For the next several days, my mother kept telling me she was going to have both of us transferred out of that school, did they think they were the only private school in New York, how dared they say such things about her daughter? I finally convinced her that graduation was just around the corner. Annie had been accepted at Vassar, she’d soon be going off to college. She’d make new friends. The accident would become a forgotten incident in an otherwise memorable school career.
On a hot, steamy day in June of 1984, while the school band played Pomp and Circumstance, Annie and I were graduated from Ambrose Academy together with some fifty other seniors, all of us in black caps and gowns. My sister was still wearing the soft cast under her long black gown. None of her graduating team mates came over to congratulate her.
On September sixteenth that year, on a clear bright Sunday morning, we all drove out to Ridley Hills, New Jersey, to witness my brother Aaron’s marriage to the “Lack of Manners Clan,” as my sister had dubbed Augusta’s august tribe.
A week later, Annie flew off to New Delhi.
My mother swore she had not paid for the coach ticket on Air-India.
Neither she nor I could imagine where Annie had got the money for it.
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.”