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Christian Century, August 26, 1998 by Mary M. Brown

I am reading an article on twins, scientific enough to make a fiction addict feel almost

healed, smug, full of the kind of knowledge others acknowledge, high on the hope

of complete recovery. It is a long article that I cannot finish in one sitting,

replete with words and phrases I must read slowly, with objective deliberation: monozygotic,

X-chromozome inactivation, and doppelganger. All the better. Between reads I discuss

what I know now with my husband, who I discover understands shamefully little about the relative

importance of nature and nurture, who has no notion that single or double placentation

might affect levels of resemblance, not a clue about the puzzling high rate of left-handedness

among twins. I think I am really all right until I get to page 52 where the author

veers off into something he says is `much too common to be considered phenomenal,'

its only sign a streak or two of blood on a pregnant woman's underpants (Just get

off your feet for a few days and I'm sure you'll be all right): the vanishing twin

syndrome. Early on and with one baby still growing inside, hardly anyone notices.

Wallah!: twin is gone. A mystery. History.

A sister gone, a daughter gone, a brother or a son, no one knows where: just gone--

vamoosed. Like in some David Copperfield trick or like she never was or like in some

fiction maybe, a figure in some story that never made it to publication, never crawled

outside the weak womb of an imagination into the larger world. A small revision,

the deletion of a minor, undeveloped character, its only sign a streak or two

of ink on an early draft. My husband eagerly asks what more I have learned and sighs again

when I put the magazine down and recite for him a simple truth of subtraction--

Two minus one equals one--then lay my one head on my two arms (Just count them]) and grieve

for what (the precious what) we singletons have lost.