The Grammarians Page 6

  “Oh.”

  “I do remember Catullus,” Laurel said. “And the man polishing his teeth with piss. I could read Catullus to the children! They would love me forever.”

  Daphne laughed. Anyway, why should her sister remember the pajama tops? “I’ll walk you to the subway.”

  They were on the street in front of their building. An abandoned armchair leaned against a metal pole with a bent metal sign that, Daphne knew, had parking regulations printed on it. But it was unreadable now, folded in on itself like a closed book. Daphne took her sister’s arm and they set off in the warm, cloying drizzle. She could feel Laurel’s nervousness.

  “They’re just little kids,” she said. “You can tell them anything. Like Brian!”

  “Children, a freak of nature is a princess who can fly.”

  “A princess who could fly would be a freak of nature, so…”

  At the top of the subway stairs, Daphne called, “Goodbye! Good luck!” in their private language, waving encouragement.

  A man pushed past her muttering “Foreigners.”

  * * *

  Laurel had chosen a tweed skirt and a silk blouse, and she hoped she looked teacherly. It was her only suitable outfit, but absolutely unsuitable for the unseasonably hot, rainy day. The subway steamed with damp people on their way to work. A woman passed her a laminated card that said I AM DEAF PLEASE HELP BUY, and offered her a green plastic key chain in the shape of a seahorse. When the businessmen with polished shoes got off at Fifty-Seventh Street, Laurel was finally able to find a seat.

  She didn’t particularly want to be a teacher. She didn’t want to be anything. She wanted to read books and go jogging past the garbage along the river.

  The floor of the subway car was smeared with street dirt and rain. Her shoes were suede, now spotted with rain, smart choice, Laurel. And she had no boyfriend. And she was a schoolteacher. A spinster schoolteacher.

  “The class size is manageable,” the headmaster had said at the interview. He was the most frazzled person Laurel had ever seen. One of his pockets was inside out. His hair was limp and clammy with sweat, and it was thinning in odd places, like a neglected lawn. “Fifteen children,” he said. He blinked at her hopefully.

  “Oh yes, perfectly manageable,” she said. Fifteen children? She tried to imagine fifteen children in a room, but could picture only a blurry, amalgamated sort of mob of small moving figures.

  “The curriculum is quite basic,” the headmaster continued, “so your major in psychology won’t come into play too much, although it certainly can’t hurt.”

  Laurel had majored in classics, but she’d seen no reason to argue. The poor man clearly had enough troubles. She was tempted to look in her purse and find a comb for him. Or a tissue. Spare change. A cracker.

  Mr. Gravit handed her a grubby manila folder stuffed with mimeographed sheets of paper. “Will this help? It’s just kindergarten, after all. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

  “Oh yes,” Laurel said. “I spent last summer working at a kennel, you know.”

  “Yes,” said the headmaster, ushering her out the door. “I saw that on your résumé. Very apt. Very apt.”

  In the two weeks since the interview, Laurel had studied the mimeographed sheets, but they didn’t give her much assistance. The letter B followed by broken lines beside a drawing of a beach ball, that kind of thing. The words to “Ring Around the Rosie,” which she thought most people, including the children, must already know by heart. A lesson plan for gluing macaroni onto oaktag paper. She had a box of macaroni in her bag that first morning, hoping the oaktag would be in the classroom.

  By the time Laurel climbed the subway steps at Eighty-Sixth and Central Park West, it was pouring. She opened an umbrella she’d brought with her, but it was not terribly effective, and both shoulders and arms were soaked by the time she arrived at school. She climbed the steps, so wide and impressive they could have led to a museum; an unimportant museum, admittedly; a museum of, say, philology. She was early, and the halls were almost empty. She went down a narrow, dank stairway that she thought she remembered led to an adult ladies’ room and pushed open a heavy wooden door on which was taped a sheet of construction paper with the word LADY’S scrawled in red crayon. Belonging to just one lady, she thought. Should she correct the sign? It seemed too aggressive an act for her first day teaching kindergarten. She put on lipstick at the mirror in the fluorescent light. She missed Daphne. She tried to pat her shirt dry with a rough paper towel. Then she went back up the stairway, her sleeves clinging.

  Shivering within the wet, cold silk of her blouse, she tried to focus on the children. She tried not to favor the attractive ones, of which there were four. The rest were a blur of garments appliquéd with zoo animals. And one little girl with an enormous eagle’s nest of curly black hair who frequently crossed her arms in obvious disapproval of the new teacher.

  “The most important thing,” Laurel said, “is not to be afraid of making mistakes. Making a mistake is how you learn what’s right.”

  The little girl with the hair that surely harbored a large bird of prey gave her an astonished look. It was not a look of astonished liberation, as Laurel momentarily hoped. It was a look of astonished pity. You blundering amateur, said the look. The child actually rolled her eyes.

  Laurel looked away, pulled at her wet silk sleeve. She watched it peel off her arm, translucent, just like the peeling skin of sunburns long ago.

  * * *

  If Laurel was a teacher, Daphne wondered why she, Daphne, was a receptionist rather than, say, a recepter. If a teacher teaches, does a receptionist-recepter recept? While Laurel tried to ambush fifteen children and cajole them into sitting cross-legged on the floor, Daphne sat at the desk in the vestibule of the alternative weekly trying to think up a better name for what she did, which was, alas, she thought, nothing.

  Her tenure was certainly less exciting than the tales about her predecessor had promised: there were no fistfights, and the staff did not trust her enough as the new person to handle their drug transactions. In fact, she seemed to be invisible to everyone there.

  Sometimes she left the office early, and no one appeared to care or even notice. Laurel was done teaching by 2:30, and they liked to meet at a large old coffeehouse on Greenwich, drink iced cappuccinos, and complain about their jobs. The chairs at the café had twisted wire legs and twisted wire backs. It was warm and dim, and the walls were lined with enormous dusty old oil paintings. Classical music played, the espresso machines hissed, and an immense statue of Pan playing his pipes looked down at them. The smell of coffee was sweet and rich and dreamy.

  “I just leave the door to the office open, and no one has to bother me going in or out,” she told Laurel at one of these drowsy coffee dates. “I mean, once I figured out how to route phone calls to the right person, there’s just about nothing for me to do. It’s very boring. But I can’t completely relax because there is always the little, teeny, tiny possibility someone will ask me something, though I can’t imagine who or for what, but it is a job and they do pay me, but it means I can’t completely concentrate on what I’m reading. And if you are not concentrating on Henry James, you’re in trouble.”

  “You’re reading Washington Square, not The Wings of the Dove.”

  “You try it. Looking over your shoulder all the time, just in case. It’s very distracting.”

  Laurel gave her a pitying look. “I have read nothing but dinosaur books since I started. I don’t have time to look over my shoulder. I feel like a mechanical rabbit on the greyhound track. Also, do you know how many times we’ve listened to Free to Be … You and Me?”

  Daphne said, “Mel Brooks! Carol Channing!”

  “It still gets their attention. But the record only lasts forty-six minutes.”

  “Read them Washington Square. I’ll audit the class.”

  “We started singing all our lessons. Even art projects, which is practically all we do. Glue and sing. Sing and glue.”


  “It sounds idyllic,” Daphne said.

  “They’re like little animals with opposable thumbs. But it has its pleasures. I can’t imagine having the freedom to read a real book, though.”

  They looked at each other, both suddenly grinning.

  “Yes?” Daphne asked.

  “Yes!” Laurel answered.

  TO SWOP. v.a. [Of uncertain derivation.] To change; to exchange one thing for another. A low word.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  What was the point of being a twin if you couldn’t pull the old switcheroo? At her sister’s receptionist desk in the vestibule outside DownTown, Laurel sat properly, facing front, not reading, trying to enjoy the switcheroo but finding it tedious. Daphne, she had to admit, was right: the job was to sit at the desk and answer the phone and announce anyone who came in, but the phone did not ring and no one arrived needing or wanting to be announced.

  Laurel peeked into the main office. No one looked up. She pretended she belonged there and began to weave her way through the desks and cubbyhole cubicles, marveling at the shabbiness of the place. Despite everything Daphne had told her, she had expected something more glamorous, but all she saw were menacing, leaning piles of newspapers lining the walls; small desks suffering beneath large typewriters, telephones, dirty mugs, and heaping ashtrays. Rolling chairs were frozen in place by the miserably curved backs and tapping feet of their occupants. In an aquarium-like glassed-in enclosure, a tall woman and a short man shook their fists at each other, silent behind the glass, like exotic fighting fish.

  Laurel stopped at a table of open dictionaries and style guides. At last, something worth looking at. Glancing down at a smeary sheet of galleys over which a woman with dirty black hair was hunched, she said, “‘Callous.’ With an o.”

  “Oh god,” the woman said. “That’s embarrassing. ‘The callus behavior of the Koch administration…’ I wonder how a callus would behave.”

  “Callously.”

  The woman laughed and introduced herself as Becky. Laurel remembered she was supposed to be Daphne just in time, introduced herself as her sister, and said, “You get to correct everyone’s homework?”

  “Yup. I’m the exalted copy chief.”

  “My dream job.”

  Becky snorted. “Right.”

  “No? I think it would be fun. Better than sitting at the front desk staring at the dirty wall.”

  By the time she went back to her post, Laurel had a pile of pages to read and copyedit. It was just a trial, Becky said. She already used four or five freelancers. But maybe some work would pop up for Laurel, whom she called Daphne, if she did a good job.

  * * *

  As she made her way to meet Daphne, Laurel thought she had already done an excellent job. Daphne would be so pleased. No one had missed the real Daphne and, better yet, the impostor Daphne had impressed the powers that be to promote (probably) the real Daphne.

  When Laurel arrived, triumphant, at the café, her sister was not yet there. Laurel hoped the children hadn’t locked Daphne in the coat closet or something. She ordered a cannoli while she waited, then another to celebrate her success, then a cappuccino to wash it down. Sated and rather sleepy, she thought: I pulled it off; more than pulled it off, I’ve given Daphne’s career a boost. A little guiltily, she wondered how Daphne had fared. Daphne was not a forceful person in new situations. If she had been, she would have discovered Becky and the copy desk herself. Laurel, exhilarated by her own success, suffered a pang of guilt at the thought of Daphne, an innocent, surrounded by so many small, sweet savages.

  * * *

  Daphne had, herself, felt reservations on her way to Laurel’s classroom that morning, reservations she had not shared with her sister. It was her idea to switch jobs, after all, unless it had been Laurel’s—it was often hard to tell—but either way she had enthusiastically gone along with the plan. As she stood at the bottom of the wide steps leading up to the school, though, she was no longer enthusiastic. She was terrified. The children would eat her alive and pick the bones clean. They would dance over the carcass of the fraudulent Miss Wolfe, banging wooden blocks together and dinging on their triangles or whatever musical instruments children in kindergarten had these days. Did they really call Laurel Miss Laurel? Or did they call her Miss Wolfe? It was an exclusive private school, after all. But they would taunt her by whatever name they chose and use their crayons and markers to write graffiti on the walls, on the windows. Then they would throw each other out the windows. Then they would throw her out the window. Could they reach the windows?

  The headmaster stood at the top of the steps greeting his employees. When Daphne reached him, he did not narrow his eyes or ask to see her passport. He shook her hand and said good morning. She recognized him from her sister’s description.

  “Sir,” she said politely. “Your sweater is on inside out. And backwards.”

  “Is it?” He smoothed the sweater affectionately. “Perhaps I put it on that way at home.”

  “Would you like me to hold your clipboard while you fix it?”

  Mr. Gravit pondered her offer. “No,” he said at last. “Thank you, Miss Wolfe. What’s done is done.”

  Miss Wolfe. Yes, she was Miss Wolfe. She was not claiming to be anyone else. She tried to relax.

  The children entered the classroom in little bursts of energy, shyness, petulance, joy. They were so small. If they attacked, she was sure she could fend them off. She began to feel more confident. When there were fifteen of them, Daphne sang the alphabet and some simple spelling words with them. They sang with enthusiasm. They did everything with enthusiasm, even refusing to sit down. Were they noticing anything different about their teacher? She hoped not. They were so amusing, crawling over each other, chewing on cardboard cutouts of numbers.

  As the day went on, she noticed one child in particular eyeing her suspiciously, a girl with wild hair and a sequined band around her head.

  “Something the matter?” Daphne asked. What was the little girl’s name? Daphne had no idea. “Dear?” she added.

  The child put her small hands on her small hips, leaned her face and the full force of her gigantic hair forward, and stared. Daphne stared back. She was sure the child had figured out she was not the real Laurel. They could tell—she knew it; she should never have participated in this needless charade. They had instincts. They could smell it. They could smell fear, and they could smell an impostor. They were like dogs. You could not trick a dog.

  Finally the girl said, “Sdack.”

  Daphne said, “Sdack?” Was that a taunt? A kindergarten curse? Did this class have its own secret language?

  “Sdack!” the girl said, her eyes bugging out, her little foot stamping the floor.

  “Snack! Snack!” they all began yelling. “You forgot snack!”

  “Oh! Snack!” Daphne smiled. “I am so sorry, children. So I did.” She handed out their graham crackers and milk cartons.

  “Would you like to be my assistant?” she asked the little girl with the hair and sequins, who continued periodically to shoot her the evil eye. Daphne thought, Keep your enemies close. She said, “You never know, I might forget something else. As my assistant, you can keep me on the straight and narrow.”

  The child glared at her, then said in her nasal voice, “Yedth, all wight.” And she did assist. She was officious and condescending—a perfect assistant, really. When it was time to go, she ran up to Daphne and hugged her.

  “You have tamed the wee serpent,” Mr. Gravit said from the doorway after the girl had run past him with a slap on his knee from her fat little hand.

  “She certainly helped me out today,” Daphne said. She still did not know the girl’s name. All day she had been addressing the child as Assistant.

  “Miranda’s a somewhat forceful child,” the headmaster said. “Bit of a pain in the ass, actually.”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You mus
tn’t. But I would. She is my daughter, after all.”

  Her gaudy outfit made more sense now.

  “Spoiled, demanding…” the headmaster was saying, a whole list of unpleasant qualities, in a sort of singsong.

  “Good for her,” Daphne said. “How else does anyone get anything?”

  Mr. Gravit nodded. “You understand children very well, Miss Wolfe. Well, I’m glad she was of use. She is the light of my life.”

  * * *

  When Daphne at last made her entrance into the café, it was exactly that: an entrance. She swept the door open, swooped into the room, stretched her arms, and aimed herself like a big redheaded bird at her sister. “I did it, I did it,” she sang to the tune of “You Did It” from My Fair Lady. “You said that I would do it, and indeed I did.”

  Laurel listened as Daphne recounted her conquest of the kindergarten class. Her fears were unfounded, it appeared. Daphne had even made headway with Miranda Gravit.

  “This is amazing!” she said. “You’re a better me than I am.”

  But I’m a better you than you are, she added silently. And she proceeded to tell Daphne how she had impersonated her into a new job as a copy editor.

  Daphne, still jubilant from her successful day as her sister, could not take it in at first.

  “Becky?” She tried to picture Becky but could only call up a murky image of a nondescript person in a mustard-colored sweater. “Really? Me?”

  “This one writer wrote ‘one of the only’ and I changed it to ‘one of the few,’” Laurel said. “I think that’s why we got the job.”

  “Thank you,” Daphne said. “I can’t believe it. Thank you!” She wondered if she would have noticed “one of the only.” Of course she would have. She wondered why she had never noticed Becky. She wondered why Becky had never noticed her.

  “Well, congratulations on a job well done,” she said, a tiny bit deflated somehow, as if neither success was really success at all. “Nobody missed me!”