyeballs,” I said immediately.  

There is a moment in “Secret of the Nutcracker” when, at the behest of a clearly flamboyantly gay puppet animal (voiced by my mother in a nasal, mincing lisp), we triplets were forced to cross a bridge over a Sea of Eyeballs.   The photographs of this were achieved when Paula did some kind of extreme, lumpy Jell-o project with lurid blue food coloring and filled it with eyeball-decorated superballs.

The triplet-hood didn’t last forever.  Around the third year of our association, the twins began to get shorter and rounder, and we stopped looking alike. 

The twins and I drifted apart, but my mother and Paula remained friends for most of their lives. 

Once when I was in my twenties, Paula and the twins came to see me in a play I had written.  Afterward we were all walking together, and Paula suddenly turned to me and said, “You know, you really should never ever act again.  You’re a terrible actress.”  

I was quite deeply wounded.  My mother was furious and stopped talking to Paula for around a year. 

“She’s jealous,” my mother assured me, but I thought Paula probably really meant it.  

I should have told her I was a better actress than she was a prop master, and kicked her right in the twiffer, but I didn’t.  

But being a triplet, for however short a time, is something I highly recommend, should the experience ever present itself to you.  The perks are tremendous. 

Artwork: “Stevie Tattoo” — Procreate drawing by Cintra Wilson