Once We Were Sisters. Sheila Kohler

Banff, Lake Louise,” Mother says with a sigh. Or, “Big Sur! Carmel!” reciting the litany of her voyages to people who have never been there.

      I see Maxine turning to me, laughing, on a boat, the wind whipping her curls; standing clutching her Guide Bleu to her swelling stomach in the shadows of a stone church.

      I remember our trips to Zermatt in Switzerland, the children standing together for a photograph with their skis at their sides like spears. I recall the long arduous voyages out to South Africa with small children to visit her in her home in Johannesburg and a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, where I stay in a hotel room where you have to put money in the meter for heat, and she does the dishes in her fur coat.

      This summer, Mother rents a villa on the Ligurian coast near Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, which comes with a cook, Ines, who will remain in our lives, working for both of us at different times.

      The villa is on the side of a steep hill with a view of the sea sparkling in the distance. In the early mornings you can hear the chickens clucking in the henhouse, which is halfway down the hill, far enough away so that the noise does not disturb the guests in the rented villa or on the beach. Sometimes at night, the stench rises up in the hot air.

      Maxine and me skiing in Switzerland.

      We all arrive in Italy in late June and meet Ines, the cook, who, we will find, has a squint in one eye and likes drama as well as food. She is always blowing up the oven. She is always trying to get Sasha to eat. Sasha seems to have decided, at the birth of her new sister, not to eat. “Mangia! Mangia!” Ines urges.

      Maxine and Carl arrive with their new baby. The proud father and new mother show us their little boy. We all marvel at this miracle, whom they call “the Professor,” because he has a partially bald head. He lies naked on the bed and pees straight up into the air like a Roman fountain. The four of us stand around him and laugh.

      Nights, Maxine and I stumble together through the big rooms of the old villa with our new babies in our arms. We wander through the long corridors with the sloping marble floors and the high ceilings and in the distance the soft sound of the sea. We rise in the night, both awake, breast-feeding every three or four hours, and meet in the dim light, whispering and giggling, as we did as girls in the nursery.

      My sister sits wearily in her white dressing gown with her boy baby in a chair by the window at dawn, while I lie on the bed, Cybele’s big head on my arm, while we talk about motherhood and the births of our babies.

      I tell her so proudly that my baby, at nine and a half pounds, was the biggest one in the hospital. We listen to the chickens clucking and a rooster crowing to announce the day.

      We rarely see Carl, who has never been to Europe before and rushes off, thrilled to visit the sights. He falls for Italy at first sight. He seems so energetic, impatient, and enthusiastic, rushing off for day trips from Rapallo to visit Genova, Portofino.

      Michael is less enthusiastic about touring. He was dragged through Europe, going from one small hotel room to another with his mother as a little boy. Lonely, unable to sleep, she woke him often in the night just to talk to him.

      My mother-in-law is often ill and has sought a cure for her asthma in Switzerland. As a young boy, Michael was sent to Le Rosey, a fancy school for rich boys in Rolle, where they drank wine with their meals. In Rapallo Michael prefers to lie on his bed and read Jane Eyre.