We make up our own secret language, a complicated system of spelling backward: “cat” is “tac,” though there are few words I can spell, and I keep forgetting the rules.
We give our identical dolls swimming lessons, tying string around their rubber waists and dragging them up and down the pool, instructing them to kick. We lie on the concrete around the pool in the sunshine and play the game of Touching Tongues, giggling. A bee stings me while we are doing this, and our nanny tells us this is what happens to naughty girls.
I sit in front with my sister behind me, her legs around my waist, using our hands as paddles sailing around the big enamel bath, with its claws for feet, visiting foreign countries, going “overseas,” traveling around and around, splashing the water on the black-and-white-tiled floor.
We whisper together in the shadows in the back of the nanny’s square green Chevrolet. “Let’s make a bunch,” I say, and together we slip off the seat, crouch down, and strain, producing a small malodorous gift for the nanny. We run down to hide in the bottom of the garden, terrified at our wickedness.
We climb the stile and hide down in the wild part of the garden, listening to the wind in the swaying bamboo. We play the secret game of Doll. Alternately Maxine is the “doll,” lying stiff and obedient to my wishes, or the mistress, who makes me do whatever she wants me to do.
It is this game I think of later, when the Roman men call out to us, “Che bambola!” What a doll!, and much later still, when I see my sister, her shattered body wrapped in white as in swaddling clothes.
III
FIRST GLIMPSES
IN NEW HAVEN MY SISTER HOLDS MY NEW BABY GIRL UP IN the air and admires her dark slanting eyes. Maxine says she is beautiful. She props the baby’s head over her shoulder and pats her back and tells me about the man she has just met, who wants to marry her.
We have both laughed at, flirted with, and danced with many different boys.
In Johannesburg we were known as the Kohler girls: Maxine, the elder one, the sweet one, with her soft blond curls and long-lashed violet eyes, her pale delicate skin that bruises so easily, the shy smile; and Sheila May, two years younger, darker-skinned, with straight hair, gray-green sloe eyes, and narrow, boyish hips.
Maxine is the one who never suffers from spots, the one who is said to look “like an English rose.” She is dreamy, good-natured, and merry. Her kindness does not mask her intelligence, but it is obvious her sympathy comes first. She seems placid, but as with a calm sea on a sunny day there are sudden squalls.
I torment her in the nursery by touching her bed with the tip of my finger, which I know annoys her. I lean across from my bed and poke. “Please don’t touch my bed,” she says again and again, “please don’t touch my bed,” and finally, when I continue to laugh and touch the bed, she throws the glass of juice she is drinking in my face.
When we fight as children in the back of the car, Mother suggests we both get boxing gloves.
“I hate her,” I tell Mother in a rage.
“No, you don’t, you love her,” Mother says.
I do, I do.
Maxine laughs and cries easily, her big eyes quick to fill with tears at a glimpse of someone else’s sorrow. She will pick up someone else’s baby on the beach, if it is crying. She is the musical one, the one who learns the Mozart sonatas and plays with feeling, the one who gets the Steinway, when Mother takes it out of storage. When I try to play nursery rhymes to my children on the piano, they will run away.
We are both readers, curious about people, the past, and above all, about love.
Now Maxine holds my baby, Sasha, in the Viyella night-dress with the drawstring neck, that my mother and sister have brought into my small room in the Grace–New Haven Hospital in a carry-cot filled with clothes for my baby to wear. She tells me about the young doctor she has met in Johannesburg. I am not sure how much she tells me that day, or even how I react to her words. I am unaware of their importance in our lives. I am preoccupied with my new husband, my new baby, and with the blood that flows from my own body. Much later, her children will fill in the blanks with words that ring with significance.
She has caught a first glimpse of Carl at a tennis party in Johannesburg. He is playing tennis, hitting the ball hard in the sunshine. She finds him dashing in his tennis whites and is, her son later tells me, “immediately smitten at the sight.”
At twenty I have already married the American I first glimpsed at nineteen standing in the shadows outside our ground-floor flat in Rome. He was slouching slightly in the dim light, before the iron gate in the Parioli. A long, lanky twenty-year-old with high cheekbones and a blond forelock that tumbled into his slanting eyes, he was slim-hipped in his blue jeans, the white shirtsleeves turned up to the bony elbows. He was ringing our bell in Rome. I stood hesitating in the twilight, my hand on the ornate wrought-iron gate. Grinning his big baby grin, he announced that he was the friend, Michael.
“Enrico’s American friend,” he said. So I let him in the door and eventually into my bed and then into my heart, my heart of hearts. He has become my conduit into life as my sister was once.
IV
SUITORS
NOW MAXINE TELLS ME SHE, TOO, IS THINKING OF MARRYING.
“But what’s he like?” I ask.
He is a blond and blue-eyed Afrikaner who grew up in Ermelo, a small town in the Transvaal, and his father works as a superintendent on the railways, or perhaps she says he is a caretaker of gardens. He seems to like flowers. Carl’s mother’s name is Azalea, which does not suit her at all, I will think, when I meet her years later. There is nothing flower-like about Ouma, as we will call her—using the Afrikaans name for grandmother—a large, solid lady with a heavy hand. Her youngest son, Louis, will say much later that his mother tried with increasing bitterness to get her children to continue to speak Afrikaans by taking them to the Dutch Reformed Church, something they resisted. English has become their language, the language of what Ouma probably considers the oppressor.
Carl, a nerd at school with thick-rimmed glasses, one of his daughters will tell me later, had been teased as a boy. He passed his matriculation at sixteen and is already a doctor at twenty-one.
“I don’t think he’s had time to read Dostoyevsky,” Maxine says and laughs.
My sister and I have sworn we will never marry anyone who has not read Dostoyevsky. We have copied out long passages from Ivan Karamazov’s speeches about the existence of evil in the world into our black hardback notebooks.
“And what about James and Tom and Neville Rosser?” I ask. She laughs and strokes the soft fair fluff on my baby’s round head.
I know my sister, at twenty-two, has seriously considered several suitors: James, a good-natured South African who owns a large banana farm with blue trees and many big dogs in Natal; Tom, a slim, fair Scot with curly hair, who wants to become an Anglican priest; and Neville Rosser, who took her to the school dance, and who has glossy black hair, a dimple in his chin, and will become an engineer and even find oil in his backyard, I find out later.
Then there is Henry, the distinguished Englishman, the member of the Grenadier Guards, the son of a friend of Mother’s who took Maxine out the night of her presentation to the Queen, she tells me.
My sister dropped a curtsy before the Queen in a pale mauve, pleated dress with a décolleté that showed off her smooth young skin, and a little mauve pillbox hat that perched on the back of her blond curls.
Mother,