The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  But as Laurel watched her belly grow rounder, she also began to notice a difference in the phone calls from her sister. While Laurel lolled in nauseated lethargy on the living room couch, Daphne was working harder than ever. Laurel noticed that as she faded from the world into a physical and mental lassitude she had not believed possible without the aid of quaaludes, Daphne burned with the vivid fires of ambition and industry.

  Daphne was finding more and more success, too. Laurel knew what was coming as soon as she picked up the phone and heard her sister’s voice: the exultation, the self-doubt, the need. The excitement and gratification that came with her success did not appear to satisfy her for more than a minute. Success seemed only to stimulate her craving for success.

  She was a clever writer, and people seemed to love to be scolded about grammar. Daphne was becoming the Miss Manners of modern speech, examining a new word usage or a neologism like an exacting governess judging the curtsies of her charges. She was serious about her writing, more serious than was good for the column, in Laurel’s opinion. It could have used a little levity, real levity, less sarcasm and sniffy superiority. But Daphne was serious about every word she wrote, as well as the fact that she wrote them. Kee-riste, Laurel thought sometimes, remembering Uncle Don and the collection of words in the childhood notebook.

  “Laurel, Laurel, guess what?” Daphne on the phone, breathless with importance.

  Laurel could not guess what, only that the what was something good, a bigger assignment or a letter to the editor praising something Daphne had already written, from someone famous, perhaps.

  “What?” she said. “Tell me.”

  “Vogue!”

  “Vogue? Like, the magazine?” She tried to imagine her sister, who still favored a somewhat ratty punk look, in a big color spread in Vogue.

  “Vogue like the magazine! They want me to do a piece on fashionable words. Not words about fashion, but words or phrases that are fashionable right now. I have been asked to write for Vogue! They pay a dollar a word! They want a thousand words! I’ll be a thousandaire!”

  Laurel felt the quick needle of envy. So childish. And she had so rarely felt envious of Daphne as a child. Pull that ugly, germy needle from your sisterly arm, Laurel, for heaven’s sake! she thought.

  Without too much effort, she let her happiness at Daphne’s success wash over her. Daphne deserved this success. She worked hard, coming home late from her job to sit at the typewriter and bang out warnings about the linguistic apocalypse. Oh shut up, Laurel, you’re getting as sarcastic as The People’s Pedant. She listened with real sympathy then to Daphne’s exhausted, worried, exalted lament.

  Laurel, herself, was exhausted, too—exhausted, plain and simple. Most of her days were spent lying on the couch, staring up at the living room light fixture. It was an old round dish of frosted glass attached to the ceiling by an invisible mounting, reverse gravity, or possibly chewing gum. The light fixture had probably been there since 1929, when the building was put up. Laurel could see shadows inside it, the ghostly remains of flies and moths that had come for the bulb and stayed for eternity. Or at least until she asked the building’s super to bring a ladder so she could dust the small corpses out. The super was a kind man and would insist on doing it for her and would refuse any payment. But she did not call him. Every day she did not call him. The effort of calling him was too great. And if she did somehow find the energy to call him and he did bring his ladder and climb it and clean out the deceased, what would be left for her to look at? This was her life now, she couldn’t give it up. Contemplation of a filthy frosted glass ceiling light and its insect decay was time-consuming and enervating, but it was hers.

  “I’m enervated,” she said after soothing and congratulating her sister. “I like that word because it sounds like it means the opposite of what it means.”

  “I’m going to think of you as languid,” Daphne said. “It’s more classical and dignified.”

  “I am the opposite of dignified. I’m wearing yellow overalls. I borrowed them from Alison. She had her baby six months ago. She has a closet full of maternity clothes in primary colors.”

  “What do you do all day?”

  “I pretend I’m not here.”

  “Well, can you think of any words for my piece?”

  “No, Daphne. I am a vegetable that is incubating a mammal. That’s all I can do, incubate. You can come uptown and watch me gestate, if you want. You could listen to the common folk speak their new dialect on the subway. It would be research.”

  “Can I show it to you when I’m done?”

  “Sure. You know another word I like? ‘Restive.’ It sounds like the opposite of what it means, too.”

  “If I ever get it done. What if I can’t finish it?”

  Laurel assured her she would finish. She always finished what she started.

  “But this is different. This is national. This is a big break for me.”

  Laurel affirmed that national was a good thing, different was a wonderful opportunity, a big break was a big break.

  “Yeah, I guess I’ll finish, but what if I don’t? And what if I do and it’s bad?”

  No, Laurel was sure it would not be bad. It would be good.

  “They could reject it…”

  Daphne went on for a while about the various ways she could fail in the composition of the article for Vogue. “And anyway, Vogue is a stupid fashion magazine. It’s true they print things by serious writers, like Alfred Kazin and Elizabeth Hardwick, I mean it’s pretty prestigious, but I don’t know if that’s the kind of prestige I really want, I mean I’m serious about what I write, but what if I can’t do it and they don’t like it…”

  Laurel turned her eyes from the ceiling light to her stomach, a buttercup prominence that rose in front of her, a hillock that blocked her view of her feet.

  “Okay, yes, it’s such a big break,” her sister was saying. “I mean, it’s Vogue, it’s really prestigious, they pay, it could lead to other things. You don’t think I’ll blow it, do you?”

  Laurel might have drifted a bit, drifted as in fallen asleep. She noticed that her sister was still talking but now sounded testy.

  “Why are you ignoring me? Why aren’t you helping me?”

  “Well, let’s see, fashionable words … People have started saying ‘asshole’ a lot more than they used to. ‘Douchebag,’ too, that’s quite à la mode.”

  “Thanks,” Daphne said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re welcome.” She hung up and resumed her examination of the light fixture. “Asshole” and “douchebag” really were much more commonly used than they had been when Daphne and Laurel were growing up. “Asshole,” she said out loud. What an awful word. She wondered if Daphne would hyphenate it. She should have asked.

  * * *

  Daphne examined her list of words. “State-of-the-art”? Not very sexy. “Stressed-out”? “Skanky”? “Multitasker”? They were contemporary words, they described much of contemporary life, but Vogue was not about contemporary life. It wasn’t about life at all. It was about a fantasy of a fantasy. Where would she find those fantasy words?

  People fantasize. We will go among the people, as our sister suggested. We will go on the subway, but we will notice that no one speaks on the subway. It is far too noisy. And they are all listening to their Walkmen. Is “Walkmen” the plural of “Walkman”? Or should it be “Walkmans”? A topic for a column. The day is not wasted! Since Daphne had begun writing, she noticed that she always felt she was falling behind. But it was not necessarily clear to her what exactly she was falling behind, which made it difficult to determine how she might catch up and pull ahead. Well, anyway, we have moved forward today, she told herself. But why are we always talking to ourselves in this manner? Has everything become fodder for our work? Are we more observant than we were when we were simply copyediting? Or are we self-consciously appropriating our own life? Are we no longer an authentic person? Do we care? Why are we thinking in the first-pe
rson plural?

  She exited the subway at Eighty-Sixth Street and wandered into a few stores before her visit to Laurel. The Foot Locker was crowded with young teenage boys and their mothers. Daphne pretended to examine the different sneakers.

  “These are tight,” a boy of about eleven said. He was wearing bright orange sneakers.

  “Should we try a bigger size?” his mother said.

  “Mom.” He bestowed on her a look of scorn.

  “But if they’re too tight…”

  “It means cool, Mom. They’re cool, okay?”

  Daphne walked happily toward Riverside Drive. She loved the word “tight.” It meant so many different things that were all somehow the same thing. Tight muscles. Tight with money. Money is tight. The organization is tight and well run. Tight friends. Tight-lipped. Hold tight. Sleep tight. Of course it also meant tipsy, which made less sense. And apparently it meant cool, too. Better than “groovy,” anyway, a word she shamefully remembered using freely. A kind of progress, then, in the world.

  The apartment was in a big prewar building that had just gone co-op the year before. The lobby was decorated with old cracked tiles. The elevator had to be run by an elevator man who closed the gate and pulled the lever to start an ascent or descent just like an elevator man in a department store in a black-and-white movie. All of the elevator men who worked there were related, looked alike, and never gave up hope for the Mets. They recognized Daphne. She was the one with the flat belly.

  Laurel answered the door looking … Daphne struggled for a word to describe her sister. Certainly not “tight.” “Slatternly,” perhaps.

  “No one says anything on the subway, so that was no help,” Daphne said. She sat down in one of Laurel’s chairs, a Bauhaus chair, Larry had once explained, a contraption of straps and cowhide that was surprisingly comfortable. Laurel resumed her beached-whale posture on the couch. She was wearing the alarming bright yellow overalls she had described before.

  “Do you go out in those?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow.”

  “I just go to Fairway to buy avocados. That’s all I can eat. You know, if you’re really looking for fashionable words, that’s where you should go. Food is all anyone talks about. All our friends. It’s nauseating. Couscous. Kiwi fruit…”

  Daphne had jumped to her feet. “My god, Laurel!” She raised her hands toward the ceiling. “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! My sister is a genius!”

  “Radicchio?”

  “Laurel! You have saved my life!”

  “Fraises du bois, fucking frisée, beurre fucking blanc. Is there nothing else to talk about?”

  Daphne embraced her sunshine-yellow, beached-whale sister. “No! There is nothing else to talk about! The piece is writing itself.”

  “Crostatas and crumbles and croissants,” Laurel said with disgust. “Well, not croissants so much anymore. Arugula, though. I thought people were saying rugelach. Fiddlehead ferns. Feh.”

  “You are such a good sister. You’re a genius! And I have the same genes! I am so lucky. Yes, of course, it’s all food. Fashion is food. Food is fashion. I have to go write my piece now! Why didn’t I think of this? Because I didn’t have to because you are a genius.”

  “Because you are not sick to your stomach every time someone extolls the virtues of raspberry vinegar.”

  Daphne squeezed onto the couch, kissed her sister’s forehead, and offered to get her a cracker.

  “Seafood sausage,” Laurel said. “Now, that is a disgusting concept. They’re white and pallid. And fishy. And blueberry mayonnaise … Oh god … Excuse me.” She pushed Daphne aside, got up, and disappeared down the hall, presumably to vomit in one of the bathrooms. Daphne envied her the bathrooms. Two bathrooms. Two bedrooms. A maid’s room. A dining room. A living room. A front hall, for god’s sake. While Daphne still lived in their little tenement walk-up. As soon as Michael finished his residency, they would be able to afford something better. Though she would never want to live on the Upper West Side. Maybe Tribeca, if she could figure out exactly where it was.

  Laurel returned and resumed her position on the couch. “I know I should exercise. Do you think that was exercise?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Good. Oh!” she called as Daphne left the apartment. “Sushi! And cheese! People talk about cheese a lot, right? Goat cheese. Not Brie. Brie is passé.”

  * * *

  To celebrate the imminent arrival of the first grandchild, Sally and Arthur decided to hold a family brunch.

  “Just like the old days,” Sally told Laurel on the phone. “Your aunt and uncle will come. Brian will come. And the best part is, you won’t have to move. We will all come to you, and we’ll bring everything with us.”

  “You don’t have to import bagels and lox,” Laurel said. “This is the epicenter of the bagel and lox trade.”

  “Let me spoil you, honey.”

  Arthur got on the phone. “Let your mother spoil you.”

  “Spoil you with second-rate suburban smoked salmon and soft suburban bagels,” Daphne said when her sister told her about the brunch. She was deep into her piece about fashionable food, none of which originated in Westchester. “Please,” she added. “Pleeaase don’t make me come.”

  “Oh no, you can’t blow this off and leave me and Larry alone with all of them.”

  The subways, Daphne said, the dreary conversation, pompous Don and snarling Brian, Paula and their mother whispering in the kitchen … “Spare me,” she said. “Please, oh please, spare me. This will take up my whole day. It will be so boring and so time-consuming. I have so much work.”

  “We always do this together,” Laurel said. She was shocked. How could there be a family get-together without Daphne? How could Daphne even consider ditching this brunch, ditching her family, ditching Laurel?

  “You can’t do this, Daphne. It’s against the rules of nature. And it’s just shitty. To me.”

  “They don’t need me,” Daphne said. “It’s not me they’re celebrating. I’m not pregnant.”

  Laurel had been silent, wounded. And furious. That lousy little workaholic sister of hers, deserting her. “You’re leaving me with the weight of Larchmont on my weary, pregnant shoulders. You should be ashamed!”

  “Your shoulders aren’t pregnant. You should be ashamed!”

  Then Daphne gave a little cough. It was what she had always done as a child when she made up an excuse. Cough. “I’m on deadline,” she said. “Deadline, okay?”

  Laurel said, “Oh, fine,” and slammed down the phone. But it was not fine. And they both knew it.

  * * *

  Uncle Don drove the family in from Westchester. While he tried to park, Laurel’s parents and Aunt Paula bustled in the kitchen, and Brian slouched toward the couch, listening to his Walkman. Laurel waved at him. He waved back.

  “I brought extra cream cheese,” Sally said. She carried in a platter piled with pale, puffy bagels. “It’s whipped. Temp Tee! Daphne always liked Temp Tee.”

  “She liked the name, Mom. But thank you, that was very thoughtful.”

  “Well, I love whipped cream cheese,” Larry said. “Less fat.”

  “Anyway,” Laurel said, “Daphne and Michael can’t come.”

  Sally looked alarmed. “Why not?”

  “Brian, take that headset off,” Don said as he walked in. “This minute.”

  “She has a deadline.”

  “Brian!” Don was tapping his son’s head with his car key, a long, thin Volvo key. The Citroën was long gone.

  “A deadline? I’ll give her a deadline,” Arthur was saying. “We drove all the way in and she can’t come uptown to see her family?”

  “You come in all the time.”

  “Well, your aunt and uncle don’t. We went to a lot of trouble. Your aunt made her coffee cake.”

  “Physical abuse is not necessary,” Brian said, loudly, the way one does with headphones on. He slapped his father’s hand away.

  Don lifted them fro
m his son’s head. “Turn off the music and behave.”

  Poor Brian, hauled into the city on a Sunday to sit miserably among his kin. Maybe Laurel and Brian could sneak out and go have brunch with Daphne downtown.

  “I don’t understand her,” Arthur said.

  Laurel thought, She’s selfish and inconsiderate. What’s to understand?

  Larry said, “A deadline is a deadline. I guess.”

  The components of the word “deadline” struck her. A line that is dead. No, a line that you must not cross or you will be shot dead. From prisons in the Civil War. Was that right? She would look it up later.

  They settled at the table, and Laurel, who had veered recently into a ravenous stage in her pregnancy, slathered cream cheese and piled salmon and red onions and capers and tomatoes on a bagel, admiring all the colors. “I’m eating for two,” she said.

  Brian looked at her with sudden interest. “You’re having twins?”

  “No, Brian. Me and the baby. That makes two.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Genius,” Uncle Don said.

  “Fraternal twins run in families,” Brian said, glaring at his father. “But identical twins don’t, that’s all. So it would be interesting.”

  Laurel had a sudden desire for scrambled eggs. Larry offered to make her some.

  “Don’t take advantage of him,” Sally said, handing her the platter of salmon. “Eat this.”

  “You know a lot about twins,” Laurel said to Brian.

  “I know a lot about a lot of things.”

  She remembered Brian putting pebbles in his mouth and chanting, “China, china, china.” He had acquired a certain snarling high school dignity these days, and she tried to smile at him in a way that showed her sympathy, but he didn’t glance in her direction.

  “Now, this business about Daphne,” Uncle Don said. “I’m surprised she didn’t join us, I really am. Is there some sort of rift between you?” he asked almost hopefully.