The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  Daphne was mugged once after a late close, two teenage boys, one with a knife. She had a twenty-dollar bill, the twenty-dollar bill she always kept on her for muggers, and she pulled it out of her wallet for them. They were disgusted with the wallet itself, no credit cards, and her bag was full of books and old Kleenex. Empty your pockets, they said, and from her coat flew white and fluttery shredded moths of paper, dozens of them, and the muggers laughed in surprise and left with the twenty.

  Now she sat hunched over the typewriter banging the keys with fast, violent fingers. The rackety noise was the sound of personal industry.

  “Be kind,” he said.

  She stopped typing. “Good morning, my poor sweet sleepy one.”

  “Be kind to the innocent little words. They know not what they do.”

  “They must be taught. They must be disciplined.”

  “They are so small. Why can’t they just go outside and play?”

  “You’re going to be one of those lenient, easygoing fathers, aren’t you?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Don’t rush me,” Daphne said, suddenly angry. “Don’t rush me about kids.”

  Michael pulled the cat onto his lap. He frowned but did not take the bait.

  “You’re not even finished with your residency,” she was saying. “Can you imagine what it would be like?”

  Bunny the cat purred and plucked at his T-shirt. Would it be like you, Bunny? he wondered. Fluffy and self-sufficient?

  “Coffee?” Daphne said, as if she were offering him a cup.

  But she was not offering, he knew. He got up to grind the beans. The cat rubbed against his calves. The kettle whistled. The mystical coffee aroma filled the apartment. He poured out two cups and added cream to hers.

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  He handed her the cup, sat at the little table across from her and the typewriter. “You are forgiven.”

  “So, I guess you’re not my sister,” she said after a while.

  “No.” What was this about, what was today’s tangled message? The twins were a complicated organism.

  “I was really arguing with my sister,” she said.

  “Laurel is rushing you about kids?”

  “No, but she will. I know she and Larry are trying. Not that she’s said anything directly, but they are, I can tell.”

  “You count her birth-control pills?”

  “I know what I know.”

  Michael grunted a skeptical assent, took her hand, and said, “Who am I to pretend to pierce the mysteries of twinship? But this I do know, Daphne: I’m not Laurel. And neither are you.”

  Daphne left the typewriter and put her arms around Michael. “How can you tell?” she said.

  “She’s better-natured.”

  Living in the apartment with Michael instead of with Laurel had been strange at first. It was as if he were impersonating Laurel, his shoes on Laurel’s side of the closet, his suits hanging where her dresses had been. Now she tried to remember what it was like without him.

  “Laurel and I had a secret language when we were little.”

  “Like pig Latin, I know.”

  “Kind of. I wonder what it’s like having a baby. It’s part of you but not you. I think it must be like Webster.”

  “Your dog? That’s not what I was expecting you to say.”

  Daphne drank her coffee. With her free hand she smeared the circle left by the mug on the table. “I loved Webster. I couldn’t speak to him or understand what he was saying, not really, but I knew, or I guessed, and I felt so close to him. I would have thrown myself in front of a car to save him. Of course, I wasn’t there when that car got him. My parents are so careless. How could they let him out the front? Do you think he was chasing a squirrel? I doubt it. That’s what they said, but he was too old to be bothered with squirrels. Maybe a deer. They said they’ve seen deer. Everyone was excited when the deer first started showing up, but then the deer ate their flowers, so now they talk about deer as if they were rats. Maybe he chased a rat. I love Bunny, too. But he’s a cat.”

  Michael stared vacantly at her.

  “Rat,” she said. “Cat.”

  “I thought you were going to say having a baby must be like having a twin.”

  “But a baby is a whole other person.”

  “I hate to keep harping on this, but so is your sister.”

  No, Daphne thought. My sister is me if I were different.

  * * *

  And then Laurel made herself a little bit more different. Daphne’s twin sister became just a few centimeters less her twin. Laurel got her nose “fixed.”

  “Which is what they do to dogs when they cut their balls off,” Daphne told her.

  “I still have my balls, so shut up.”

  The nose looked fine, Daphne had to admit, although she admitted this to no one other than herself. The surgeon had made it a tiny bit straighter, more conventional. If he got paid by volume, he didn’t make much on Laurel.

  “Leave your sister alone,” Sally said when Daphne confronted her about Laurel’s nose job. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about. You can hardly tell the difference.”

  “She changed her face to make it look less like mine! Of course I’m upset. It’s an implicit insult.”

  “Her nose was beautiful, your nose is beautiful, her new nose is beautiful. Pretend it’s a sentence. Some molecules got rearranged instead of words.”

  Daphne started yelling into the phone. She made sentences better when she edited. She only changed something if there was something wrong with it. Or something inelegant. How could her mother not understand? Did Daddy understand? Or did he approve of this mutilation, too?

  “What if your sister lost an eye in an accident?” Sally yelled back. “Would you be like this? Have a little compassion, Daphne.”

  Daphne slammed the phone down and went back to work. She worked all the time now. She was copyediting full-time and she was writing about copyediting. At least that’s what Michael liked to say.

  “No,” she would say. “I’m writing about language. Grammar. Usage.”

  “Isn’t that what copyediting is?”

  “No. Copyediting is helping the words survive the misconceptions of their authors.”

  The column ran irregularly (like bowels, Becky said), but it was still a column. It had a byline (hers) and it had a name: The People’s Pedant. Daphne had devoted readers—fans, you might even say. The column was modishly vulgar in its attack on the vulgar tongue. DownTown allowed any word into print, and Daphne enjoyed the alternative journalist’s privilege of tossing out “fuck”s like shiny coins to the poor. Observations, corrections, and objections that might otherwise have struck her readers as prim struck them instead as edgy. A sense of superiority does not belong exclusively to conservatives, Daphne knew.

  * * *

  When you have just returned from Green-Wood Cemetery, where you have buried a close friend, say, and you dig in your pocket for great handfuls of bills to release to your cabdriver who is sneezing into his own hand which he then holds out to you in order to collect his perhaps well-deserved but nevertheless exorbitant fare, it would be reasonable to expect that this viral cabdriver, having picked up a passenger at a cemetery and driven the passenger in his taxicab for close to an hour at breakneck speed broken not by necks, by the grace of God, but by brakes every few minutes as the vehicle pulls up, inevitably, behind the vehicle that precedes it on the road and has preceded it on the road for close to an hour in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, would infer from the location at which he picked up the passenger, as well as from the tears streaming down the passenger’s face, that the passenger, who has just forked over a considerable sum of money, is not having an especially good day, nor is it likely that the remainder of his day will be good. It would be reasonable for you to expect that, and in these unreasonable times, you would be wrong. For, lo, listen to the cabbie as the passenger pulls the recalcitrant door handle and push
es the car door open: “Have a good day!”

  Have a good day is a fucking odious formulation. I do not like to be told to have a good day, and if I did, I would not like you or anyone else, including the cabdriver, to be the one to tell me to do so. What if I don’t want to have a good day? And who are you, whoever you are, to tell me what fucking kind of day to have?

  Ronald Reagan is fucking president. Need I say more?

  Yes, let me say more. Worse even than Have a good day is Have a good one, a new expression that has snuck up on us like TK.

  Have a good one.

  Have a good what? A good bowel movement? A good orgasm? A good breakfast? And why only one? Why not two? Or more? Who are you to limit me to one?

  * * *

  Daphne read over what she’d written. Was the tone too petulant? Or just petulant? And what about that “TK”? Snuck up on us like what? And wasn’t it “sneaked,” not “snuck”? And shouldn’t she be writing about AIDS? That was where she started, a cemetery in which a victim of AIDS was buried yesterday morning, the boy from the art department, sweet young Richie, twenty-four years old, thinner and thinner, then gone. Michael treated patients with AIDS all day long. Some of the doctors and nurses still wouldn’t go near them. Bring out your dead. She remembered the grubby peasants calling that to the grubby townspeople in a Monty Python movie. So many dead. And dying. And the cabbie said, Have a nice day. A man doing his job, trying to be polite. Why didn’t people just say, Thank you? Maybe the cabbie had a friend who was sick from AIDS. Maybe Have a nice day was a way of saying May God protect you, and him. Maybe. And maybe it was a way of saying, Don’t bring out your dead, I don’t want to see them, you must pretend that the days are nice and all the young men are not dying.

  Michael was at the hospital, but he would be home for dinner. She was alone with Bunny. Bunny and the Beaujolais. She poured herself a glass. The cat leaped onto her lap. The late sun came through the window, slanted and soft. The cat purred. The wine purred. She dozed off, then heard Michael’s key in the first, then the second, then the third lock. She saw his tired face and got up, letting the cat slip to the floor. She poured him a glass of wine. She heard the chimes of an ice-cream truck through the window. She thought, Damn Laurel’s nose. Damn that cabdriver. The cabdriver was right, it is a nice day, and I have it.

  GE´NIAL. adj. [genialis, Latin.] 1. That which contributes to propagation.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  Hackneyed phrases, said the great grammarian Henry Watson Fowler, author of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, have become hackneyed because they are useful. This sentiment was, of all things, what Laurel thought of when she found out she was pregnant. Right after she thought, Pregnant pause.

  She left the doctor’s office, went to a phone booth, and called Daphne. “I’m coming to see you right now.”

  There was a pause. A pregnant pause! Laurel thought.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing at all. Just some news.”

  Another pregnant pause.

  “You’re pregnant!”

  “This phone booth smells so much. I’ll be right over.”

  “You’re the first one I’m telling,” she said when she got there. Pregnancy, wombs, babies—they seemed somehow to have more to do with her sister than with her husband. “I haven’t even told Larry yet.”

  “Oh, Laurel.” Daphne embraced her and whispered awed congratulations, then began to cry.

  “Don’t worry,” Laurel said.

  “I know.”

  Daphne tried not to show how moved she was by being the first to hear the news. She scrutinized her sister’s face.

  “What?” Laurel put her hand up to her nose.

  “No, no, I’m looking to see if your face is glowing.” She wondered how long Laurel had suspected. For at least a month. Yet she had never mentioned it.

  “You glow later. Now you puke.”

  “Remember when we went on the grapefruit diet?” Daphne said.

  Laurel now put a hand on her stomach. “You can’t see anything yet.”

  “No.”

  But soon Laurel’s belly would expand and Daphne’s would not. When they’d gone on the grapefruit diet, they tried to lose weight at exactly the same rate. Neither of them had needed to lose any weight at all, and neither of them did.

  “I still like grapefruit,” said Daphne.

  “Someone gave us grapefruit spoons for a wedding present.”

  “Trade you the electric knife.”

  But Laurel didn’t want an electric knife. She never wanted to eat again, she said. Everything made her feel sick. Nothing was palatable.

  Especially not an electric knife, Daphne said.

  Laurel smiled at that. And when Larry was out of town for one of the Lamaze classes, Daphne came with her instead. The rest of the couples laughed in delight when they saw the twin sister with the same flaming red hair.

  “Our lives will change, I guess,” Laurel said when they left the Y where the classes were held. “I mean, they already have. But now they’ll change more.”

  “There will just be an extra person in the family. And I will be an aunt. That’s not so radical.”

  “No.”

  They walked along in the early dark of February. The cold was raw, and bits of gray snow littered the gutters. Laurel stopped to pull her gloves on. She said, “Daphne, I have to tell you something.”

  “The baby’s not mine.”

  “We’re moving to the Upper West Side. We’re buying an apartment. We found a beautiful place, we just have to tear down some walls all the therapists put up, and then it will be perfect and it’s on Eighty-Ninth Street.”

  “You can’t! That’s so far away. There’s no direct subway line. You’re moving to a cultural wasteland. Oh, this is bad, Laurel. This is bad.”

  She stomped up the street, then stomped back.

  “Shit.”

  “I know, but with the baby coming…”

  Daphne pulled out a pack of cigarettes, held it out to her sister.

  “I can’t smoke. I can’t drink. I can’t even drink coffee. Come on, be happy about this. I mean, not that I can’t drink coffee. But the apartment—it’s a big, wonderful apartment. We couldn’t live in Larry’s fur-vault apartment forever. You’ll move, too, as soon as Michael gets done with his internship.”

  “Residency.”

  “Okay. Residency. Then you can move right next door.”

  “Djever.”

  “Djever day djever.”

  Daphne thought of the woman on the lawn at Larry’s parents’ house, the woman whose expensive clothes didn’t fit, whose heels sank into the soft turf. That cheered her up, she could not have said why. “You’re right.” And there would be a baby. A nephew or a niece. It would idolize her, the fabulous, glamorous downtown aunt.

  The next sisterly trial for Laurel was the moment she had to tell Daphne that she was leaving work. Laurel hemmed and hawed.

  “So, um … Hem. Haw.”

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  They were sitting on a bench in Riverside Park near the new apartment and watching robins hopping on the patchy grass.

  “I’m hemming and hawing.”

  “Yes, I hear that, Laurel.”

  “Because I don’t want you to be mad at me, and, even more important, I don’t want you to lecture me.”

  “Spit it out,” Daphne said.

  “Oh,” she said when Laurel told her. She took a deep breath and said, “But you like teaching,” though when she thought back to her one day as Miss Wolfe the kindergarten teacher, there was a part of her that did not blame Laurel for quitting. “But I guess if teaching is too, you know, unsatisfying, um, intellectually, you can get another job.”

  “I don’t want another job. I like teaching. But I want to be home with my own child, not chasing other mothers’ kids around.”

  “Do you realize how selfish you sound?”

&nbs
p; “No.”

  “But, Laurel, a child needs a strong, interesting, engaged mother. Not a boring housewife.”

  “A child needs a mother.”

  And you know what? Laurel did not say, but thought in a thunderous voice: A mother needs a child.

  “Babies don’t even talk.”

  “We did.”

  Daphne was chain-smoking. Laurel turned to avoid the smoke.

  “Oh my god! You’re such a stiff! It’s just smoke. Talk about lecturing.”

  “You need to quit. You really do.”

  “No one ever quits. A wise colleague told me that.”

  “You can’t smoke in the apartment when the baby comes, Daphne.”

  Daphne shook her head. “You are becoming so conventional. Radically conventional. Just don’t turn into a Republican.”

  Laurel laughed. “No.”

  “Okay, then you can stop teaching.”

  “It’s only kindergarten.”

  Daphne, of course, agreed with her. But she didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Kindergarten is the cradle of civilization,” Daphne said stoutly.

  * * *

  They spoke on the phone every day.

  “But what is a telephone, anyway?” Laurel said one day, pulling the receiver away from her ear, looking at it. She was lying on the couch in her new apartment, spring sunlight wafting through the windows. “I mean, how does a telephone work? It’s practically obsolete, but I still don’t know how the words squeeze through the wires.”

  “It’s electricity.”

  “Why don’t the light switches talk, then?”

  This was the kind of conversation they had most days. The telephone, previously not that important for the inseparable twins, became vital, an extension of intimacy. Sometimes they barely said a word, attached just by the knowledge of attachment.