Here's what I know: life is ordinary. Dreams, sickness, joy, grieving, loving our children -- everybody experiences these things. Everyone is full of goodness and dark longings. We all have the capacity for sacrifice, for betrayal, for wildness. Everybody has woken up one morning and said to themselves, I want everything, everything, now, now, but we grow up. It goes away; the longing to take the whole world inside ourselves, to make every second count, to live many lives. We spend our days lost in activity. We marry rich men who can never fully know us, and we like the idea. Or -- what? We end up like Samantha -- with our feelings smacking us like waves, over and over, half-drowning us, never getting a chance to learn to swim, never even being smart enough to get out of the water. I know. That could have been me.

I ask Kevin if it could be me again.

"I'm not sure what you mean," he says. He's sitting surrounded by papers, questionnaires, file boxes -- he'll spend the rest of the year working on this weekend's data.

"I mean could I be like Samantha? Could I be volatile? Could I run around claiming dogs that aren't mine and crying at everything, could I charm thirteen-year-old boys, could I eat raw meat -- that kind of thing."

"Well," Kevin says, "you are like Samantha. If anyone could, it would be you. But ..."

"But what?"

"You aren't her."

"Not right now. But I have been."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Sunday evening, after we've finished the last of the tests, Samantha and Diego and I take another ride in her Impala. We drive out into the farmland, through rows of vegetables fanning out from the road, lettuce and peas and tomatoes and cotton, squash and soybeans, all growing fat in the California sun. The plants look beautiful, but they're all sprayed down with toxic chemicals. The migrant workers get sick from working with them, or so I've read.

I ask her to pull over beside a field of cherry tomatoes. They're hanging off the stalks like green pearls, and the air is spiked with their pumpkin smell. All that produce, all that ripening -- it's an incredible abundance, and it fills me with hunger. We sit there in silence as the engine cools down.

"Ivan's not that nice, is he?" Samantha gazes through the windshield at the tomatoes. "Jason says he's an asshole."

"Jason's thirteen."

"Yeah, but he's not an idiot."

I consider this. "Ivan's not that bad. He can be an asshole, obviously. He doesn't take any shit. He's rich and successful and feels he deserves all that and more."

"How is that?"

"It's steady. It's very calming."

"It sounds kind of great."

Diego's head is in my lap. She's snoring. Already I know Samantha and I are thinking the same thing.

"Does he always wear that aftershave?"

"Every day."

"I like it."

"So do I."

I smile and pull my dress off over my head. Samantha watches me with almost no expression -- just a little disbelief around the corners of her eyes. Because usually she's the one, with her Samantha Moments, who changes everything. But not this time. I take off my bra and pantyhose and hand them to her.

Samantha starts to giggle. Then she takes off her bikini top and ripped jeans and passes them over. She hands me her cigarettes. She smoothes down her hair and puts on my linen sundress, my beige ostrich sandals. Now we're both giggling. We used to do this all the time, back when we had the same dreams. Sometimes we'd do it for just a few hours, but other times we kept it up for days, months even. I would be Samantha, and she would be Amanda. I would be creative and spontaneous, and she would be methodical and calm. I'd carry her books and take her tests and use her toothbrush and sleep in her bed. No one knew. Even our parents were utterly fooled. We thought they deserved it for dressing us alike, cutting our hair the same, taking us to the same piano teacher, who taught us the same pieces to play at the same recitals. There have been times, over the years, when I've even wondered if we ever switched once and forgot to switch back.

Maybe I've been the volatile one all along.

"What do I need to know?" Samantha asks.

I have it all laid out: I open the ostrich purse. "Here are my credit cards," I say. "This is the code to our alarm, these are the keys to the house, here's my driver's license. This is my address book, with our friends' names highlighted, and my calendar with birthdays and anniversaries indicated. This is where I take yoga," I hand her a flyer, "usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is my smoothie punch card. I like the Femme Boost."

"What else?"

"Kevin told me you're pregnant."

Samantha laughs. I have no idea what this means. For once, I have the giddy sensation of having absolutely no idea what my sister is thinking. And I don't want to know.

But she does say, "You don't have to do this for me."

"I'm not."

We switch places and I drive my sister back to the hotel. She leans back in the passenger seat, an arm hanging out the window into the warm California sky. I'm surprised to see how good she looks in my linen dress. Conventionalism suits her remarkably well. She looks calmer, more focused, now that she's inhabiting my skin. You don't miss the breasts, either. No one will ever know. Except Jason, of course.

I stop the car in front of the lobby. Samantha bends over and kisses Diego so that I'm staring at the tender spot on the top of her head.

"Goodbye, Amanda," I say.

"Goodbye, Samantha," she replies. And then without a glance back she slams the door and walks off, wobbling slightly on her heels, until she's swallowed up by the revolving smoked-glass doors.

I put the car in gear and turn it around, Diego at my side, and drive off, crying, into the vegetable sea.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Twin Study" originally appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, the award-winning fiction magazine published by Francis Ford Coppola. For more information about Zoetrope: All-Story, which was recently selected as a finalist for the 2004 National Magazine Award for Fiction, please visit the Web site. Zoetrope is offering Salon readers an exclusive subscription offer. Subscribe online with the discount code 4SAL44 and receive free the two issues that won recognition from the National Magazine judges (Spring and Summer 2003). Zoetrope is where the great writers of tomorrow are published today.

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