My twin sisters were nearly seven years older than I was; and they were the most normal sisters I ever knew. They hit me for no reason, and they kissed me for no reason, and they made me the victim of a hundred childish medical experiments. They also loved horses.
Now, all young girls seem to love horses, and there are at least a hundred theories about why. Most young girls love horses from books like Black Beauty, and some of the young girls in our town had a passionate but unrequited love for real horses that they were too poor to own, and I'd heard that a few daughters of really wealthy people actually owned horses. My sisters weren't like any of those kinds of girls. They loved horses so much they created their own horses, rode them, made up stories about them, cured them when they were injured or sick, and generally made life miserable for them. But I had very little sympathy for those horses. They were dull and brutish animals, and for some reason I had never understood, my sisters thought I was one of them.
Because my sisters were twins, they presented a special problem for me: there were two of them, identical twins who shared the same mind, and they could surround me in a variety of thoroughly malevolent ways. The fact that they seemed to be able to surround nearly anyone didn't make any difference to me. When they surrounded and beat up my older brother's enemies, it didn't seem any different to me than when they surrounded and beat up my older brother, or surrounded me and did something to me I didn't like. There were too many of them and they were too agile for my liking. There was always one in front of me, whichever way I tried to escape. And the more I tried to escape, the more they thought of me as a horse they were trying to train.
They were small for their age, and were probably at least as aggressive as they seemed to me. My mother dressed them alike, and amused herself by correcting people who couldn't tell them apart, which nobody could. My sisters were simply content to know where the other one was, and where the horses were. They didn't much care about what which of them was which. They decided I was one of their horses when I was about four years old, or at least that was when I became aware of it. In fact, they probably decided I was one of their horses when I was born, and no doubt, right from the beginning, treated me as their own tiny palomino colt. Since this made them good babysitters, my mother didn't object when they put me in a makeshift stall under the piano and tried to teach me to whinny. I may have whinnied before I spoke human language; I can't remember. My earliest memory is one of sitting underneath the piano stool being groomed by my sisters, and I had to recognize that I was not a horse before I could decide, in that formal recognition of the existence of the self we all experience, that I was a little boy.
Before I got to any of that, though, there were some other things I figured out. I wasn't the only horse in my sisters stable. My older brother was just a year younger than the twins, and he fared much worse than I did. The twins considered him a bronco, and the two of them took turns trying to break him. Maybe they succeeded. My mother always told her friends how docile a child he was compared to the girls, and maybe that was why. I can remember the day he became a human being, too. They were herding him around the house on the end of a rope, pulling and pushing him from room to room, and he lost his temper. My sisters locked themselves in the bathroom and when my parents got home several hours later my brother was still trying to knock down the door to get at them.
