* * *
Michael and Daphne closed the door on their departing guests with a sigh of relief. He put his arm around Daphne and held her close to him. He was always relieved when he and Daphne were alone again. Daphne was tagged as the dramatic member of the family, but he had been with her long enough now to see that the charged emotion she was supposed to carry was usually tossed aside as soon as she was away from them. Particularly Laurel. Or any mention of Laurel. Someone had mentioned Laurel at dinner.
“I’m really upset,” Daphne said.
“I thought the lamb was delicious. And if someone doesn’t say they’re a vegetarian ahead of time, how are you supposed to know? Angie got plenty of salad. And potatoes.”
“I don’t mean the goddamn lamb, and you know it.”
He said nothing. Their friends had mentioned reading a story by Laurel in Harper’s Magazine.
“No one reads Harper’s, anyway,” Daphne said.
Michael blocked a sigh, but she caught it.
“Well, she’s ridiculous, you know she is, Michael. I mean, let’s start with the nose. I’m sorry, but what was that about? I should ask Uncle Don. Does she hate her face so much, which by the way is my face, that she had to turn it into a whole other face?”
Michael did not say, It’s not your face, Daphne. He did not say, It’s her nose to do with as she pleases. He did not say, The surgeon did a beautiful job, it looks completely natural and not all that different. He did not say that was over a decade ago. He had said all of it so many times before.
“And now Charlotte looks more like me than she looks like Laurel. So I guess that backfired.”
Michael began clearing the table. It was pretty rude of Angie, he thought, not to give them a vegetarian warning.
“And now she’s a poet?” Daphne said, following him from dining room to kitchen. “A short-story writer? It’s cut-and-paste, Michael. Plagiarism, really, when you think about it, which I don’t, but god.”
He was glad, actually, that the meat they had served was lamb. The only thing better would have been veal. That’ll show you, Angie. He wondered if Angie mentioned the story by Laurel as revenge for the slaughtered little lamb.
“You know what she called me?” Daphne said.
“You hardly even speak to her. You two are impossible. Do I have to start seeing Larry on the sly?”
“The last time we spoke she called me a prescriptivist! You know what that is? A person who cares about proper language usage. A person who cares about the rules of grammar.”
“But you do care about that. That’s what you write about. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. But she says it the way you say a dirty word. Or … or ‘Nazi.’ Because she’s been reading all this stuff about education, and this crap about how we can only describe what is being said, and whatever is being said is what is right. English is not Latin, she says. All your rules are imposed on English. All your rules were invented in the seventeenth century to make English seem more like Latin. Or, even worse, French! All my rules, she says! As if rules weren’t rules but just some … some fetish of mine! Laurel the Descriptivist! It’s ridiculous! She didn’t want Charlotte to have a babysitter because she was worried about her speaking with a, let’s face it, lower-class accent! And now she’s telling me I’m narrow-minded because I think using ‘they’ in the singular is wrong? And she gets her nose fixed so she won’t look Jewish? So she can follow the Barbie-doll rule of nasal beauty conformity? With her WASP husband? Well, who’s the real prescriptivist? Who’s the Nazi now?”
Michael rinsed dish after dish and placed them in the dishwasher. Daphne rearranged each one. Wasn’t I just remarking to myself that she was not really the theatrical loon her family makes her out to be? he thought.
She began to shake him. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “so just spit it out!”
“Okay, this is what I’m thinking: she’s your sister.”
Daphne removed her hands from his shoulders. “The story of my fucking life.”
OBERRA´TION. n.s. [from oberro, Latin.] The act of wandering about.
—A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson
There was something wayward in the twins’ relationship now, a devious shift Sally sensed but could not catch in the act. For a long time before the Rift, as the often odious and occasionally prescient Don had called it, had separated them completely, it unraveled gradually, like a tear in a sweater. Sally recognized it before she was willing to. The family brunch in honor of the pending first grandchild, which Daphne refused to attend, yes, that should have been a sign, thank you hindsight, useless as always. Then, with Daphne’s move to Brooklyn, well, you had to be blind not to notice. Their excuses were always sensible—the subway took forever, a cab was unthinkably expensive, there was always something one or the other of them had to do—but Sally knew the distance between the twins was not just geographical. She could feel it; it disturbed her to think of the girls separated from each other. She had repeatedly tried to lure them out to Larchmont together, but there was always some barrier—school, work, after-school, and, Mom, frankly, you know, life.
“Daphne writes a weekly column, Mom,” Laurel had said when Sally first complained to her. “She’s collecting her columns into a book and she’s collaborating with Michael on a book about how doctors and patients miscommunicate. Prudence is practically a baby. Daphne’s busy.”
“Do you know how hard teachers work?” Daphne said when Sally complained, in turn, to her. “The planning and correcting and the reports. The conferences. It never ends. And Charlotte needs help with her homework. And she goes to fencing class and dance class and the piano teacher. Laurel is busy.”
At first it reassured Sally when each daughter stood up for the other. She had still thought of them as a unit, two sides leaning in, propping up the whole, a single edifice in two parts. But in time their excuses seemed not like a defense of the other one, but a defense against the other one.
“Just don’t forget your sister’s birthday,” she told Laurel, who laughed obligingly.
“Just don’t forget your sister’s birthday,” she said to Daphne, who laughed in just the same way.
Okay, girls, the joke is on you, Sally thought irritably when she’d hung up the phone that day. And she began planning a big birthday party for herself, one neither of them would dare miss.
This was years ago, five, six—no, eight years ago. Arthur was still alive. Laurel had not published anything yet.
Daphne had arrived first, breathless with importance. And why not? Several of Sally’s friends headed straight for Daphne to offer compliments on her last column and offer suggestions for future columns, some slang word they objected to or an offensive neologism. Sally watched her daughter smile uncertainly, nod uncertainly, take Michael’s hand, and extricate herself from them, uncertainly.
She knew Daphne was still reeling from her good fortune, that she was both proud and embarrassed, relishing what she was not quite sure she deserved. She knew because Daphne told her. When Sally went to Park Slope to visit, she and Daphne sometimes sat together in the backyard. Even in winter, beneath the leafless tree under the cold blue sky, they wrapped themselves in blankets and talked and talked—talked in a way they never had before. Those were satisfying days for Sally. She had never gotten enough of either child when they were growing up. She wondered if they had gotten enough of her.
Daphne would sit with her in the Brooklyn backyard, put her head back, and stare at the bare tree and the cloudless sky. She would tell Sally how tired she was, how thrilled, how frightened of losing it all.
Once, just once, Sally had suggested that Daphne worked too hard. “And now with this big house…”
Daphne had turned to the house, looked up at the three narrow stories, and said, “Only in New York would this be considered a big house. It has one bathroom.” She turned back to her mother. “One bathroom,” she said, in a kind of wonder.
&n
bsp; Then she asked Sally if she was insufferable, and Sally assured her that she was just as sufferable as she had always been. They had both laughed comfortably, and Sally knew she must not disturb that comfort by asking what had happened with Laurel.
She had shared similar moments with Laurel years before when Charlotte was a baby. There was something about having a child that opened her children to her, their mother. Sally’s illness had brought both of them to her side. She treasured the intimacy, though she knew it suggested not just a deeper feeling about motherhood or concern about her health but also a weakening of the intimacy between Daphne and Laurel.
When she first tried to bring up the estrangement with Laurel, then with Daphne, their answers were—comically, Sally thought—identical: “We’re not married to each other, Mother.”
At the birthday party she gave for herself eight long years ago, Sally had watched Daphne and her admirers, watched Prudence launch herself across the terrace toward the pile of presents, watched Daphne take Michael’s hand and, once free of the others, swing it up and down like a happy child. Daphne grinned at her, and Sally grinned back.
What a good idea, she’d thought. I should give myself a party every year.
I didn’t know Arthur would die. I didn’t know the cancer would come back. If I had known, would I have enjoyed that party more? Or not at all?
All Sally knew was that she had enjoyed it tremendously. Ignorance was blissful that day. And her daughters had been wonderful, so beautiful walking together in the afternoon sunlight, their red hair still fiery and shining. Her grandchildren had played together, little cousins romping on the lawn. Arthur had put his arm around her and called her Old Thing.
Laurel and Daphne had spoken to each other before the party. They were no longer in the habit of talking on the phone every day, or talking very much at all, but they were on good enough terms to discuss what present to get their mother. Should it be something from both of them? Yes, of course it had to be from both of them. Without even having to say it, they knew that would be the real present—the fact that it came from them together as one. A year’s worth of monthly spa days? A cashmere sweater? It hardly mattered as long as they both signed the card and presented it together.
When Laurel got to the birthday party, the first person she came upon was Prudence roosting in a pile of wrapping paper and brightly colored tissue.
“Happy birthday!” the little girl said to Aunt Laurel, looking dazed.
“Happy birthday to you, too!”
“I’m overstimulated!” Prudence said, then waved goodbye and ran off trailing ribbon to follow her big cousin, Charlotte, and Charlotte’s au pair, Miranda the Assistant. Laurel and Larry had hired Gravit’s daughter as their mother’s helper that summer, and she dutifully ran alongside the little girls, explaining a game, its rules technical, complicated, and bountiful.
“She has got to be the world’s bossiest au pair,” Laurel said.
“Read too much Mary Poppins as a child.”
Sally watched her two granddaughters play with the babysitter, that beautiful girl who had been the flower girl. At least my grandchildren are playing nicely with each other, she thought. They ran by her, squealing.
“You naughty children broke the rules,” the babysitter was yelling, “and I will catch you and cook you for my dinner!” She ran after them, which made them squeal and laugh more, suddenly turning on her and tackling her to the ground.
“I must really be getting old,” Sally whispered to Arthur. “The ruckus! It’s like Grand Central Station.”
He made a lame joke about it being her thirty-ninth birthday, did his Jack Benny imitation, and took her wineglass to refill it.
Sally spotted Aunt Beverly approaching. Beverly’s husband had died the year before. Looking back now, with Arthur gone, Sally understood Beverly’s determination not to let her sorrow slow her down, but at the time it had seemed unnatural and more macabre in its way than widow’s weeds.
“Isn’t this a cheerful chaos?” Beverly said. Bright, brave Beverly! See how bright and brave I am? She had adopted a perpetual smile—plucky, ghastly. Or so Sally thought at the time. She understood it better later.
“What fun!” bright brave Beverly added.
Sally hugged her and felt how small Beverly had become, a bony, birdlike figure.
But it was Beverly who said, “Sally! You’ve lost weight! You’re all skin and bones,” then caught herself with a small gasp. Was she remembering why Sally was thin? Or remembering to be bright and brave?
“The chemo. It does that.”
Beverly’s smile wavered, then gathered strength again.
“Modern medicine!” she said.
“Yes. A miracle.” And it was. One-breasted like an Amazon and on her way to her second year cancer-free. She smiled back at Beverly. “So many things happen. Yet here we are.”
Now they had a real hug. They both cried a little. Then Beverly straightened herself up and marched off.
After Laurel wished her mother a happy birthday and embraced both her parents, exchanging the loud kissing noises her mother and father insisted on making these days—Mwah! MMMwaHH—she looked around for Daphne. Instead, here were Uncle Don and Aunt Paula standing together by the makeshift bar. Paula looked contentedly bored, as she often did. Poor Uncle Don was never content, Laurel thought, or bored. How can you be bored when you are so alert to other people’s opinions about you? Extreme, if narrow, engagement is constantly required. Takes it out of you.
“A family reunion,” she said to them. “Just like the old days. Where’s Brian?”
“Up a tree,” Don said.
“He’s on the beach birding, that’s what Don means. He’ll be here soon.”
“He prefers birds to his own family.”
Paula gave Laurel a look as if to say, Can you blame him?
“Well, he is an ornithologist, Uncle Don.”
“Do you think Brian’s gay?” Paula asked. “Don thinks Brian might be gay because he doesn’t like football.”
“Hey, there’s your answer! Gay as a goose.”
“I don’t think he’s gay,” Don said. “I was just wondering what that might imply.”
Laurel let the bartender, an unhappy girl who was probably underage, where on earth had her mother dug her up, pour her two glasses of white wine.
“For Larry,” she said to her aunt and uncle, then hurried off to share with him the Uncle Don gossip.
* * *
Brian did not see anything of particular interest, but he enjoyed the walk along the beach, and it postponed meeting up with his family. He had come down from Cornell at his parents’ insistence: It was his Aunt Sally’s big birthday bash, but also they had something important they wanted to tell him. They were getting divorced, they wanted him to be the first to know.
“Okay,” he said, not sure if he was surprised or not. “I’m sorry. I want both of you to be happy.”
“Please don’t tell anyone,” his mother said.
Was it a secret divorce? God, they were weird. Weirder and weirder as time went on.
“We’re just not ready to announce it,” his father said.
His mother took his father’s hand. “Not just yet.”
Brian promised he would say nothing, grabbed his binoculars, and headed for the beach. He sat on the sand and watched a few gulls pick through the low-tide rocks. His parents were ridiculous. Dragging him home to make their big announcement, then dragging him to his aunt and uncle’s to keep their big announcement a secret. Okay, he was upset. He admitted it. He wasn’t that surprised, except that they were so old, but he was upset. What was the point, after so many years? His mother said she had found someone she was more compatible with, a lawyer, a judge actually, Malcolm McManis, a wonderful man, they both said. They were obviously determined to be civilized about it all. But that made it so much weirder. How did they not see that? He wondered how long it would take his father to find someone and how old she would be. Proba
bly his age. He felt a pang of sadness at the uselessness of everything. Marriage vows. Never safe, even after thirty years.
Some birds were monogamous, but most mated and split up. Birds do it. Let’s fall out of love.
He wondered if he would ever find someone he wanted to marry. His girlfriend at the moment was a fellow graduate student in ornithology, though she was thinking of becoming a vet instead. He liked her, but he certainly didn’t want to marry her. Or anyone right now. Of course, his father had asked him if he was seeing anyone. Of course, Brian said no. Out of spite, he supposed. Though at the time it felt more like simple manners, protecting himself and Cynthia from his father’s intrusive curiosity.
He walked slowly to his aunt and uncle’s house. It had seemed so far from his house when he was little. Everything in town seemed smaller now. Except his cousins. When he thought of Daphne and Laurel with their red hair and superior knowledge of the world, two skinny girls towering over him, he felt as though he were still a child and always would be.
He remembered walking in the woods so many years ago, walking with the superior cousins, listening to them speak in code. He remembered thinking, I’ll show them. And he did. He literally showed them what he could see and they could not. He showed them an ovenbird on the edge of a stream. They shrugged.
Then he said, “Seiurus aurocapilla.”
They stopped and Daphne pulled out her notebook to write down the words.
“It’s the scientific name for ovenbird,” Brian said. “Their nests are shaped like ovens. In a dome.”
He had memorized the Latin names of all the birds he saw. Some children liked baseball statistics or memorized the names of all the presidents. But Brian liked birds. And trees. And clouds. He liked the way they looked, the ways they changed but still were the same bird or tree or cloud. And he liked their names.
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