The Moment She Was Gone

5

That first trip to India and Southeast Asia ended some eight months later Annie came home in May of 1985 wearing baggy pants and sandals, and silver circlets through her brow, her nostril, and her tongue. Her hair was hennaed and crawling with lice. (Her pubic hair, too, my mother later informed me.) It was after this first journey to India that Annie told us she was a Tantric adept, having been initiated into the religion in Sri Lanka. She brought home a collection of the jewelry she’d learned to make from a silversmith in Bali, an odd collection of earrings, bracelets, pins, and rings fashioned mostly of silver and copper, with one or two pieces in gold. Some of the work depicted Shiva and Shakti, the god and goddess who were Tantric adepts. But most of the jewelry...

“Oh dear,” my mother said when Annie held up for exhibit a massive gold ring shaped in the form of a penis wrapped around her forefinger, its bulging head set with a tiny seed pearl representing delayed orgasm. We were beginning to understand that “Tantric adept” meant someone skilled in the art of prolonging sexual awareness through ritualized intercourse. We were beginning to catch on to the fact that Annie believed sexual orgasm was a cosmic and divine experience, something my mother didn’t particularly relish hearing because she didn’t want to believe her young daughter — Annie would be nineteen in September — was running all over the universe prolonging the pleasures of intercourse without reaching orgasm as described in the fourth-century Hindu sex manual called the Kama-sutra.

But spread all over my mother’s rug was an assortment of wrought, or perhaps overwrought, penises, vaginas, clitorises, testicles, nipples, and various abstract representations of “orgasms without ejaculation,” as Annie described them, silver and gold and copper and bronze splashing drily this way and that in perpetually delayed frenzy. The jewelry was explicitly sexual. In fact, it was embarrassingly so.

“An early Tantric deity was a goddess idolized in the form of the yoni,” Annie said, “which is the vulva on that pin, Mom.”

At that moment, my mother was holding in her hand a copper pin formed in the shape of an open vagina with the shaft and head of a penis lying between its ripened lips.

“The male god was represented by the lingam, which was the Aryan word for penis, Mom, you can see that on the pin, too.”

“Yes, I see,” my mother said, and placed the pin back on the rug as if it had grown suddenly hot in her hand.

“In Tantra,” Annie went on to explain, “the sexual partners learn to heighten the act through the use of breath control, proper posture, meditation, and the pressure of fingers. You’ll see that one of the rings — which by the way can actually be used during sexual intercourse — is shaped like a tiny finger. I used a real ruby for the fingernail.”

“Would anyone care for some coffee?” my mother asked.

We were still living on Columbus and Seventy-second at the time. Mr. Alvarez, who was still super of the building, used to keep pigeons on the roof, and Annie and I went up there one evening shortly after her return, to watch the sunset. There were times, when Annie and I were growing up, that we seemed to live in a world of our own, speaking codes we ourselves invented, the ciphers known only to ourselves. But even when we spoke in plain. English, it was a rapid form of communication, Annie completing a sentence I had begun, I finishing one of hers. We were a reclusive, self-reliant pair. We needed no one else in our closed and intimate circle. We were twins. That evening, it seemed we were twins again. Annie was home again.

Sitting with our backs to one of Mr. Alvarez’s coops, the birds making their soft subtle sounds behind us, she told me that traveling to places like India and Indonesia had been difficult at times, but she knew she’d remember it forever, and felt certain she’d go back again...

“I know that with all my heart, Andy.”

It was a calm, lovely evening, the end of what had been a surprisingly cool day in June. Dusk was fast approaching in Manhattan, even-gloam was almost upon us. When we were children, we used to come up to the roof all the time, to watch the sun set over Manhattan. We used to look to the West, and watch the sun going down behind the GW Bridge. There were hardly any tall buildings on the Jersey shore back then. My sister and I would hold hands as the sun gradually disappeared and dusk gathered. We were holding hands now as well, the pigeons gently murmuring behind us.

“I wish you wouldn’t keep running off all the time,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, “all the time! I’ve only been gone twice And I always come back, don’t I? You should come with me next time. You want to be a writer, you’d learn a lot.”

“Well, a writer,” I said.

“You really would have enjoyed the sex show I went to in Bangkok,” she said, and waggled her eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “There was a woman who popped Ping-Pong balls out of her vagina...”

“Disgusting,” I said.

“... and another one who pulled out a series of small metal balls on a chain. Another woman used her vagina to blow a toot on a toy bugle...”

“Please, Annie.”

“I’m telling you the truth. One woman even stuck a cigarette in there, and lit it, and smoked it. With her vagina! I mean it. Blew smoke rings from her vagina! Anything but what it’s meant for, right? God, I hated Bangkok! The air was so polluted, my eyes burned all the time. You know what they do in Thailand, Andy? Pregnant women drink the milk from young coconuts so their babies’ll be born with lovely skin, did you know that?”

“You’re making all this up.”

“No, it’s true. They have schools that train monkeys to climb trees to bring down young coconuts.”

“What else do they do in Thailand?”

I was smiling. I knew she was inventing all this. I was thinking, she’s the one who should become the writer.

She smiled back at me, tapped me playfully on the hand to let me know she was telling the absolute truth. In the West, the sky was already beginning to turn red and orange and yellow.

“The people burn the peels of mandarin oranges to keep mosquitoes away from their houses. So they won’t get malaria. That’s what I’m going to do the next time I go there. Burn orange peels. Instead of taking those stupid malaria pills.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go away again,” I said.

“You can come with me,” she said. “Do you know there’s a fine for chewing gum in Singapore?”

“I’ll just bet there is.”

“Stop it, Andy, I’m serious! You can get a fine for chewing gum! And in Yo Jakarta, a bell... which do you like best, Andy, I’ve heard it pronounced three ways. Joe Jakarta, Yo Jakarta, and even Georgia Carter, which sounds like a stripper, doesn’t it? I prefer Yo Jakarta, it sounds softer, doesn’t it, Yo Jakarta? Do you remember the trouble Daddy had with the names in The Once and Future King? When he read it to us at bedtime? All those strange medieval names! But in Yo Jakarta, a bell peals at bedtime, to remind the women to take their birth control pills. They sound a second bell an hour later.”

“The second one is called coitus interruptus,” I said.

Annie laughed.

I knew she was making all this up.

“In Bali,” she said, “if a person is buried in the ground, he won’t go to heaven. That’s why it’s important to be cremated. But if you live on the side of a mountain, it’s all right for your body to be laid out on the ground to decompose in the sun. That’s because mountains are holy.”

The sun in the Western sky was rapidly dipping below the horizon. We sat side by side with our backs against the pigeon coops. It was such a good time of day. It was so good to have Annie home again.

“There’s a temple in Bali where menstruating women aren’t allowed to enter,” Annie whispered, as if telling an enormous secret now. “There’s a big sign out front, I mean it, this isn’t a joke. Because it’s a holy place. I’ll take you there sometime, it’s called Uluwatu, and it’s supposed to be full of these little gray monkeys that are holy. I went in, anyway. They told me later I shouldn’t have. Because that day, there was only one monkey in the temple, instead of the hundreds that were supposed to be there. In fact, they call it The Monkey Temple. But there was only one monkey that day. Because I had my period, and went in, and angered the gods. Was what they told me later.”

“Who told you? The guides?”

“No, not the guides.”

“Then who? The gods?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Well, who, Annie?”

“I don’t remember. Somebody told me. Who remembers? Anyway, what difference does it make? I never listen to what they say.”

“What who says?”

“Whoever,” she said, and waved one hand on the air, as if brushing away a fly. “I’d go crazy if I listened to them.”

I turned to look at her. Her face was stained by the setting sun. In the gathering dusk, she shook her head, and then closed her eyes. Behind us, the pigeons were muttering softly.

“Do you remember when Daddy used to read to us at night?” she asked.

“Oh yes.”

“Do you remember when Archimedes the owl taught the Wart to fly?”

“I remember,” I said.

The sun was almost gone.

“Do you remember Cully the hawk? And the two falcons, Balan and Balin?”

“Yes, Annie, I remember.”

“Do you remember the wild goose Lyo-lyok?”

“Yes, oh yes.”

“It used to be such fun,” she said. “Flying.”

In September of 1985, my sister started a new rock group named The Gutter Rats, and was preparing for a tour through Dixie. A tour!

You have to understand that this so-called rock group was in effect a garage band with pretensions. I don’t know how they managed to find a booking agent, and I don’t know how he succeeded in getting jobs for them throughout the South, but they did, and he did. His name was Wallace Hennessy, Wally to my sister and the four other members of her group. I met him only once and remember him as a huge and flatulent man in his early forties, wearing a rug that looked like a fright wig.

There was a black girl named Pearl in the group (she played keyboard) and a lead guitarist and bass guitarist who were also black and whose names were either Teddy and Freddie or Perry and Lennie, I forget. There was also a white drummer named Stephen. As she had with The Boppers, the group we formed when we were fifteen, my sister played tambourines and sang. You will remember that in that earlier effort, I played bass guitar, which is the equivalent of choosing geology as the course to fill your science requirement. I mentioned this to either Freddie or Lennie, one old bass-guitar player to another, heh-heh, get it, Fred, Len, little poke in the ribs there, get it? Not a smile.

In January of 1986, Wally booked The Gutter Rats on a tour that ran them through Virginia and the Carolinas, and then swung through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, before heading into Florida where they would play Tampa, St. Pete, and a few towns in the Everglades. As rock bands go, they weren’t too bad. They were merely amateurish. In that respect, and again because our lives — my sister’s and mine — seem to run all too often along parallel lines, my writing wasn’t too bad, either, it was merely amateurish. Or maybe it was bad and amateurish. But at least it never got me in trouble. The band did get Annie in trouble.

I was still living at home, and attending school at NYU, when the call from Georgia came that May. My mother answered the phone. It was the middle of the night. Everything with Annie seems to occur in the middle of the night. “Andrew, wake up,” my mother yelled, “quick, pick up the phone!”

“What is it?” I said.

“Your sister’s in trouble. Annie? Hello, just a minute, your brother’s getting the extension. Andrew!” she yelled.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

I was on the living room phone already, standing there in my pajamas. My mother was on the phone in her bedroom.

“Annie? We’re both on now. What is it?”

“Hello, Sis.”

“Hi.”

“What is it, Annie?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I got arrested.”

“What for?” my mother asked.

“I peed on a policeman.”

“You what?”

“He wasn’t in uniform.”

“Annie, what on earth...?”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Georgia,” she said.

“Where in Georgia?”

“Just outside Atlanta.”

“You got arrested?” my mother said.

“It’s okay, I’m out on bail.”

“But why’d they... what did you say you did?”

“He forced us to cake off our panties.”

“Annie!”

“Well, he did, Mom.”

“Then he’s the one they should have arrested.”

“Oh sure,” Annie said. “I need money to pay the fine, Mom. The gig broke up in a riot, and we never got paid. Can you send me some money?”

“How much money?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“What!”

“The fine is a thousand dollars.”

“What!”

“This was a cop I pissed on, Mom.”

The way she tells it, the party at the fire house was in full swing when this young man came up to the bandstand and made advances. Fire house, you heard me correctly; the jobs Wally Hennessy booked for The Gutter Rats were seldom of high caliber. The job that night (or gig, as my sister preferred calling it) was paying a hundred dollars a man (women, too, for that matter) and started at eight and was to have ended at midnight had it not been for the fracas precipitated by one Harley Welles.

At the time, Pearl Williams was a strikingly attractive black girl who was only a fair musician, as for that matter was every other musician in the group, with the possible exception of my sister whose tambourine-shaking was admittedly no great shakes, but whose voice was pretty good for this level of performance. They made a nice couple, my sister and Pearl. Shaking her tambourines and her considerable booty, Annie would stand emerald-eyed and blond and somewhat body-pierced, belting out songs made famous by other singers, while behind her at the keyboard Pearl tossed her head and hurled lightning bolts from her flying fingers, dark eyes flashing, wide grin promising gospel-sister pleasures. It was no wonder that Harley Welles thought both these ripe young ladies from the big bad city might care to accompany him home for the night.

Harley was wearing some kind of blue nylon jacket with yellow letters on the back, GHP for Georgia Highway Patrol or some such, although the first time around (we heard this story many times, too) he was merely an out-of-uniform member of the local constabulary. Whatever else he was, he was certainly comical. At least the way Annie tells it. She’s wonderful with accents and dialects, my sister. I wish I could do them the way she does.

Young Harley, it appears, came up to the bandstand during the eleven o’clock break and immediately introduced himself to Pearl and my sister.

“Hah, ah’m Hahley Wales, nice t’meet y’all, ladies.”

(I can’t do dialects, I’m sorry.)

I’ve been observing you ladies (he tells them in his inimitable way) and it occurred to me that you both being strangers in town and all, you might enjoy a little sight-seeing tour after y’all quit playing tonight. I want you to know there are more enjoyable places we could visit here in town than this li’l ole fire house, though I must say your presence has enlivened and beautified the place beyond measure. We could, for example, go to a fine ole bar I know of down the road, which is touch-close to a lovely motel many visiting celebrities like y’all stay at when they’re here in town. I would be happy—

“We’re busy, thanks,” my sister says.

“Thanks,” Pearl echoes.

I would be happy (young Harley goes on, undeterred) to accompany you ladies to this bar I’m telling you about, where perhaps you might enjoy dancing a little instead of singing and playing your l’il ole hearts out, like you’re doing here, though it’s a juke box there, I must admit. I’m a fair dancer, and I would be happy to alternate as your partner, so to speak, until such time as the three of us might become better acquainted. I’ve been noticing how well you two ladies play together, and I know this sort of intimacy, if you take my meaning, comes with practice—

“Get lost,” my sister says.

“But thanks,” Pearl says.

He is not about to get lost, young Harley. He tells my sister that if perhaps she’s not interested, then maybe her little black friend here with the swift fingers and the big smile might be enticed into sharing a brew and tripping the light fantastic, or whatever, this being an enlightened age in the South and all. My sister tells him that perhaps he hasn’t understood what she’s saying, which is that neither she nor her little black friend here with the speedy fingers and the bright smile is interested in sharing anything at all with him tonight, and besides it’s time they got back on the bandstand.

“So tell you what, Cracker, take a walk,” she says. “Or I’ll call a cop.”

“I am a cop,” he says.

According to my sister, Harley then pulled a rather large weapon from under his blue nylon jacket with the letters GHP on it, and pointed it at both her and Pearl, waving it in their faces from one to the other, and forcing them to accompany him outside behind the fire house where he ordered both of them to take off their panties and pee on their hands.

This was sixteen years ago.

I had not yet heard Annie’s story of molestation by the man giving pony rides or the kid sitting behind her on the saddle or poor Mr. Alvarez under the sink. When she related this Southern atrocity story to me and my mother, it sounded entirely fresh and believable. My mother was thoroughly appalled. I think she would have preferred Annie being raped, rather than so humiliated; her ruination, so to speak, rather than her urination.

As for me, I found the whole tale amusing. First, the image of these two frightened amateur rock artists, one black, one white, pulling down their panties for a redneck in a blue nylon jacket holding a .357 Magnum on them, and then Pearl actually starting to pee on her own talented fingers while Annie becomes so enraged that she suddenly straddles ole Harley’s leg and begins pissing all over his pants and his shoes — hey, you can’t get that on prime time television.

We laughed so hard, Annie and I.

We sit on the living room sofa, side by side, my mother and I. It is beginning to become light outside, a false dawn promising another clear day. I take my mother’s hand in mine. It is cold to the touch.

“Mom,” I say, “when did you speak to her last?”

My mother hesitates.

“Mom?”

“Yesterday afternoon sometime. I was going downstairs to do some shopping. We needed milk and orange juice.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She certainly didn’t say she was planning to leave. I would have...”

“Mom? Please, okay? We’re trying to find her. No one’s hurling accusations. Can you remember what she said?”

My mother sighs deeply.

“She was watching television. I came in to ask if she wanted to come shopping with me. An old movie was playing. Something with Joan Crawford, they play all those old movies in the afternoon. Annie asked me if I thought Joan Crawford was smarter than she was. I told her...”

“Smarter? Why would she ask something like that?”

“She said people say Joan Crawford is smarter. People say she’s stupid.”

“What people?”

“Well, she didn’t say ‘people,’ exactly,”’ my mother says, sounding suddenly wary, even cagey, the way she often sounds when we’re discussing my sister.

“What were her exact words? Can you remember?”

“Well... she asked me if I thought Joan Crawford was smarter than she was, and when I said ‘No,’ she said, ‘They say she’s smarter.’ ”

“They?”

“Yes.”

“They say?”

“Yes.”

“Who did she mean by ‘they,’ did she say?”

“No. Well... she was using it the way everyone uses it. It’s a common expression. ‘They say’ means ‘People say.’ ”

“Did she seem to think anyone was at that very moment telling her Joan Crawford was smarter than she was?”

“No, she was watching television. There were just the two of us in the room. I certainly didn’t tell her Joan Crawford was smarter.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her Joan Crawford had script writers.”

“She didn’t think anyone on television was telling her Joan Crawford was smarter, did she?”

“Well, I can’t say what she was thinking, I’m not a mind reader.”

“Did she seem to be listening to voices coming from the television set?”

“There were voices coming from the television set, Andy. There was Joan Crawford’s voice and the actress in the scene with her, I forget her name.”

“Mother,” I say, “please don’t be dense.”

My mother flashes me one of her withering green-eyed looks.

“I’m asking you if voices told Annie to run off again.”

“I did not hear any voices speaking to Annie,” she says stiffly. “Did she ever tell you she hears voices?”

“No.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m simply trying to...”

“There were no voices. Wouldn’t I know if she was hearing voices?”

“But she said ‘They say,’ is that right?”

“They say she’s smarter, yes.”

“Meaning Joan Crawford.”

“Yes.”

“And you told her Joan Crawford had script writers.”

“Well, first — Annie said, ‘They think I’m stupid.’ ”

“They again.”

“Yes.”

“What’d you think she meant by that?”

“People. People think she’s stupid. But they don’t, you know. All my friends think she’s highly intelligent.”

“You didn’t think she was referring to voices or anything.”

“No, I didn’t think she was referring to voices or anything, as you put it. Look, son, I know just where you’re going, so cut it out, will you, please? Your sister wasn’t talking to Joan Crawford or anybody else but me, is what you’re suggesting, isn’t it? That Annie hears voices? That’s right, isn’t it? Annie hears voices, I hear voices, everybody in the whole wide world hears voices except you and your Dr. Lang! Please, kiddo, give me a break!”

“Did she say anything else?”

My mother doesn’t answer me.

“Mom?”

“I heard you.”‘

“Well, did she?”

“She said, ‘Forget it.’ ”

“And that was it?”

“Yes.”

“Was she still watching television when you left the room?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say anything when you came back?”

Again, my mother doesn’t answer.

“Mom?”

“No,” she says at last. “Nothing.”

The front door opens.

Augusta is back from her nicotine break.

“Anything happen while I was gone?” she asks, sounding as if she’d been to the ladies’ room during a particularly good part of a movie and now wants to know what she missed.

“Andy thinks his sister was talking to Joan Crawford,” my mother says.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Augusta says, and then waves her hand as if to dismiss this entire nutty family into which she has married.

“Where’s Aaron?” my mother asks. “I thought he was with you.”

“He’s downstairs chatting with the doorman,” Augusta says. “Is there any coffee?”

“On the stove,” I say.

“His sister’s gone, and he’s downstairs chatting with the doorman?”

“I’ll go get him,” I say, and leave the apartment at once.

My brother Aaron is standing outside the building when I come downstairs. He is smoking a cigarette. He looks like all the other lost souls standing outside buildings all over Manhattan, puffing on their forbidden cigarettes. He is the CEO of a giant corporation, but he has been reduced to sneaking smokes behind the barn.

He does not even try to hide the fact from me. Perhaps he’s forgotten that he told us he quit smoking five years ago. Or perhaps he no longer gives a damn what he told us. There is certainly an arrogant swagger to the manner in which he deliberately takes a huge puff as I approach, and then blows the smoke on the air like a factory smokestack belching pollutants.

“I thought you quit smoking,” I say.

I have never been able to resist taking a jab at Aaron. Perhaps that’s because he took so many jabs at me when we were kids. Rarely does his verbal sparring match mine, however. This time his riposte is at least adequate.

“So did I,” he answers. “What’s going on upstairs?”

“Joan Crawford,” I say.

“Joan Crawford?”

“Whether or not Annie heard Joan Crawford talking to her.”

“I’m sure she did,” Aaron says.

I look at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” he says.

“What makes you so sure Annie...?”

“The doctor in Sicily told you she hears voices, didn’t he? So it’s quite possible she heard Joan...”

“No, you didn’t say it was quite possible, you said you were sure. What makes you so sure all of a sudden?”

“Forget it, okay?”

“No, let’s not forget it. Annie’s gone...”

“Annie’s been gone forever,” he says, and takes a last drag on his cigarette, and crushes it under his shoe. He is starting into the building when I catch his sleeve.

“Just a second, Aaron.”

Our eyes meet.

“What is it you know?”

“Let it go, Andy.”

“No. Tell me. Please.”

He hesitates a moment, and then shrugs and takes a deep breath.

“How do you think she got the money to go to India that first time?” he asks.

“I always suspected Mama gave it to her.”

“Never in a million years. Mama was still angry about the band equipment.”

“Then how?”

“Do you remember when it was? That she went to India?”

“Yes?”

“A week after my wedding. Do you remember my wedding?”

I remembered it came as no surprise that Augusta decided to get married not in the New York area, where everyone in our family lived, but instead in Ridley Hills, New Jersey, where the Unmannerly Clan lived. Never mind that Grandma Rozalia was battling cancer at Sloan-Kettering, never mind that. We were invited to Ridley Hills, and if we couldn’t make the long trip there — as certainly Grandma couldn’t — then that was unfortunate, kiddies. As Augusta’s younger brother The Gulf War Hero once remarked, “In her own way, Augusta leads.” Ah yes, so she does.

So on that brisk Sunday morning in September, I rented a car and drove my mother and sister across the George Washington Bridge, and onto the Jersey Turnpike, and then across the entire state of New Jersey to where first Ridley, and next Ridley Falls, and finally Ridley Hills nestled close to the Pennsylvania border. We actually passed the football stadium where Augusta must have conceived on a pair of starlit nights in a Chevy and on the grass. We actually passed the hospital where she gave birth first to Lauren and next to Kelly. We actually found the church — Augusta’s directions were somewhat less than meticulous — where she would be bound in holy matrimony to my jackass brother, who was now asking me to remember a day I’d chosen long ago to forget.

“I remember, yes,” I said.

“Augusta’s father gave us a thousand dollars as a wedding gift.”

“Yes?”

“Annie stole it.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Andy, please, she stole it.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe it, don’t believe it. Kelly saw her putting the envelope in her hand bag.”

“How old was Kelly? Eight, nine? You took the word of...”

“She was ten. And she’s my daughter.”

“Be that as it may.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Andy?”

“It means some ten-year-old kid tells you...”

“My daughter, Andy. Not some ten-year-old kid. My daughter told me she saw Annie slipping that envelope in her hand bag. And I believed her. Period.”

“Fine. What’s this got to do with Annie hearing voices?”

“I kept wondering why she’d done such a thing. Annie? Sweet little Annie who used to sit on Daddy’s lap when he read to us? How could she steal a thousand bucks from her own brother on his wedding day?”

She didn’t, I’m thinking. You want an answer? Okay, she didn’t. Your daughter was wrong. Or she was lying. Or maybe both. Annie is not a thief!

“Augusta refused to have her in our house after that, can you blame her? But I kept wondering. I mean, this was Annie, my little sister. How could she do a thing like that? Then when she got into that mess in Georgia, I started thinking about it all over again. Maybe because she’d stolen a thousand bucks...”

“No, she didn’t, Aaron.”

“Oh yes she did. And the fine in Georgia was a thousand bucks, too, some coincidence, huh? Mama paid the fine, of course. Mama always pays, doesn’t she, she never learns.”

I’m thinking, You’re the rich man, Aaron, why don’t you occasionally bail out our sister? Why do you always leave it to Mama?

“But why just a fine? She assaults a police officer, and no charges are brought? No trial? Not even an appearance before a local magistrate? Nothing? Just, hello, goodbye, thanks for visiting Georgia? So I began thinking, Gee, maybe my sister’s a thief and a liar. Otherwise, why...?”

“She’s neither, Aaron.”

“Okay, maybe just the voices are liars and thieves.”

“How do you know there are voices?”

“Do you remember the Welcome Home party Mama gave her? When she got back from the tour that fall?”

“I remember.”

“Pearl Williams was there.”

“Pearl...?”

“Who used co play keyboard with the band?” he says. “She told me what really happened in Georgia.”

In addition to the band itself, and the Gulliver family (minus Augusta, who as usual has matters to take care of in New Jersey) Annie has invited to the party some kids we knew from Ambrose Academy. There are maybe twenty to thirty people in the apartment when she announces that the band will now perform “For your delectation and elucidation,” she says, grinning, “a few select tunes from our recently concluded triumphant tour of the South. Pearl?” she says. “Guys?”

The Gutter Rats actually manage to play three full numbers before Mr. Alvarez, the super, comes upstairs to politely ask if we can tone it down a little, he’s getting complaints from the neighbors. The band is grateful for the respite. They’ve been touring all summer, and they’ve “picked their fingers to the bone,” as one of the guitar players tells Aaron. The mood in my mother’s apartment on Seventy-second Street is one of celebration and good fellowship, everyone suddenly descending on the dining room table where my mother has set out wine, and sandwiches she herself made for the occasion. My sister flits like a firefly among the members of her band and our former school mates. Aaron takes a chair alongside Pearl.

“It’s so good to meet you at last,” she says. “Annie’s told me such wonderful things about you.”

He can’t imagine Annie ever having told anyone anything nice about him, but he nods in acknowledgment, raises his wine glass in a silent toast, sips, puts the glass down on the end table beside him, and is picking up his sandwich when Pearl says, “She seems okay now, doesn’t she?”

He doesn’t know who she means.

“Annie,” she explains. “She seems to’ve gotten over what happened in Georgia.”

“Oh, yeah, that was something, wasn’t it?” he says.

“Never saw nothin like it in my life,” Pearl says, shaking her head. “Her losin it that way.”

The way Pearl tells it...

But first she takes a sip of her wine, and glances to where Annie is standing chatting with the girl who was co-captain of the soccer team before she broke her leg...

The way she tells it, there were no clues that anything might be wrong with Annie until that morning in May, in Atlanta, when she attacked the waitress.

Pearl knows, of course, that Annie has been all over the world. She never ceases telling everyone and anyone about her travels all through Europe and Asia and her spiritualistic explorations and discoveries and eventual conversion to the Tantric religion. Pearl has seen (as who could not?) the silver circlet in Annie’s tongue and the other through her left nostril and the third over her right eye, respectively purchased in Katmandu, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka. Pearl has even seen (they were roommates, after all) the swastika tattooed on Annie’s right buttock with the mysterious words Ek Xib Chac and Chac Xib Chac straddling it in red and in black. Pearl — like my brother Aaron — believes that Annie is a trifle eccentric, but hey, man, most rock musicians are, and for a white chick, she can sing up a fuckin storm. So everything’s cool until that morning in May, when suddenly a waitress in a pink uniform in a cheap little diner in a dinky Georgia town outside Atlanta seems threatening to Annie.

Pearl isn’t even aware of it at first, she’s busy with her sausage and eggs. They were up till two in the morning, and this is now close to noon, and they’re sitting opposite each other in one of the booths, neither of them wearing makeup, Annie in a halter top and jeans, Pearl wearing overalls over a white T-shirt. This is 1986, and this is the enlightened South, and a black girl eating yellow scrambled eggs can sit at a table with a white girl licking purple jam off whole wheat toast.

But something is bothering Annie.

Aaron is listening intently now. Presumably, Pearl’s tale will lead inexorably to The Urination Incident and the real reason my sister got arrested. Across the room, one of the Ambrose girls begins giggling.

“She’s watching me,” my sister says.

Pearl looks up from her plate.

“Who?” she asks.

“Don’t look at her,” my sister whispers. “She’ll know.”

Pearl thinks she’s kidding at first. My sister does great imitations, so surely she’s doing one of her bits now, pretending to be a fugitive on the run, or an undercover detective, or whatever, her eyes darting toward the counter where a redheaded waitress in a pink uniform is sitting smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper.

“She knows,” my sister whispers.

“Knows what?” Pearl asks. “Who?”

“The waitress. Don’t look at her.”

Pearl turns to look at her again.

The waitress is not paying them the slightest bit of attention. She looks like any other waitress in any cheap roadside diner anyplace in America.

Annie is suddenly out of the booth.

She goes to the counter.

“I’m onto you,” she whispers.

The waitress swivels her stool around. She is facing a young blond girl in blue jeans and a red halter top, nineteen, twenty years old, somewhere in there, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, standing in front of her with her hands on her hips, green eyes blazing, lips tightly compressed, hissing words through teeth virtually clenched. The waitress doesn’t know what she’s trying to say or what the hell’s bugging her.

Annie slaps the newspaper out of her hands.

“Hey!” the waitress says.

“Stop second-guessing me!” Annie yells.

Pearl is out of the booth, already heading for the counter.

“Hell’s wrong with you?” the waitress asks, and is reaching down to pick up her newspaper when Annie shoves out at her, pushing her off the stool. Pearl’s eyes go wide. The waitress is screaming bloody murder now, and a white man who looks like he wouldn’t at all mind a good old-fashioned lynching comes running from the kitchen with a cleaver in his hands.

“Run!” Annie yells, and is out the front door and onto the street before the short order cook, or whatever he is, can come around the counter with his cleaver. Pearl has been black for twenty-two years. She knows better than to run in Georgia, or Harlem, or Watts, or anyplace else where a running black man is reason enough for somebody white to chop off his legs. She lets the waitress and the short order cook do all the running, but by the time they get out on the sidewalk, Annie is gone.

“That’s not the end of the story,” Pearl says.

Aaron listens.

Annie is not at the motel they’ve been living in. The band is supposed to check out at two that afternoon, the van is already packed. They’re supposed to be heading on to the next town, where they will rehearse in the fire house, and then perform there later that night. The two guitarists (Freddie and Lennie, it now turns out their names are) want to get going. They’re still not sure of several passages in Sade’s “Sweetest Taboo,” and they feel they are absolutely in dire need of the rehearsal this afternoon. Besides, someone like Annie — who is constantly bragging about her travels all over the world — can certainly find her way from here to the next town they’re playing, a scant fifteen or so miles south, as the crow flies. Pearl agrees to move on.

Annie does not show up at the fire house until seven o’clock that night, an hour before they’re supposed to start playing. She tells Pearl there’s a nationwide manhunt out for her, police cars all over the roads, state troopers stopping automobiles and searching them and even opening trunks, looking for the blonde who assaulted the waitress up on US 1. She tells Pearl she walked through fields of corn and tobacco, keeping off the roads, tells her she barely escaped being raped by four redneck ruffians who’d come upon her while she was peeing in the bushes, tells her she stopped at a sharecropper’s shack where the door was opened by a bald giant who’d head-butted her and almost knocked her unconscious. She tells Pearl she finally boarded a bus heading south to Macon, and almost missed getting off at the stop here in town. She tells Pearl she’s so happy she got to the gig on time because she knows she has an obligation to the band and the music profession and her own talent.

Harley Welles walks into the fire house during the eleven o’clock break. From the way Pearl describes him, he is a dead ringer for Sven Lindqvist in Stockholm, Sweden, except that he is not a hotel waiter, he is instead wearing the uniform of a Georgia Highway Patrolman. But other than that, he is Sven’s doppelganger for sure. Six feet-some inches tall, with green eyes and blond hair, my sister must have thought she’d died and gone to Valhalla. Tossing all caution to the winds — after all, the entire law enforcement community of the United States is out looking for her — she sidles up to this handsome stranger and asks if he’d like to accompany her outside while she has a smoke.

According to Pearl, my sister and the trooper Harley Welles go out back to have a smoke or whatever else. Pearl and the guys are hanging around the bandstand, fending off the multitude of fans fighting for their autographs, oh sure, when suddenly there comes a shriek from the alley behind the fire house. Someone is yelling “Rape!” My sister Annie is yelling “Rape!” Again. More urgently this time. Lennie and Freddie are black, and therefore not eager to go anywhere near the location where a white girl is getting raped, you know whut I’m sayin, bro? Stephen is white, but neither is he too keen about rushing to the scene of a felony in progress. Pearl is black but female and presumably incapable of complicity in a sexual attack. It is she who rushes out the open side door of the fire house into a May night alive with fireflies, and stops dead in her tracks when she sees Annie standing alone against the wall of the fire house, the trooper Harley Welles nowhere in sight.

Annie’s skirts are up above her thighs.

She is urinating onto the cement driveway.

She is urinating and talking to herself.

Mumbling the words.

Her eyes wild.

There is no one with her.

She is completely alone and talking to herself.

And then she yells “Rape!” again at the top of her lungs, and pulls up her panties, and drops her skirts, and yells, “No!” again, and when she sees Pearl approaching with her hand outstretched and a plaintive look on her face, she shouts “Get away from me!” but she is not talking to Pearl, she is talking to Christ only knows who. And she yells “Rape!” again and rushes off around the back of the fire house and into the arms of two local policemen in uniform and one state trooper named Harley Welles, who apparently ran for backup the minute Annie started behaving peculiarly.

“They wanted to take her straight to jail,” Pearl tells him now, “but I begged them not to. I told them she’d just broken up with her boyfriend and was taking it very hard. They didn’t believe me for a minute. I think they figured she’d dropped acid or something. But they were nice guys, actually, and they let her off with just a warning instead of booking her for disorderly conduct and inciting to riot, which was what one of the cops said they could’ve done.”

“Well, they weren’t that nice,” Aaron says. “They fined her a thousand bucks.”

“Where’d you get that idea?” Pearl asks.

“My mother sent her a thousand dollars.”

“Not to pay any fine. How could there be a fine? They never even arrested her.”

Aaron looks at her.

“She was lucky, actually,” Pearl says.

“Yes.”

“It was scary, I have to tell you.”

“I’m sure it was.”

They sit in silence for several moments. Across the room, there is more laughter.

“But she’s okay now, right?” Pearl says.

“Oh, yes, she’s fine,” Aaron says.

“Well, good,” Pearl says. “Good.”

Annie walks over, smiling.

“You guys getting to know each other?” she asks.

“You learned this sixteen years ago?” I say.

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ve known this for the past sixteen years?”

“Yes, Andy. However long. When she came back from the tour.”

“Does Augusta know?”

“I tell Augusta everything.”

“No wonder she treats Annie the way she does.”

“That’s not why she treats Annie however you may think she treats her. But see? You still don’t believe she stole that money!”

“Who else did you...? Jesus, you didn’t tell Mama, did you?”

“Yes, I did,” Aaron says.

“Then... why didn’t you tell me?”

“I think you know why, Andy Besides, what difference would it have made?”

“We might have prevented what happened in Sicily.”

“Oh, really? How? Would you have called the police? Would you have put your twin sister away? Who are you kidding?”

“You should have told me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You should have at least given me a chance,” I say, and turn abruptly and start walking away from him.

“Hey!” he calls. “Where’re you going?”

“There’s someone I have to see,” I say, and keep walking.