The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  There were four locks on the door, one of them a long iron rod with one end fitted into a metal plate in the floor. On the windows were metal accordion fences, also locked. Outside, a rickety fire escape.

  But beyond the fire escape, Laurel saw rooftops and the steeple of a church. There was a bleary skylight that probably leaked. Gray light filled the three little rooms. The church bells rang. The stove was so old it looked like something from a silent movie. Laurel breathed in the air that smelled empty and full, like dust and new paint.

  “It’s like a garret,” she said. “In Paris.”

  “It is a garret,” Daphne said.

  Our very own garret, Laurel thought.

  “Our very own garret,” Daphne said.

  Was there anyone who understood anyone else as well as she and Daphne understood each other? There was no need to explain or justify wanting to climb linoleum M. C. Escher stairs to live in a tenement their grandparents had probably moved out of the minute they could, because Daphne already understood. Understanding is love, Laurel thought. She put her arm around her sister.

  “Aren’t we lucky?” Daphne said. “Together in a garret.”

  They stood quietly enjoying the dim light of autumn through unwashed windows.

  Whenever the wind blew outside, Laurel and Daphne could hear it whistling—like a phantom looking for its phantom dog, Laurel said. They named the phantom dog Mariah.

  You walked through the front door with all its rattling locks and bolts into a kitchen that also served as living and dining room. Their mother asked why they didn’t share a bedroom and turn the second room into a living room.

  “Why don’t we just move into a studio and be done with it? Sleep in the same bed? Come on, Mom. We’re twins, but we’re not babies anymore.”

  They did end up curled side by side sometimes, asleep in one bed, especially when it was cold, but there was no need to tell their mother that.

  They bought a cheap futon couch, painted a wooden crate white to use as a coffee table, and found a beautiful oak chair on the street. By the window, between the ancient stove and the half refrigerator, they squeezed a small table they found at an antique store on Fourth Avenue that, they suspected, sold castoffs from the Goodwill. At the actual Goodwill Daphne picked up another chair with a tall ladder back, a shredded rush seat, and a small combination lock forever attached to one of its rungs.

  “I thought it important to accessorize,” Daphne said, spinning the lock’s dial fondly. “And maybe someday we’ll figure out the combination.”

  “And free the chair.”

  “And it will turn into a prince.”

  “Two princes.”

  “Two princes. And they’ll sit down on the futon and say, Where’s my breakfast, woman? And we’ll kick them down the stairs.”

  “And we’ll have to buy a new chair.”

  Daphne stretched out to the extent possible on the futon and said, “Where’s my breakfast, woman?”

  Laurel made some coffee, the only thing she knew how to make. They drank silently, Daphne still on the futon, Laurel on the ornately carved wooden chair. They listened to the wind called Maria, then the thump of large raindrops on the skylight, which, it turned out, did not leak at all.

  * * *

  Sally and Arthur came to the apartment just one time, an easy drive, the car redolent with roast chicken Sally was bringing for her daughters.

  “Why do you have to live in such a dangerous neighborhood?” she asked them at the door. “It’s a jungle. A concrete jungle.”

  “I forbid it,” their father said. “I absolutely forbid it.”

  “Welcome. Come in and sit down,” Daphne said.

  Arthur and Sally sat with exaggerated discomfort on the futon. “You’ve already been robbed twice,” Sally said. “What are you waiting for? Three’s a charm?”

  “They took a speaker, but they left the other. Would you like some music?”

  “Oh for Pete’s sake,” Sally said.

  “They couldn’t carry everything,” Laurel said.

  “That’s the upside of living on the fifth floor,” said Daphne.

  “And it keeps our weight down.”

  The girls put the chicken in the refrigerator and convinced their parents to return to the street to eat spicy scraps of someone else’s chicken in a questionable sauce while out-of-season Christmas lights blinked around them. After the visit, during the exit of which a wino tried to wash their windshield with a filthy rag before collapsing facedown on the hood of the car, Sally decided she would not return.

  “Never, never, never,” she said as they waited for the drunken soul to roll off their car. “Never again.”

  “But we do have to keep checking on them,” Arthur said when they got home. “They live in Needle Park without the park.”

  She grunted her assent, then said, “But they are each other’s keepers. I always feel that is true.”

  Arthur was unwrapping a new cylinder of Rolaids. Indian food did not agree with him. “I forbade it,” he said. “I absolutely forbade it. You heard me.”

  Sometimes, when Sally thought of the two girls, she imagined two knights, each astride a muscled, prancing horse, each holding a lance, the lances crossed in solidarity. There was something chivalrous about the way the twins were with each other, she thought. “They’ll look out for each other, Arthur.”

  “They live in a slum.”

  “Together.”

  Arthur said “Hellhole,” threw some more Rolaids into his mouth, and got into bed. “I forbade it.”

  “Yes, you did,” Sally said in a soothing voice. “Yes, you did.”

  * * *

  All that remained missing from their lives as young New Yorkers was a job. Two jobs, ideally. For years, Laurel had secretly feared that she would end up supporting Daphne because Daphne refused to learn to type. She could too easily picture them, two old twins, their red hair faded into a mélange of pink, beige, and gray, Laurel typing away to earn a meager living, Daphne sitting at home complaining.

  Daphne used to watch Laurel practice her typing with affectionate pity, explaining that if you never learned this secretarial skill you could never be a secretary. Then she would sigh before turning back to whatever novel she was reading and murmur, “Oh, Laurel, what will we do with ourselves?”

  Laurel wanted to say that she did not know what “we” would do, that they were not shackled together like runaway convicts from the chain gang.

  But apparently she was wrong. For here she was, a temp typing words she did not even bother to read, while Daphne did not. What did Daphne do while Laurel was typing in one midtown office and then another? Daphne read the want ads looking for jobs that did not require typing.

  Such jobs were scarce, Daphne discovered. And those few that did not require typing so often required something else she did not have, like a master’s degree in economics.

  So it was with great joy that Laurel waved her sister off to an interview for a receptionist job, no typing or advanced degree required, at the East Village’s new alternative newspaper. DownTown was not as prestigious as The Village Voice or The SoHo Weekly News, but Daphne was willing to give it a try, she told her sister.

  Laurel, who could see fear and trepidation in her sister’s eyes, said, “Yes, see how you like the place. An interview is just an interview. No commitment.” Daphne had never been one to rush into new situations. That had always been Laurel’s task. She wished she could come with Daphne, push her through the door, cheer her on from the sidelines. But she could at least cheer her on from the garret.

  “Very Mary Tyler Moore,” she said.

  “To be unmarried and thirty in Minneapolis—every girl’s dream. I’ll be sure to wear a beret,” Daphne said, but she did seem cheered by the thought, and on the morning of the interview Laurel heard her singing the theme song in the shower.

  The hallway leading to the paper’s office was painted the yellow of old, urine-soaked newspaper. The top half o
f the door was mottled glass with the name DOWNTOWN on it in black letters. Daphne entered a room with an empty desk facing her. There was a telephone on it, a few chairs opposite it, and a closed door behind it. She sat down facing the empty desk, smiled at it in a way she hoped showed competence and intelligence, then sighed and slumped back and checked her watch. The interview was for eleven o’clock. It was 10:55.

  The room was the same color as the hallway. It had a hollow, chalky smell, the smell of abandonment, like a classroom after school has let out. She half expected a bell to ring and children to rush past her swinging their lunch boxes. She heard voices from the other side of the door, angry voices. Were they yelling at the previous applicant? Was the previous applicant yelling back? It was 11:10 now. Had they forgotten her appointment?

  There was a cigarette butt on the floor. She kicked it beneath her chair.

  It was 11:30. She had skipped breakfast because she was nervous. She needed a cup of coffee. And the cigarette butt on the floor reminded her that she was desperate for a cigarette. She put her hand into her purse and fumbled around, her eyes on the door, until she found the pack. It was empty.

  The phone on the desk rang. It rang and rang until Daphne could not stand it. She picked it up. “DownTown,” she said.

  “I need to talk to Richard Fucking Goldstein.”

  “He doesn’t fucking work here,” she said. She pushed open the door and yelled, “Doesn’t anyone answer the fucking phone around here?”

  She was hired immediately. The last receptionist had quit after one of the writers punched him in the face for saying Charles Mingus was more important than Charlie Parker.

  “You’ll end up running the joint,” Laurel said. “You’ll see.”

  They were on their way back from a celebratory dinner of Mexican food and margaritas.

  “Two incomes!” Daphne said. “We can have caviar tacos! Every night!”

  “Every other night,” Laurel said. “Because, you see, I quit my job today.”

  Daphne stopped and stared at her sister. Laurel looked away. Two thin young men shuffled past. They looked like winter saplings, she thought, sticks of skinny legs planted in big buckled boots.

  “You what?”

  Laurel watched a drunk weave his way toward them, zigzagging crazily from one side of the sidewalk to the other, his dog on its leash zigzagging patiently behind him.

  “I quit,” she said, sidestepping the drunk and his loyal dog.

  “You can’t do that,” Daphne said. “Why would you quit? No, you can’t, Laurel. N-O.”

  “I quit because I hate it. You were right. I never should have learned to type.”

  “Oh my god, oh my god.” Daphne was walking quickly now, her head bowed with worry. “It’s too much responsibility.”

  “We’ll be fine. I promise.”

  “What if I end up hating my job? And I quit? Then what? One of us has to earn some money. For god’s sake, Laurel.”

  “I promise I’ll get a new job, okay?” She said it in their private twin language, and Daphne calmed down.

  The truth was, Laurel already had a new job. She’d gotten it even before she quit typing. She wouldn’t start for a week, but for that week, she said nothing about it to her sister. When Daphne left for work in the morning, Laurel pretended to be asleep. When she returned, Laurel greeted her in a fog of marijuana smoke. She wasn’t sure why she held back. Partly it was easier not to tell Daphne, who would be contemptuous of what she was embarking on, which was teaching, bad enough, but teaching kindergarten, even worse, and teaching kindergarten at a private school. Private school! Daphne would say. The parents have to pay for teachers like you with no teaching credentials whatsoever? What a scam!

  Yes, there was the desire to put off her sister’s scorn for as long as possible. But more than that, oh, so much more than that, Laurel had to admit, was the guilty but acute pleasure she took in watching Daphne squirm.

  “I can’t keep this boat afloat alone,” Daphne kept saying. “Look at you! You’re a complete degenerate.”

  This was not the first time Laurel had held things back from her sister. She could sometimes feel herself clutching at the details of her life, keeping them for herself as long as possible—just little things that happened, an observation, a passing sensation, which she did not want to let go of. She had never minded sharing toys or clothes or candy with her sister the way some children, children like Brian, minded. But she didn’t want to share everything that befell her—or might befall her. She didn’t want it all to disappear into her sister’s existence. Was that selfish? The one person she might have asked was Daphne.

  Sometimes Daphne and Laurel still dressed identically. It was not economical—far better to swap clothes, effectively doubling their wardrobe. But Sally sometimes bought them matching jackets or scarves. She couldn’t help herself. Today, they were wearing the leather jackets their mother had given them for their birthday. And white jeans. Their red hair was bright even in the city sun, and people they passed glanced at them, some smiling, some puzzled. A woman not much older than they were hurried on the sidewalk, hauling a recalcitrant little boy beside her. He stared openmouthed at them. Daphne stuck her tongue out at the boy, and he scuttled after his mother.

  Laurel said, “Why would you do that to a child?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  They linked arms. The day was crisp, the limp city alive again, the summer smell of decay whisked away.

  “I like your jacket,” Laurel said.

  “My mother gave it to me.”

  They went into a deli and ordered blintzes.

  “Which is better, the way sour cream looks or tastes?” Daphne asked.

  “Tie.”

  Daphne thought about that as they ate, looking at the beautiful, shimmering sour cream, tasting it cool and smooth against the warm, buttery blintz. Could anything really be a tie? Was anything really equal to any other thing? She and Laurel were twins, eggs of a feather, so to speak, but were they tied? Tied together, yes. But tied?

  “‘Tie’ is a funny word,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” Laurel said, “I think all words are funny.”

  After a week of indolence, Laurel came home with a bag of new pencils and pens and an assignment book.

  “What’s all that for?”

  “You may call me Miss Laurel from now on. I got a job as a kindergarten teacher at a private school on the Upper West Side.”

  Daphne gave her a sharp look. She hated her sister’s secrets. “I hate this, Laurel. Why do you do this?”

  “Look, I meant to tell you earlier, but somehow I didn’t.”

  “Somehow? You sneaky snake of a sister. You’re a teacher?”

  “Oh, Daphne, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, it’s just—”

  But Daphne was raising her hand now, like a child in a classroom, waving it frantically. “Call on me, Miss Laurel! Call on me!”

  “The school was desperate.”

  “They must have been.” Daphne embraced her sister. “Miss Laurel, Miss Laurel! You need a bell. They’ll love you. You’ll be like Miss Crabtree in The Little Rascals. They’ll all have a crush on you. And then midgets will sneak into the class, but I can’t remember why, can you? Oh god, I’m so relieved.”

  “No, really, they were so desperate they went to the temp agency, then they asked me in for the interview two weeks ago—that’s only two weeks before school starts. I wonder what happened.”

  “Someone must have had a nervous breakdown. Or gone to jail.”

  “Or gotten pregnant.”

  “Don’t get pregnant, Miss Laurel. Just don’t. We can’t afford another mouth to feed.”

  * * *

  Funny to think of her sister as a teacher. Teachers were so old. Daphne thought of Mrs. Piper, the oldest teacher at their high school, who taught Latin and wore her hair in a bun. One day, it must have been the first day of sophomore year, when she and Laurel switched from Spanish to Latin, the twins w
ore their father’s pajama tops to school to protest something having to do with the dress code, she could no longer remember what. They had expected a proper pedantic scolding and a trip to the principal’s office from Mrs. Piper, who was famously strict. Instead, she seemed not to notice the large long-sleeved pajama tops. She clapped her hands with pleasure at their first names, their last name, and their twinship.

  “Daphne, the goddess who turned into a laurel tree! And Wolfe,” she said, smiling at them. She read to them from Plutarch—the story of Romulus and Remus—in Latin, then translated. When she read aloud, “‘We are told that they were named from ‘ruma,’ the Latin word for teat, because they were seen sucking the wild beast,’” the class began to snicker, and she clapped her hands again and said, “‘Nam risu inepto res ineptior nulla est!’ There is nothing more foolish than a foolish laugh! Catullus, canto thirty-nine. But no more Catullus, discipuli, until you have matured.”

  Of course, the twins went to the library immediately after class to look up Catullus, number thirty-nine. They knew a challenge when they heard one. It was a poem making fun of a man with a big shiny smile. Catullus said he obviously brushed his teeth with urine.

  Laurel stood at the sink, getting ready for her first day of teaching, brushing her teeth with Colgate.

  “Remember Mrs. Piper? Our first class?” Daphne said. “I wonder if any of your students will be wearing their father’s pajama tops.”

  “Oh, I forgot about that!”