trousseau said, “I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you have beautiful breasts.” I did not tell her the reason for the sweet swell. The Greek dressmaker, Mme. Vlamos, who seemed to get herself into all the wedding photos, was one of the only people who was alerted to the predicament.
I held a bouquet of lily of the valley in my hands, and I wept.
What about my dreams of being a writer, a teacher? What about my education? As children, my sister and I had laid the crayons out before us and pretended they were our pupils.
Pregnant, I married this boy who had finally penetrated my body, a few months before, in Paris.
At nineteen or twenty, I was still a child, lingering on in the imaginary world I was accustomed to, a world of nineteenth-century books, a child’s world of fantasies. I was in a story, as I will be all my life to some extent. A subterranean stream of story runs parallel with reality through all my life.
I was there but also on the page in words that conjured up a fiction. At nineteen, the reality of a masculine body with its frightening parts was too threatening to me. I felt inadequate, not ready for the reality of his hard, dangerous, thrusting sex.
Michael wrote in despair to his mother at his lack of success, and she had her Italian lover reply with kind words of advice and encouragement. Enzo was a kind man. “It has happened to me many times,” Enzo said, perhaps not quite understanding the situation.
Finally, one evening, on the bed in his apartment in the Latin Quarter in Paris, Michael did manage to penetrate my reluctant body. There was no blood, no pain, no ecstasy. Afterward he played Ray Charles, and I retreated to the bath, flushing out the semen as best as I could, and then leaving in an unreasonable rage, slamming the door. Though I allowed this to happen, did nothing to stop him except to present him with my stiff, unyielding body, somewhere within myself I felt deeply and irrevocably violated.
I spent the night in a hotel room, while he wandered the streets, looking for me. I wrote two letters that night: one to an old German boyfriend, Richard, who had always respected my virginity, describing the scene, which seemed to me like two frogs copulating; and I wrote a letter to Michael, but somehow I sent the wrong letter to the wrong man. It was Michael who read about the frogs. Obviously, I was angry with this determined young man, who was struggling with his own demons, a man whom I married in my white silk dress, a man to whom I would give my heart.
My sister, whom I followed around so faithfully as a child, now follows in my footsteps, though she is the older one, and her choice seems so much wiser: a doctor at twenty-one, a brilliant boy, who will study to be a cardiothoracic surgeon. He will learn to be good with hearts, so to speak. Out there, they are often good with hearts. They take a heart from the almost stiff and put it into the barely quick. He will tell us that the difficulty is not so much exchanging hearts as finding the right ones to exchange.
Carl seems a much more suitable choice of husband than my own, Michael, who is a lanky boy who looks so much like me, that people inquire if we are brother and sister. He is a boy without fortune, who is still a student at university, studying French literature and political science.
It was even suggested to me by the accountant, Mr. Perks, that instead of marrying him I go quietly to Europe with one of my aunts and give up my baby for adoption. Instead, I married but lost the baby almost immediately, once we were back in Paris in the apartment on Rue de Noisiel, with the blue walls and the one pink azalea plant, the blood flowing from me through the night while the two cats, Kochka and Minette, slept on my bed.
We would make a new baby almost immediately. I am like the Japanese man in a film I will see in later years, The Woman in the Dunes, who falls into a deep dune and is trapped down there, obliged to remain with a woman who must dig the sand endlessly. When he finally has the chance to escape, he no longer has the desire to leave her.
Maxine marries in the same stone church where I married Michael.
When I ask Libby Paul, one of the bridesmaids, what she remembers about the wedding and the reception, she tells me that, above all, she remembers that she was the one who recommended the dressmaker, as she was doing some modeling for her. Also, apparently there was not enough material, a Thai wild silk, for all the bridesmaids’ dresses, so they were made in different shades. In the black-and-white photo, which is all I see, they all look white.
At my sister’s wedding Mother seems mollified, though she complains about Ouma’s hat. Carl’s mother wears a rather odd-looking bonnet for the wedding, which I see in the photographs, and which reminds me of the red bonnets men wore in the eighteenth century during the French Revolution.
Mother moves into a comfortable cottage in the grounds of the couple’s big house on Valley Road. Roses grow outside her bay window, and there is an extra bedroom for my Aunt Pie, who moves in with her.
Carl will work as a doctor in Johannesburg: an esteemed and energetic young man with a finely chiseled face, a hard knotty body, the sudden flash of an unexpected white smile. He is tall, blond, and athletic. His nurses adore him, Maxine tells me; his grateful patients speak highly of his postoperative care, he does pro bono work on the weekends, even flies to Lesotho to operate there. His large family—several brothers and sisters; an intelligent mother, despite the hats, who is of distinguished French Huguenot stock; a father who, though not wealthy, seems responsible and kind—all look up to him, the brilliant boetie, the one who has passed his matriculation at sixteen, the one who will go on to Edinburgh to do his special training in heart surgery, the one who works with Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur, though not on the first famous heart transplant, but later and, particularly, on a difficult operation with a man whose heart seems to stop completely before starting up again.
Maxine and Carl’s wedding with Ouma and Oupa and my mother in the wide-brimmed hat.
My sister will soon fill the rooms of her big house with babies. She tells me her South African gynecologist encourages her in this endeavor. “We need more white babies,” he says.
IX
NAMES
OUR MOTHER HAS HER TWO WHITE BABIES, HER TWO LITTLE girls, one named after my father, Max, and one after her, Sheila May. I understand that my father loves my sister more. She is older and knows more than I do and can talk with my brilliant father during his brief appearances. Maxine knows how to read and write, how to add, subtract, and multiply, and how to file his papers. She is his preferred one. In a photo of the four of us on the beach she sits at his feet and leans longingly up against his legs. Because of her name, Maxine, I feel she is part of him, a little Max. They belong together.
Once, we are taken to the timber yard to see our father and tumble around in the sawdust, which goes down the backs of our dresses and pricks our necks. We are introduced to one of Father’s employees, who tells us that when Maxine was born, he put a gold coin in her hand, which she grasped greedily.
As sometimes happens in families, there is a pairing here; my sister is my father’s “Pet,” as I am my mother’s, or so I understand. Later, my sister’s children will tell me Maxine thought she was Mother’s “Pet.”
Sometimes, in the mornings, when our father has left the house, Mother allows both her little pets to enter her big bedroom, the lined curtains drawn on the bright light. We climb up into her wide, soft bed with the initialed blue linen sheets. She gathers us up to her bosom,
