Читать книгу Once We Were Sisters - Sheila Kohler - Страница 18

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, almost visible through the sheer pink nylon nightgown.

She permits us to slip our hands into the dark at the back of the secret drawer in her kidney-shaped dressing table with the triple mirror, the glass top, and the sea-green organdy skirt, where she hides her jewels. We bring forth the Craven A tin. She tips out the bright snakes of tangled necklaces and bracelets onto the blue sheets. She decks us out with her rings and brooches. She slips her brilliant diamonds, the yellow, the brown, the blue, and the blue-white, into our hair, and onto our fingers and toes. She dances us on her knees. She sings, “And she shall have music wherever she goes.”