The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  “I hear you, Daphne, and I’m going to mash them, and you have to boil them before you mash them. Right, Mom?”

  Sally said yes, you couldn’t mash raw potatoes, and even Daphne should know that, and she was sorry she had failed them as a mother.

  “She’s sorry she failed us as a mother because you think mashed potatoes are raw,” Laurel said to Daphne.

  * * *

  Their mother was in labor for twelve hours before the twins were born. Two nurses sat outside her hospital room playing cards. That was all Sally told them, except for how happy she had been.

  “And I was a surprise!” Daphne would say when she was little.

  “You’re still a surprise,” her mother would say, pulling her little body closer, kissing her forehead. But she had not been a surprise at all when she was born. Her parents had expected twins. Daphne understood that later: She was not the startling bonus, the icing on the cake, the cherry on top. She was the second child.

  Daphne wondered what life had been like for the two of them in that womb. Did they fight over scarce resources? Did they elbow each other out of the way, once they had elbows? Did they tenderly bump and find comfort in the other little thing that resembled a shrimp, then a dolphin, an identical dolphin? Something must have happened between them in those nine months. You can’t share a gestational sac for all that time without something going on.

  An egg splits into two eggs. Somehow, one becomes two, not by adding another but by separating. Two halves become two wholes. Daphne reflected on that when she was young. The logic was both elusive and obvious. Eggs were such lovely things, their shape, the smooth, cool shells that held so much in their perfect, fragile grip. Laurel, unlike her sister, had been afraid of eggs. She’d read that eggs sometimes have double yolks. Double yolks mean double embryos. Double embryos take up double the space inside the egg. There isn’t enough oxygen in the egg for both embryos. Usually, Laurel explained to anyone cooking or eating an egg, one of the embryos dies. Then it rots. It pollutes the egg environment. And then the other embryo dies. Laurel refused to acknowledge the difference between a fertilized and an unfertilized egg. Her sister ate eggs with abandon, said she felt an affinity for them. But for Laurel, the sight of a raw egg in a bowl had always made her queasy, the yolk quivering, a globe of coagulated yellow in trembling jellyfish-white.

  Now she stood in the East Village kitchen cracking a brown-shelled egg into a glass bowl. Daphne stood in the doorway, dropped her bag and her coat onto the floor, and opened her mouth in pantomime astonishment. “Eggs? I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

  Laurel cracked another egg into a bowl.

  “Is this some kind of aversion therapy?”

  Laurel wondered if she could split the yolk in two and turn it into a double embryo. She gingerly pulled the fork through the yolk. Of course the yolk broke. Egg whites were used as glue, weren’t they? She tapped on the jellied substance. Or was it paint? Or was that eggshells? Or was that a color of paint? “I’m practicing,” she said. “For when I have a boyfriend.”

  She broke another egg into the bowl, then another, and whipped them up with milk, salt, and pepper. She cooked them slowly, stirring them with a wooden spoon. They were a beautiful color. They were fluffy. She had made them herself.

  “You will have to eat them, though,” she said. “One can go only so far for love.”

  This was around the time Larry entered the picture.

  “It’s the cooking,” she said to her sister. “It’s like pheromones.”

  “Have you cooked anything for him yet?”

  “No, but I think he can see it in my eyes.”

  “The pheromones or the scrambled eggs?”

  “The womanly confidence and skills.” And she started to laugh. “Oh! I make myself laugh!” she said through tears of laughter. “Oh god, I’m funny.”

  Daphne was not laughing. “How did you find a boyfriend at my place of business and I did not?”

  “Why did you go home with an old poseur and not up to the roof like me?”

  Daphne had no answer. She knew that Laurel never would have gone home with Jon, though she didn’t know why not, and that she would never have gone up to the roof alone at night, or anytime. It never would have occurred to her. Who wanders up to the rooftops of buildings? She had never even thought of the building as having a roof.

  “He’s not that old,” she said. “I guess there’s no one for me to meet at your place of business. Even on the roof.”

  “There’s a sandbox on the roof.”

  “Is it Jewish?”

  Laurel served her the scrambled eggs, which were surprisingly good.

  * * *

  Laurel had stayed at Larry’s apartment a few times. It was enormous, almost empty of furniture, drafty, and had amazing views over the brownstones to the west.

  “It used to be a showroom. For furs, I think. Look, my family owns the building, okay? I work for my family business, and they own this building.”

  “It’s okay with me if your family’s rich, Larry.”

  “It is? Some people find it offensive.”

  “Someone’s bound to be rich. It’s not your fault.”

  They were lying in bed looking at the sunset on a Saturday evening. She kissed his head. His head had become something precious to her in the last few weeks. She loved the smell of his hair, the uneven white line of his part, the weight of his head, the view of his ears when he tucked his head beneath her chin and breathed openmouthed on her as he fell asleep.

  “Thank you for understanding,” he said.

  “Thank you for confiding in me.”

  On one very late night walking around, talking, they ended up almost in front of Laurel’s building, in front of the garret, which she and Daphne had begun calling the garrotte. It was as good a time as any, with Daphne asleep in her own room, and Laurel led him up the interminable stairway.

  “The garret!” he whispered. “At last.” He looked up at the skylight. He had been hoping for stars, but it was opaque with a century of grime. There were stars out there somewhere, though, he knew it.

  When he woke up the next morning, Laurel was already out of bed. He pulled his clothes on and went into the kitchen, which was also the living room.

  “Hello,” he said, and went to hug her.

  “Ach! No! Larry, it’s me.”

  “Oh. You.” He gave Daphne a hug anyway. A different sort of a hug.

  “She went out to buy food,” Daphne said. She handed him a cup of coffee. “There’s no milk. Do you take milk in your coffee? I use cream, but there’s no cream, either.”

  Larry said he liked black coffee and settled on the futon. He watched Daphne, trying to determine how she differed from her sister, because there was a difference. If they didn’t take you by surprise, by standing at the coffeepot with their back to you when you had not put your contact lenses in, there were differences. Daphne moved in shorter bursts. And as she stood staring back at him, she did not tap her foot the way Laurel always did.

  “What?” she said.

  “What? Nothing.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Good coffee.”

  “My speciality. My only culinary accomplishment, as a matter of fact.”

  Laurel came back with a great rattling of locks and an almost empty grocery bag. “Stay there,” she said. “I’ll make breakfast.” She threw The New York Times at him, and his contentment was so thorough, it made him uneasy.

  “Goodbye,” Daphne said, jiggling all the locks open. “Tootle-oo!”

  “It’s so early,” Larry said. “Don’t you want breakfast?”

  But Daphne had already closed the door and the locks were clicking back in place.

  “There,” said Laurel a few minutes later. She put the plate of bright, fluffy scrambled eggs on the little table.

  “Oh.” He stared at the eggs and looked sad.

  “No good?”

  “Well, it’s just my cholesterol.”
>
  Laurel got out a box of cereal.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting at the little table, his elbow on top of the half refrigerator. “Thank you for cooking them. I should have told you.”

  “Secrets, secrets, secrets. Your family has money, you don’t eat eggs … What else are you hiding from me?” She gave him a bowl of cereal and a spoon, then sat beside him, the plate of eggs and toast in front of her. She ate the toast, then absentmindedly took a forkful of egg.

  “Hey!” she said. “Eggs are delicious!”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I don’t eat eggs.”

  “No, me, either, but—”

  “I always thought there was something … carnal … about eggs.” She laughed. “Exactly the wrong word. I mean, I always thought they were so gooey and … primal! That’s the word I mean. But I wanted to make you a nice breakfast. And now I see the light! Eggs are delicious!”

  “Except for the cholesterol.”

  “I didn’t realize you have high cholesterol, or I—”

  “Well, I don’t. Yet.”

  “Because you don’t eat eggs? I don’t even believe all that cholesterol shit. They keep changing their minds.”

  “You overcame your egg disgust for me,” he said. He took her hand, a little buttery from the toast, and kissed it. He smacked his lips. “Butter,” he said softly. “God, one forgets.”

  * * *

  Once Laurel began eating eggs, she began cooking eggs in earnest. She scrambled them, boiled them, deviled them, and whipped them into soufflés. She made omelets and Scotch eggs and baked eggs. She soft-boiled eggs to perfection.

  “Converts,” Daphne said. “They’re so extreme.”

  Then Laurel bought an omelet pan.

  “How did you know such a thing exists?” Daphne asked one dark, rainy evening when she got home. “Where did you find it?”

  Laurel found it at Bloomingdale’s, where everyone found everything, she said.

  “And you’re humming. I come home from a hard day of possessive gerund insertion, and you’re cooking eggs in an omelet pan and humming?” Daphne threw her bag and then herself on the sofa. “Larry’s coming for dinner, I presume.”

  “He doesn’t eat eggs, you know that. Mr. Gravit is coming for dinner.”

  “Mr. Askew the headmaster? Here? Why?”

  “He’s been very sad,” Laurel said. “He’ll be here any minute.”

  “With the Assistant? Oh my god.” She got up and rummaged through a drawer in her bedroom until she found half, almost half, of a joint. “What is wrong with you, Laurel?” she said, offering her sister a hit. “Give a girl a little warning. Jesus. Askew and Assistant Askew here. What if he figures out we switched places? And he might shed on the furniture.”

  But Laurel continued stirring and whisking and slicing airy, earthy mushrooms as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about her inviting her peculiar boss for dinner. “The Assistant is with her mother. Who went home to her mother. Mr. Gravit is lonely and sad and hungry. I felt sorry for him. And I wanted to try my new pan.”

  Daphne sidled up to her sister and gently took the knife away, took Laurel’s hand in her free hand, led her to the futon, and sat her down. “Now look,” she said, waving the knife for emphasis. “Look, you don’t invite a man to dinner on the day his wife leaves him unless you want to fuck him, Laurel. Is that what you want to do with Mr. Gravit?”

  “Don’t be disgusting.”

  “Does he know you have a boyfriend? Does he know I’m here? That you live with a roommate? A roommate who is your twin sister?”

  “Well, no, it didn’t come up.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll bet something else came up.”

  “You are so disgusting. And his wife didn’t leave him. She just went to see her mother.”

  Daphne stuck the knife into the wooden crate they used as a coffee table, then watched it wobble. “Grow up, Laurel,” she said.

  “I only have six eggs. Do you think that’s enough?”

  “I have only six eggs.”

  “Daphne, no one says, ‘I have only six eggs.’ People say, ‘I only have six eggs.’”

  “You don’t only have eggs. You have milk. You have mushrooms. You have herbs.”

  “You have become such a pedant. Are six enough? They’re extra-large, but still.”

  “You’re a disgrace.”

  “I know what an adverb is and where it goes, for god’s sake. I, for example, am picking up a knife. I have only one sister at whom I am pointing it.”

  Gravit appeared at the door red-faced as well as disheveled. He was wearing his school clothes: a brown corduroy jacket and cuffed permanent-press khaki trousers, one of the cuffs partially turned down. His shirt was missing only one button, Laurel noted approvingly.

  “Don’t I know you?” he said to Daphne when they were introduced. “I’m sure we’ve met before.”

  Daphne couldn’t tell if he was in earnest. She said, “Possibly.”

  “So you’re something of grammarian,” he said when she told him she worked as a copy editor.

  “It’s an uphill battle. I’m sure it is for you, too.”

  “Sometimes it is,” he said. “But, you know, and forgive me for paraphrasing Dr. Johnson, but to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, ‘To enchain syllables is just the same as trying to lash the wind—pride unwilling to measure its desire by its strength.’ Pride unwilling to measure its desire by its strength. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Daphne didn’t like someone paraphrasing Dr. Johnson at her. She didn’t like the idea of herself as someone who enchained syllables, either.

  “I just correct copy. The way you correct a student’s essay. There’s nothing enchaining about it.”

  They were sitting facing each other over the crate, he on the sagging futon, Daphne on the wooden chair they’d found on the street.

  “Oh damn. That was obnoxious, wasn’t it?” he said with resignation. “I’m sorry. I’m often obnoxious. That’s where my daughter gets it from.”

  “Huh!” Daphne said, laughing.

  “You’ve met her, then?”

  Daphne shook her head. “Oh no. No, never.”

  “She’s the light of my life, as I like to say. She’s off with her mother. My wife’s father is sick and they went to New Hampshire to see him. One last time, I suppose. I would have gone, but he despises me. It was awfully nice of your sister to invite me here. I did not come empty-handed!” he said, smiling suddenly, reaching into his briefcase.

  Wine, Daphne thought happily. They rarely had enough money to splurge on a bottle of decent wine.

  He rummaged in the briefcase. “Here it is,” he said at last.

  There was a magician-like gesture, and he held up something squirming and white by the scruff of its neck.

  “A rabbit?”

  “It’s a kitty,” he said in a surprisingly childish voice. “I found it on the street on my way here.” He kissed its head. “A kitty cat.”

  A kitty cat that rose, miraculously, from a briefcase: a scrawny, mewling kitten deity. Gravit held the small god out to her in the chalice of his two cupped hands, smiled when she took it from him, uttered a soft, reverent “Kitty cat,” and stood up.

  “Now,” he said heartily. “What’s for dinner?”

  TO DISBRA´NCH. v.a. [dis and branch.] To separate or break off, as a branch from a tree.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  Larry’s parents lived in a large, rambling house in Greenwich built in the late nineteenth century. Laurel stood uneasily among the brocade and polished wood chairs, the scattering of ornate ticking clocks, the dark portraits of unsmiling children and small dogs. Larry’s family, Larry had warned her, was the kind one might have referred to as “Larry’s people” if one lived in a novel written in the previous century. Larry called them Angular Anglicans, though they were Episcopalians. But it sounded better, he said, and anyway they all did have white angular faces, all
those except the ones with red blotchy faces and red swollen noses, which came, he said mildly, from drinking too much.

  “You’re just trying to scare me,” Laurel said when Larry first described his “people.” “With terrible stereotypes.”

  And here she was at a party given by the Angular Anglicans, given for her, and she was unable to shake the stereotypes from her thoughts. She watched her own parents, blandly unconcerned as they talked to a man with a red nose and a woman with a bleached Connecticut beak. How she envied them. Not the Anglicans, who were stuck talking to Arthur and Sally, but Arthur and Sally. Laurel wondered if she would ever feel comfortable at a gathering of other human beings to whom she was not closely related. Then she remembered that these strange people of distilled courtesy and ease were soon to be her relatives. She saw Daphne across the room. She wondered if they could hide somewhere together. The linen closet. The greenhouse. Surely there was a greenhouse somewhere on the property. But no, no hiding. She squared her shoulders. She prepared to mingle.

  Daphne saw her sister square her shoulders, She actually squared her shoulders!, just as one of Larry’s ancient New England–y aunts bustled past and knocked Daphne’s arm. The drink in Daphne’s hand gave a shudder and spilled, cold on her skin. Drops darkened the rug. It was gin, clear as water, but it was not water. Should she get a towel and blot the spots from the rug? It was a beautiful rug, a silvery blue, very old, with the kind of worn spots that identified it as the cherished, threadbare possession of the rich rather than the cherished, threadbare possession of the poor.

  She swore under her breath and headed for the kitchen, downing what remained of her drink too quickly.

  The kitchen was full of attractive caterers and waiters and waitresses. Energetic young people who carried trays instead of standing on a stage. Perhaps, like Daphne, they preferred carrying a tray to acting on a stage. Perhaps they only went onstage when they could not get jobs waiting tables.

  “Excuse me, sorry, oh, sorry,” she said to the brave young people, realizing that however much of the gin she had spilled, a great deal too much had not been spilled and had been imbibed. By her. “Oops. Sorry. Just need some paper towels. I spilled my drink on the beautiful rug…”