“Can’t we pump out her stomach?” my mother asked.
“Wouldn’t help a damn,” Tannenbaum said. “Whatever it was has already been absorbed into her blood stream. Put her to bed. And pray to God she doesn’t wake up a vegetable.”
Annie slept soundly for a bit more than thirty-six hours.
On the second of January in the year of our Lord 1984, she woke up, looked around her room, recognized my mother, recognized me, and in a very hoarse voice said, “Hi, what time is it?”
I told her it was eleven-thirty.
“Morning or night?” she asked.
“Night,” I said.
“Want to watch Johnny Carson?” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
“What’d you take?” my mother asked.
“Take?”
“Dr. Tannenbaum said you ingested a massive dose of some drug. What was it, Annie?”
“I have no idea, Mom.”
“Annie, you were unconscious for...”
“Mom, leave her...”
“I was not un...”
“Don’t tell me you have no idea what you took! You’re lucky we didn’t have your stomach pumped out!”
The room went silent.
“Somebody may have dropped something in my drink,” Annie said.
“Why would anyone do that?”
“How should I know? People do crazy things,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“To get even.”
“Get even? What are you talking about?”
“For being blond. And pretty. For having good breasts. Who the hell knows? People just do things. You have to watch yourself at all times. I’m hungry. Can I get something to eat?”
She wasn’t a vegetable.
But we still didn’t know what else she was.
What happened to Annie in our senior year at Ambrose Academy was admittedly a bad break, no pun intended.
I find it difficult to think of my mother as a Soccer Mom, especially since the term did not exist back then in 1984. But assuredly, that’s what she was. In March, you see, my sister had the good fortune — or bad, depending upon how you looked at it — to be elected co-captain of the soccer team, and it was in the fifth game of the season, as she was kicking the ball downfield toward the opposing team’s goal, that Annie was blindsided by two girls in yellow and blue tunics and shorts, and knocked off her feet head over teacups, to land at a peculiar angle that broke her left leg.
In her hospital room, her leg in a cast and supported by pulleys and ropes, she told me, “They were after me, Andy. The were out to get me.”
Actually, the girls who’d been responsible for the accident had come to the hospital only the day before, to apologize to Annie, and to tell my mother and me how sorry they were. I could not imagine that they’d been out to break Annie’s leg deliberately. These were prep school girls. Even professional athletes wouldn’t do anything so intentionally cruel. Would they?
“I’m telling you they were out to get me,” Annie insisted. “I should have listened.”
“What do you mean? Listened to who?”
“Haven’t you ever sensed that something was about to happen? I should have listened to my own inner thoughts. But butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, you know?” she said, and here she fell into imitations of first the chunky redhead who was captain of the opposing team and next her slender blond co-captain, who in tandem had knocked Annie down. Annie’s impressions were dead on, and actually quite funny, both girls shaking hands with her and wishing her luck before the game started, both of them being oh-so-sportsmanlike and rah-rah private-school ladies while secretly planning all along to hit her simultaneously at the thigh and the shin, ensuring a broken leg. “The two-faced bitches,” Annie said.
“Annie, I’m sure they didn’t...”
“Oh, I’m sure they did,” she said, and handed me a Magic Marker and asked me to write something clever on her cast. I wrote “Give me a break, willya?” Annie thought it was funny.
She did not think the almost-two months she spent in a plaster cast to the hip was comical, however. Nor did she find even mildly amusing the additional six weeks she was forced to spend in a soft cast from her knee to her ankle. Riding the bus on crutches to and from school each day, she complained endlessly, becoming something of a kvetch who railed on about all the mean people in this world — “Like Blondie and her redheaded dyke girlfriend” — who couldn’t bear seeing anyone else getting ahead in life.
Before the accident, she’d been a very good student. In fact, as I recall those days now, they form my happiest memories. Annie and I riding to school together on the bus, telling jokes and cracking wise with the other kids. Annie and I in class together, our hands popping up simultaneously whenever a teacher asked a question. My sister was the prettiest girl in the whole damn school, and I was her twin brother, and we were both smarter than anyone else around. We were The Gulliver Gang. My sister and I. We were twins.
But after her accident...
We thought it was the accident, you see.
We never once thought something might have happened to her in Sweden. Never once imagined anything had happened to her mind.
Even when she began losing interest in her classes, we blamed it on the accident. Now it was just my hand that popped up when a question was asked, my sister sitting unresponsive beside me. Or if, for example, a discussion was going on in class, where earlier Annie would have been a lively participant, she now sat silent and withdrawn. If a teacher asked, “Annie? Anything to contribute?” my sister would snap a surly “No!” or simply refuse to answer at all. Her concentration seemed to be fading. Sometimes, she didn’t seem to be there at all. I told her she should stop thinking about the accident all the time, focus her energy instead on the future. This was our senior year at Ambrose. We both had college to look forward to.
I wasn’t surprised when she started losing friends. At first, she just kept bad-mouthing the co-captains she insisted had deliberately broken her leg, but then she started accusing girls on the Ambrose team as well, her own team, suggesting that they’d also been part of the conspiracy somehow. Once, on my way to an English class, some girls from the team were whispering something as I approached, and all at once they stopped and turned away, and I figured they were talking about Annie, but I didn’t know how to defend her because I myself thought her accusations were completely wrong-headed. Another time, I saw some girls openly mocking her, pretending to limp down the hall and yelling, “They broke my leg, they broke my leg!” and I went over and said, “Cut it out, it wasn’t you who got hurt!”
Then my mother got a call after school one day, from the coach of the soccer team, who told her Annie was trying to work up a petition to get the two girls who’d broken her leg expelled from their school, and suggesting that Annie might want to schedule a talk with the psychiatrist at Ambrose. My mother took a fit. On the phone, she sounded the way she had that Thanksgiving morning when she was yelling at Grandma. “Are you suggesting there’s something wrong with my daughter?” she said. “You try having your leg broken, see what effect it has on you! Her father abandoned her when she was five, you might take that into consideration as well. My daughter’s an A-student, how dare you tell me she’s crazy? Oh, no? Then what did you just say?” My mother listened and then said, “Yes, I am listening, how about you listening to me for a change? My daughter’s not going to see any school psychiatrist! That’s the end of that!” she shouted, and hung up.