More tea was passed around. More whiskey. Aunt Paula’s coffee cake on paper plates. The paper plates sagged beneath the weight of Aunt Paula’s cake. Why had their mother gotten such flimsy paper plates?
“What’s with these plates?” they both murmured, then looked at each other and said, “Ha!”
“Oh, Arthur, Arthur,” their mother said softly into her cup of spiked tea.
“I’ll take such good care of the dictionary,” Laurel assured her.
Daphne said, “No, no, the dictionary will be much happier in Brooklyn.”
“You can’t have the dictionary, Daphne, that’s crazy. I’m the oldest. It comes with me.”
“That is completely unacceptable and you know it and Daddy would never want that for the dictionary. Never. He’d want it with me. I can consult it for my work. I can appreciate it in a way you can’t.”
“What about my work? I create things with words. I don’t bully other people about their choices.”
“Oh, right, create. That’s a laugh. You appropriate, that’s what you say you do anyway. ‘Sample’! Like a rapper. Create? Wrong word, Laurel. Look it up.”
The argument escalated quickly, noisily. Michael tried to distract Daphne with comments about Prudence, her homework, the long drive home. On his side of the boxing ring, Larry poured more scotch into Laurel’s cup—perhaps she would pass out and he could sling her over his shoulder, like a beautiful, obstreperous thirties movie star, her little fists weakly pummeling his back.
Sally closed her eyes. The dictionary. The dictionary held the world between its covers. The world was shrunken and drab now without Arthur, but what there was of it the dictionary embraced with magnanimity. How delighted the girls had been the night the dictionary came, how thrilled Arthur was with the gargantuan thing on its throne, its altar. How silly the girls were being now, two grown women squabbling like the children they used to be. Go to bed this instant! she wanted to say. Arthur! Tell them if they don’t stop quarreling they will be sent to their room. But there was no Arthur to back her up. There was only Sally, now, to back up Arthur.
“The dictionary stays,” she said.
Some angry noises from her children. Some angry words. Many angry words. Words, words, words! I’m so sick of words, she sang to herself. But there were words that had to be said, there were always words that had to be said if there was anything to say and even when there wasn’t. Her head was swimming from the whiskey and the grief and the rage at her quarreling children who were acting like children. She would have to act like their mother. They were fatherless now. They needed her more than ever, the two big redheaded baby birds, more like screeching birds of prey than twittering bluebirds.
“Girls!” she said.
They stopped.
“It was your father’s dictionary,” she said. “Now it is mine. Your father is gone, but I am still here. The dictionary is still here. It will stay here, where it belongs. On its stand. In your father’s den.”
“But—”
“I do not want to hear one more word on this subject ever again.”
“But—”
“Not one word.”
TO WORD. v.n. [from the noun.] To dispute.
—A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson
Sally did not hear one more word on the subject. Nor did her daughters exchange one more word in person. The possession of the dictionary remained the subject of bitter controversy, but Daphne and Laurel moved their quarrel to print. When Daphne’s column targeted a respected journalist who had written “know of which he speaks” and, incredibly, “the up most confidence,” the column also mentioned Webster’s Second Edition, how cavalierly, arrogantly it had been usurped by Webster’s Third, how relativism was slowly eating away at the very foundations of the culture. Another column centered on the sentence “The congressman has been accused by nearly ten women,” and Daphne asked whether that was nine and a half women, nine and three quarters women, or nine and one-thirtieth perhaps, and railed against imprecision in the world of letters and the world at large. The carelessness and ignorance of the writer in question was a symptom of a general carelessness and ignorance in language, a valorization of carelessness and ignorance, a lack of appreciation for tradition, all of which could be seen in the contemporary attack on the literary canon, the lowering of standards in published poetry and short stories, and the changes from Webster’s Second to the loosey-goosey of Webster’s Third.
Laurel, soon after, wrote a poem published in The New Yorker called “I’m a Sit Right Here.” It was an obscure poem, but it seemed to have something to do with a large book.
Neither Laurel nor Daphne was famous in the way that celebrities are famous. No one recognized them on the street. They could not get restaurant reservations anyone else couldn’t get. But in the world of words in New York, they were known, and they were known to be twin sisters. There was, therefore, an item about them on Page Six. The glamorous redheads, identical twins, mysterious feud, Brooklyn vs. Manhattan. The Rift was official.
Everyone close to them tried to calm them down. Aunt Beverly Hills called with a teary pep talk. Aunt Paula tried reason, Uncle Don guilt.
“This is all about your father,” Uncle Don said. He started with Laurel, thinking she might be the more reasonable one. “This is a natural reaction to grief, this desire to blame someone. But your father would be so unhappy about this.”
“My father was unhappy about a lot of things, wasn’t he?” she said pointedly.
Don tried Daphne next. “Lashing out in your grief—your father would be so unhappy about this, Daphne.”
“My father is dead, so nothing either of us can say or do will get back to him.”
Mr. Gravit, who felt duty-bound to listen to Laurel’s complaints after she had listened to so many of his during his divorce, was so disconcerted by the situation that he got in touch with Daphne’s friend Becky to see if, together, they could do something to resolve it. They met at a midtown coffee shop for the sake of discretion.
“Daphne would kill me if she knew I was here,” Becky said. She flagged the ancient waiter. “White wine. White toast.”
Gravit ordered coffee and fruit salad.
“Is it fresh? The fruit salad?” Becky asked the waiter.
“Of course.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks. I only like canned fruit salad. So, Mr. Gravit, why are they torturing us like this? Have they no shame?”
“It’s tiresome and tedious.”
“Well said.” She tasted the thick yellow wine. “I’m a sucker for coffee shop cuisine.”
“My divorce was much more civil than this,” Gravit said.
“Oh well! Did you read Daphne’s column on the word ‘civil’? It was a response to something Laurel wrote in a book review—a book review!—in The Boston Globe. This is not the nineteen-fifties, Daphne and Laurel. This is not Partisan Review. What are they thinking?”
Gravit looked across the table at her, her nicotine-stained fingers, her nicotine-colored dress, the smudge of ink on her chin.
“What is anyone ever thinking?” he said.
“I would say it’s like a horror movie, hideous creatures roaring out of the womb, but I like horror movies, and I don’t like this.”
They sat in the booth of the coffee shop, Gravit sipping from the heavy coffee cup, Becky sipping the heavy wine. With her fork she stabbed a piece of orange from Gravit’s bowl of fruit salad.
“I actually love horror movies,” she said.
Gravit thought, Yes, how like you. He pushed the fruit salad her way.
“Thank you. Do you like rye toast? With butter? I like that even more than horror movies. One of my favorite foods. But I think I like white toast better. It’s a dilemma. Do you smoke?”
“I started again after my divorce,” Gravit said, shamefaced.
Becky nodded. “You can never quit. It’s a myth.”
After their fourth weekly meeting to discuss strategy they stood
on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. “Ah, the irony,” Becky said. The tips of their cigarettes glowed faintly in the streetlights of the city night. “Malice has brought us together.”
“Cigarettes and malice,” Gravit said happily.
As they parted, Becky could hear him singing, to the tune of an old Frank Sinatra song, “Suddenly I saw … cigarettes and malice … all around a pug-nosed dream…”
Sally said, to anyone who dared bring up the subject of the Rift, At age forty-four, Laurel and Daphne have to grow up, but few dared bring it up. She was steely on the subject of the dictionary. “Not a word,” she would say in a cold voice. “I am in mourning.”
Sally was angry at death. She was personally enraged. Sometimes she shook her fist at death, wherever it was, doing what it did to so many innocent people everywhere on the globe, and especially Arthur.
She thought her daughters must be angry, too, and it broke her heart to imagine them feeling the emptiness she felt. They still had their husbands, but the loss of Arthur filled her life, and she believed it must fill theirs with the same amplitude of emptiness. Alone, without Arthur, she needed Daphne and Laurel, but she also felt she must protect them. Daphne and Laurel, who had always seemed to protect each other, even when they seemed to protect each other from each other. Now they were truly unmoored. No father, no twin to reflect the loss of that father.
It is up to me, Sally thought. The responsibility weighed on her, heavy and urgent.
At the same time, she gloried in the intimacy she had with her daughters. They made more time for her now, their widowed mother. Did they compete to be the most thoughtful, loving daughter? And if they did, was there anything wrong with that?
The afternoons with Daphne, hours of languid, friendly confidences, became a weekly Saturday tradition. On Sunday, she went to Manhattan to cook big dinners with Laurel, Laurel who had been spooked by eggs as a child. There was no sense trying to push either daughter toward the other. They repelled each other now, like magnets. But, she assured herself, the alienation between Laurel and Daphne would not last. How could it?
In the meantime, what was Sally supposed to do with all this rage, sickening waves of anger, her ears ringing with blood, her eyes aching with tears and ugly, stinging, swollen membranes of red rage?
I am lost in my own home, she thought. The modest house she had lived in for so long was cold and vast and unrecognizable, a desert of a house. The only thing recognizable sometimes was the dictionary open on its glossy wooden stand, an ungainly dun-colored creature balanced on one dark, shiny leg.
Paula called to see how she was holding up.
“I’m holding up,” she said. But what was she holding up?
The winter light was so frail.
Arthur took me for granted, she thought. And I took him for granted. That is the point of marriage. That’s what marriage is. And now she had no one to take for granted. Certainly not her daughters. They needed her attention now and her strength. She was King Solomon, but she would not offer to cut the dictionary in half. If she did, her children would only argue about which one should get the head, which the feet. She was King Solomon, but it was the twins who had to break apart in order to come together. King Solomon was even crazier than King Lear, she thought. King Kong, now, that was a king. Protective, loyal. Where was King Kong when you needed him? Her lab tests had not been great, and there was no king or ape or Arthur or Daphne or Laurel who could fix that. When she lifted a dish to throw, to make a noise in the emptiness, she noticed it was dirty, brown with the remains of lunch, an avocado salad. She carried the plate into the kitchen and washed it.
AFFLAT´US. n.s. [Lat.] Communication of the power of prophecy.
—A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson
Sally will never see the girls again. She will close her eyes and she will be gone. She will be in her bed at home, and then she will be gone. She sees what will happen through her closed eyes. She sees the scenes in words. Words are what she is made of, what the world is made of when you tell your tale or someone else’s.
Daphne and Laurel will grow old, older than Sally ever will live to be. They will live in the same city, one on an island, the other on another island. Laurel in Manhattan, Daphne in Brooklyn, the western end of that glacial deposit called Long Island. They will not have spoken in years, ten years, twenty, maybe, thirty—Sally cannot be sure, the future is murky even to her, watching it in words behind closed eyes.
Michael will retire and spend most of his time sailing a small sailboat he keeps at a marina near Floyd Bennett Field. He sails in the nineteen-foot sailboat, which he shares with a friend, from April to November. In the remaining four months, he and Daphne travel. They go to Botswana and Japan and Bhutan. They hike, with many stops for whiskey tastings, in the Hebrides. They are insufferably bourgeois, they tell each other, finding that their admission somehow mitigates a life they would once have considered ludicrous. Daphne continues to write, though her syndicated column has suffered along with the newspapers that once carried it. She writes a blog for a while, but blogs go out of style, and her daughter helps her set up a language podcast. On the podcast, instead of writing about writing, Daphne talks about talking. She is funny and harsh and finds new, young listeners. I am a language scold and I like it, she tells Michael, not for the first time. He answers as he always does, as Laurel once did: You were born for the job.
Sally agrees: Daphne was born for the job. And Michael, she tells the darkness, was born for her daughter Daphne. She has always liked Michael, a man of uncompromising kindness to temper Daphne’s uncompromising … Sally falters in her story made of words as the story searches for the right word. Daphne’s uncompromising … uncompromisingness!
Michael is there, in the room, with Sally. He touches her hand with his hand. She remembers when he walked down the aisle with Larry, the two grooms in their feminist aviator glasses. She knows they will stay together as long as they live. She laughs inside her darkness because the words suggest that it will be Michael and Daphne who stay together, and they will, but what the words of her story mean is that Michael and Larry will stay together; and they will, too, until the day they die, which is not the same day, but close enough. Michael will fight a disease with good humor, and when Larry finally succumbs to congestive heart failure, Michael will be losing his good humor and will arrange for a cocktail of drugs that allows him to go quietly into his own darkness, much as he has helped Sally arrange to go quietly into hers. Michael will sell the boat a few years before this happens, he and his sailing partner. His sailing partner can no longer manage the strain of getting on and off the little sailboat. His sailing partner has gotten weak because of his congestive heart failure. Michael’s sailing partner is Larry, of course, but no one knows it until they sell the boat and come clean.
In the darkness, Sally can see the words that make up this part of the story:
Larry will take a cab to Brooklyn to the marina to have one last look at the small fiberglass sailboat, a pretty robin’s-egg-blue, its soggy lines coiled neatly. The centerboard (replaced five years ago), the engine (replaced ten years ago), the sails in their sail bags, the cold wind whipping through the bay, the mushroom-shaped ride at Coney Island in the distance. Michael will already be there. He has made a pot of linguini with clams, and he helps his old friend into the boat, where they sit across from each other and drink beer from cans. Michael dishes the linguini out of the enormous pot he has brought from home. A gull paces the dock, watchful, gigantic.
The boat is called Without You. The title of a song from My Fair Lady.
“I will miss this,” Michael will say.
Larry will give a short wheeze in agreement.
Michael will sit next to him, hold up his phone, and take a selfie, two old men, their sparse hair ruffled by the wind, their eyes bright.
He will post the photograph on whatever the future iteration of Facebook will be, and will caption it: Ahoy!
; Daphne will see the photo right away.
Laurel’s daughter will point it out to her minutes later.
The twins will be furious. It is as if they have discovered their husbands having an affair.
“That’s your sailing partner? That’s Lorrie?”
“That’s Mickey?”
It is an affair, in its way.
“You brought us together,” Larry will say to his wife. “You and Daphne.”
“That was before.”
“You can’t just demand that a friendship end. That’s not the way friendship works. You know that, Laurel.”
Larry is very ill by this time. He is weak. He has trouble breathing. Laurel will sit next to him on the sofa and put her head on his chest and hear the hard work going on in there.
“Wow,” she will say. “All these years? Wow.”
Daphne and Michael will have a louder discussion, Daphne weeping and slamming doors, opening them in order to slam them again.
“How dare you? How could you? Why didn’t you tell me? This is treason. This is treachery. This is two-faced. This is perfidy. This is sedition.”
This is why I didn’t tell you, Michael will say. Because you would have erupted into a thesaurus of insults and theatrics, just the way you are now. Because you are irrational on the subject of your sister. Because Larry is my best friend.
And then Daphne will cry as he holds her, because all those things are true.
“But you’re pretty weird, you have to admit,” she will say. “Sneaking around in your little boat.”
Michael will not admit even that.
“I admit nothing. I regret nothing.”
“What was the name of the boat?” she will ask.
“That you will never know.”
And she never will. Though Sally knows. It is part of the story, and it amuses her.
They will take care of each other, Sally had said when her daughters were about to embark on their double wedding. She said it to Arthur, her dear Arthur in his pajamas, baby-blue cotton pajamas with white piping, he wore the same style pajamas until he died. He said, I know that, but who will take care of their husbands? Sally meant each half of each couple would take care of the other half of the couple, of course. And vice versa. But in the story, looking back and looking forward, it is the husbands who will be the ones who will take care of each other. Michael and Larry will stay together until the very end, until death does them part. Daphne and Laurel will continue to elbow each other out of the way in the giant womb of the world.
The Grammarians Page 19