Anne

Anne, also called Sissy by her sister Bobbi, is presented through recollection and imagined speech rather than through a scene in which she appears directly. Her influence is nevertheless immediate: Bobbi hears Anne’s familiar ridicule whenever she considers that the object beneath the earth might be a spaceship, and measures her own independence against the prospect of being dismissed as mad.

Identity and Presence

Anne is Bobbi’s sister, associated in Bobbi’s thoughts with family criticism and the pressure to treat unconventional ideas as evidence of instability. Bobbi imagines Anne laughing at her for living alone with her dog and becoming as strange as Uncle Frank. The voice is intimate because it is remembered as Anne’s, but it also operates as an internalized judgment that Bobbi must answer even when Anne is not present.

The name Sissy appears in Bobbi’s recollection of Anne’s voice and in her angry address to her sister. Bobbi imagines that she could phone Anne and receive an authoritative, dismissive response, as though Anne could supply scripture chapter and verse for the claim that Bobbi was losing her mind. The anticipated certainty matters as much as the criticism: Anne is imagined as someone who would close down speculation before it could be tested.

Bobbi’s Recollection of Their Conflict

Bobbi remembers a period after she moved to Haven when Sherry Fenderson rejected her writing with a curt postcard. Bobbi was crying on the porch when Jim Gardener arrived and challenged her to care less about Fenderson’s judgment. In the remembered exchange, Jim connected Bobbi’s distress to her sister, asking whether she wanted to be like Anne and insisting that Anne was not there and did not have to be allowed into Bobbi’s thoughts. The episode does not establish Anne’s presence in that conversation; it shows how Bobbi’s sister had become a point of reference in Bobbi’s struggle to assert herself.

That memory sharpens the contrast between Bobbi’s vulnerability to rejection and her resistance to Anne’s imagined authority. Jim urged Bobbi to stop crying and to continue doing what she wanted, but Bobbi’s later thoughts show that the conflict has not simply disappeared. Anne remains a voice Bobbi can summon—and then angrily try to dismiss.

The Buried Object and the Question of Sanity

When Bobbi considers whether the buried object could be a spaceship, she imagines Anne warning that she is becoming strange like Uncle Frank and might be taken to an asylum in Bangor or Juniper Hill. Bobbi recognizes this as the response she expects from her sister, not as an actual conversation. The imagined rebuke frames the discovery as a contest between the familiar label of madness and the possibility that the extraordinary explanation might be true.

Bobbi does not accept Anne’s presumed standard as decisive. She reasons that Anne would regard her solitary life as madness whatever she did, and that the spaceship hypothesis might be irrational but was worth entertaining until disproved. Her insistence on keeping an open mind is therefore also a defense of her right to judge reality for herself, rather than accept a family verdict in advance.

Influence and Narrative Role

Anne’s effect on Bobbi is double-edged. Her remembered voice provokes self-doubt: Bobbi even wonders whether suspecting that Gard is becoming unstable while considering herself perfectly sound might itself be denial. Yet Bobbi concludes that she feels saner in Haven than she did in Cleaves Mills, and much saner than she did in Utica, where she associates life around Anne with being driven toward madness. Bobbi attributes to Anne a kind of sacred mission to make close relatives crazy, a judgment that reveals Bobbi’s anger as well as the depth of their estrangement.

Anne’s indirect presence gives the discovery a personal and psychological dimension before its nature is settled. Bobbi’s fear and excitement coexist with the pressure of her sister’s imagined skepticism; resisting that pressure becomes part of how she preserves the possibility that what she has found is real. The available account leaves Anne’s own perspective and circumstances outside the scene, making her characterization inseparable from Bobbi’s memory, anticipation, and defiance.