The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  When you get home, you both have fevers. Soon you are told you both have measles. You lie in your twin beds with the curtains drawn. Even in the dim light, you can see that the red spots do not occur on the same places on your otherwise identical bodies and faces. You conclude, with the sharp intelligence of a child, that you are not symmetrical in sickness. It seems profound. And sad. And it is a lesson you will not forget.

  In the darkened room, you tell each other stories. Your parents have read Twelfth Night to you because it is cultural and educational and has twins in it. You argue about which of you would be which, both of you wanting to be Viola, neither wanting to be a boy dressed as a girl. Neither of you wanting to be named Sebastian. You work out an agreement, a plot change that requires even more disguises and changes of identities than the play, but you both become testy and exhausted and feverish and cannot follow your own script and argue again until you fall into a disturbed, overheated sleep, your hand stretched across the narrow divide between your beds holding fast to your sister’s hand.

  “What if the blue I see is different than the blue you see?” one of you says in the morning.

  “The blue is the same, and our eyes are the same. So no way,” says the other of you.

  Twins in literature are always disguised as each other, or they are sleeping with each other. The banality of “twin sweater sets” cannot make up for Siegmund and Sieglinde. You think that later, of course, much later, when no one wears sweater sets anymore and you have just read a disturbing story by Thomas Mann.

  “But what if we both call it blue and it’s really a different color but we both have always called it blue so we think we’re seeing the same color but we’re not?” says one of you.

  “Blue is blue,” the other of you says.

  “What I see as blue might be what you see as green. We don’t know. You’re not in my eyes. I’m not in your eyes.”

  “The sky is the same color whatever you say.”

  “Well, that’s true. But I might say it’s green.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course not. It’s blue.”

  On and on the arguments go.

  Identical twins, dressed in identical outfits—are they half or double? It’s pleasant to make people uncomfortable sometimes, people like your uncle. Making other people uncomfortable allows you to shake off your own discomfort. When people stare at you, you stare back, four matching eyes.

  You have dark red wavy hair and round, childlike faces. Even as children, your faces are not so much children’s faces as childlike faces, an approximation, a description, a suggestion rather than a definition. It is difficult to notice your faces beyond that, partly because of the dazzling red hair but mostly because there are two of you. You understand this when you are older, when someone brings too many gifts to a birthday party or too many bottles of good wine to a dinner party, and the presents and the wine are undervalued in their own abundance. You are indistinct, undervalued in your own abundance.

  Sometimes you wish you knew other twins or had siblings who were twins, like the Bobbsey Twins.

  There was one time when Laurel cut her own hair in an attempt to look different from Daphne. Your mother was furious and took you both to the beauty parlor to get identical pixie haircuts. Daphne cried herself to sleep that night, her back turned to her sister.

  “I’m sorry,” Laurel said, poking her. “I’m sorry you had to get an ugly haircut because of me.”

  Daphne did not answer. She secretly liked the pixie cut.

  “It will grow back,” Laurel said.

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m sorry, Daphne. I said I was sorry.” She yelled into Daphne’s ear: “I’m SORRY!”

  “Shut up. I don’t care what you do. So shut up.” But then she thought, You think the haircut’s ugly and you’re stuck with it, which made her feel better. And you still look just like me, which made her feel better still.

  In school, both Laurel and Daphne often had to clarify that they were themselves and not their sister. “No,” they would say. “I’m the other one.”

  “I’m the other one,” Daphne said in third grade when a little boy who had a crush on Laurel stuck paste in her hair. “I’m the other one.”

  “I don’t care,” the boy said, but he ran away to the far end of the playground.

  “I’m the other one,” Laurel said to the cafeteria lady who knew Daphne’s love of Sloppy Joes and was ladling an extra gelatinous spoonful onto her hamburger bun.

  The cafeteria lady said, “Oh! Well, you enjoy your meal, too, dear.”

  “How can we both be the other one?” Daphne asked Laurel.

  They looked up “other” in the dictionary.

  The entry was surprisingly long. “Other” was an adjective that meant one of two. It was usually preceded by a demonstrative or possessive word. Daphne liked the idea of a demonstrative word, imagining the word hugging and kissing “other,” generally making a spectacle of itself, until their father explained that a demonstrative word meant, simply, a word like “this” or “that.”

  “Other” also meant additional.

  “‘Additional’—that means not the main one, not the important one,” Daphne said.

  “Yes, but they mean it as different. See? It says different. And not the same.”

  “Not the same is the same as different.”

  Laurel squinted at more of the tiny print. “Two obsolete meanings!” she said. Obsolete meanings were a find—like the time they discovered a chamber pot in their grandparents’ attic. Obsolete meanings were treasures of infinite value and no use.

  Daphne got out her notebook and pencil.

  “One of the obsolete meanings is left,” Laurel said, her face close to the page, her nose touching it.

  “Left like your left hand? Or left like left behind, left over?”

  “Hand.”

  What a wonderful, mysterious word. “Other.” It not only took a pronoun, it was a pronoun. It was also an adverb. And a conjunction!

  “It’s even a noun,” Laurel said. She read:

  “‘Other, n. Philos. That which exists as an opposite of, or as excluded by, something else; as, the nonego is the other of the ego, nonbeing the other of being, the objective world is the other of self-consciousness.’”

  “I’ll be the ego,” Daphne said.

  “I’ll be the objective world.”

  And they ran off to play.

  * * *

  It would be difficult to fault Sally for an occasional feeling of inferiority when she contemplated her children. There they stood, when they stood still, vibrant and loquacious and cocksure. Their red hair marked them as different and as the same, as other. Their flaming bright heads stood out in any group of children, so unlike the girls and boys with blond, brown, black hair; the two of them identical in their contrast. They seemed to their mother, sometimes, to be mythical creatures, beyond the reality of skinned knees and squabbles, dirt-smeared tears, or even laughter. But then one of them would skin her knee and the dirt and tears and need were as real as anybody else’s, and Sally would almost welcome the unhappy moment, which was a moment she could share with one injured daughter, unencumbered by the other. She asked Arthur’s brother, Don, if that was selfish of her. He was a pompous ass, as Arthur often pointed out, but so were the children, as she often tried to explain to Arthur. And Don was a psychiatrist. That had to count for something. Or did it? He sat her down at the kitchen table as if the kitchen were his office and spoke soberly about archetypes.

  “Romulus and Remus Wolfe,” he began. He chuckled. “Sorry about the pun.”

  He clamped his pipe between his teeth and puffed in what Sally considered a derisive manner, his chin tilted up, his eyes looking down at her. “Romulus and Remus Wolfe,” he said again. As always, she thought not of two boys nursing from a she-wolf but of two wolf cubs nursing from her. Still, there was nothing wrong with a pun. Don was a snob. So was Arthur, of course. But only about filthy lucre.


  Don was now telling her about Jacob and Esau. But they weren’t twins, were they? One was hairy and one was smooth. That was all she could remember. Now Don was talking about the sun and the moon. Twins were antagonistic, he said. They were mystical and primary and opposite and one.

  Sally poured him a glass of iced tea as he spoke. She thought of Thompson and Thomson, the detective twins in the Tintin comics, and she wanted to laugh. Instead, she silently passed Don a plate of cookies. She was sorry she had asked him about the girls. She felt foolish now. Jung was all right, but she had two little girls, she was not a wolf, she was not the sun or the moon or Leda or the swan. She was not biblical. She was tired. She was outgunned. She said, “I know you’re right, Don. But what’s all that got to do with me? How do you raise archetypes?”

  Don laughed, not his normal sarcastic, superior laugh that soured the air around him. He gave a full, open laugh, and for a moment he reminded Sally of Arthur. “The same way you raise every other kid,” he said. “By the seat of your goddamn pants.”

  Years later, when the girls were grown, Sally had occasion to remember Don’s words. She was sitting on the couch with Daphne, holding Daphne’s newborn baby, Prudence. Sally began to sing to the baby:

  Tweedle, tweedle, tweedle dee.

  She had sung that song to Laurel and Daphne every night.

  I’m as happy as can be.

  Jimminy Cricket, Jimminy Jack,

  You make my heart go clickety-clack.

  “I used to think that Laurel was Tweedledee,” Daphne said. “I couldn’t wait for the last lines when you’d finally sing Tweedledum. That was me. Tweedledum.”

  She moved closer to her mother and her daughter.

  “‘Look at that sugar plum,’” Daphne sang.

  Sally thought, I did something right. She took her daughter’s hand and held it, hard.

  BA´BERY. n.s. [from babe.] Finery to please a babe or child.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  Uncle Don and Aunt Paula and their little boy, Brian, came for dinner every other Sunday; and every other Sunday, Laurel and Daphne and their parents went to Uncle Don and Aunt Paula and Brian’s house for dinner. This Sunday was a home gathering for Laurel and Daphne, which they much preferred. Because Brian was afraid of the dog, they spent a large part of the visit brushing Webster as a way to keep their distance from their younger cousin. He was little and petulant and too easy to tease.

  At the dinner table, Uncle Don told their father to tell them to stop babbling, which made them talk faster and interrupt each other more.

  “Babbling!” cried Daphne. “That’s onomatopoeia!”

  “Spell ‘onomatopoeia’!”

  Brian stuck out his lower lip ominously and muttered, “Dumb.”

  “Foolish!” Laurel called out.

  “Speechless!” yelled Daphne.

  “God, yes, speechless,” Uncle Don said.

  “Thunderstruck!” Laurel and Daphne said at the same time.

  Aunt Paula gave a small laugh. “You girls.”

  Brian said, “Girls are dumb. Girls have chinas.”

  “Hush,” said Aunt Paula, still smiling a little.

  “Brian!” Uncle Don said. “No china talk at the table.”

  “They do have chinas,” said Brian. “They do.”

  He looked accusingly at the twins.

  Uncle Don looked accusingly at Aunt Paula.

  “Nolo contendere,” said Aunt Paula, who was a lawyer.

  “China, china, china,” Brian chanted.

  “We’ve been talking about possibly having another baby, explaining things, in case we ever do,” Uncle Don shouted over the din. “Jealousy. Perfectly natural,” he added.

  “Why bring it up unless it’s happening?” Arthur asked.

  “That’s what I said,” Paula said.

  “Precautionary.”

  “In case you forget precautions,” said Sally.

  They all laughed, except Don, his yowling son, and the baffled twins.

  “CHINA…”

  Brian was eight years younger than the girls. He had been a pleasing baby, looking slowly around him, his mouth open. But as a four-year-old, he left something to be desired. He still looked slowly around him, his mouth was still open, but the behavior and the aspect of a gentle baby were no longer becoming in a little boy. And since the age of two he had thrown tantrums, which disrupted most dinners and outings the two families shared. He screamed when he saw Webster, he pulled the twins’ hair, and they were, being older, forbidden to retaliate.

  “His early interest in bodily functions has clearly advanced to an interest in body parts,” Arthur said.

  “Take your cousin out to play,” their mother said. “Distract the child.”

  “I’m a child, too,” Laurel said. “And I’m not done eating.”

  “Me, too,” said Daphne. “Me, either.”

  “I don’t want to go outside with them!” Brian screamed. “They have chinas.”

  “I told you not to use euphemisms,” Uncle Don said to his wife.

  “That hardly seems to be the issue,” she said. “And it’s not a euphemism. It’s baby talk.”

  “I’m not a baby!” Brian screamed. “I’m not a baby!”

  Daphne and Laurel caught a beseeching look from their mother and lured their cousin outside with the promise of squashing ants. There were no anthills available, so they sat in the driveway and threw pebbles. He seemed to like that.

  “You’re freaks,” he said. “Freaks of nature. Daddy said.”

  “She is,” Laurel said, pointing at Daphne. “But I’m not.”

  “Nope. She is the freak of nature,” Daphne said, pointing at Laurel.

  “Do you know what a freak is, Brian?”

  Brian shook his head. “No.”

  “It means princess,” Daphne said.

  “A princess who can fly.”

  “Fly where?” Brian asked.

  “To China.”

  Brian smirked. “You said a bad word. I’m telling Daddy.”

  “Don’t be a tattletale, Brian.”

  “I’m telling Daddy you called me a tattletale.”

  “Do you know what ‘tattletale’ means, Brian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what ‘tattle’ is?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you know what ‘tattletale’ means?”

  Brian put a pebble in his mouth and pondered this.

  “A bad word?” he said at last.

  Laurel and Daphne congratulated him with such warmth and sincerity that he decided not to tell his father anything. There was hope for him, they told Brian.

  “There’s hope for me,” he told his parents when they went back inside. “Because ‘tattle’ is a bad word.” He began chanting, “Tattle, tattle, tattle!”

  Aunt Paula said, “Maybe one child is enough.”

  “The next one might be easier,” Sally said.

  “You never know,” Arthur said.

  They all looked at Brian, standing on a chair chanting, “Tattle, tattle, tattle!”

  “Sweet Jumping Jesus,” said Uncle Don. He shook his head in a kind of awe.

  SCRINE. n.s. [scrinium, Latin.] A place in which writings or curiosities are reposited.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  These are some of the words Daphne collected in her notebook:

  fugacious

  rebarbative

  oxters

  divagations

  promptuary

  whilom

  irenicon

  hendiadys

  aposiopesis

  gloze

  turgid

  conurbation

  She read through books understanding practically nothing of the content, on the lookout only for words she fancied.

  “But the words don’t have to be fancy,” she explained to her mother. “I have to fancy them. That means I have
to like them.”

  “But how do you know you like them if you don’t know what they mean?”

  Daphne could not explain something so basic, so primal. How do you know a flower is pretty? How do you know a cat’s fur is soft?

  Laurel was the one who looked the words up. How could Daphne stand it, not knowing the meaning, just guessing from the context of sentences she didn’t really understand? It was ridiculous when there was always a simple answer. That was her job, to look up the word in the tissue-paper pages of the dictionary and record the meanings in the notebook.

  Each word, once it landed in the notebook and was defined with its dictionary definition and spoken out loud by the sisters, seemed to develop its own special personality. “Whilom” and “oxters” were such different characters, their temperaments arising from their looks, their sound, and to a lesser extent their meaning. “Whilom”: former. “Oxters”: armpits. “Whilom” was light and airy and lost, like a lady in a white nightgown wandering through a field of flowers filmed over with dewdrops; “oxters,” drudging and heavy and tired, muscled and damp with sweat. Sometimes Whilom and Oxters met in the flowery field. Irenicon might appear between them then, an offering of peace as cool and placid as a river, Whilom dipping a bare foot into the calm water, Oxters immersing its entire self with a groan of relief. Laurel and Daphne loved their collection. They played with the words as if they were toys, mental toys, lining them up, changing their order, and involving them in intrigues of love and friendship and bitter enmity.

  They tried to include their younger cousin Brian in their game, but his participation was fugacious.

  “It is not,” he said when they told him this, and ran, as usual, to tell his parents that the twins had called him a bad name.

  “It means fleeting,” Laurel said when Uncle Don complained in turn to their parents and their father confronted them.

  “You made him cry. He’s just a little boy. He doesn’t understand.”

  They were forced to apologize to Brian and play Go Fish with him. They let him win.

  “We’re sorry we were mean. We didn’t mean to be.”