Her: A Memoir by Christa Parravani

She patted my cheek and pulled me toward the living room. We walked in together, coy, our hands in our pockets.
    I sat down next to Cara’s boyfriend and waited. A quiz show began at the top of the hour. We all shouted answers. Her boyfriend yawned and stretched, placing his arm over my shoulder. Cara looked at me, hot with jealousy. “I’m so sorry,” I mouthed to her, hoping her boyfriend could spot a decoy.
    But then my boyfriend put his hand on Cara’s leg, above the knee. She picked it up and moved it to the inside of her thigh. I glared at her and she smirked back at me. I tipped my head against Cara’s boyfriend’s forehead and kissed him with my tongue. I hoped Mom wouldn’t catch us.
    Cara stood up and grabbed my hand, pulled me up off the sofa, and twisted my fingers back against my wrist until I cried out in pain. Our boyfriends looked worried. “You’re dumped,” she said to her boyfriend, “for kissing my sister.” Cara undid her hair from the style I’d made for her and shook her long locks over her shoulders, dramatically exposing her true identity.
    Our boyfriends sat stunned. The blinking blue screen of the television flickered on their faces.
    “Whatever,” one of our boyfriends said to the other. He got up to leave. “They’re the same chick anyway.”
    *   *   *
    Identical twins are not exactly alike. They begin in the womb, at conception, with a single egg and sperm. Twins are made after the egg is fertilized and splits. Similarity is a result of how long the egg takes to divide. The longer it takes for the egg to split, the more alike a set of twins will look. We must have split early. My feet and nose were larger than Cara’s. As adults she usually outweighed me by fifteen pounds. Identical twins share the same DNA but do not have identical DNA. The egg splits into two halves to form identical twins, but the DNA does not divide equally between the two cells. We were like an apple sliced in half: two halves of the same fruit, one with more seeds, one with fewer.
    We constantly teased each other for our differences. She called me “Big Foot” and “Horn Nose.” I called her “Piggy.”
    Cara bought me a present the summer before I was married: two pairs of shoes. Converse All Stars: one pair black, one pair red. She’d picked them up for me because they were priced to move, at a 60 percent discount. Cara, like all the women in our family, couldn’t pass up a sale. She bought the shoes in a women’s size 9; I wore a size 8. Cara wore a size 7. She’d razzed me throughout our childhood about my “Bozo” feet, my “flippers.” In her loving gift, she revealed her opinion of my feet—they were huge. My feet were the one feature I possessed that made me less dainty than she. Cara cherished them. She was more than happy to dress my boat feet; the shoes were her thank-you for my being imperfect.
    Cara couldn’t resist the shoes. She stole the black pair from my closet even though they were two sizes too large. She was raped in those shoes, and in a sweater of mine she stole; the shoes were lost in the forest, sliding off her feet as she was dragged. The police kept them as evidence. She should have laced them tighter.
    As children, I picked on Cara for her weight even though we were both undersized for our age. I remember sliding next to her on the floor one night when we were ten years old, preparing to watch a movie after dinner. Mom had spread out a blanket for us; she’d set out two bowls of ice cream: one for each of us. We lay down hip to hip, our small bodies too close; I wanted more room. I thought of the low-fat bacon commercial that played constantly on TV, and repeated the slogan. “Slide over, bacon. Make room for something leaner.” I pinched at the tiniest roll of fat on Cara’s upper arm. She looked at me and blinked sadly, moving over slowly, like a cow resigned to a prod. She scooched several inches to the right and stayed there. Years of dieting spoke