The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  “Don’t start,” their father said. “Don’t start that with him.”

  The adults were drinking cocktails, and the children sat around the coffee table with their cards.

  Uncle Don said, “Their regret was pretty damn fugacious, too, wasn’t it?”

  Brian began to cry again.

  “Don’t cry, Brian. It’s just a word,” Daphne said. “It means it’s gone away. Like, if you stop crying, you can say your crying was fugacious. And if you say the word three times, it’s yours, right, Daddy?”

  “All yours.”

  But Brian sniffled and said he didn’t want any stupid words, he would prefer to play Go Fish again.

  “More words for us,” Daphne whispered to Laurel, but both girls were disappointed. They wanted to like their cousin Brian, but what would become of someone who understood so little of what mattered in the world?

  * * *

  The twins argued not just with Brian or Uncle Don. They argued with each other every day. And slept in the same bed every night. Their parents had gotten two twin beds, but every morning they found the girls in the same bed, arms around each other.

  “They’re called twin beds, girls,” their mother said. “Two beds for two twins.”

  But, until junior high school, they insisted on sleeping together. Then one night Laurel said, “Well, I think I’ll just sleep in my own bed tonight.”

  Daphne looked at her sister. “Need a little privacy?”

  Laurel actually blushed. “I didn’t say that.”

  Daphne shrugged. “Dar vudge obe dzegs, deedr.” The force of sex, dear.

  “I didn’t say anything about sex!”

  “You don’t have to. Privity speaks louder than words.” It was one of their favorite words. Laurel found it in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. Its meaning was: private communication, joint knowledge. But in the plural it meant private parts. “‘Privity’ and ‘privities,’” Daphne said.

  “I never said ‘privities.’”

  “Shared DNA, Laurel. It speaks volumes. I know all your secrets.”

  Laurel began to laugh. “DNA has a big mouth. And a big nose!” She tapped her nose, which she complained about constantly.

  “I like our nose,” Daphne said.

  “Be my guest,” said Laurel.

  “But that means you think I’m ugly.”

  Laurel said, “I get to have an opinion about my own nose.”

  They squabbled a bit more, then turned out their lights.

  “Peace, love, and DNA,” Laurel whispered.

  They both had simultaneously, that minute, added “DNA” to their shared vocabulary without having to consult each other. “Masturbation” was not a word they would ever have used, even with each other.

  * * *

  For their thirteenth birthday, Laurel and Daphne received a portable record player and a copy of Revolver to play on it. Their father also gave them a book entitled The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English.

  “It will make you laugh,” he said when they unwrapped it.

  They looked uncertainly at the little paperback.

  “It’s a phrase book,” he said. “From the nineteenth century.”

  “But we don’t really want to learn Portuguese, do we, Daphne?”

  Daphne shook her head.

  “Don’t worry,” Arthur said. “You won’t!”

  They opened the book.

  “‘Proverbs,’” Laurel read.

  Daphne read: “‘The stone as roll not heap up not foam.’”

  “‘To make at a stone two blows’!” Laurel read.

  “‘It before that you marry look twice’!”

  “‘The mountain at work put out a mouse’!”

  The girls were in full cry. Arthur watched them and thought, God, I love them.

  He said, “It was all the rage in Victorian England. Mark Twain was a fan, too. The translations are so preposterous, it became a comic sensation. It was known as English as She Is Spoke.”

  “‘That which feels one’s snotly blow one’s nose.’”

  “This is a new edition,” Arthur said. “Brendan Gill wrote the introduction.” Arthur worshipped the New Yorker critic. He worshipped The New Yorker generally. He kept all the back issues stacked neatly in the den.

  “You know you’ll never read all these,” his brother, Don, said now at the mention of Brendan Gill. He gestured toward the piles of magazines. “They’re just gathering dust.”

  “I might go back to an article. You never know.”

  Don made a dismissive sound.

  “Uncle Don said ‘Puh,’” Laurel said loudly to Daphne.

  “Puh,” Daphne said with great emphasis on the p: “Puh.”

  “They have never liked me,” Uncle Don said to their father.

  “No one likes you, Don,” Arthur replied. “You’re unlikable. You know that.”

  “Puh,” said Don.

  The twins retreated happily to their room to listen to Revolver and read aloud to each other from the little phrase book:

  “‘Here is a horse who have a bad looks’!”

  “‘He not sail know to march, he is pursy, he is foundered’!”

  “‘Take care that he not give you a foot’s kick’!”

  * * *

  “But do you ever worry that they don’t have that many friends?” Arthur said to his wife one night.

  Sally smiled at the “but.” Nothing, no conversation or observation, had preceded Arthur’s question. He must have been turning it over in his mind.

  “They have friends,” she answered. “Of course they do.”

  “Not that many.”

  “How many friends do they need? They have each other.”

  Laurel did eventually have a best friend, a slender, dreamy girl named Linda with long black hair and enormous blue eyes. Linda was a liability in some ways, so beautiful and otherworldly that any boy Laurel had her eye on had eyes only for Linda. One summer, she and Laurel were counselors at a day camp the town started for disadvantaged children. By disadvantaged they meant black. Linda played the guitar and sang folk songs. Laurel watched the children yawn and fidget while Linda crooned. The songs were beautiful. Linda had written them herself. They were about justice and rivers and death.

  “And she looks just like Joan Baez or Buffy Sainte-Marie when she sings,” Laurel told Daphne. “But the children act like they’re in school with a horrible, boring teacher.”

  It was only then that Daphne realized how jealous she was of Linda and that she knew she didn’t have to be jealous at all. She could already hear the Linda fatigue in Laurel’s voice. Linda was mentioned less and less at the dinner table. When she was, it was no longer because Linda was reading a book by Alan Watts or was boycotting wine because it was made with grapes. It was because Linda didn’t notice when one of the children wandered away from the playground.

  “And you know,” Laurel added, to her sister’s satisfaction, “it’s not as if she even drinks wine, she’s not eighteen, not that that stops anyone, but she doesn’t drink, so that was not much of a sacrifice, when you think about it.”

  “It won’t help Cesar Chavez, anyway,” Sally said. “Wrong grapes.”

  “Thank god,” Arthur said. He had given up table grapes without much resistance when the girls demanded their parents join the boycott. But wine was another matter. “And what do you mean, being underage doesn’t stop anyone? It stops you, I hope.”

  Both girls rolled their eyes and made their awful tsk sound.

  “You’re such a hypocrite,” Laurel said.

  “That is my right as an adult.”

  “It’s Linda who’s the real hypocrite,” Daphne said.

  “What happened to the lost camper?” Sally asked. “That’s the real point.”

  “She’s not a hypocrite. She’s very dedicated.”

  Daphne realized she had made a strategic mistake, but she could not stop. “She’s so dedicated she lost a kid.”

  �
��She didn’t lose him. He was in the boys’ room. Why are you all ganging up on Linda?”

  If it had been Daphne, she would have stormed away from the table, but her sister didn’t storm. Which enraged Daphne. “Well, if you care about her so much—”

  “Okay, girls, that will do,” Sally said. “The little boy was found, no one eats grapes, your father and I can drink our wine with a clear conscience, and no one is perfect.”

  Daphne stormed away from the table.

  In five minutes, she returned. “I’m still hungry.”

  Laurel gave her the as-yet-ungnawed bone from her lamb chop. A peace offering of blackened fat. Scraping the fat from the bone with her teeth, Daphne smiled a greasy smile of thanks.

  COLLECTI´TIOUS. adj. [collectitius, Lat.] Gathered up.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  Every other Sunday, the twins were on their front lawn waiting when Brian and his mother and father roared up in their old Citroën, a car that was, to Brian’s mind, as affected as his father’s pipe and goatee. Laurel and Daphne called the car the See-tro-eh. “See-tro-eh,” they would chant, cartoon French accents, kissing their fingers like a cartoon chef. Don would curse softly and bring the car to a stop with a jolt. Brian was embarrassed by the Citroën, by the twins’ reaction to it, but he secretly loved it, its odd shape and the way it sighed back down on its wheels when the motor stopped. The twins could See-tro-eh the car all they wanted, but they always asked him how it felt when the car rose on its haunches or fell back to earth. They always begged their uncle for a ride.

  “Children who are not mature enough to appreciate a vintage Citroën do not ride in a vintage Citroën,” Don would say, not to the girls, but to Brian’s mother.

  Brian would have liked to lord this refusal over his cousins, but there was no spirit of superiority for him in his father’s snub. Brian was too intimate with weakness not to recognize it in someone else, and he knew fear when he saw it. His father was afraid of the two little girls. So was Brian.

  He was ignored by his cousins, mostly. When they came to his house with their parents on alternate Sundays, Brian always asked them to play in the woods with him. He loved the woods surrounding his house and spent most of his free time there.

  “There are bears in the woods,” Daphne said. “Let’s play Scrabble.”

  “There haven’t been bears here since 1776,” he said. He had no idea when the last bear had been seen in Larchmont, or if there ever had been bears.

  For a moment, he thought he had impressed them. But they both shrugged and Laurel said, “How do you know?”

  “Look it up,” he said, which was enough to get them to follow him along a swampy trail that led to the beach, where they saw a deer swimming along the shore.

  * * *

  Paula thought: The two parts of the Wolfe family are small and inverted, if that was the right word—the opposite of extended. And oppressively close. She wondered why Don, who saw dysfunction everywhere, did not see that. Don and Arthur were like trees that had been planted too near each other, their crowded roots popping up from the soil naked and exposed. They were worst, the most gnarled and raw, when they were together. Don was to blame, she thought. He was cruel to his brother. Even the dog noticed, sidling protectively up to Arthur the minute Don entered the same room.

  “Why do you insist on seeing them every weekend if they bother you so much?” Paula asked Don. That was many years ago, when the twins were little and babbling their strange language at each other. “Why does he want you to come? You’re cruel to him. And you’re not a cruel man.”

  Don had scowled and said, “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  She never could figure the two brothers out, but she hadn’t minded the visits. The predictability, the rhythm; every weekend, a visit by one family to the other family. As time went on, Paula came to consider Sally her best friend, which made it easier, almost amusing, when the brothers would squabble. The two women would share a glance, a suppressed smile.

  Brian’s father often said that Arthur was too dull for someone of Sally’s nervous imagination. But as Brian got a little older he realized that Arthur was too peculiar to be dull. No numbers at the dinner table! he would shout. The girls would stand on their chairs and chant numbers until Arthur pushed his chair back with a crash and chased them from the room, their shrieks of laughter trailing like colorful scarves. Don said his brother was neurotic, thwarted, and therefore explosive. Don had a diagnosis for everyone. Brian’s mother called him Diagnosis Don, which made him almost as angry as Uncle Arthur pretended to be.

  Brian had once tried, at the dinner table, to express his own love of numbers to Uncle Arthur. Admittedly, he was showing off for his cousins, home from college, superior beings more superior than ever.

  “You’re young,” Arthur had said.

  Brian, disappointed he had not gotten a rise out of his uncle, tried again. “There are patterns,” he said. “Beautiful patterns. The patterns of nature, of the universe—”

  “Shut up, darling,” Brian’s mother said in her smiling, gentlest voice. She often told Brian to shut up in that voice. It was one of the intimacies between them that Brian’s father disliked.

  “Don’t say ‘shut up’ to the boy,” Don said.

  “Yes, it will stunt my growth, Mother.”

  “I just want some peace,” Uncle Arthur said. He put his hand out, still holding a large ear of corn, and patted Brian’s hand with his wrist, the corncob waving above like a sword. “Peace.”

  “Numbers,” Don said, “are cold but necessary.”

  Did he expect his wife to say, “Shut up, darling,” in her special Shut-up-darling voice?

  “Like men,” she said instead.

  “Cold but necessary,” Daphne chimed in. “Like ice cream.”

  “Or shrimp cocktail,” said Laurel.

  “Or beer,” said Arthur.

  Don said, “Damn it.” He pushed his plate away.

  “Well, one cold thing I detest is coffee,” Sally said. “And cold coffee is not at all necessary.” She and Paula took the plates off the table and retreated into the kitchen to get the coffee and dessert. Brian heard cups rattling and quiet laughter. He wanted to join them, to also escape the two pontificating men and the merciless twins. But he sat, paralyzed as he so often was by his father’s displeasure.

  “The ocean,” he said after a while.

  They all looked at him.

  “Cold,” he said. “But necessary.”

  FLAGRA´TION. n.s. [flagro, Latin.] Burning.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  Laurel and Daphne had always argued about something. They argued out of habit—bored, lackadaisical arguments that had the slow, fated rhythm of playing Solitaire. Until Daphne retreated in a huff.

  “If you do it bit by bit, you tan instead of burning,” Laurel said. It was a hot day at the end of June and they had just finished their junior year of high school. Laurel was lying on her stomach on a beach towel in the backyard. The sun beat down on her, on her legs, on her head. She was wearing a bikini, but she had undone the strap of the top so there would be no tan line. Daphne was under a tree, fully dressed, hugging her knees. Laurel waited for her to say that they both always got as red as lobsters, so why bother.

  Silence.

  It wasn’t like her sister not to rise to the bait.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” Laurel sat up. “What’s the matter?”

  Daphne shrugged, slightly, and said nothing.

  And Laurel knew right then. She knew.

  “Oh.” She said it softly.

  Daphne didn’t cry, though she looked like she wanted to. She just sat, immobile. Not statue-immobile, but dead-fish-immobile, roadkill.

  “But you love him,” Laurel said. “So it’s a wonderful thing. Right?”

  “I guess so.” Her voice was barely audible.

  “Oh, come on, it’s 1970, you lost your vir
ginity, it’s not like the old days. I can’t believe you beat me to it. I’m the oldest! I’m supposed to go first!”

  That worked. “For once!” Daphne laughed. “You don’t think it’s wrong?” she asked a minute later. Laurel thought, If you feel so awful, maybe I do think it’s wrong, but she said, “Of course not. It’s not the Middle Ages.”

  “I feel shitty, though. Why?”

  “Because you’re a big old slut with big old privities!” Laurel said. That made Daphne laugh again, and they went inside to fix sandwiches for lunch. But Laurel thought, Yeah, why? Why do you feel shitty? She had slept with her boyfriend months ago. It was such a relief to get it over with. She hadn’t told Daphne, and Daphne hadn’t guessed. Because I didn’t mope and posture like Sarah Bernhardt, Laurel thought.

  “Your life is very dramatic,” she said to Daphne.

  Daphne sighed. Dramatically.

  CITE´SS. n.s. [from cit.] A city woman. A word peculiar to Dryden.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  The twins went to separate colleges for their first year, but they found they did not like being in separate small liberal arts schools in small, icy communities, and they both transferred to Pomona, a small liberal arts school in a small, sunny community. After graduation, they hung around Los Angeles for a couple of years waitressing, then decided it was finally time to come home. They agreed that by “home” they did not mean Larchmont; they meant New York City, home to all.

  They couldn’t afford the West Village, and they wouldn’t consider the Upper West Side, home of recently graduated Columbia students and the elderly. The Upper East Side was not even a passing thought. They had one friend who lived in the West Forties, an eccentric actress who spent all her time with drag queens. Otherwise, everyone they knew lived below Fourteenth Street.

  But by the time they got to the last apartment of the day—“the dump finale,” as Daphne put it—and hauled themselves up the four flights of stairs covered in worn green linoleum, the banister sturdy and thick with a century of layers of darker green paint, Laurel was longing to share a boxy postwar studio with ten stewardesses on York Avenue. The East Village was grimy and ominous. The apartments they’d seen were more grimy and more ominous still. She was so tired that the stairway they were on now seemed the grimiest and most ominous of all, though it wasn’t, it was just green. Dogs barked from behind doors. A couple fought in Spanish. The smell of cooking here, the smell of wine there. The landlady had ankles as thick as tree trunks and wheezed on each landing as she led them skyward. Laurel thought of carrying groceries up the steps. What if you forgot toilet paper?