The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  The twins nodded, though they were far more interested in the etymology than they were about seeing the delicate little bird with its spotted chest or hearing it singing, “Teacher, teacher, teacher.”

  But Brian had discovered the key to their attention. A cloud in the sky was of real interest to them only when they were told it was a cumulus cloud and that “cumulus” meant heap in Latin. In their way, Laurel and Daphne were as fatuous as his father, he had realized.

  He wondered what he could say to them now that would impress them. Nothing. They would smile and pat his head and say how grown-up he was, but he would always be little Brian to them. Daphne was particularly insufferable these days, or he was envious of her success, or both. Laurel had retreated into perfect motherhood, which was its own insufferable showing off, he thought.

  He stopped and watched some pigeons at the base of a trash can. How beautiful they were, iridescent in the clear sunlight. They were overlooked or considered vermin in most places, but it didn’t seem to bother them. They puffed out their breasts and cooed like doves. Brian searched his pockets for crumbs. He usually carried dog treats in case he met a hostile dog on his birding expeditions, but there was nothing in these clean jeans.

  “Sorry,” he said to the pigeons.

  “Coo, coo, coo,” they replied. And Brian smiled and thought families were not so bad. They were like these pigeons, cooing and puffing up and scrapping for crumbs. Like every other kind of creature. He thought of throwing dog biscuits at his cousins to calm them, tame them, make them his friends, and that made him laugh and enter the house in a better mood.

  He said all his hellos to the older generation, answered their questions about where he was in his graduate studies, yes, still another year or so, yes, he studied birds, their mitochondrial DNA, actually, no, it was the DNA that passed through the mother, blah, blah, blah, and blah.

  He saw Michael and Larry—too deep in conversation to interrupt—but he did not see Daphne or Laurel anywhere. He wandered around the backyard, idly looking up at the trees for a flutter of some kind, then sat on a chair that had been set out and waited, as if he were in the field, for something to happen.

  Which it did. A beautiful girl walked toward him, little Prudence clasping one hand, Charlotte the other. The girl looked familiar, a dramatic sort of person, a mass of dark wavy hair, pale skin, her cheeks flushed pink in the heat.

  “You look familiar,” he said after the little girls crawled into his lap. “Not you two. Your keeper.”

  She stared at him a moment, then said, “Flower girl.”

  He stared back at her. The shiny black ringlets, the big resolute eyes, the clouds of tulle. The defiance. She smiled grimly at him, as if to say, Yep, that one.

  “The little girl in the fluffy Gone With the Wind dress?”

  “Yep, that one.”

  “You’ve grown up,” he said.

  “I’ll get over it.”

  She sat down on the grass. The girls climbed down from his lap and began to try to do cartwheels. She sighed heavily.

  Brian said, “You sound miserable.”

  “I am. I come from a broken home.”

  “Really? Me, too! Those are my parents over there. Cordially chatting with each other.”

  He could think of no other words for the hypocritical pantomime he was seeing.

  “They don’t look divorced.”

  “It’s a secret.”

  The flower girl laughed.

  “I find them nauseating,” he said.

  The flower girl said, “Aren’t you too old to find your parents nauseating?”

  “Never too old for that.”

  He was still marveling at the transformation of the flouncing flower girl into this person, this human. “I remember you so well from the wedding,” he said.

  She grinned. “I made quite an impression, didn’t I?”

  They were both watching his parents now. Cordially chatting with Arthur and Sally.

  “Do you think they’re secretly divorced, too? Arthur and Sally?” the flower girl asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Did your parents bribe you with stuff?”

  “No. I actually am too old for that.”

  “That’s too bad. I think bribery is fair in my case. It’s very inconvenient to have divorced parents when you’re growing up. They’re trying to make up for that, and I appreciate it.”

  That sounded sensible to Brian, profound almost. He wondered if he could still put in his claim.

  * * *

  Daphne could see her father through the window of the small room that had once been a screened-in porch and then became the den filled with bookshelves. He was leaning back in his armchair, his eyes closed.

  “Daddy?” She knocked at the open door. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m fine. Just taking a break. Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “How much you girls loved this room, as a matter of fact.”

  “We did.”

  The books on the shelves were so familiar, the spines faded, the titles in worn, unreadable gold letters. She could feel herself, on her toes, reaching up for a book, feel the coarse cloth of the binding; the weight of the book as she tipped it toward her, sliding it from the high shelf. She wondered if her notebooks were still upstairs in the bedroom she’d shared with Laurel. She went to the dictionary on its stand, reached over, and let the pages riffle past her fingers.

  “You and your sister loved each other so much. I can still see you two hunched over that dictionary together.”

  Daphne let her index finger pop down the niches in the side of the dictionary.

  “A sister is always a sister,” she said.

  She and Laurel had ceremoniously handed their mother their gift, a cashmere sweater and a bunch of days at a day spa. There was a speech printed out, the paper folded in a deep, careful crease. They had written it together, over the phone. They unfolded it together. They read it in unison.

  “We love you, Mom,” they had said when the speech was finished. “Happy birthday!”

  They had spoken in the first-person plural. They had spoken together. Their mother had gazed at them with love and gratitude, and they had turned to each other with a sudden, mutual rush of love, an embrace, a tear.

  Then there was a birthday cake. It was a coconut cake, Sally’s favorite, and Happy Birthday Sally was written on top in beautiful pink-icing script. One candle for each decade. Sally had ordered the cake and poked each candle into the icing herself. Arthur carried it out of the kitchen and into the backyard, the candle flames tall in the still summer air. Sally looked first at Laurel, then at Daphne. She made a wish and blew out the candles.

  It was a wonderful party, Sally thought now, looking back, even if my wish did not come true.

  MO´RTUARY. n.s. [mortuaire, Fr. mortuarium, Latin.] A gift left by a man at his death to his parish church, for the recompence of his personal tythes and offerings not duly paid in his life-time.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  The dictionary is sprawled on its stand, open to pages 1072 and 1073—“Goat God” to “Godden” to “Goddess” to “Going.” Drawings of a “goatsucker” and a “goby” and a “godwit,” two birds and a spiny-backed fish. Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged. Unabridged except for the missing pages 75–76, on which would have been found the word “altar.”

  The altar. The dictionary dais Arthur had drawn forth from the trunk of the Buick so many years ago. There it was, holy platform for the holy book of words. Whether you were “God-fearing” or you were “godforsaken,” the dictionary’s altar remained in the little den lined with big books, and the dictionary was open upon it. God of love, god of war, god of wine, you are all there on the silky pages, though you are lowercase. Goddess of Liberty, Goddess of Mercy, Goddess of Reason, you are all gathered together there, too, but you, somehow, have attaine
d the glory of the uppercase.

  But there is no god or God or goddess or Goddess, thought Laurel, spreading her palms on the sacred pages. Even the dictionary is arbitrary, trying to capture contingency, to enchain syllables, to lash the wind.

  Going, Daphne read over her sister’s shoulder. Departure.

  Their father was gone.

  * * *

  On the plane from Indianapolis to New York, Brian leaned against the window and thought about the last funeral he had attended. He had described it as the Great Jewish Weep ’n’ Eat to his mother, but she did not think it funny and he had realized instantly that neither did he. That was the funeral for his grandfather, a very old man. But Arthur was not a very old man. And Brian put his face down on the tray in front of him, buried his face in his sweater, and cried.

  It’s not the end of the world, his chair had said when Brian told him he had to go to New York.

  The end of the world was such an odd concept. The world ended for someone every day, every minute, probably every second. And still the world toddled along. Soon it really would end, in five billion years or so, if it didn’t crash into something first. But humans would be gone long before that. Everybody dies, and the world will die, too. So why worry?

  Everybody dies. But Uncle Arthur was not supposed to die yet.

  The twins once told him they remembered when Grandpa had two real legs. They remembered him driving a Cadillac. They said that Grandpa always knew which girl was which, even when his mind was long gone. That’s when Uncle Arthur said that when they were babies, when they were first born, their mother put nail polish on one baby’s toe so they could tell them apart.

  “Which baby?” the girls asked.

  “How should I know?” Uncle Arthur said with a laugh.

  Brian’s mother was waiting for him at the airport gate, smiling, waving, hugging. When had she become such an exuberant person? He patted her head and said, “Down, Fido.”

  Paula opened the trunk and Brian deposited his little rolling suitcase. She wished it had been a big suitcase, a steamer trunk, filled with clothes for every season.

  “I don’t understand why you live in Indianapolis,” she said.

  “No. Neither do I.”

  “I mean, I do. Of course I do. Academia, academia. You go where you must.”

  She burst into tears. Brian put his arms around her. “Oh, Arthur,” she said. “Arthur, Arthur, Arthur.”

  They drove through town, past their own house, toward the funeral home.

  She stopped at a red light and turned to look, again, at Brian. What a fuss he used to make as a small child, how withdrawn he became as an adolescent, and how quickly and thoroughly he had moved away as soon as he could. But she only had to hear his voice to feel as close to him as ever. Don had been jealous, of course, and thrown an occasional bitter professional diagnosis her way because of that. But that was long ago. Don had mellowed, or she had, or both most likely. And now Arthur’s sudden heart attack had put everything and everyone in a different light.

  She had felt a deep family love for Arthur for what seemed like her entire life. The tension between him and Don was noticeable even the first time she met Arthur at a French restaurant. She had duck, she could remember that clearly, duck à l’orange, delicious. Sally was there. They wore Stevenson buttons. Or was that another dinner? Arthur said, “Welcome,” and that’s all it took for Paula to feel at home with him. Sally took her hand and shook it in a hearty, boyish manner, and Paula was at ease with her, too. They made people feel at ease, which was just as well with those two precocious wild things for daughters. Maybe that was what drove Don crazy about his brother, how at ease Arthur made everyone feel. She knew what drove Arthur crazy about Don—Don. He was like a snarling cur around Arthur. Well, the girls paid Don back tenfold, that’s for sure.

  Paula wiped tears away with the back of her hand. She had been twenty when she met Arthur, younger than her son was now, how odd. Time was odd.

  Brian smiled at her and said, “Green light, Mom.”

  * * *

  Neither daughter was able to speak at their father’s funeral. Their husbands read what they had to say while Daphne and Laurel wept. Sally was silent, dry-eyed, shocked. At the house that evening, Paula sat beside Sally, patting her hand. Daphne watched them and thought how long they had known each other and tried to remember what they always whispered and laughed about in the kitchen during those Sunday family get-togethers. She had eavesdropped—they had seemed to have so much fun in there—but the conversation turned out to be about nothing, about vacuuming dog hair, about the ladies’ room at the courthouse, about politics, about the weather, about a New Yorker cartoon—about all the things everyone spoke of, yet it had been so intimate an exchange. They had spoken of nothing and everything in such mirthful tones. Privity, Daphne thought. That’s what it was. Two people, separate and private if only for a moment, communicating. Like sisters. Like twins.

  She watched Michael pile his plate with what she thought of as Dead Jew Food. Whitefish salad. Slightly stale rye bread. Herring. It was raining outside and every window was closed against the wet, cold air. She saw her father, or the legs of her father stretched out, visible in the doorway of his den, but they weren’t his legs at all. They were Don’s.

  She stood in the doorway and watched him. One hand stroked the tall pile of New Yorker magazines, the other covered his eyes. His body shook with sobs. Daphne approached him hesitantly, but he looked up and leaped to his feet, his hand knocking New Yorkers to the floor. Daphne bent to pick them up.

  “He was a good man,” Don said, a voice behind her, a voice too late for her father, but welcomed by her.

  “Yes, he was.”

  They stood facing each other. Daphne clutched the magazines against her chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  Quiet filled the little room of books, but murmurs and bits of conversation floated in from other parts of the house. They’re just words, Daphne thought. Meaningless words that don’t change anything. My father is dead.

  There were no words for what she felt, the depth of the emptiness, the breadth of the emptiness, the emptiness of the emptiness. Words could only cloak what she felt. Words were supposed to illuminate and clarify. Words were meant to communicate information and feelings from one person to another. But today words stood numb and in the way. We are alone, Daphne thought, words can’t change that. And our lives are as meaningless as a single, lonely letter, an s with just a hiss that meant nothing, a p sputtered, a t of staccato disapproval. Today, every word seemed wooden, leaden, no distinction between wood and lead, just inanimate weight.

  “Sometimes I hate words,” she said. But Uncle Don had already left the room, and the sentence fell in the woods with no one but Daphne to hear it.

  Laurel, too, found herself drawn to the study, the room Uncle Don had made fun of, the little library room that had once been a screened-in porch with spiders in the corner, her father’s proud refuge, her playground with her sister and their pet words. She saw Daphne standing by their father’s armchair, clutching some old magazines, looking lost—literally lost, as if she had taken a wrong turn in a strange forest. Laurel opened her arms, and Daphne walked into the embrace.

  For a long time, neither of them could have said how long, they stood in the little library and held each other and wept, loud gasping sobs that were so loud and gasping they brought others to the door. But whoever looked in at the two sisters looked away, quickly, and moved on.

  For a week, the traditional Jewish time of mourning, Daphne and Laurel spent each evening at the house they’d grown up in. On some nights, their husbands joined them and stood by the fireplace sipping Arthur’s middling scotch and speaking in hushed voices. On two nights, the children came and played Monopoly in the kitchen. On all the seven nights, Sally occupied the chair in the living room that had been Arthur’s favorite. She didn’t want to see it empty. She received the condo
lences of her friends and family with a wan smile. She assumed she would die soon, too, though she did not speak of that. She did not want to be reassured.

  On the seventh night, after the herring and egg salad and roast beef sandwiches had been distributed to visitors or put away in the refrigerator and all the glasses and cups had been washed and put away, Laurel and Daphne dried their hands on the dish towel they had brought back from a trip to France years ago. The Eiffel Tower, wet and wrinkled, was smoothed out and hung above the sink. They remembered a nightmarish hitchhiking episode in Provence they’d never divulged to their parents and marveled at their youthful insanity, then split a brownie and joined their mother, Michael, and Larry in the living room.

  “If you drove to Bridgeport you could take the ferry to Port Jefferson and drive home via Long Island,” Larry was saying.

  “That would take, what, three extra hours?” Michael said, looking at his watch as if that would tell him. “But the ferry would be beautiful.”

  “Cold. But beautiful.”

  Cold but necessary, Daphne thought. Like numbers.

  “Cold but necessary,” Laurel said.

  “Like numbers,” said Sally. And finally, after more than a week since Arthur’s death, she began to cry.

  * * *

  After what seemed like hours but was probably just a minute or two, Sally stopped. She accepted a cup of tea, pouring whiskey into it. She said, “He loved you girls so much. You and your words.” She smiled. She said, “Oh, Arthur.” She shook her head. She said, “When he would chase you, when you said, ‘There are two of us’? And chanted it? And he would chase you all around the house?”

  Yes, Daddy and his numbers allergy. They had so much fun teasing him. They loved the books he brought home. They remembered the day the dictionary arrived. It was like a sibling, they said. Like a little brother. Or sister. It was precious and it was part of him and always would be.