IDENTICAL TWINS, ROSELLE, N.J.
DIANE ARBUS, 1966
So, the phone rings in a house in Roselle, New Jersey. It's 1972, the way Bob Wade remembers it. Somebody on the line tells him his twin daughters are on the cover of the Village Voice. He tells his wife: "I didn't sign anything." She says: "Uh, I did." That's how the family finds out. A few winters earlier, there'd been a Christmas party. A twins club at the Knights of Columbus hall in town. And a woman with a camera, who stood the Wade girls against a wall outside. Shoulder to shoulder, in matching corduroy dresses their mother had sewn. The woman was Diane Arbus. You've seen what she got. Same headbands. Same collars. Same haircut. Everything matches until you get to their faces. Cathleen's on the left, her mouth pulling down. Colleen's on the right, almost smiling. There's chocolate cake in the creases of their lips. You can barely see it. It's there. MoMA bought a print in 1967. Five years later, the photograph went on the cover of Arbus's book. Then the movies got it. The girls in the hallway in The Shining are usually traced back to this picture. The family's review was different. We thought it was the worst likeness of the twins we'd ever seen. That's Bob, decades later, whispering in front of the photograph at a museum. Baffled, he said, that Arbus had made them look ghostly. Ask the sisters what they remember about that afternoon. Nothing. Not the camera. Not the cake. The dresses they remember. The dresses they kept. Our mother made them, Cathleen said. They look black in the photograph. They're actually green.