The Grammarians Read online

  “Or me!”

  “We said that we would do it…”

  “And indeed we did.”

  The sisters sat quietly for a moment. Outside, a sheet of dirty newspaper blew past the windows.

  “The Assistant was wearing a crown as well as a headband,” Daphne said at last. “I didn’t see it at first.”

  “It was lurking in her Garfunkel hair? She’s a difficult little girl. But sometimes I catch her staring at nothing, daydreaming, and I think what an interesting adult she will probably turn out to be.”

  “You’re such an optimist, Laurel.”

  “Everyone needs a hobby.”

  “Everything about poor Mr. Gravit is askew, isn’t it?”

  “He looks like someone left him in the dryer,” said Laurel.

  “A forgotten sock.”

  That night, Daphne began to work on the galley Laurel had brought home, a review of a play. “It’s a play about a consciousness-raising session,” she said. “The audience joins in. Isn’t that a little passé?”

  “Luckily, you don’t have to see the lousy play. Just help the words sort themselves out. And be glad you’re not a teacher.”

  “These words are just as confused and squirmy as children.”

  They both looked affectionately at the galley.

  “But they don’t hug,” Daphne added.

  “But they have to be listened to, just like children.”

  Words and students, Laurel thought—they could be recalcitrant, out of order, trying to slip by without being noticed. But once you got them working together, unobtrusive and efficient, it was beautiful.

  “Of course, words never have to go to the bathroom, and you don’t have to wipe their noses,” Daphne said. “I still can’t understand why I never noticed Becky and the wonderful world of copyediting.”

  “You don’t notice anybody. You have your nose in a book, as they say.”

  “Laurel, you’re not really going to fix your nose, are you?”

  Laurel shrugged, looked away, stood up. “I might,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because…”

  “Why shouldn’t I if I want to?”

  “Because…”

  “We’re not a two-headed monster, Daphne.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one planning to disfigure myself.”

  “Plastic surgery is not disfigurement. And I’m not planning to tamper with your nose, so lay off.”

  Then we won’t be interchangeable, Daphne thought sadly.

  “We’re not interchangeable,” Laurel added, as if she’d heard her sister’s thoughts.

  * * *

  Daphne wanted a boyfriend. The feeling was one not just of desire but of deficiency. She felt inadequate not having a boyfriend: incomplete. She believed that being a twin sister and having a twin sister was a kind of magic circle that would always protect her from being alone, yet she felt alone. A terrible admission. How disloyal she was. And childish, as if she could not manage on her own. She didn’t manage on her own, didn’t have to: Laurel was there, her older sister, her alter ego, on whom she had always been able to rely. She knew that Laurel would always be there. But what if she wasn’t?

  Anyway, there it was, the sad truth: She wanted a boyfriend.

  She wanted someone by her side, on her side, a man, not her sister. Or not just her sister.

  She wondered if the closeness between Laurel and her seemed outlandish to the outside world. It sometimes seemed outlandish to her. Most people probably thought it was part of being an identical twin. And that was true, she knew that was true, she could feel the connection to Laurel in her cells. But all the same, it was peculiar to be so close to someone who was not a boyfriend. Or a husband.

  A husband. Because that was what she really wanted, wasn’t it? A husband. She could not admit it to anyone, not even Laurel, least of all Laurel. She would sound like someone out of the 1950s. She might as well start wearing a little hat and gloves. But she did, she wanted a husband, a person to sink into, to rely on, to sleep with every night, to have sex with every night, to wake up with every morning. To love.

  Was that too much to ask?

  She was lucky, she thought, that her job served as a surrogate boyfriend. Her job now was demanding and capricious, jealous of her time and filling up her inner life with its needs and moods.

  “There are rhythms,” she told Laurel. “It’s uneven, raggedy, like the breathing of someone who just ran up a hill. One minute a fact-checker is crying and the layout guy is on the roof getting high and the reporter you’re working with starts yelling that he doesn’t care if his participles dangle, and then the proofreader corrects the spelling of ‘Cincinnati’ to ‘Cinncinatti,’ and then, suddenly, just like that, the noise stops. The commotion stops. And you can go back to the quiet, precise, orderly routine of reading line by line, word by word.” Her eyes were alive, her lips in a half smile. “I love my work.”

  “There is something fair and just in what we do,” she said to Becky one day. “Grammar is good. I mean ethically good. If you think of all these words just staggering around, grammar is their social order, their government.”

  Becky, her face drawn and sallow, her cheek smudged with ink, put a cigarette in her mouth but did not light it. “I’ll never quit smoking,” she said. “How do people quit?”

  Daphne said, “Grammar makes you respect words, every individual word. You make sure it’s in the place where it feels the most comfortable and does its job best.”

  Becky flicked her lighter. “Mm-hmm.” Slowly, she let the flame touch the end of the cigarette. Slowly, she inhaled. “You can’t quit, just so you know. It’s a myth.”

  “Every part of speech is as deserving as every other part of speech.”

  “Mmm,” Becky said, with great satisfaction, smoke dribbling from the sides of her mouth. “Yes, it is. It’s in the Constitution, I believe.”

  “Sometimes, okay, a word needs to be led. Or nudged. Or dragged. Or squeezed a little. To get it to the spot where it belongs.”

  “Or cut.”

  Daphne said, “Well, last resort.”

  “Different styles, you and I,” Becky said.

  Daphne thought, Yes, thank god for that. Becky was wearing the same old pilled sweater the color of expensive mustard, which smelled faintly of mothballs.

  Becky tapped the manuscript she was reading. “‘I came home to him stumbling, peeing, and hiding,’” she read. “Now, which one would you say is stumbling, peeing, and hiding? The guy who came home to the junkie in his house, or the junkie? Then he writes, ‘I gave him a bath in my shower with most of my clothes.’ Do you think he means most of his clothes were in the bath sloshing around with the junkie? I mean, come on, people.”

  “But the point is, any collection of words can be copyedited with pleasure. Even this wash-the-junkie-intruder crap. Because we are bringing order to the world of wash-the-junkie-intruder crap. This is the best job I’ve ever had. Thank you, Becky.”

  “You’re welcome,” Becky said. “Personally, I’d rather get laid.”

  * * *

  Yes, well, there was that. When she got home that evening, Daphne put on her pajamas and settled in for a good sulk. She had found, at the last minute, a “masterful” that should have been a “masterly,” and she had inserted a semicolon in front of a conjunctive adverb. She had changed a “knelt” to a “kneeled,” then changed it back again. She was good at her work. So what? It was Monday, the big night of the week, the paper rushing to its inevitably late close, and Daphne would have to go back in a few hours, but in the meantime she could stare into space and think about not having a boyfriend.

  “Why are you home?” Laurel said when she came in. “Isn’t this free-food night?”

  “Yes.”

  Food was brought in every Monday night and served to the staff in great aluminum foil troughs.

  “So? What’s the story?”

  “No story.”

  “Want me to co
me with you, the secret twin, and we can be at two ends of the room at once and freak people out?”

  Daphne hated the word “freak.” Even in ninth grade when all the kids they hung out with, the hippie kids who were not quite old enough to run away, called themselves freaks, Daphne had not liked the term.

  “Oh come on, ‘freak’ means capricious,” Laurel said. “Whimsical. At least, ‘freak’ used to mean capricious and whimsical, which is good enough for me.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be capricious.”

  “Too bad.”

  Daphne said, “Whimsical would be okay.”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  Laurel looked at her sister, wasting away on a saggy futon, already in her pajamas, her expression woebegone, her hair up in an ugly tight bun, and said, “Yes, you are. You are whimsical. You’re the most whimsical person in the world.”

  They both started to laugh.

  “What’s wrong?” Laurel asked. “Really, Daphne. What is it?”

  Daphne hesitated and then said, very softly, a tremor in her voice, “Will I ever find a boyfriend?”

  Laurel pushed her sister’s feet out of the way and sat on the futon.

  “Silly,” she said. “You’ll find a million boyfriends.”

  “I don’t want a million boyfriends. I want one. A real one.”

  She had managed to assume a dramatic pose, even on the cramped futon, one arm flung across her face, the other falling languidly to the floor. But Laurel could sense the real fear and loneliness, the panic, almost. She recognized it because she so often felt it herself.

  Of course Daphne would find a boyfriend, she told her. Daphne was a remarkable creature. She just needed a creature as remarkable as she was to be her remarkable boyfriend. She just needed to find the right one, one good enough and freaky enough and whimsical enough for her. “Come on, get dressed, we’ll go freeload and find freeloader boyfriends. Up you go!”

  * * *

  They stood in line, then loaded their paper plates with yellow rice and greasy chicken wings.

  “You’re twins?” asked a young reporter who was just behind them.

  “No,” one of them said with a smile.

  “Uh-uh,” the other said, shaking her head.

  They were wearing identical clothes—they had not been able to resist—plaid Kenzo dresses, courtesy of their mother.

  One of the other star reporters came over, an Englishman, thin and wiry in a Mick Jagger sort of way. His suit was the color of good vanilla ice cream and he wore a short paisley silk scarf tied around his neck. A suit! A neckerchief! both girls were thinking. Older, in his thirties, he reeked of superiority; it was in his accent, in his walk, a bandy rock ’n’ roll walk, in his vanilla-colored suit among the blue jeans and work shirts. He was charming, too, which was unfair, Daphne thought, like his work—eloquent, funny, rather brilliant, rather unfair. Did they all look like the stories they wrote? The way people look like their dogs?

  “Well, well, well,” said Jon the Englishman. “What have we here?”

  “Diplopia,” Laurel said, holding out her hand to shake his.

  “Ibid,” Daphne said, doing the same.

  They smiled so openly when they spoke. It was a routine they had developed, and they relished, every time, that delicious moment, half a moment, quarter of a nanosecond, when they were believed, when whoever they were speaking to thought, Here are two girls named Diplopia and Ibid.

  No wonder I don’t have a boyfriend, Daphne thought in a flash. Then pushed it out of her head. She wondered if it would be unprofessional to sleep with Jon. She liked older men. She liked men who looked like dandies but were known to be philandering heels.

  No wonder I don’t have a boyfriend, she thought again.

  That night, in Jon’s rather squalid unmade bed, she decided she had been right and wrong. She was right, it was unprofessional; and she was wrong, she did not like older men who were philandering heels all that much. Too smooth. Chest too smooth, words too smooth, sex too smooth.

  “I have a question,” he said, lying back against a slightly yellow pillow. “About you and your sister.”

  “No,” she said immediately. “We never have. And, no, we don’t want to.”

  He exhaled a cloud of smoke and a sound of mild disappointment.

  “Not one of my personal fantasies, mind you,” he said.

  “One of your impersonal ones? What are your fantasies?”

  “You really don’t want to know, you sweet little girl.”

  She laughed, because he was right. “No, I don’t.”

  “And now,” he said, “what you do probably want to know is how I can help you leave behind the dreary confines of the copy desk for the glories of a byline.” He crossed his white weedy arms over his white weedy chest. He flicked back his hair, which was thin, shiny, the color of golden wheat blown by a fresh, hushed breeze. His cigarette hung from his lips.

  Daphne took a cigarette from his pack, unfiltered, ugh, but hers were in her bag in the living room and she was too comfortable to get up.

  “You are very attractive,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

  “The first thing you need is a beat,” he said. “A reporter needs a beat.”

  “But I don’t want to be a reporter.”

  “Of course you do. You all do.”

  Daphne watched him pour more scotch into a glass and wished she liked scotch. “I don’t,” she said. “Reporters have to talk to people and ask them questions.”

  “How else do you discover the truth?”

  “That’s lofty. The truth! I guess I could read your column to find the truth, for starters. Because even though it’s usually not true, it is very entertaining. And I’ve noticed you are not intimidated by the split infinitive. Is that because you’re English?”

  He took another swig of whiskey. “Yes,” he said. “Privilege of lost empire.” Then he grabbed her and brought his face close to hers. “And I think, young copy girl,” he said, his breath warm and sweet with whiskey, “that it is time to split infinitives once more.”

  After another round of pleasant copulation, as Jon put it, Daphne declined his offer to spend the night, put her clothes on, and walked home in the humid springtime dark. It had been raining, and the sidewalks seemed to steam damp gray night air. She could hear her own footsteps. It was as if they were following her. She glanced back to make sure no one real was following, but the gay men strolling past were not interested in her. Neither were the drunks farther east.

  She wondered if she would ever find someone she cared about. It was so draining, worrying about finding love, as if it were an upcoming exam. She liked sleeping with guys, liked the flirtation and the buildup, the funny, awkward dance that led at last to bed. Why was everyone, herself included, so determined to have a proper boyfriend? Everyone wants to be loved; everyone wants someone to love: that was the reason, obvious and bland and thrilling and eternal. God, it would be so nice, so restful, to call off the search.

  * * *

  Laurel watched her sister leave with the bandy-legged English reporter, sighed, then watched a man with shoulder-length hair and a large bald spot empty other people’s chicken bones into a bag. “For soup,” he happily explained to anyone who asked. Laurel walked up to the roof to get some air. Too many adults were alarming. Children had the excuse of being children. But these people …

  “These people?” a voice said. “Which people?”

  She must have said it aloud. How much of her little homily, she wondered, had she spoken out loud?

  “Those people,” she said. “Any people. Too many people, that’s all I meant. In one place.”

  “Eating.”

  “Talking.”

  He nodded. He seemed, in the dark of the rooftop, to be extremely good-looking.

  “Why are you up here?” she asked.

  “I live here. You?”

  “Those people.”

  “Right.”

&nbs
p; They walked down the stairs to the street and into the bar next door. A jazz trio was playing, bass, piano, and horn.

  “I live two floors above the paper,” said the man, who was extremely good-looking even off the dark rooftop. His name was Larry. “I hate Monday nights.”

  “I don’t even work there. My sister does. I was freeloading. But free food has its price. There was a man collecting old chewed chicken bones for soup.”

  Larry ordered them both cheeseburgers.

  “Beer?”

  “Beer,” Laurel said.

  She thought, I wonder if he would be a good boyfriend for Daphne? Then she thought, I wonder if he would be a good boyfriend for me?

  EDA´CIOUS. adj. [edax, Latin.] Eating; voracious; devouring; predatory; ravenous; rapacious; greedy.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  When Laurel and Daphne first moved into the garret, they’d laughed about its ancient stove. They considered it decorative, like something from a stage set. They were afraid to light the burners and never had any reason to; they got every meal from the lunch counter on the corner, even breakfast, for which they ordered oatmeal that was slopped into a paper coffee cup decorated with Greek pillars. The kitchen with its half refrigerator, scratched sink, old stove, and cockroaches was not an inviting place to cook. And neither of them knew how.

  Then Laurel suddenly—and stealthily, in Daphne’s opinion—decided to learn. She went on the hunt at secondhand bookstores for cookbooks. She called their mother and asked about recipes. Astonished when Sally explained the right way to cut a mushroom, Laurel realized she had never eaten a fresh mushroom, much less sliced one.

  “I am embarking on an awed journey into the unknown.”

  She held the mushroom reverently in her hand. It was so light, so smooth, so dirty, and yet so otherworldly. It was like dead flesh. It was like fresh air.

  She called her mother again. “Do you boil the water before you put the potato in or after?”

  “Oh for god’s sake, who eats boiled potatoes?” Daphne muttered.