Sisters First

JENNA

From the very beginning, before we could walk, before we could talk, Barbara and I were a pair. It wasn't just our matching pajamas and our tiny baby jeans with the same pointy green cactus stitched across each back pocket. It was that we were an unmatched set and ripe for easy comparisons: This one is the brunette and that's the blonde. She's smaller; she's bigger. She has the bright blue eyes; hers are smaller and brown. After a few years, the typecasting became a kind of shorthand: You're the loud one, right? You must be the troublemaker. Your sister's quiet. She must be an introvert.

Many of these observations were made by complete strangers. The obvious ones are accurate; my sister does have catlike turquoise eyes, while mine are beadier and brown. But were other stereotypes true or did we simply absorb them? I wonder if I become louder and more gregarious because so many people thought I was, even though I love quiet time alone. Did Barbara become more guarded and reserved because she heard others say it so often, even though she has her own strong opinions?

To much of the world, we were never really individuals; our true middle name might as well have been "and." Jenna and Barbara, Barbara and Jenna. When we walk into a restaurant or any public space together, we still invariably hear, "Oh, look, it's the Bush twins," sometimes followed by an eye roll, and then the place will fall uncomfortably quiet. Oh, those wild Bush twins.

But when we are apart for too long, I miss my twin terribly. Our first separation was the summer after first grade when we went to Camp Longhorn, the camp my father had loved as a boy.

Barbara and I attended different branches of the camp—"sister camps" was what they were called, ironically—across the lake from each other. For three weeks, we were apart. The initial summer, I was homesick. My first letter home was a piece of performance art, stating how many friends I had and how much I was enjoying camp. In the second, the mask came off. As only a rising second grader can, I wrote how the earlier letter had been a lie and that I had no friends at all and missed my family not just some but dreadfully. (Yes, I used words like "dreadfully" back then. No one has ever accused me of being subtle!)

During free time I would venture over to the cement clearing where we would have our campfires. On this ash-darkened stage, I put on a one-woman show. I didn't have an audience exactly, but in the quiet evening, my voice was within earshot. The other campers found the whole thing odd. So much so that, once, they locked me out of my cabin when I was naked. Humiliated because the boys' waterslide was nearby, I hid as best I could behind a screen door, covering my body with my chubby hands, trying to laugh it off.

The only way that I could comfort my homesick heart was to program my yellow Walkman to an AM radio station that broadcast the Texas Rangers' baseball games. Deep into the night, while everyone around me slept in their bunks, I put on my earphones and listened to the sounds of the game, the counts of balls and strikes and the solid crack of the bat connecting on a hit. I imagined my mom and my dad and my sister beside me, sitting in our usual seats. I drifted off to sleep surrounded by the people I loved.

But what I remember most from that summer is the feeling of such relief, of such pure happiness, when Barbara and I were reunited. It was a feeling of once again being made whole. For a few weeks after camp, even though we had separate rooms, we slept snuggled next to each other, lulled by the other's breathing. On those nights, Barbara's was the last voice I heard as I nodded off to sleep, and she was the first person I spoke to when my eyes opened.

We remain the finishers of each other's sentences, the conveyors of each other's dreams and desires. Again and again in all the years since, we have been the first person for each other, the one who so often knew what was in the other's heart without a word.

BARBARA

When you're born a fraternal twin, you are automatically compared, as if each twin must be the inverse of the other, a yin and a yang always slightly at odds. The shy twin versus the loud twin; the smart twin versus the funny twin; the color-inside-the-lines twin versus the creative twin. Yet I always felt that Jenna and I could simultaneously embody all these characteristics—both be smart and creative and funny, in ways that were distinct and our own.

Jenna was a hilariously creative kid who loved to perform in front of others. As second graders, she, Joanna Gikas (our best friend who lived across the street in Washington, DC), and I would create and perform endless skits, often based on movies we'd seen, for an audience of two or three: my mom and my dad and my dad's enormous 1980s video camera, which he balanced on his shoulder like a TV news cameraman on location for a live feed.

Jenna was our lead, my camera-fearing self her supporting actress. Jenna would gamely dress up in whatever costume was required—from Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid to sing "Under the Sea" to a clown for "Put on a Happy Face."

For her favorite anthem, "Castle on a Cloud" from Les Misérables, she carried around an old broomstick and sang every sad refrain as the lonely orphan girl. When we returned to Dallas, my mom chauffeured us around in the back of her baby blue, wood-paneled minivan so that Jenna could audition for real—Les Miz, The Phantom of the Opera, Fiddler on the Roof, and a host of other local theater plays. I never understood why she didn't get a callback. In my mind, Jenna was already an actress.

But in the years since, we've come to embrace that we carry within us the same traits. While Jenna's creative in a performing, audience-focused way, my creative pull finds its outlet in a quieter, introspective way. In high school and college, I studied architecture and design, and I painted for years, bold portraits, even one of Jenna. I dreamed of becoming Texas's version of Frida Kahlo.

Perhaps this inborn duality made it easier for us to navigate the public typecasting of our parents—the assumption that our dad is loud and unthoughtful and our mom quiet and bookish. Both can be true—my dad is loud and hilarious. He loves people, loves to make them laugh, and gets great joy out of putting them at ease. My mom certainly loves reading; she got her master's in library science in the 1970s. But those stereotypes capture only a tiny sliver of who they really are. My father is just as much the bookish one, a voracious reader who revels in being married to an ex-librarian. While he was in the White House, Dad and his strategist Karl Rove had an annual reading contest. The first year, Karl won, but the race was close: his 110 books read to my dad's 95. These days, Dad outreads us all.

Beneath her flats and cardigans, my mom is in fact our closet hippie and Rastafarian. When she was in her fifties and the first lady of Texas, she and I went on a mother-daughter excursion to find a Wailers show—the remnants of Bob Marley's famous reggae band—in downtown Austin. I overheard a kid in my tenth-grade art class mention that the Wailers were performing a secret concert; I excitedly told my mom the second I got home. After dinner, my mom, with her sensible hairstyle and CoverGirl lipstick, and I set out to track them down. What must the roadies have thought of a mother-daughter duo waiting in the otherwise silent music club hours before the concert while they set up speakers and tested the mics? We didn't make it to the start of the show—they were late starting and my mom had her limits on school nights—but we got close enough to read the set list taped to the stage, hinting at what we would miss.

Saturday mornings, Jenna and I would dig through Mom's record collection, playing Van Morrison, The Band, or the soundtrack from Jesus Christ Superstar, to which Jenna would happily perform. As a kid, I worried that my mom would leave my dad to run off with Van Morrison, because she loved his music that much.

Paul Simon's classic album Graceland was released when Jenna and I were in first grade, and we tagged along with my mom and her friends for our first concert. Beforehand, I spent hours picking out the most stylish item in my closet, a long red shirt emblazoned with a huge yellow pencil. Jenna and I stood on wobbly tiptoes on our concert seats when the entire crowd got up to dance as Paul sang along with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. My mom was in her element: singing, snapping her fingers, and step-touching side to side.

My mom is good at remembering names, while my dad is better at remembering people's nicknames, most of which he has given them. He has a nickname for almost everyone—and once christened, it's impossible to escape whatever he has dubbed you. Mine is "Bo-jeesh" (said, or often yelled, at a high volume exactly as it is spelled, an emphatic pause between the two syllables). How exactly this consonant-heavy nickname came to be, I'm unsure. I have no memory of ever entering his house or a room where he is without hearing a loud "Bo-jeesh" belted out, announcing my arrival. His loving proclamation is always met with my stifled laughter and sometimes my humiliation, especially when I was young and bringing friends home, or older and accompanied by a significant other for the first time. But these nicknames are his secret language, his way of letting us know we are uniquely special to him, an "I love you" in one-word form.

Jenna and I have one of our own. Our name for each other is "Sissy." One name, two sisters, our shorthand whether we are separated by a room or by an ocean. A word to which we both instinctively answer and turn. Because, after everything, we are sisters first.