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

by Joyce Carol Oates

  CONGRATULATIONS WE LOVE YOU BLISS RAMPIKE

  YOU ARE A BRAVE BEAUTIFUL LITTLE GIRL BLISS

  REMAIN TRUE TO YOUR VISION BLISS

  WE LOVE YOU AND PRAYE FOR YOU

  Such messages from strangers!—at first, New Jersey neighbors (not snooty Fair Hills, but “the other” Jersey), but eventually people in many states including remote-improbable Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii and nations distant as Denmark, Germany, Japan and Australia. Most of these “fans” had never seen my sister skate, you had to assume they’d seen TV clips, in who knows what contexts: “girls’ figure skating”—“American winter sports”—“cute-kid routines”—“exploited-American-kid routines.” Mummy examined each of the cards carefully, making sure that there were no alarming or mysterious messages, or cryptic symbols or signals, before passing the card on to Bliss to see, and taking it back then to file away, in Bliss’s ever-growing album of photos, clippings, promotional material and such cards from fans.

  And there were gifts as well: little-girl gifts of dolls and stuffed animals; hand-knitted wool caps with tassels, hand-knitted mufflers, mittens, leg-warmers; handmade little skating skirts and vests in unusual fabrics like felt, taffeta, corduroy. There were handmade little tinsel tiaras. Often there were photographs of Bliss skating beneath bright lights and, at times, alarmingly up close, taken by fans who’d gotten within a few feet or inches of her, for Bliss to inscribe in her childish hand—

  —to be returned in stamped self-addressed envelopes.

  Wistfully Bliss asked, “Do all these people love me, Mummy?” and Mummy said proudly, “Darling, yes! They love ‘Bliss Rampike,’ they are our ‘fans.’”

  The most beautiful gifts were likely to be entire skating costumes, some of them in expensive fabrics, crushed velvet, pleated Fortuny silk, shimmering gold lamé, with tiny bodices covered in seed-pearls, aurora borealis crystals, gold-dust. My beloved Crista wore this when she was crowned Miss Royale Ice Princess at the Miss Royale Ice Capades in Bangor, Maine, 1957 when she was ten years old, please wear this in Crista’s memory. God bless you dear Bliss we love you.

  “OH, SKYLER! IS THAT FOR—ME?”

  It was. Of course it was. On January 30, 1996, which was Bliss’s sixth birthday there were many cards and gifts from fans but one singular gift was the strangest and most wonderful of all.

  The Marriage of Miss Finch and Cock Robin was a tableau of life-sized birds with “real” feathers, all of the birds dressed in old-fashioned finery. The birds were stiffly arranged inside a Plexiglas cube each side of which measured approximately ten inches so that the viewer could look into the box from any angle and, if you gently lifted the lid, you could touch the birds. Miss Finch the demure little bride, was a small bird with a delicate snub-beak, sparrow-like wings and a rosy head and breast, in a lace wedding gown with a long skirt, a trailing train, and a veil; Cock Robin was a suave bridegroom, considerably larger than Miss Finch, with an uplifted grayish head and sparkly eyes you might almost think were real and a splendid russet-orange breast, in a gentleman’s frock coat and tails. The bride and groom were being married by a black-feathered bird with a chunky beak and a benign if somewhat unfocussed look and in attendance were a dozen smallish birds in exquisite replicas of old-fashioned human attire: sparrows, chickadees, warblers. And how realistic the birds’ feathers, though the birds themselves, their little bodies, were stiffly/awkwardly posed.

  This unprecedented gift had been brought to the house by special delivery, according to Maria, who took it from the “delivery man” who’d offered to carry it into the house for her, which was not necessary since the package wasn’t that heavy. Maria brought it inside to place beside the day’s more ordinary mail on a table in the small room opening off the foyer, that Mummy called the den; and when Skyler returned from school that afternoon, Skyler wanted to open it, as he opened most of Bliss’s packages for her, while Bliss looked on, but had to wait until Mummy and Bliss returned. (For Mummy and Bliss were always away, somewhere: each day at the rink, for Bliss’s lesson and skating practice, but also at one or another of Bliss’s appointments: hair salon, where Bliss’s “naturally dingy” hair, as Mummy called it, had to be “lightened”; pediatric orthodontist, for Bliss had “an overbite, that has to be corrected”; pediatric nutritionist, for Bliss required weekly injections of vitamins and “growth stimulants” to enable her to “keep up with the competition.”) And when at last the elaborately wrapped package was opened by Skyler, and The Marriage of Miss Finch and Cock Robin was revealed, both children and both adults, Mummy and Maria, were astonished.

  With widened eyes Bliss stared into the Plexiglas box. Skyler saw an expression almost of dread, or fear, pass over his sister’s wan little face, The Marriage of Miss Finch and Cock Robin was too wonderful to be borne. “Oh Skyler! Is that for…me?”

  Skyler had to resist the wisecrack Who else is it for? You know damned well it isn’t for me.

  How enchanting, a wedding of birds! And such exquisitely attired birds! Little Miss Finch in her wedding dress, in the bashful pose of a real-life girl-bride; and swaggering Cock Robin in frock coat and tails, head set at a rakish angle, chunky beak just perceptibly open. Mummy laughed: “‘Cock Robin’—he looks just like Daddy, doesn’t he?” Mummy searched for the card which Skyler, typical careless child, had crumpled with the wrapping paper, and discovered it to be an old-fashioned Valentine, with a red satin heart on its cover. Mummy read aloud:

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY CONGATULATIONS BLISS

  LOVE & KISSES FOREVER

  YOU NUMBER ONE DEVOUT FAN WHO WOULD DIE FOR YOU

  Neither Bliss nor Skyler was very interested in the identity of the mysterious G.R. but Mummy was curious, Mummy was suspicious searching in the torn wrapping paper for a return address: but there seemed to be none. By this time, Mummy’s sensitive nostrils were picking up a very strange yet somehow familiar smell, a sickish smell, still faint, remote, yet alarming, so Mummy, ever-resourceful gringa employer, enlisted Maria to lift the lid to the box and to “put your head inside, and tell me what it smells like.” And so it turned out, to Bliss’s and Skyler’s surprise, that the utterly wonderful Marriage of Miss Finch and Cock Robin was hastily bundled up in torn wrapping paper and carried away by a grave-faced Maria, even as Bliss protested: “Mummy, that’s mine. Where is Maria taking it? That came to me—‘Miss Bliss Rampike.’ I saw it. That is mine.”

  Mummy said: “That thing is not for you, Bliss. That ‘gift’ should never have been allowed into this house, it has come by mistake.”

  “It has not. It is not a ‘mistake.’”

  Bliss’s voice was rising dangerously. A bright frantic look came into her face, her eyes were narrowed. It was the look that sometimes came into Bliss’s face for just a moment, fleetingly, like a struck match, when she skated badly, or fell. Skyler, too, was demanding, “Mummy, why?”

  Both children would have rushed after Maria, but Mummy blocked the way. Sharp lines in her forehead, that stern bulldog set to Mummy’s jaws, she said: “Nooo you don’t! Both of you. Go up to your rooms and do your homework and enough of this. Bliss, you will be celebrating your birthday with your family, tonight—Daddy is going to be home for the occasion. And we have gifts for you, ever so much nicer than—”

  “I want that gift! I want Miss Finch and Cock Robin—it came for me.”

  “Bliss, you’re making Mummy angry. Mummy has told you to go upstairs to your room. You are not going to play with that repulsive ‘gift’ so just pretend it never arrived. Maria used very bad judgment to have brought it into this house, and—”

  “Mummy, it is mine. It is mine. Those are my birds, Mummy! They came for ‘Miss Bliss Rampike’ and that is me, that is not you Mummy! That is me! You know that is me. That is not you, Mummy!” Bliss began to scream, white-faced and furious as Mummy struggled with her. Skyler looked on astonished for it was rare that his little sister became emotional; Bliss never raised her voice, even when others were shouting and clamoring, and Bl
iss did her best to stoically stifle sobs when she was in pain. Now she cried, furious: “I want my birds! I want my pre-sent! That came to me from a special friend! Somebody who likes me! I own that, that is mine, my friend sent it to me! You can’t take that from me, Mummy! He meant it for me! He likes me, Mum-my, and not you. He’s my friend! I want to be with him! I own my birds, Mum-my, you can’t take my birds from me, I’ll tell Daddy on you! Daddy said to me once, Tell me if Mum-my hurts you, if Mum-my makes you do anything you don’t want to do, and I will tell Daddy that you do! I will tell Daddy that you do! Lots of things, that you do! I will tell Daddy you stole my birds! I hate you, I will tell Daddy what the doctor does! I don’t want to be ‘injected’! My bottom hurts, where I sit, from being ‘injected.’ And I don’t want that thing in my mouth! I don’t want that nasty ‘bite’ in my mouth! I will tell Daddy! I want my birds! My birds came to me! My birds—”

  Hurriedly Mummy called for Maria to take Bliss away: “The child is hysterical. She’s being ridiculous. Take her up to her room, Maria, and calm her down. It’s the least you can do, you’ve caused this by being so careless, take her upstairs now.”

  And so it was done, though not without resistance on Bliss’s part, and Skyler, who’d been astonished by his little sister’s outburst, asked Mummy what was wrong? why couldn’t they keep Bliss’s gift? and Mummy said, crinkling her nose, “The thing is—what d’you call it—‘taxidermy.’ Real birds! Those were real birds! You could tell, they looked so strange, not like manufactured birds would look, and I could smell through the glass that something was wrong. They’ve been treated with something like formaldehyde, and stuffed, and their eyes are glass, but their bodies are real, their feathers are real, and they smell of rot. Ugh! Don’t tell your father, Skyler. Not a word about any of this.”

  Little suck-up Skyler quickly assured Mummy he would not ever tell Daddy: “I promise, Mummy.”

  Poor Mummy was agitated, trembling, as she hadn’t been in some time, gripping her little man’s shoulder so it hurt, but Mummy’s little man stood unflinching. How like the old days it was, for just this interlude: a frenzied infantile wailing somewhere upstairs, and Skyler with Mummy, at a distance from it, just the two of them.

  THE MARRIAGE OF MISS FINCH AND COCK ROBIN IN ITS PLEXIGLAS BOX disappeared at once from the Rampike house, as if it had never been; and was never sighted again; yet in the room off the foyer called by Mummy the den, a faint, sickening odor of decay/rot would linger for a very long time.

  * Sorry! See Part I, “A Very Brave Little Girl,” where I’ve already recorded this painful episode. Anyway, a “poetic” dream/nightmare version of what happened: nearing the end of her routine, Bliss turned her ankle suddenly, lost her balance and nearly fell, but managed bravely to skate (wobblingly) to the end of hot-throbbing “Begin the Beguine” even as the showy black-lace mantilla slipped from her hair, tangled in her legs and nearly tripped her…Yet Bliss had been skating so beautifully before these mishaps, the crowd at the Trump Tower & Casino applauded her wildly; and her performance was to become famous/notorious, frequently played on TV, on countless cable channels, especially after her death. Along with her prize-winning performance at the Miss Jersey Ice Princess competition in 1996, the “Begin the Beguine” routine with five-year-old Bliss Rampike dressed in sexy black lace and taffeta, and glamorously made up like a much older girl, is the video clip you are most likely to see of her, if for instance you click onto one or another of the numerous Bliss Rampike Web sites for somewhere in cyberspace the clip is being played, replayed. Is this our immortality? Not Heaven, if there ever was Heaven, but the possibility that somewhere, someone, who knows who, who knows with what motives, sympathetic, lurid, “just curious,” will download our most heroic/tragic/humiliating moments to ponder as if they might mean something?

  “G.R.”

  HE MEANT IT FOR ME! HE LIKES ME, MUM-MY, AND NOT YOU. HE’S MY FRIEND. I want to be with him!

  The alert reader has picked up on these mysterious and riddlesome words flung out in the midst of my sister’s unexpected tantrum. But what to make of it? What do you, the alert and “objective” reader, think?

  Wish I knew what the hell to think! My skin is crawling with these riddles, like lice swarming over me, as with lice it’s futile to try to pick them off with your fingers, the lice-swarm continues undiminished, new generations of lice are being hatched even as you claw frantically at them, so too with obsessive/repetitive thoughts Did Bliss really know G.R. as she claims, was G.R. somehow Bliss’s friend, or was Bliss simply taunting our mother as young children sometimes do, even “good” children, in the temporary madness of a tantrum?

  Or, yet more upsetting possibility: that little Skyler was so stunned by his sister’s behavior that he misheard what she said or, trying to recall it afterward, he simply got it wrong?

  By the end of My Sister, My Love the reader will know why such details are significant. Why, if Bliss had actually “known” G.R., meaning that G.R. had (somehow) contacted her, spoken with her, established a rapport with her, such a fact—if it is a fact—would be crucial to the (yet-unsolved) mystery of who murdered Bliss Rampike.

  POPULAR!

  THOSE YEARS! GIDDY-HAPPY YEARS! AND NOT MANY YEARS FOR WHAT BEGAN with Tots-on-Ice 1994 would be finished in late January 1997 and so is scarcely a fraction of a lifetime, yet in a way a very American lifetime: obscurity, fame, end.

  In those years of the ascendency of Bliss Rampike it happened that Bix and Betsey Rampike were pulled in their daughter’s wake, as scraps of paper are pulled in the vortex-wake of a rushing tractor-trailer truck. For wonderfully it was happening, as Mummy could scarcely have dared to hope on her long-ago little drives with Skyler past the splendid homes of certain of her Fair Hills neighbors, that the Rampikes were becoming popular among their snooty Fair Hills neighbors.

  Even Skyler was becoming sought-after for playdates among his Fair Hills Day classmates, or anyway their mothers. Even the prune-face runt with one leg shorter than the other.

  Popular! In America, what else matters?

  Local newspapers had carried flattering little “human interest” pieces on Bliss since Tots-on-Ice and in the giddy spring of 1995 glossy upscale New Jersey Lives published a five-page spread including photographs on “the 5-year-old skating prodigy some are comparing to Sonja Henie.” In the fall of that year the New York Times New Jersey section published a feature on Bliss and her “devoted manager-mom Betsey Rampike,” soon then followed a cover story in glossy upscale Garden State Galleria, a new publication in the showy faux-aristocrat mode of Vanity Fair. In Galleria, there appeared eight pages of crisply fawning prose—“Skating experts are predicting that before her 10th birthday this gifted and very pretty little blond ice-skating prodigy from Fair Hills will win the Trifecta of girls’ figure skating with a triple crown…”—and theatrically posed photographs of little Bliss in one of her sequined skating costumes, on the ice highlighted by a halo of heavenly light; Bliss in the same skating costume, with Mummy behind her, hugging her and partly swathing her in a cashmere wool cape like folding wings, Mummy’s chin lightly resting on top of Bliss’s small blond head; Bliss in little-girl dress-up clothes, jumper, blouse, tiny white shoe-boots, with her family—Mummy, Daddy, eight-year-old Skyler smilingly posed* in the family room of the Rampikes’ “beautiful part-restored 18th-century Colonial nestled in a cul-de-sac in one of Fair Hills’s most prestigious neighborhoods.” (Prestigious? Was this so? Mummy must’ve been thrilled, if uneasy. Ravens Crest Drive was only just O.K., in Fair Hills real estate terms.) Most of the feature was an interview with Mummy: “‘Family comes first with us! Bliss’s career is not our primary concern, only Bliss’s happiness’—‘We Rampikes are a very close-knit family, we never miss Sunday church services at Trinity Episcopal’—‘Oh yes: we are shielding our daughter from the glare of publicity’—‘Practice and prayer, prayer and practice—that is our formula for success so far!’” Bix Rampike too was quoted: “‘C
rucial to keep perspective, as Betsey says ‘Family comes first!’—‘The bottom line is our love for our daughter, not our ambition’—‘Never say never: it runs in the family, a Rampike never gives up.’” The interviewer, a woman with the byline Adriana Fyce, seemed taken with Daddy whom she described as “tall, athletic-built, with a handshake to crush your fingers”—“could pass for a Pittsburgh-born cousin of one of the Boston-born Kennedys”—“a handsome up-and-coming junior executive in that hottest of corporate sectors, project development, at Scor Chemicals, Inc. with a sharp sense of humor and a touching doting-dad devotion to his daughter.” Though little was stated of Betsey Rampike’s background except that she’d been born in “remote” upstate New York and had “skated competitively, briefly” in high school, it was noted admiringly that Bix Rampike had been a “star athlete” through school; he’d played varsity football at Cornell University and in his senior year he’d been “aggressively recruited” by several pro football teams, among them the Pythons of Indianapolis and the Stingrays of St. Petersburg.

  The Galleria feature concluded, in a final paroxysm of a paragraph of quivering-female prose: “Asked what he most wished for his talented but very young daughter, Bix Rampike paused for a long moment, as a look of brooding tenderness came into his warm brown eyes, and the strong-boned features of his face softened. ‘May she be granted beauty and yet not beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught.’ It’s what some Irish poet said, and I say, Amen.’”*

  POPULAR! FOR NOW THE PHONES AT 93 RAVENS CREST DRIVE THAT HAD for so long tormented Betsey Rampike by not-ringing, seemed to be ringing-all-the-time. And the calls that Mummy placed so strategically, following the logic of the elaborately hand-printed pyramid of names of those residents of Fair Hills and vicinity whom Mummy understood to be Very Important People, were now being returned. And nearly each day’s mail delivery brought, in addition to cards and packages painstakingly addressed to MISS BLISS RAMPIKE, invitations to dinner parties, luncheons, receptions and gala open houses, for MR. AND MRS. BIX RAMPIKE. “It’s like Christmas every day,” Mummy told Skyler, with a dazed-Mummy smile, hand pressed against her heart, “—I can feel the love from our neighbors, I could just cry.”