One and the Same by Abigail Pogrebin Page B

getting tackled out of bounds and he wasn’t even close to me, but he comes over and just elbows me like this.” He shows me. “I’m like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ He says, ‘I’m just trying to make it look good.’” He especially loves one particular photograph of Ronde tackling him near the goal line in 2006, because he’s enveloping Tiki just as he must have in utero.
    â€œSomeone told me this great quote yesterday,” says Tiki. “‘Life isa crack of brightness between two eternities of darkness.’ My first eternity of darkness with my brother was me on top of him—because he came out first. And when we were babies, my mom would put us on opposite ends of the bed and before you know it, we were lying on top of each other like we were in the womb. And here we are again in this photograph.”
    I wonder where the wives fit into this duet. Tiki’s striking wife, Ginny, a former publicist who comes from Korean and Vietnamese lineage, has known the Barber twins since college, when she started dating Tiki. (They married in 1999.) Ronde’s equally attractive wife, Claudia, who now works with Diabetic Charitable Services, is of Filipino descent and married Ronde in 2001. All three Barbers I spoke to tiptoe around the question of how the wives handle the twinship. “Let me answer it this way,” says Geraldine. “Do they understand it? I’d say, ‘Not totally.’ Do they respect it? Definitely.”
    â€œWhen we’re all together, it’s a great foursome,” Ronde says. “When we’re not, it is what it is. …” He smiles, clearly not wanting to expand further, then takes a different tack. “You know what it is? And they’ll never admit this: They’re both control addicts; they want control. And neither one of them can have it, especially when Tiki and I are the ones who are really in control, if that makes any sense. It’s not intentional; they have the
appearance
of control and they do a lot of things for us. But at the end of the day, we all know who’s making the decisions. It will come down to what Tiki and I want to do, because that’s the Relationship. So
you
figure out the psychodynamics of that. … When you’re married to a twin, essentially, whether you like it or not, you’re married to the other one, too. Tiki’s as much involved in my life now as he was back when we were in college.”
    Does he think that bothers their spouses? “Of course. Absolutely. And they’ll never talk about it; they probably don’t even necessarily recognize it, but, yeah, that’s what it is.”
    Tiki echoes him: “I think our bond is the strongest it’s ever been and the strongest bond that there possibly is. Greater than marriage. I’m closer to Ronde, without a doubt. And that will never change.”
    So many married twins told me the same thing. And it always moved me to hear it, but it’s not how Robin and I feel. Our husbands know us better. They get more of us now—not just in terms of time spent but in what we tell them and whose counsel we seek. When Ronde told me their spouses don’t always embrace their closeness, I thought of my brother-in-law, Edward. He’s accustomed to my relationship with Robin, but I wouldn’t say he facilitates it. He and I have a warm friendship, but it’s been clear over the years that he doesn’t believe that a twin should get special treatment. When Robin first got pregnant, for example, Ed didn’t think she should tell me the news ahead of his family or the rest of ours. She told me anyway, but it was hard to learn she’d had to overrule him to follow her impulse. It seemed self-evident to me that she would rush to share something so momentous. To thwart that reflex was to obstruct the normal blood flow of our relationship.
    Days later, I asked Ed to meet for coffee