Siamese Twins Take the Big Step to College : 38-Year-Old Sisters End Long Seclusion, Thrive on Campus

It’s no real surprise that Siamese twins Yvonne and Yvette McCarther finally got around to enrolling in college. They’ve been talking about it for years but kept putting it off, finding it easier, as Yvonne puts it, “to just lay around the house all day, watching TV and being worthless.”

Besides that, their aging, ailing mother was so fiercely opposed that she burst into tears at the mere mention of school, envisioning all manner of horrors that might befall her unusual daughters should they venture into the world alone.

But when a Compton Community College catalogue arrived by chance in their mailbox earlier this year, the spell of both television and tears was somehow at last broken. They can’t explain it. They don’t even try. The McCarther twins, now 38, say they never did waste much time wondering why.

‘I Just Decided’

“All I know is, I just decided the time had come,” said Yvonne.

“Me too,” Yvette agreed.

“Besides, I’m not getting any younger,” Yvonne added. “Me either,” Yvette agreed. In this duet, she has always been the shy, quiet one, leaving her lively sister to take the lead.

This time, they didn’t even discuss it with their mother. Instead, they called the school to make sure they were eligible (although they earned a high school equivalency certificate years ago, the sisters never went to school but received their spotty education entirely at home instead, through irregular visits from public tutors). Then they made arrangements with a friend for transportation.

Next morning, in their first radical departure from routine in years, the twins got out of bed before noon, which they hate, and put on dresses, which they hate even more. As usual, they dressed identically, from head to toe. Even their purses contain matching sets of everything from vitamin jars to wallets with exactly the same family photos.

At the last second, on their way out of the house, they told their mother where they were going, then softly closed the door before she began to cry.

Approached It Calmly

They weren’t nervous, because they never are.

As they walked across the campus, two of the world’s most unusual people, born inextricably attached at the crowns of their heads, a few students glanced up from their books at the curious sight. But nobody stared or followed to get a closer look.

And when they walked into the admissions office, a couple of people blinked, but nothing more.

Instead, school officials were more efficient than usual. The McCarther twins were tested, processed and enrolled within a matter of hours.

Because their skills were so rusty, their years of virtual isolation from any intellectual stimulation beyond television so evident, they were assigned to basic math, English and computer classes. A young woman named Jennell Allen was appointed their counselor. A single phone call was made, from the dean’s office to building supplies, quietly ordering a couple of round tables and two armless chairs to be moved into classrooms where the twins would sit, replacing the conventional desks.

And that was that. Almost.

Another Important Matter

Robert Butler, director of student life, had been nursing one special concern all day. Butler still laughs at himself as he tells how he finally approached the twins, and, mustering all the delicacy he could, asked if they might find it more convenient to use his private office bathroom, rather than the smaller campus toilet stalls.

They stared at him for a split second in pure amazement, before Yvonne, breaking into a brilliant smile, dark eyes dancing, said, as Yvette smothered a giggle, “Why, thanks, hon, but I’ve escaped from places half that size.”

“Me too,” Yvette said.

Then they went home to tell their mother, Willie, 73, that everything was going to be OK. She only cried harder.

That was in February.

Last week, Willie McCarther was still crying, but no longer out of fear. Now the mother who was once told at the old County General Hospital that her babies should be institutionalized, that they were so grossly deformed they would never manage more than a crawl and that although they had separate brains, they would probably be retarded too, was crying tears of joy and triumph.

Because, three months into their new life, everything is turning out to be even better than OK for the McCarther twins.

They love school so much, in fact, that Willie McCarther’s newest worry is that “they’re working themselves to death, they don’t want to do anything but study.” Besides that, they don’t want to come home anymore either.

Although their classes are over by 1 p.m. and the campus is mostly deserted by mid-afternoon, they never catch the bus until at least 4. Sometimes they sit in the silence of the library poring over homework, whispering even when they are there alone. Or they spend hours sitting in rapt fascination before the Apple computers assigned to them. Or they browse through the bookstore, studying titles, fingering books that they will read when they reach more advanced classes.

Other times, they roam the campus grounds, exploring some far building where they haven’t been. To the McCarther twins, every office, every person, every single function the school performs, from the welding shop to the infirmary, is special and important for them to know about.

And sometimes they can be seen, silhouetted against the afternoon sun, just sitting on some distant patch of campus lawn, mostly in silence, watching the clouds, the passing traffic, the occasional student playing Frisbee with his dog.

But on this pretty, serene little campus of about 4,500 predominantly black students, it is the people who attract Yvonne and Yvette. Students, teachers, cooks, maintenance workers, gardeners--the twins gravitate to them all, because what they have discovered at Compton Community College, for the first time in their lives, is a population of amazing grace, ordinary people doing ordinary things, who neither recoil nor condescend at the sight of them but allow them instead to simply join in, to come and go as they please, to be neither more nor less than any other element of the human landscape.

And it has been that way from the very first day, starting from the moment they walked into Rhoda Casey’s English class. She was calling roll: “Tracy? Julian? Yvonne? Yvette? Santalario? Abra. . . .”

A few minutes later, Casey earned the twins’ permanent respect when she actually caught them collaborating during a pop quiz and snapped, “Laaadies!” They still laugh about it, but at the time, they were positively shocked, because, when they try, the twins can usually communicate so imperceptibly that sometimes even their mother wonders if they’re talking or reading each other’s minds.

Change Is Dramatic

To anyone who knew the McCarther twins when their world was still limited to dim rooms and a droning television, the change in them in just three months, both physically and mentally, is dramatic. Always alert and outgoing by nature, their exuberance and energy now verge on the awesome. Always agile, now they lope around the campus at such a fast pace it’s hard to keep up.

And their minds are moving just as fast. Their thoughts now pour forth in such torrents that they sometimes even interrupt each other--unheard of in the old days when, often as not, one would finish the other’s sentence, or they would utter the same thought, verbatim, in perfect, eerie unison.

They even look younger. In fact, as they wander about the campus in their blue jeans and sweat shirts, with their fresh-scrubbed faces and sparkling eyes, it would take a practiced eye to single them out as being far older than most of their classmates--a fact that, however ironically, all things considered, actually bothers them.

“I swear, some days, just looking at these kids makes me feel like a absolute antique ,” Yvette lamented one morning last week as she sat on a sun-flooded patio at school, watching the stream of students milling about.

“Me too,” Yvonne agreed.

“One time, I told a kid in computer class that they didn’t even have cars when I was born,” she added, rolling her eyes in comic dismay. “I was only joking, but I think he believed me. I swear, I was depressed over that one all day.”

“Me too,” said Yvette.

Periodically classmates or acquaintances waved or paused to chat. Idle stuff. “How was your Easter?” asked one young woman in passing. “A real drag, hon,” Yvonne told her. “How ‘bout yours?”

Or, from another student, nervously fingering his math workbook, “Who you got for math?” “Upton,” said Yvonne. “Nhhn,” he mumbled. “You ever had Cecil? That bald-headed guy? He’s real good . . . but I think I’m gonna flunk.” “Aw, naw, hon, you won’t. Buck up,” said Yvette soothingly. The twins call everybody “hon.”

Before long, they even got hit by the campus eccentric, a girl who habitually bums other students for spare change. “Aw, hon, I’m sorry, but I never have any money to spare,” Yvonne told her gently. The girl smiled blankly, then shuffled off. For a few seconds, the twins fell silent, watching her.

‘I Just Love It’

But their pensive moments don’t last long. “I just love it here, I can’t believe I waited so long to sign up,” Yvonne bubbled, dark eyes dancing in the sun.

“Me either,” said Yvette. But she wasn’t through. Nowadays, the shy twin increasingly goes on to add a thought of her own instead of merely echoing her vivacious sister. “I’m going to summer school too,” she announced with a pleased little grin.

“Me too,” said Yvonne.

In a final measure of their new and improving mental health, after nearly four decades of passivity, reacting instead of acting, accepting but never questioning, and otherwise displaying few direct opinions or emotional extremes, the McCarther twins have lately even begun to develop a mild little list of gripes.

Vociferous nonsmokers, for instance, are beginning to get on their nerves. Heavy smokers, despite years of trying to at least “slack off,” the twins suffer enough, they grumble, just trying to make it through classes without a cigarette. “But lately it seems like smoking bothers almost e verybody ,” said Yvonne, exasperated. “Even when I light up outdoors, people look at me like I’ve lost my wits.”

It was enough to send her fishing in her purse for a last cigarette before the first class of the day. Yvette reached for her own cigarettes in the same second.

(Beyond their disconcerting habit of always speaking singularly, the twins’ most fascinating personal peculiarity is their apparent inability, or unwillingness, to ingest anything independently, be it food, drink or nicotine. They inhale, chew and drink with the simultaneous precision of a machine, always finishing at exactly the same moment. They say it’s unconscious. And they’ve never wondered why.)

The twins are caffeine fiends too. As they smoked, both were steadily pumping coffee into themselves, still trying to wake up. That’s another thing they don’t find so hot about going to college--having to get up at 6 a.m. every day to catch the bus. Lifelong night owls, accustomed to staying awake until dawn and sleeping into the afternoon, neither has yet learned to love the dawn.

“I figured I’d bomb out in a week, that there was no way I’d ever adjust to getting up with the chickens,” Yvette said wryly. But she did. “Monday mornings are still a bitch, though. If I don’t get to bed by 1 (a.m.), I’m dead meat the whole next day.”

“Me too,” Yvonne said.

Then, moving in the same perfect, mysterious unison as they always have, the McCarther twins glanced simultaneously at their watches, took a last gulp from their coffee cups and a final greedy puff from their cigarettes, then hastily rose from their chairs with fluid grace, two beings moving as one, and trotted off through the crowd to Rhoda Casey’s English class.

“If I’m late, she’s gonna be really mad,” Yvonne told Yvette. Who said, “I already blew it once--I was late yesterday.”