That’s My Line

by Barbara Krasner

The house lights dimmed at Camp Stanley’s rec center. I stood in the wings, snapping my suspenders, making sure I had my corn pipe ready. Though I had tried out for the role of Mammy Yokum in the summer camp’s production of Li’l Abner, I accepted the role of Pappy. Even I had to concede that my Floridian bunkmate, Gene, with her natural southern accent and big personality, was a better fit as Abner’s folksy yet bare-knuckled domineering Mammy. I didn’t think about my identical twin sister. She’d been an unhappy camper, miserable all summer, because camp administrators placed her in a lower division even though she’s four minutes older than I.

I had one line and I practiced it silently, wagging my finger in the air to make myself visible next to Gene. With perfect timing, I said to the camper playing Senator Phogbound, “Yeh, git to the point!” The audience of this New York weight-reduction camp howled with laughter. Basking in the attention on stage, I imagined myself joining the Drama Club, auditioning for school productions, becoming a star! It could all happen in one month, when I’d turn thirteen and enter Lincoln Junior High.

Years later at a holiday dinner, my twin said, “Like that time I said, ‘Yeh, git to the point!’”

I looked up from the turkey. “That wasn’t you. That was me.”

“I played Pappy Yokum.”

“No, that was me. I played Pappy.”

Psychologists call this a disputed memory. And when it’s about performance, it takes on even more meaning. I played Pappy Yokum, and my twin played me. The boundaries between her, me, and Pappy blurred. She wanted the attention, the applause. She thought she got it. She needed the attention because, as our mother told me later, my twin had trouble keeping up with me.

Our little episode of disputed memory shows just how porous the self can be, how blurred lines can emerge between spectator and actor, audience and performer. In our Pappy Yokum case, the confusion is even greater because the stage itself is a site of borrowed identity. Biology and theater converge as my sister remembers my five-word performance as her own. An eerie fusion of representation and individual identity. She is the perpetual player and simultaneous understudy.

I wanted to know more about this phenomenon of disputed memory and its occurrence among identical twins. I found that about twenty years ago, a team of researchers at the University of Canterbury and Duke University conducted experiments of disputed memory among sets of same-sex twins. In one experiment, the study’s questions unearthed plenty of disputed memories. In one case, for instance, both twins believed they had been asked to demonstrate a dive at school. I wonder if this experiment meant there needed to be some trigger event to excavate the memory. In another case, one woman remembered being sent home from school because her skirt was too short, but it was her twin who actually received the punishment. The twin without the lived experience could still recollect it “as clear as day.” Our DNA is the same, why shouldn’t our memories be the same? And the disputed memories appeared to have come out of events that occurred when the study participants were aged eight through twelve. My sister and I were twelve when I played Pappy Yokum.

I knew none of this when my sister performed my line at the holiday dinner table. Because she claimed the experience so many decades later, researchers might say she recalled it from an observational perspective. If I had played Pappy much more recently, my sister would have recalled it from a field perspective. Put simply, the older the event, the more she was in the audience; the newer the event, the more she was on stage.

If my sister and I had not had this conversation at the dinner table, I might never have known that she claimed my memory. But I begin to wonder about where the tectonic plates of our experiences converge. She came to school wearing my clothes. She stole my German homework and copied it. But when she earned her driver’s license and I scraped a parked Division of Motor Vehicles car during my road test, I didn’t have a memory of passing. When she received an invitation to go to the senior prom and I didn’t, I didn’t believe I wore a gown and corsage. What was it about Pappy Yokum? It had to be that I was chosen to play a role that maybe she wanted but didn’t audition for. It had to be about wanting the spotlight for herself.

BIO

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.