Читать книгу Once We Were Sisters - Sheila Kohler - Страница 19

X

PREGNANCY

WE ARE BOTH PREGNANT NOW, MY SISTER WITH HER FIRST baby boy, me with my second, fifteen months after the first. Michael hopes for a boy.

My sister, who started her university studies of languages at the University of Cape Town, graduates from Wits, the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. It is 1963.

I have a graduation photograph of her with my mother in her wide-brimmed hat and pearls and my Aunt Hazel with her dark curls, at her side. They are standing smiling proudly in the sunshine. Look how happy they seem! Maxine is pregnant, her stomach swelling in her graduation robe, as she holds a scroll in her hand, a black band around her neck.

Without any degree and dressed in a loose jacket, I slip surreptitiously into the back of darkened auditoriums at Yale. I listen to Victor Brombert and Henri Peyre lecture on French literature, and Vincent Scully, on art. With my sleeping child in her stroller, I haunt the Yale art gallery in New Haven. I read all the books Michael reads and coach him with the flash cards I have made for his exams. I coach him for his art exams. I make him identify the pictures of famous paintings, parts of famous paintings, the feet of a girl on a swing. I take notes on the books he is reading and help write his papers. He writes a paper on the mask and the mirror image in the work of Stendhal.

Graduation day.

I kneel beside the gray four-poster colonial bed to pray to God for his success during his exams.

It seems we make love in the sunny bedroom every afternoon. I sigh and make the noises I have heard in the films, though the real pleasure will not come until much later. Easily, so easily, so young, healthy, and fertile, we fall pregnant, my sister and me. Our husbands seem to prefer us pregnant. The pill is still controversial, Maxine’s gynecologist does not recommend it. It will give you varicose veins, he says.

Both our babies are expected in early May.

In New Haven it turns hot unexpectedly, and I have to buy summer clothes for the few weeks that remain of my maternity. I sit out in a loose pale green cotton dress, my stomach swelling. I sweat on a bench at the edge of the New Haven Green and watch my little girl, Sasha, play in the grass. It seems the new baby will never come.

I sit at my huband’s new Scandinavian desk in the dim light of the dawn in the living room at University Towers with the bookcases behind me. I talk to my sister in Johannesburg on the telephone in the early morning, Sasha on my lap.

“How are you? How did it go?” I inquire about the birth. Her baby has arrived earlier than expected. All has gone well, she tells me. She has a beautiful baby boy whom they will call Vaughan.

My baby, who was supposed to arrive before my sister’s, is the laggard. She is taking her sweet time, reluctant to leave me. She tarries, while my sister’s boy is in more of a hurry to come into the world. The doctor decides finally to induce the birth. Cybele, my second child, a big baby girl, arrives two weeks late. Mother sends my Aunt Pie to help with the new baby and the long flight with the two small children from New York to Milan to meet my sister and her new baby. We are on the way to Rapallo. Pie is wonderful with babies and wraps them up tightly, winding the baby blanket around the little limbs.