The Grammarians Read online

  Two of them. He remembered bathing them when they were babies, so many pink arms and legs, so many chubby little hands splashing, two open little birds’ mouths. He remembered leaning over the side of the tub, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his watch resting on the sink. He remembered dribbling water on their heads. And the crowns of their heads, the swirls of wet baby hair. He remembered the rush of tenderness so powerful he thought he might stop breathing.

  When the girls first began to speak in their careful gibberish, Sally had worried.

  “You just feel left out,” he said.

  She nodded. Yes, she did feel left out.

  “Don’t feel left out.” He put his arms around her. “You’re their mother.”

  “But they are…”

  “What?”

  “Each other.”

  He didn’t like that, and he said so. They were alike, two peas in a pod, but each pea had its own circumference. Daphne followed Laurel, a tiny acolyte. He wondered if Daphne would ever turn around and walk away. He wondered if Laurel would follow.

  His brother had aggravated Sally’s worry, getting her all worked up. But so what if they spoke in tongues? When he looked at his daughters, he found it difficult to see anything not lovely. He loved to watch them, to listen. Their voices were music, their little heads nodding at each other were dance.

  “You should have been the shrink,” his wife told him. “You have so much patience. When they talk to each other in gobbledegook, well, sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  Then, at last, they’d begun to speak English. Arthur had half expected their first words to be, like Macaulay’s, “Madam, the agony is somewhat abated.” In unison. But there was no dividing line, really, between their nonsense talk and their foray into English. Like foreigners living in Italy who quite unexpectedly realize one day that they can understand Italian, Arthur and Sally realized that they knew what their children were saying.

  The prattle had become language, and Sally no longer heard it as compelling background music. Every word was a word she could hear clearly and understand, a word that must be taken into account.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy!” she said. “They never stop talking!”

  “Maybe,” Arthur said, “you are going crazy. Maybe you just think they’re speaking English. Maybe they’re still speaking baby talk, and you are, too.”

  She laughed and sang, “‘Words, words, words! I’m so sick of words.’”

  The twins were two little Professor Higginses. On rainy days, Sally listened to My Fair Lady over and over with them. They liked it better than any other record. “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” they sang. They jumped from the armchair to the couch, their arms spread, their bare feet flying. “Loverly!” they sang. “Ah-wooo-dent it be loverly.” Tumbling over the back of the couch, running, leaping, flinging themselves into somersaults.

  “Let a woman in your life and your serenity is through…”

  Arms flailing, feet flying.

  “When you yell you’re going to drown…”

  “I’ll get dressed and go to town!”

  Sally would sit in a chair in the corner, well out of their way, singing along.

  “Somehow Keats will survive without you.” What could they possibly make of that, the two little girls? They didn’t know who Keats was. Or did they? Perhaps they had long ago memorized Endymion and recited it to each other at night, translated into their strange language.

  “Do you know who Keats is?” she asked them one day.

  “In the song?”

  “Yes, in the song.”

  They both shrugged, and Laurel said, “He’s in the song, Mommy.”

  “In the song,” Daphne echoed.

  “Silly,” Sally heard Laurel say softly to her sister as they walked away.

  “I know,” Daphne whispered back. “Keats is in the song.”

  Sally put the record on for them then and relaxed into her chair in the corner. Her coffee was cold, of course. She was sure she had not had a hot cup of coffee since the girls had been born, but at least, she thought, sipping, tapping her foot to the music, her children did not know who Keats was.

  Sally sometimes suggested other records. When the rain persisted and they couldn’t go outside for several days in a row, they listened to The King and I or Guys and Dolls. But My Fair Lady was the family background music.

  Inevitably, somewhere around the time the rain began to fall in Spain, one of the girls would tire and trip, banging her head on the coffee table, and the crying would begin.

  “Stop this fracas!” their mother would say in a voice of mock severity. They had only to hear the word “fracas” and they would cheer up and begin again.

  BO´OKISH. adj. [from book.] Given to books; acquainted only with books. It is generally used contemptuously.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  In the evenings, the sisters waited for their father, kneeling on the couch, side by side, staring out the living room window.

  “Maybe a wolf did suckle them when I wasn’t looking,” their mother said. “They have a canine sixth sense. They know when you’re coming.”

  He suggested they bring him his slippers in their mouths, one slipper per.

  “God, don’t let them hear you. They’ll really do it.”

  The night the dictionary arrived, they were there, on the couch, waiting. Their hands, like four paws, lined up along the back of the couch, their two chins resting on them. They were always mercifully silent at that time of day, Sally noticed, gazing into the dusk. Sniffing out their prey, she thought. She laughed, and they turned to look at her, two sweet and innocent faces. She leaned down, kissing one on the top of the head, then the other, in the blissful quiet that held them until Arthur came home.

  The night the dictionary arrived, the girls heard the drawn-out crunching of gravel as they did every night, a favorite sound: the car in the driveway, their father. As adults, years and years later, they both particularly remembered that night. Happily watching their father step out of the car. The car door slamming shut. Another night. Daddy’s home, Daddy’s home. But then Daddy opened the trunk of the Buick and lifted out some sort of wooden stand. He lugged it into the house. No, no questions yet. Just wait and see. They stood on the front porch, then, cold bare feet, watching him lift an enormous book from the dark trunk of the car, like a doctor delivering a baby, they later said, the biggest book imaginable.

  The stand was dragged into the new den. The biggest book imaginable was placed on top, open, each side swelling like a wave in the ocean.

  Their mother said it looked like an altar.

  “What’s an altar?” Laurel said.

  She didn’t really care. And she knew what the word “altar” meant, somehow, without being told. But their father said, “Let’s look it up.”

  He flipped through the biggest book imaginable, the dictionary, a book that contained and explained every word in the language, he said. The print was so small it looked like print for a mouse to read.

  But the page that should have had the word “altar” was missing. Thousands of tissue-thin pages, and that one was lost, torn out, gone forever.

  “Damn,” he said.

  Their mother laughed. “Look that up for the girls instead.”

  Daphne wanted him to close the big book. She wanted to run her hand along the cliff of compressed pages notched with steps the size of a fingertip, each one labeled with letters of the alphabet.

  Other books were unloaded from the trunk of the car that night, but none of the other books had its own altar. A man who worked at their father’s office had sold all the books to Arthur. The man’s father had died, and the man had no use for his father’s old books.

  “You could say we’ve inherited them.” Their father handled each one as if it were precious, breakable.

  Laurel and Daphne watched their parents put the other books in the new, empty book
shelves. The den itself had just been constructed, converted from a small screened-in porch. Their parents admired how the new room looked. There were only thirty or so books, but they were impressive. Some were bound in leather.

  * * *

  It was an instant library. Like instant coffee or instant soup. That’s what Uncle Don said. He said books were not meant for display, they were meant to be read.

  Their father had been sitting comfortably in his new armchair in his new room, his legs stretched before him, pointing out the books to his brother. When Uncle Don said what he said, Arthur pulled his feet back. He no longer looked comfortable. One pant leg had risen up, and Laurel saw his skin, which looked uncomfortable, too, a strange colorless patch, vulnerable, almost frightened, like a squirrel waiting, frozen, on a branch until you passed by.

  “Why not fill the shelves with your own books, books you’ll really read?” Uncle Don said, as if answering their father, though their father had said nothing.

  “We read them,” Laurel said.

  “Yes, well, they would, wouldn’t they?” Uncle Don said. He pulled a volume from a shelf. “The King’s English. Utterly appropriate for a five-year-old.”

  “Don’t start up with them, Don,” their father said, a little wearily.

  “Yeah,” Daphne said. “Don’t start up with us.”

  She got a look from her father and said quickly, “Sorry, Uncle Don. Start up with us!”

  That made their father laugh and Uncle Don look up at the ceiling and say, “God help us,” which pleased Daphne. She looked at Laurel expecting a sly smile of approval. But Laurel was now sitting on the floor, her lips moving as she slowly read from The King’s English.

  “‘… air of cheap or-na-ment…’”

  * * *

  They liked to pull the ottoman in front of the altar, climb up, and stand there, leafing through the dictionary. Sally sometimes encouraged them to watch television just to get them away from the dictionary. It couldn’t be healthy, two little faces pecking at the musty pages of a dead man’s discarded book. Of course, it was educational, she told herself that. But what sort of an education? Bits and scraps, words as unconnected to one another as candy wrappers dropped on the street. She smiled at that thought. A lot of candy wrappers that would be, thousands. Where had the thousands of pieces of candy gone? Sally went to the dresser in the front hall and opened a drawer. She always kept a box of chocolates there in case someone stopped in for coffee. If the children wanted to read about words, why shouldn’t they? She went into the kitchen, made a cup of coffee, and opened the box. She extracted two pieces heavy with caramel and nuts. But just two. They were quite rich.

  Collie, colie, coaly, coal-black. See COAL. 1. A large dog of a breed originating in Scotland, where it has been used for generations in herding sheep. The breed is large, standing 20 to 24 inches at the shoulder and weighing 50 to 60 lbs. The variety with a rough and profuse coat is more common and decidedly more commanding than the smooth-haired variety.

  In the frail, almost transparent pages, the collie looked like Lassie and was indeed commanding. On other pages there were other dogs drawn in fine-lined profiles. There was a long, low dachshund, decidedly less commanding than even the smooth-haired collie, and a seriously uncommanding dog with a fanciful name, the Dandie Dinmont terrier.

  “And spaniels, spaniels, spaniels,” Laurel said. “Every spaniel has its own drawing.”

  She brought this up with her father one night after dinner.

  “Why isn’t the dictionary nice to cairn terriers? It gives them no picture. And look what it says about them: employed chiefly to enter rock piles and dislodge vermin.”

  “Vermin.” Not a nice word. And while other dogs were described as “noble” and “loyal,” cairns were “employed.”

  “The dictionary is not fair.”

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to be fair, exactly,” their father said.

  “It’s not supposed to be mean, is it?”

  “Well, it has mean words in it, so we can understand them and know what they mean, but…”

  “How can ‘mean’ mean mean and also mean mean?” Laurel said.

  * * *

  “Perhaps we should get the girls a real dog,” Sally said that night when she got into bed. “They spend so much time looking up breeds in the dictionary, maybe a flesh-and-blood dog would do them good.”

  “It’s you who wants a dog,” Arthur said. “Isn’t it? Two wolf pups not enough?”

  How did he know? Could he tell she was lonely?

  Sally Wolfe loved her daughters as much as her husband did, but she was less comfortable with them. She loved them the way you love the birds in the trees, that was the sensation: the birds sing, they flutter, their colors flash by; but you cannot touch them because you cannot catch them. She admired her children from a baffled distance, pretty little girls, as busy as birds, as alien. She worried about Daphne and Laurel, too, worried about how they would fit in, because they seemed to fit nowhere but with each other.

  Sally was a dominating mother, when she could be, but it was all in self-defense, which was something the twins clearly understood.

  When she told them bedtime stories, they listened intently, then commented, like adults exiting a play.

  “That was not a good ending,” Laurel said.

  “It doesn’t make sense, Mommy, and it’s a little boring because the bear never finds the honey anyway. And what bear would be friends with a spider? Spiders don’t have friends.”

  “It’s a story, girls. In stories anyone can be friends with anyone else. And how do you know spiders don’t have friends?”

  They thought about that for a while, until Laurel said, “No.” She shook her head back and forth on the pillow. “Uh-uh.”

  There was such finality. Sally didn’t know whether to laugh or beg forgiveness. That was often how she felt with the girls.

  “Tell us another.” Daphne was sitting up now.

  “If my stories are so bad, why do want another?” Sally asked. “That’s silly, you sleepy girls.”

  “We’re silly,” said Daphne.

  Sally gave a sigh. They liked to make her words circle back on her.

  “You can do it, Mommy,” Laurel said. “I know you can.” She gave her an encouraging nod.

  Sally waited, counted to two, and there it was: “We know you can,” Daphne added, just as Sally had expected. She smiled at the two serious faces. Not only would she tell another story, she knew, but she would try harder.

  “Good one,” Daphne whispered at the end. She was almost fully asleep.

  “Thank you, Mommy,” Laurel said.

  Sally left them, elated with her success.

  * * *

  Arthur came home with a puppy a week later, an Irish setter mix the color of the girls’ hair, a bumptious, friendly creature who settled on Sally as his mistress the moment he galloped through the kitchen door. He slept on the rug on Sally’s side of the bed. He followed her, dogged her, as she liked to say, from room to room, his scarlet ears flopping, his nose reaching up reverently to graze her hand. If the dog was by a closed door, it meant that Sally was somewhere on the other side of that door. He listened when she told the twins stories, without comment or criticism of her narrative skills. The girls—inevitably, Sally thought—named the puppy Webster.

  HARMONICK. adj. [… harmonique, French.] Portioned to each other; adapted to each other; concordant; musical.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  If you can fold something, and both sides match up, that thing has symmetry. Twins are symmetrical. Beauty of form arising from balanced proportions—far preferable to one dictionary’s definition of “twins” that they’d seen: One of two children or animals born at the same time. It was practically agricultural. The example of a sentence using “twins” was worse: Experiments were carried out using sets of identical twins.

  Were Laurel and Daphne experiments? Farm experiments
gone wrong?

  When the dog was with them, a real animal, his tail swinging gaily in the sun, his ears rising and falling with his gentle trot, the girls did not feel like an experiment; they felt like a parade. People smiled and greeted them and made much of the three redheads in an open, good-natured way. The red-haired dog, because he was a dog, made the redheaded twins less identical, less strange. When it was just the two of them, each face a mirror of the other, their clothes carefully chosen to match, their long, dark red hair flaming behind them, they became, again, oddities.

  People often stared at them. To be the object of that fleeting stare, a series of those stares as you walk down the street, makes you wonder what is wrong. You hold your sister’s hand and the heads turn, eyes following you, one after another, a row of faces flipping as you pass, like pages in a book. What do they see? You look out from your eyes, you burn with shame, but you don’t know what you’re ashamed of because you can’t see what they see. Then you turn and see your sister. She, also a mortified pink, has turned to you. And you know then that what they see is identical to the person you see, the person you love the best. And then you change the way you walk. You swagger. And then you are beautiful and symmetrical, two lovely girls walking hand in hand, two sides of the folded paper, shapely as origami, mysterious, confident, radiant. You are not an animal or an experiment. You are math. You are perfection.

  Then your sister turns a new, funny shade of pink that is really a shade of green. She says she isn’t feeling well. She says she must have eaten too much candy at the movies. Your mother says, I told you so. Your sister’s hand is clammy and your sister is green. She is bent over the curb throwing up.

  You stand away from her, and she alone absorbs all the stares now. The piece of origami paper has unfolded, is flat, torn. One half of the sheet of paper vomits in the gutter. The other half wants to disappear but also thinks, At least my shoes don’t have throw-up on them.