The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  A particularly emaciated brave young woman said, “Oh! I’ll take care of that,” and ran off with a dish towel without asking where the spill was.

  “Darling!” a woman said when Daphne escaped to the lawn. “Where have you been hiding? What a bash this is.”

  “No, I’m the sister. Laurel’s inside.”

  The woman was stylishly dressed in ill-fitting clothes, as if she had lost a lot of weight recently or gotten the dress at a deep discount.

  “The sister! Of course.” She stepped back and ran her eyes down to Daphne’s shoes, then back to her carefully blown-out red hair. “Remarkable.”

  “Yes, it is,” Daphne said. She wanted a cigarette. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “Oh, I quit years ago.”

  “Oh, never say never!”

  The woman gave Daphne a pitying look, which Daphne tried to return.

  “Well, off I go,” the woman said. Her heels left a line of little holes behind her in the grass.

  There were eighteen of them at the long table. Laurel sat at one end, which Daphne chose to think of as the head. Larry sat at the foot. Daphne was at his left, which she knew was an honor.

  “‘How kind of you to let me come,’” she said.

  “Why are you talking like that? In an English accent?”

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘Now, once again, where does it rain?’ And then I sing, ‘In Spain! In Spain!’”

  Larry gave his goat laugh. “You girls,” he said. “Is that one of your special things you do?”

  “You’ll have to learn our special things, Larry. Now that you’re going to be one of the family.”

  But Daphne knew it was she who would have to learn to do without them.

  “It’s from My Fair Lady,” she said. “Our favorite. Can I still say ‘our’? You don’t mind, do you? Of course, you two will have your own favorite musical that will be your ‘our favorite,’ but our ‘our favorite’ will still stand.”

  “I love Brigadoon.”

  Larry was charming and handsome, Daphne thought, but there were definite gaps.

  A small dog jumped onto Larry’s lap and looked around the table quizzically, clearly questioning why it hadn’t been invited.

  “Get her down this instant,” Larry’s mother said.

  Daphne, just for a fleeting moment, thought Larry’s mother meant her, Daphne.

  Larry paid no attention to his mother. He kissed the dog and petted her and murmured words of love.

  “This instant, Larry,” his mother said.

  Larry pushed his lower lip out in a small pout and lowered the dog to the floor, where it lay down beside his feet with a loud sigh. Daphne felt a wave of affection for the dog, for Larry, and for her sister for seeing that, Brigadoon nothwithstanding, Larry was okay.

  “We have a cat,” she said. “I thought it was wine. Then I thought it was a white rabbit.”

  “I’ve met your cat, Daphne.”

  “Right. You’re the allergic one.”

  A dispute broke out between two of the Wolfe family great-aunts. Aunt Lila was outraged at something she’d read in The New York Times Magazine, something about feminists—that young women didn’t consider themselves feminists anymore, that it was out of fashion. Aunt Beverly, secretly called Aunt Beverly Hills by Laurel and Daphne, said, “When was it ever in fashion?”

  “The way those people dress,” one of Larry’s relatives said. His uncle? Whoever he was, he had a spot on his tie. Larry’s mother dipped her napkin into her water glass and rubbed at it.

  “Honestly, Stuart, you of all people should not talk about the way people dress.”

  “Anyway, what people?” Aunt Lila demanded.

  “Lesbian women,” Uncle Don said. He said it casually but distinctly, the self-conscious way some people said “Jew” or “black.”

  “I hope they’re women, Uncle Don,” Laurel said. “There aren’t any lesbian men, to my knowledge.”

  “Stop it,” the man with the stained tie said to Larry’s mother, who was still scrubbing. “I’m not a child.”

  “You interrupted me,” someone said.

  “Well, stop talking and I won’t have to.”

  There were flowers in the salad. “Nasturtiums,” Larry’s mother said.

  “What next?” Uncle Beverly Hills said. His real name was Burton. He was twenty years older than Aunt Beverly Hills. When lunch was finished, he pulled out a cigar and lit it.

  Throughout the meal, throughout the day, Laurel seemed calm, happy. But Daphne caught her eye now and then and knew she was not calm at all. Was she happy? That was difficult for Daphne to know. She was too overwhelmed by her own unhappiness. She and Laurel had always shared happiness. If Laurel now took happiness for herself, as she seemed to be doing, Daphne would have to come up with a new plan.

  The wedding was going to be held in Maine, near Mount Desert Island. Larry’s family had a house there. They’d had it for a hundred years, or close enough, a summerhouse high on a cliff above the ocean. A house with many wings, Laurel said, and Daphne imagined it flying, all its many wings flapping. The wedding would be held at a small church nearby. Laurel didn’t mind getting married in a church—such a pretty one, she said. No bleeding statues of Christ hanging from the rafters or anything. Very low-key, in perfect taste. Their parents didn’t seem to mind the idea of the church, either. They were not observant Jews, after all, they said. Even the aunts didn’t let it bother them. Money, old WASP money, was just like the church: in perfect taste. Daphne was the only one in the family who worried. She liked churches and loved hymns. But they were spectacles, glimpses through arched doorways, places to visit, to hear a string quartet concert or see a fresco. They weren’t places in which to live out a part of your real life.

  “I was sure you girls would have a double wedding,” Aunt Lila said.

  “Oh, we will,” Daphne said.

  The table went silent. Laurel cocked her head. “Daphne,” she said. “Is there something we don’t know?”

  Daphne tried to smile enigmatically.

  “You’re such a tease,” their mother said. And conversation resumed.

  “But we will,” Daphne said softly.

  Larry would be difficult to match. He was so damn good-looking and so damn rich. Too bad he didn’t have a brother. “Too bad you don’t have a brother, Larry.”

  “Lucky you have a sister.”

  * * *

  Daphne pondered the possibilities in the marriage department, and she was not encouraged. She was twenty-six years old—she had some time—but who among her motley collection of friends and acquaintances could possibly be the lucky man? The guys at work were unacceptable in every way. She had already slept with several of them, and they would not do, out of the question, the kind of guys who had no sheets on their beds, who washed only the tops of their plates. Or they snorted far too much cocaine. Or they scurried like rodents, unsociable, paranoid. Or they were gay. Or married already. Jon was older and had, as a consequence, more furniture and a cleaning lady who came in every other week. But he had other disqualifying characteristics. He had long been engaged to a minor Italian aristocrat, for one thing. He was a Maoist, for another. A sexy accent can carry you only so far.

  It turned out that Aunt Beverly Hills was also concerned with Daphne’s marital prospects. “I have a fella I want you to meet,” she told Daphne a few weeks later. “I met him in Florida. He was visiting his mother. Such a nice boy. He’s in manufacturing.”

  “I don’t really want to meet a fella, in that sense.”

  “In what sense?”

  “In the fella sense.”

  Daphne and her aunt were having lunch at a coffee shop. Daphne ordered a cheeseburger instead of a hamburger, knowing that her aunt would pick up the tab and so, too, the extra cost of the slice of American cheese.

  “Yes, you do. That’s why I asked you to lunch, dear, to tell you about this boy. He knows all about you, and he wants to meet you, so I think you shou
ld get off your high horse and go on a date with a nice fella instead of the beatniks you hang around with in Greenwich Village.”

  Daphne wondered if there had been a beatnik in Greenwich Village in the last twenty years and if so how she could find him and hang around with him, but she saw also that her aunt was trying to be kind, and she did not like to think of herself as someone on a high horse.

  “Thank you, Aunt Beverly,” she said. “Okay, I will be happy to meet your friend.”

  “He was visiting his mother,” Aunt Beverly H. said. “Now, doesn’t that tell you something?”

  Within a month, Daphne was engaged. The boy who had visited his mother in Florida was named Steven Greene, and he was thirty, had his own business and all his hair. He wanted three children, but would settle for two. He did not want Daphne to work unless she wanted to. He was an excellent cook. His father was dead and his mother lived in Florida. He wasn’t as rich as Larry, but he had started his company himself and someday he might be rich, you could never tell with business. Besides, money wasn’t everything, as Laurel made sure to tell her when Daphne announced she was engaged.

  Laurel hugged her and hugged her and they did their happy dance, the Beatlemaniac dance, they called it.

  “So we will have a double wedding!” Laurel said.

  “I told you.”

  Laurel hugged her again and said, “I think we should be neighbors. I think we have to live really close, Daphne.”

  “We’ll have a tunnel.”

  “God, I’ve known Larry for two years. You’ve known Steven for a month?”

  “I’ve decided to be the impulsive twin.”

  Laurel held her hands and did the Beatlemaniac dance again, then threw her arms around her. “As long as you’re happy. I want you to be as happy with Steven as I am with Larry.”

  Daphne rested her face on Laurel’s shoulder. Laurel’s hair smelled different today. She sniffed.

  Laurel said, “Jojoba.”

  “But—”

  “Well, it’s all-natural. And I just wanted to try something new. You don’t like it?”

  Daphne said, “I’m not used to it, that’s all.”

  Daphne admired Steven. She liked him, too. He was madly in love with her, he said, though Daphne wondered if at least half that love was inspired by the fact that she was a twin. He found her twin status fascinating. He gazed with wonder at Daphne and Laurel when they were together. He gazed with wonder at photographs of them when they were children. Sometimes he held Daphne’s hand and stared at her fingertips, touching them gently, almost fearfully, with his own.

  “Why?” she asked him once.

  “That’s the only part of you that’s just you,” he said. “Your fingerprints.”

  The double wedding was at the frenetic height of planning when Steven said, “That’s the only part of you that’s you.” The identical dresses were chosen but not yet fitted. The menu was planned, but not the flowers. The date was set.

  Daphne looked at her fingertips.

  Laurel was a quarter of an inch taller. Should she break the bad news to Steven, that she also had the absence of a quarter of an inch that was hers and hers alone, that was her?

  “I don’t like the smell of jojoba,” she said instead. “But I like the sound of it.”

  Steven kissed her fingertips.

  “Let’s name our first child Jojoba,” she said.

  * * *

  The choice of tablecloths, the poached salmon, the musicians, even the service—all of it would be tasteful in the extreme.

  “Mommy and Daddy don’t mind the money, either,” Laurel said. “They’re thrilled they only have to pay out once.”

  “It’s the least we can do. After all those outfits they had to buy two of.”

  “Not to mention tuitions.”

  “And bicycles.”

  “And skis. Four skis.”

  Daphne laughed. She thought Laurel had said “foreskins.”

  “Is Larry circumcised?”

  “Of course he is. He wasn’t born in Bulgaria.”

  “Good. Otherwise I don’t think I could go through with it.”

  * * *

  She couldn’t go through with it anyway. Not after the fingerprint remark.

  “Steven, we haven’t sent out invitations yet,” she told him. They were on the subway. A man across from them was leaning to the side at a sharp angle, bouncing precariously with every jolt of the train. He was smiling, eyes closed.

  “My mother is trying to cut the list back,” Steven said, patting her hand in a way she knew he meant to be comforting. “She promised she’d have it by next week.”

  “No, but my point is, there’s still time to reconsider, and I have reconsidered, and I think perhaps we rushed into this idea…”

  “This idea?” he said.

  “Of getting married.”

  “Yeah, I get what the idea is, Daphne.”

  Silence within the noisy clatter of the train. Above the tilted, unconscious, smiling man someone had spray-painted a name in big puffy graffiti cloud letters. FOU? POY? Daphne could not make it out.

  “Okay, so what is the idea, then? No wedding?” Steven said.

  She could tell he didn’t think that was the idea at all. He thought she wanted the wedding smaller or bigger or separate or sooner or later.

  “That’s the idea,” she said.

  “At all? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m really sorry, Steven.”

  “You’re breaking up with me? For no reason? What happened? Did something happen?”

  She looked down at her shoes, at his shoes, at the blissfully unconscious man’s shoes. “Look, I know it’s sudden, but trust me—”

  “Trust you? Oh my god. Trust you?”

  “I’m sorry, Steven. I’m so sorry. I just don’t think it will work.”

  He stared at her.

  “You tell me this on the subway? You break off our engagement on the subway?”

  “I just—”

  “For no reason. For no fucking reason.”

  He kept saying, “For no reason.”

  Daphne kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  The train stopped at Fourteenth Street. He stood up suddenly. “You’re not like your sister at all,” he said.

  As the train pulled out she saw him on the platform, giving her the finger.

  * * *

  There was a reason to break off the engagement with Steven, even beyond fingerprints, and his name was Michael. Something had happened, yes—Daphne had fallen suddenly, utterly, head-over-heels in love.

  When Daphne met Michael, saw him waiting outside the Bleecker Street Theatre, she noticed he was shorter than Steven, not as thin, not heavy, just compact, and his shoes were the ugliest shoes she had ever seen, loafers with some sort of folded strap across them. Vibram soles. Normally Vibram soles alone would have turned her inexorably against him.

  When he saw her he gave a little double-take, rushed up to her, and took both her hands in his.

  “You’re not at all what I expected,” he said, and they both burst out laughing, together. Daphne stopped thinking about his shoes. She thought about her hands, and his hands, and how her hands felt in his. She thought about the sound of his laughter and the sound of hers, joined. She took out a cigarette and when he told her she really shouldn’t smoke, she smiled apologetically instead of turning on her heel as she ordinarily would have done.

  “You’re not what I expected, either,” she said, which was true, but she also meant, I’m not what I expected, because she had not expected to fall in love with an old friend of Laurel’s, whom she had never met before, while standing outside the Bleecker Street Theatre in the cold trying not to blow smoke his way.

  Laurel had asked Michael to join them at the last minute. “You’ll like him,” she’d said to Daphne over the phone. “I met him at the peace march. When I got separated from you?”

  She had come down to Washington from New York wit
h Daphne and several other friends on a bus of high school students when they were sixteen. Somewhere during the day, in the marching and chanting, Laurel lost track of the others. There were hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall, but she was suddenly alone. She had no money on her, no money to speak of. And what would she have done if she had? Hailed a cab? Take me to Larchmont, please. She was hungry and thirsty and lost, and the people all around her waving signs could have been blades of grass for all the help they were. She walked and walked, back the way she thought she’d come, looking for her bus and her friends and her sister.

  After about half an hour, she realized something: she was alone. It was a new and strange sensation, being alone. Alone, even in this crowd of like-minded people. No one knows me. No one cares. No one looks at me. No one looks like me.

  Oh, she thought. This is what it feels like to be alone: free!

  She continued walking, aimlessly, comfortably now, strolling, watching other people as they gathered up their backpacks and signs, until she saw a bus with a piece of paper taped to its side saying ZION CHURCH NEW YORK. They were happy to give her a ride back to the city. They pointed to a seat with another white kid who had lost his bus and needed a lift, and that person was Michael. He lived hours away from Larchmont in a small town at the tip of Long Island, and Laurel didn’t see him often, but they wrote to each other for years. Whenever Laurel thought of him, she remembered that unmoored feeling of freedom.

  “I know it’s our sister night,” she said when she called Daphne.

  “Hitchcock double feature, Laurel.”

  “Hitchcock won’t notice. And he seemed at loose ends.”

  “Hitchcock?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

  Daphne had minded. Some guy Laurel hadn’t seen in years? “Yeah, but it’s supposed to be just us,” she said. Her sister stayed at Larry’s almost every night now. Daphne hated the way her voice sounded, pleading, but she continued, “No fiancés, no one but us.”