a book I am reading. It is about a drinking party where each of the men speaks in praise of love, but Michael’s friends look at me askance: A pregnant woman without a university degree, talking about Plato? What could she know? It is apparently something they cannot grasp. They turn the conversation back to cooking, babies.
Maxine sits by the big window and holds my new baby and talks about Carl. She tells me she has had a call from one of his old girlfriends.
“Who was she?” I ask.
“A tall, attractive girl with the name of a bright flower,” Maxine says pensively. “Strelizia, she said her name was.”
The girl telephoned and asked if she might come and talk to my sister. She wanted to tell her something very important.
“What did she say?” I ask.
“It’s so strange. She begged me not to marry him,” my sister tells me, looking at me.
“Why not?” I ask.
“She would not tell me why. She just kept saying, ‘You must not marry him. Do you understand? I can’t tell you why not, but believe me, please believe me, you must not marry him.’”
“What a strange thing to say,” I say uneasily.
“I presume she must just be jealous or something. Perhaps she wants to marry him herself,” my sister says, stroking her long, doll-like dark lashes between finger and thumb.
“Do you think so?” I ask.
It is only later that the significance of this comes back to me, and I wish with all my heart that the woman had had the courage to explain what she really meant. What dark secrets had she already discovered? Why did she not dare to tell my sister what she knew? What did she fear?
So many things not said, not known.
VII
KNOWLEDGE
YET IT IS MY SISTER WHO KNOWS ALL I BELIEVE AS A CHILD.
It is she who has the knowledge. I follow her around, her pale shadow, pretending to do what she does, “reading” a book, Pinocchio, because she, two years older than me, is reading it. “You are not reading, silly,” she says, laughing at me.
“I am!” I say, holding the book upside down, sitting on the soft velvet sofa in the dimness of the lounge, with the soft mauve carpet, and the mauve velvet curtains closed on the light.
I stay in the swimming pool as long as she and my cousin do. I tread water, though my teeth are chattering with cold, my lips blue, my fingers crinkled like an old woman’s.
I imitate and emulate as long as she will permit it. Sometimes she escapes me. She vanishes.
Once, we are told to take our afternoon nap in the nursery with our cousin Heather, Pie’s daughter, who is four years older than I am and often spends time with us. When I awake, I discover my sister and my cousin had only pretended to lie down to sleep, and while I was sleeping, they slipped out quietly and went off to swim at the public swimming pool, leaving me to wake up alone in the nursery. I feel this departure is a terrible betrayal; they have lied to me, left me alone. I weep bitterly.
My sister is the only one allowed into my father’s study, a mysterious place on the west side of the house. I have peeped in there and seen the fat, dark leather armchairs, the big desk before the window, the gramophone, where I believe little men must live and make music. Maxine is allowed into this sanctum sanctorum to file Father’s papers, a mysterious operation that concerns the alphabet, which I do not yet know.
We rarely see my father, who leaves before we wake up, slipping off silently, driven down the driveway in his shiny Rolls-
Royce, going to the timber yard, where he makes all our money.
Once, though, by chance, I saw him standing naked in the black-and-white-tiled bathroom before the big basin, and I dared to go up to him and touch the thing dangling there temptingly like a bell. I reached up and said, “Ding dong!,” swinging it back and forth with my little fingers, much to his ire.
My father’s Rolls-Royce coming in the gate at Crossways.
Maxine will be the one to explain the strange secrets of sex to me. We are walking together on the dry lawn—it is winter in the Highveld, and the grass is yellow and stiff. She tells me how the man puts his part into the woman to make a baby.
“It’s not true!” I exclaim.
“But it is. Cross my heart,” she says.
At the thought of this absurdity I fall to the grass and roll around in laughter, holding my stomach. For some reason this seems extraordinarily funny to me.
My sister says severely, “There is nothing funny about it at all!”
VIII
WEDDINGS
I DO NOT GO TO MY SISTER’S WEDDING IN JOHANNESBURG, though she has come to mine. There are so many times in her short life when I have let her down, betrayed her, when she has called out to me, and I have refused to respond. Once, much later, she comes to America with her children and rents a beautiful yacht on Chesapeake Bay. She telephones me in Connecticut, where we are spending the summer, and asks me to join her. “Please come,” she says, but I refuse, so preoccupied with my own paltry problems, my own obsessions, and my own husband. Perhaps, too, I need to see the world through other eyes, eyes that are no longer hers.
Why was I not at her wedding? I do not remember the reason I gave my only sister. Was it because I had let myself be carried along entirely by my husband, like a leaf caught up in the current of a strong river, buoyed up by his needs and desires?
Was it because my husband did not want to confront this crowd of relatives and friends, who had repeatedly told him on his wedding day what a lucky man he was to marry me? Was he obliged to pass an examination that day, and did he wish to have me at his side? Or was it that I was glad that part of me had escaped this old world of my childhood, my relatives, my mother, even my sister, and entered a new, brash American world? Instead I sent a telegram wishing that the bells would ring harmoniously. Maxine responded saying they had, indeed. Perhaps they had.
Yet Maxine stood behind me as a bridesmaid at my wedding like a white shadow. All the bridesmaids were in white. She followed me up the aisle, as I had followed her as a child around the garden, doing whatever she did, as I will wish to follow her into death. When I accepted the ring, she held my bouquet for me, as she would later hold my baby. There was no engagement ring. How could this twenty-one-year-old boy produce such a thing?
I walked up to the altar in the Anglican stone church, St. Martin’s-in-the-Veld, in Johannesburg on my uncle’s arm, wearing a white silk dress, my breasts swelling suspiciously beneath the smooth cloth.
A
