My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And there is—can it be Skyler?—on a dwarf settee in the foyer, hunched like a fetus, shivering in a blanket that would seem to have been wrapped hastily and carelessly around him, Mummy’s little man shivering and whimpering, deathly-pale; he is dazed and incoherent and, so strangely, his clothes and hair are soaking wet. (It will turn out that his playdate host Ty, panicked at what appeared to be a lethal reaction to the meds-mix he’d taken, dragged the convulsing eight-year-old into the bathroom adjoining Ty’s room, and into the shower where Ty turned on “full blast” the cold water in an effort to “calm” Skyler.) At this time, when Betsey Rampike arrives to take her stricken son away, Tyler, Jr. is nowhere in view.

  “Oh my God! Oh Skyler! Oh what have you done.”

  Fortunately, Skyler does seem to revive in Mummy’s car, on the way to the Fair Hills Medical Center, vomiting up a yellow gruel-like liquid onto the floor and Skyler insists to Mummy that he’s all right, he is feeling much better, so Mummy decides against the ER as she will decide against recounting any of this unfortunate episode to Skyler’s dad when he returns home from Toyko, or Singapore, could be Bangkok. At home Skyler overhears her speaking agitatedly on the phone, in the stilted voice in which Mummy leaves voice mail messages she suspects will be futile, “Theodora? This is Betsey Ranpick—Rampike!—may we speak? Please will you call me as soon as you get this message? I’m a little upset about what happened at your house—what my son has told me happened at your house this afternoon—I don’t mean that I am terribly upset but yes, I am upset—so will you call me, please? Skyler is much, much better now—you will be relieved to hear—please tell your son—and he is hoping—and I am hoping—that the boys can t-try again—we can plan another p-playdate—soon?”

  Though Mummy telephones Mrs. McGreety several times, her calls are never returned; and when the women encounter each other in Fair Hills, which is not frequent, and always in the presence of others, Mrs. McGreety will seem not to know who Mrs. Rampike is.

  Wiping a tear from Skyler’s eye he hasn’t known he has shed, Mummy whispers fiercely, “Skyler! Don’t cry. Next time, we will try harder.”

  ADVENTURES IN PLAYDATES II

  SKYLER! WE ARE NOT GOING TO GIVE UP ON A SOCIAL LIFE FOR YOU, I promise. And so there were others. Numerous others. Playdates with other Fair Hills children, mostly boys, and mostly classmates of Skyler’s at Fair Hills Day School or the yet more prestigious Drumthwrack Academy for Boys, or children of families belonging to Trinity Episcopal Church, these dates arranged by Mummy at her most exacting, ambitious, and hopeful in the interstices of Mummy’s ever-more busy life as the mother-manager of Bliss Rampike in those frantic years 1995 through December 1996 for after January 1997 there would be no more playdates for Skyler Rampike, no indeed.

  Ah, but memories! What is childhood but a giddy repository of memories! Quick cut to: fat-faced/sullen-giggly Albert Kruk who was a year older than Skyler, in fourth grade at Fair Hills, not H.I.P. track, not G.C.S.S., whose father was Morris Kruk the “highly regarded” criminal attorney and whose mother Biffy Kruk was membership chair of the Village Women’s Club and one of Fair Hills’s “movers and shakers,” whose photographs appeared frequently in the Style section of the Fair Hills Beacon: Albert Kruk who clearly had not wanted a playdate with Skyler Rampike but took him “fishing”—as he called it—on the immense flagstone terrace at the rear of the Kruk house on Hawksmoor Lane, stomping on luckless worms marooned on the terrace after a recent rainstorm but Skyler hadn’t much enthusiasm for “fishing” and the playdate with Albert Kruk was not a success, and would not be repeated. And there was Elyot Grubbe, fourth grader at the Drumthwrack Academy with whose heiress-mother Mummy was acquainted through Reverend and Mrs. Higley: Elyot was a boy of precocious mental gifts (it was claimed) yet strangely slow in speech, slow in movement and sinuous as a sloth, prone to staring off into space, as if mildly sedated; a playdate friend with whom Skyler could sit quietly for an entire playdate, in fact mutely, at either Elyot’s home or Skyler’s, each boy deeply absorbed in his own homework with no need for the usual phony small talk: “D’you like school?”—“It’s okay. You?”—“It’s okay.” Of Skyler’s playdate friends, Elyot Grubbe was his favorite; if Skyler had had a brother, Elyot Grubbe was his brother; perhaps because, unknown to Skyler at the time, of course, Elyot Grubbe was one day to become a child of media scandal (in April 1999, Elyot’s heiress-mother Imogene would be “brutally bludgeoned to death” by an intruder in the Grubbes’ Neo-Edwardian mansion on the Great Road at the exact time when Elyot’s father A. J. Grubbe was deep-sea fishing in the Caribbean off the coast of St. Bart’s with friends on his thirty-foot sailboat) as if anticipating that his life, like Skyler Rampike’s, would be but a footnote ever after.* And there was Billy Durkee, a Fair Hills classmate of canny mathematical skills who taught Skyler to play poker (“This game is five-card stud, son: you in?”) in order to win from the naive boy his meager allowance (meager by Fair Hills Day standards, just twelve dollars weekly) and meds (by this time Skyler was taking Ritalin for his now-active A.D.D. in addition to the new F.D.A.-approved-for-children painkiller Balmil much touted for its minimal side effects); and there was fifth-grader Denton “Fox” Hambruck whose father was an older Scor Chemicals associate/squash partner of Bix Rampike and whose mother had befriended Betsey Rampike, to a degree. Fox Hambruck was famous at school for bringing with him, inside his loose-fitting clothes, small screw-top bottles filled with his father’s blended-Scotch whiskey, which he shared with a very few select fifth- and sixth-graders. At school, Fox would not have been caught dead in the company of a third-grade runt/cripple like Skyler Rampike but, cajoled into a playdate with Skyler by his mother, Fox seemed friendly enough, offering to show to Skyler, on the occasion of their first and only playdate, what he called his father’s home movies: “These are tapes of my dad’s special friends, that nobody knows about but me”—adding with a wink—“and Dad doesn’t know about me.” A dozen videos were kept locked in a small safe in Mr. Hambruck’s office (to which, by what sleight-of-hand Skyler could not guess, foxy Fox had the combination) in somber black cases identified only by initials and dates. “Know what X-rated is, Rampike?” Fox teased the younger boy, “—well, this is XXX. Hang on!” As soon as Fox began the first tape, and starkly black-and-white images leapt onto the large TV wall screen, Skyler was unnerved: no mood-music? no voice-over? only just a crudely photographed scene of—was that an adult woman? an adult naked woman? a fleshy woman like Mummy with large softly sagging breasts cupped in both her hands, dark eye-like nipples, an alarming swath of something dark and bristly as a beard, but in the wrong place for a beard. As Skyler stared slack-jawed the naked woman lurched toward the camera opening her arms as if to embrace him, as Mummy used to do when Skyler was younger, and Mummy’s little man; the woman made kissing/sucking gestures with her thick lipsticked lips and a wave of panic washed over Skyler—Was this Mummy? Even as Skyler could see clearly that the woman was heavier than Mummy, not nearly so pretty as Mummy with a bumpy nose not a snub nose like Mummy’s, and yet—Was this Mummy? What if this was somehow Mummy? Jerkily the camera moved to show a second female figure, much younger, a girl?—of about eleven?—a girl with long straight hair and pouty lips who resembled a sixth-grader at Fair Hills Day School yet could not be that girl of course, for this girl was naked, and you never saw naked girls, this was a girl made up glamorously as the woman, in fact made up to resemble the woman, Skyler thought, who was she?—the girl’s mother, as Mummy was lately making up Bliss to resemble her when Bliss was performing on the ice and the lights, as Mummy said, bleached all color from a child’s face, and made a child’s eyes disappear so you had no choice really except to put on makeup including eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara; and now the camera swung drunkenly around to show a pot-bellied middle-aged man who appeared also to be naked, though wearing black socks like Daddy’s, that came halfway to his knees, and a watch of the kind Skyler had learned to identify as Rolex, for
Daddy wore a Rolex watch, and the man in the film was not Daddy because the man in the film was older and his body slack and sagging and the man’s face was blurred, for the camera was unsteady, and Fox was saying, snickering, “That’s Dad! That’s Dad!” and “watch what Dad does,” giggling and wiping at his mouth; and Skyler pushed desperately away from Fox, as Fox laughed crudely and grabbed at Skyler saying he had to stay! had to watch! and Skyler shielded his eyes from the screen as often watching TV in the family room when neither Mummy nor Daddy was with them Bliss would shield her eyes with her fingers—yet peeking through her fingers?—even when, by Skyler’s standards, nothing was happening on the screen that was scary or upsetting, but Bliss was just a little girl, easily made anxious by loud noises, jarring intrusions and swift changes of scene and of mood-music and huddled on the sofa blinking and staring at so much that seemed to be rushing at her—from where? from the Adult World?—a whirlwind of sights, sounds, sensations you could not hope to make sense of, not when you were four years old, or scarcely five, the only remedy was to shield your eyes, better yet shut your eyes Is it over, Skyler? Is it gone now? in a faint quivery voice to make Skyler jeer What a baby! There’s nothing there, silly baby but now Skyler wasn’t jeering and Skyler wasn’t laughing for Skyler had had a glimpse of someone, another man, a blurred and mirthful face?—* beyond the fattish figure of the naked man said to be Fox Hambruck’s father and so broke away from Fox’s clutching hands and ran from Fox’s room (as large and as cluttered with expensive boy-things as Tyler McGreety’s room) to hide frightened and panting in a bathroom of perfumed soaps and gleaming white walls, the door locked to protect him until sometime later there was a sharp rap on the door and a female voice called to Skyler: “Your momma is downstairs, Sk’ler. It is time for you to go home.”

  What nice people! Skyler you know your father works with Mr. Hambruck who is a senior executive at Scor Chemicals! Oh I hope I hope that you and that fascinating little Denton got along well and he will want to see you again and that you did not disappoint Mummy again, darling!

  SORRY TO GIVE THE IMPRESSION THAT MOST OF SKYLER’S PLAYDATES WERE disasters,* or took place at others’ houses. In fact there were plenty of playdates in which nothing happened—“forgettable” interludes, you could say—which is why I’ve forgotten them. And there were plenty of playdates at our house under the eye of the current Maria, when Mummy was out; and sometimes, when Mummy was home, Mummy hovered over Skyler and his little visitor like an anxious hostess asking would they like something to drink? Would they like some fresh-baked (by Maria) chocolate-chip cookies? Some banana-nut bread? One of Skyler’s visitors said politely, “Thank you, Mrs. Rampike. But I am on the Atkins diet.” Another was innocent freckle-faced Calvin Klaus, Jr. the ten-year-old son of scrawny-sexy-blond Morgan Klaus who would one day soon give Bix and Betsey Rampike’s shaky marriage a final nudge into ruins, of which more later. I guess.

  “WISH YOU WERE MY BROTHER, SKYLER.” BREATHY MILDRED MARROW paused, wiping at her damp eyes. “Wish I had a brother, and he was you.”

  Mildred Marrow was one of Skyler’s very few girl playdates. (Why was this? Did our mothers anxiously fear pre-pubescent sexual gropings, “experimentation”? Even among the walking-wounded of the upcoming generation?) A moony fifth grader a year older than Skyler, Mildred was famous for her high—“off-the-radar”—I.Q. at Fair Hills Day, and was generally disliked. How could you tolerate a smirky girl who’d not only been tapped for the H.I.P. track (in pre-school!) but was ranked in the “highest one-percentile” of all H.I.P. students at the school, K through twelfth grade? Mildred was the daughter of a New Jersey state senator of independent means and his socialite wife: a lanky girl with brooding damp eyes, a quivery mouth and rounded shoulders who’d been designated both G.C.S.S. and R.A. (“recovering anorexic”) by fourth grade. Mildred’s schedule was as crammed and purposeful as Bliss’s, though more varied: a special nanny-driver transported Mildred to and from school, to and from her Mandarin Chinese tutorial; to and from equestrian lessons, tennis lessons, dance lessons; sessions with her acupuncturist, and with her (Jungian) therapist; and, at least once a week, a playdate with a child like Skyler Rampike who was deemed to pose no threat, intellectual or otherwise, to Mildred’s delicate sensibility. To Skyler’s surprise, Mildred seemed actually to like him, perhaps out of pity?—for Skyler was known not to be H.I.P. nor even G.C.S.S. and though he tried hard to disguise it, one of Skyler’s legs was obviously shorter than the other, causing him to limp, occasionally even to walk with a cane (“Sprained my Akills tendon in the gym, this is just temporary”) thereby endearing him to his girl-classmates even as it roused to scorn most of the boys.

  High-strung at school, Mildred relaxed in Skyler’s presence. Her “favorite thing” was helping him with his homework, especially arithmetic which Mildred said was “restful” to her: “To slow my mind down, to keep pace with you, Skyler. I love that!” Once in a thoughtful moment Mildred confessed that she wished that Skyler could be her brother, and live at her house: “My neurotic parents would then have someone else to obsess over, not just me.” Mildred was Skyler’s sole playdate to speak of his sister, with frank admiration and envy. “Bliss is just a little girl, and she has a career. In a few years, she can live by herself.”

  Skyler laughed uneasily. “Live by herself? Bliss is five years old.”

  Mildred, who hadn’t actually seen Bliss in person, only just photographs of her in local publications, seemed not to hear. She was showing Skyler a clipping from the Fair Hills Beacon with the headline FAIR HILLS “PRODIGY” WINS GIRLS SKATING TITLE. The article included a photograph of both Bliss and her mother: the occasion was the Junior Miss Girls’ Skate Challenge 1995 held in Roanoke, Virginia, a few months before. Wistfully Mildred said: “Your sister is so pretty, and so little. I wish that I was pretty like her and not ugly like I am; I wish that I could skate like her, and get my picture in the paper. She is so lucky.”

  Skyler wondered if Mildred was joking. Mildred Marrow, a rich-girl famous for her I.Q., the highest one-percentile of H.I.P students, both G.C.S.S. and R.A., was envious of Skyler’s little sister?

  “I hate who I am!” Mildred said. “Of course I am superior to just about everyone at school, at damn old tests anyway, but who cares? I don’t care! I’d rather be a champion ice-skater with blond hair.”

  Skyler, staring at Bliss and Mummy in the newspaper photo, had to suppose that, if he hadn’t known that the beautiful little doll-girl in the photo was Bliss, he wouldn’t have recognized her. For her performance, Bliss had been transformed into a fairy princess in white tulle, white satin, white feathers, with a glimpse of white lace panties beneath the little skirt; in her plaited hair was a sprinkling of what Mummy called “stardust,” and on top of this plaited hair a small silver—or silver-plate—tiara had been placed. It was so, Bliss looked beautiful. And behind her, embracing Bliss with her chin resting lightly on Bliss’s shoulder, Betsey Rampike looked beautiful, too.

  Skyler had attended the Roanoke competition. Skyler had seen his sister win an “upset victory” over exquisite little ten-year-old Chinese-American prodigies, as she’d won over all other girl-skaters in the junior competition. Skyler had frankly doubted that Bliss would win, skating to a slightly syncopated “Sleeping Beauty Waltz”; more than once, Skyler had shut his eyes, and clenched his fists; thinking Now she will fall! now it will end but somehow God had protected Bliss on her hissing skate-blades, as Mummy had prayed He would do. The little girl with the “fairy sparkle” had won the audience’s fickle heart away from the Chinese-American twins, and she’d won the judges’ hearts: out of a perfect score of 6, Bliss was awarded 5.88 and the title Miss Girls’ Skate Challenge 1995 (Junior Division). And now Mildred Marrow, brainiest of brainy Fair Hills children, feared by her classmates and even by some of her teachers for her sarcastic tongue, was saying, sighing, “Skyler, your parents must be so proud of your sister. ‘Bliss Rampike’ must be the happiest little girl
on earth. Gosh!”

  * Though the “career criminal” who confessed in May 1999 to having killed Mrs. Grubbe for $75,000 ($25,000 up front, remainder to come) allegedly paid to him by Mr. Grubbe, was tried in Morris County, found guilty and sentenced to 260 years in prison, somehow it happened that the wily Mr. Grubbe, very capably defended by the equally wily criminal defense attorney Morris Kruk, was acquitted of all charges by a jury of his peers and shortly afterward moved from Fair Hills to “divide his time” between Manhattan, Palm Beach, Florida, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Quickly remarried and quickly again a father, Mr. Grubbe chose not to take his son Elyot with him into his new life; and what became of Skyler’s playdate friend and shadow-brother, Skyler would not learn until September 5, 2003.

  * Repeatedly I have read this passage, brooded upon it, and frankly don’t know: did Skyler catch a glimpse of his father in the background of the video; or did Skyler panic, imagining that he might catch a glimpse of his father in the video? What do you think?

  * Exactly like most “great works” of art, culture. Why?

  HAPPIEST LITTLE GIRL ON EARTH

  IF I FALL, WILL PEOPLE STILL LOVE ME?