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

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Repeatedly Bliss was taught the alphabet, memorized the sequence of letters in clusters, recited it slowly and with painful concentration; then, next time, scrambled the order of the letters or forgot them entirely. As repeatedly Bliss memorized the single-digit multiplication tables which subsequently she scrambled, or forgot. If for a week or so Bliss could “read”—in the way of a blind child making her halting way across the floor—mysteriously over a weekend she lost the ability, to the bewilderment of her tutors and to Mummy’s disgust.

  “My daughter is not ‘dyslexic.’ She has been tested many times, she has had MRIs, her brain is ‘perfectly normal’—as her neurologist has said. There is no reason why she can’t learn to read at least as well as her brother, who is dyslexic.”

  (If Skyler were present, the pedantic little brat might pipe up: “Mummy, I am also A.D.D. You know that.”)

  Some of the tutors had better luck with Bliss than others, at least initially. You could see—at least, Skyler could see—that Bliss was trying very hard. Yet somehow it happened, after a few embarrassing setbacks, tears, a temper tantrum, Bliss seemed to give up, sat unresponsive at the table in the solarium with her arms folded tight across her chest. In her glassy blue eyes as in the tragic set of her mouth was the declaration Can’t do it, can’t remember. I will only get it wrong.

  Most memorably, Rob passed on to his little friend Skyler copies of “speculative sci-fi” comic books and the “underground” comics of R. Crumb* after extracting from Skyler the promise that he wouldn’t show his parents these items which of course Skyler would not. R. Crumb made a profound impression on Skyler at the vulnerable age of nine and soon the savage sagas of R. Crumb became Skyler’s favorite after-bedtime reading; Skyler even tried to draw comics in the inimitable style of R. Crumb. In all of Fair Hills there was no one who resembled R. Crumb’s freaky people and yet, how familiar they seemed to Skyler! Slutty big-breasted females with massive buttocks and legs, teetering on ridiculous high heels, pinhead cretin males with enormous floppy feet…And runty gargoyle figures like Skyler looking on with leering-demonic grins.

  “Rob? What is ‘Keep on trucking’?” Skyler asked, and the tutor said, “It means—‘Just keep on.’”

  “Yes, but—why? ‘Keep on’—why?”

  “Ask your dad, Skyler. He’d be the one to know.”

  Skyler was naive but not so naive as to ask Daddy any question to which he hadn’t a good idea what the answer might be.

  Subversive R. Crumb was Rob Feldman’s parting gift to Skyler. Abruptly then the tutor was gone. This was spring 1996. From his mother’s indignant reaction, Skyler guessed that Rob had quit just before Mummy could fire him: “That deceitful Feldman! And I trusted him with my daughter! And my son! If he imagines that I will be a ‘character reference’ for him…”

  But when Mummy complained to Daddy about the tutor’s “betrayal” Daddy was unpersuaded: “A Jewish person, with his tragic sense of progoms through the millennia, he will instinctively jump a sinking ship, can you blame him? That’s why at Scor we make them sign legal contracts, so they can’t walk away with our secrets and sell them to our enemies.”

  Was Daddy kidding? Was this tricky-Daddy speech? Catching his son’s eye and winking man-to-man while poor Mummy fumed and fussed biting her lip to keep from crying.

  Soon Bliss wanted to see what the comic book was Skyler was trying to copy from but Skyler told her no.

  Bliss asked why.

  “Because this comic book isn’t for girls.”

  Bliss asked why.

  “Because R. Crumb is ugly, and funny. And you’re not supposed to laugh at ugly things.”

  Bliss asked why.

  “Because you’re not. Because I say so.”

  Yes said Bliss, but why?

  Just inside the doorway of Skyler’s bedroom his six-year-old sister stood staring at him with a peculiar wistful/insolent smile. Her voice was both pleading and demanding. Here was both the angel-child and the devious little brat. For much of that day Bliss had been practicing at the Halcyon rink under the tutelage of Masha Kurylek for there was an interregnum during which the dread homeschooling sessions were suspended while Mummy searched for a new tutor. Bliss’s skin was mottled as if she’d been picking at it with her nails, her nostrils looked inflamed. She had not been given a bath and was wearing her skating-practice jumpsuit of soiled pink wool-flannel embossed across the chest with white satin letters B L I S S. Evidently she had not been made to take her several afternoon meds and so was skittish and irritable and could not possibly lie down for a nap before the evening meal for Mummy was out somewhere, and had been gone for hours, and the younger of the Marias had recently been fired for “insubordination”—“incompetence”—“moral laxity” as Mummy had charged.

  Bliss ran at Skyler giggling, intending to snatch the R. Crumb comic from him, but Skyler scrambled to his knees on his bed holding the magazine at arm’s length. “I promise, Skyler, I won’t laugh. Please,” and Skyler said again, in a tone of nine-year-old prudery, “I told you: this comic book isn’t for little girls.”

  “I’m not a ‘little girl.’ I’m a thousand years old.”

  Wildly Bliss rushed at Skyler trying to wrest the magazine from him, tearing the pages. Each time Bliss attacked him like this Skyler was surprised by her strength and agility and he recalled Daddy’s admonition: Never hit a girl! In self-defense Skyler tossed R. Crumb across the room, and Bliss ran to snatch up the comic book, peering as if nearsightedly at the crudely drawn humanoid figures. Skyler said, “I told you, it isn’t for girls. Now give it back.”

  Skyler was listening uneasily for Mummy to come home. The sound of Mummy’s car in the driveway, the sound of the downstairs rear door opening. When neither Mummy nor Daddy was home there was in the Rampike household an air of excitable tension like the air before an electrical storm which the arrival of one or another of the adults, nearly always Mummy, for Daddy was away “on business,” would exacerbate.

  On her heels on the floor, Bliss was turning the pages of the lurid comic book. Such ugly figures! Such “nasty”—“dirty”—things, very wrong for a young girl to see. Skyler could hear Bliss breathing through her mouth. Certainly she did not appear to be laughing, nor even smiling. Nor had Skyler laughed much at the comic book. With the look of pained concentration she brought to certain of her lessons before disillusion set in, Bliss continued to peer at the pages, and finally, after perhaps five minutes, she handed it back to Skyler without a word.

  Skyler said, “What’d I tell you! R. Crumb isn’t for girls. If you tell Mummy, I’ll wring your neck.”*

  Quickly Bliss fled the room.

  Soon afterward, Mummy arrived home. By then, Bliss was being bathed by the elder Maria and had taken her meds and Skyler had hidden away his torn copy of R. Crumb in a corner of his closet beneath pairs of smelly old sneakers, where Mummy would never think of looking, not ever.

  * This brief, unabashedly sentimental interlude is not strategically placed to generate what sneering critics call “cheap suspense”—I swear! Nor do I wish in glib postmodernist style to fuck up the already fatally fucked-up chronology of this document. Just wanted, amid so much that is dark, gnarled, blighted and sinister-sorrowful, before plunging into a “harrowing” account of the final months of my sister’s life, to acknowledge that there were, now and then, in Skyler’s young life, what greeting-card companies call Good Memories.

  * These were early Zap comics, Rob Feldman must have bought in a secondhand comics store. Long missing, destroyed. See the subsequent chapter in this document “Post-Mortem”—hundreds of pages distant.

  * My God, did I really say this? Did I really threaten to wring my six-year-old sister’s neck? I hadn’t remembered any of this in ten years and now it is all flooding back and maybe it is a mistake to be doing what I am doing and in the grip of R.C.S. I am fearful that I will be propelled onward to reveal worse…

  ANSWERS TO QUERIES OF PREVIOUS CHAPTER “
QUERY”

  NO, NO, AND NO.

  OW!

  “HAVE YOU NOTICED, CHILDREN?—YOUR FATHER HAS DEPARTED.”

  Skyler stared at Mummy: wasn’t sure what Mummy had said.

  Bliss stared at Mummy: wasn’t sure what Mummy had said.

  In the doorway of the family room Mummy stood. A glaring light like raging flames behind Mummy, the startled children could not bear to look at head-on and so Skyler who’d been jotting down cheat-notes for a “cognitive-skills” test he was scheduled to take the next day at school looked to the side and Bliss who’d been raptly absorbed in The Ring of Kerry Irish Skate-Dance Troupe which was Bliss’s favorite-of-all-times skating videos shut her eyes. And Mummy said, “Why are you smiling, Bliss? Is this news amusing?”

  Bliss’s eyes blinked open. Had Bliss been smiling? A twitch and a tremor in Bliss’s left cheek, easy to mistake for an insolent smile. Seated beside Skyler on the sofa Bliss cast her brother a sidelong glance for support, but Skyler was looking away.

  Telling himself Sure Daddy is departed! I knew it.

  In fact, Skyler hadn’t known. Or if he’d known with a part of his mind he hadn’t known. For to even a shrewd child who eavesdrops with the nervous concentration of a sparrow picking in the dirt very little is known unless an adult has confirmed it.

  It was so, Daddy hadn’t joined his family at Palm Beach the month before. Poor Mummy had driven to the airport to bring him home to Grandmother Rampike’s house where they waited for Daddy eagerly, Grandmother Rampike’s Cuban cook had prepared a lavish late-lunch to be served on the wide white veranda overlooking the sweep of beach and the ocean, but an hour passed, and another hour passed, and finally Mummy returned with reddened eyes, her breath smelling of something very sweet and fumey like gasoline and Mummy told Grandmother Rampike that Daddy had not been on the plane he’d been scheduled to take from J.F.K. and so Mummy had waited at the airport for the next flight, from Newark, thinking that Daddy had missed the first flight and would catch the later flight without having time to call and explain but Daddy had not been on the later flight either and so Mummy who wasn’t feeling very well was going upstairs and did not want to be disturbed and when Grandmother Rampike tried to restrain her Mummy threw off Grandmother Rampike’s talon-fingers with a sharp little cry No! Don’t touch me.

  (Had Skyler witnessed this? Maybe.)

  Later it would be revealed that for weeks Daddy had been caught up in “crucial negotiations” with Scor Chemicals lawyers who were determined not to lose Bix Rampike to the aggressive hiring campaign of mega-global Univers Bio-Tech, Inc. which negotiations in what had promised to be the final hour were dramatically interrupted by the sudden emergence of a similar campaign to hire Bix Rampike at mega-global Vortex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and so a three-way tug-of-war had been raging the object of which was Skyler’s and Bliss’s Daddy: “Very flattering, sure. But God-damned exhausting.”

  Since then, Daddy had been more and more away from home and even when he hadn’t been away “on business” he returned home late for dinner, rarely home in time to kiss Skyler and Bliss good night in their beds. Mummy had said with her brave-Mummy smile that it was “a time of transition” and that Daddy was “very, very popular” in the corporate world; from Singapore, from Toyko, from Sydney and from Rio and from Scor Chemicals headquarters in Paramus, New Jersey, came phone messages for Skyler and for Bliss in earnest-Daddy tones Hey you kids your Daddy is missing you, y’know your Daddy loves you two kids to death don’t you?

  Skyler had always known that Daddy was very special—of course!—but this sentiment had been corroborated just recently at Fair Hills Day when not only smirky Tyler McGreety but snooty Fox Hambruck who usually ignored Skyler went out of their ways to speak to him in the school dining room, even to smile at him, and to ask how “Mr. Rampike” was?—a question so baffling to Skyler at the time he could only stammer: “D-Daddy is okay, I think.”

  But this appeared to be something different. Your father has departed had the ominous sound of something not related to the corporate world.

  “Skyler, stop scowling! It breaks your mother’s heart to see you looking so tragic. And Bliss, why are you smiling? Is there something you know, that your father has told you, he hasn’t told Skyler and me? Is that why you are smiling?—to mock us?”

  Mummy spoke as one might speak with stones in her mouth and Mummy stood with her elbows pressing against her sides as if to keep herself upright. Mummy’s crimson lipstick was partly eaten away which meant that Mummy had not glimpsed herself in a mirror for some time and Mummy’s hair was springy on one side of her head and flattened on the other as if Mummy had been sleeping on her side, in rumpled clothes. In recent days Skyler had heard Mummy speaking sharply on the telephone and that afternoon, when he’d returned home from school, there was Mattie Higley, Reverend Higley’s wife, just driving away in the Higleys’ station wagon, with a bright be brave! smile for Skyler he hadn’t wished to interpret. Skyler saw that the polish on Mummy’s fingernails was chipped and Skyler saw that Mummy’s hands were loose and quivery and quickly Skyler said, in defense of his trembling little sister, “Bliss isn’t smiling, Mummy. She doesn’t mean anything by it, she can’t help it.”

  Mummy’s dilated eyes swerved upon Skyler. For a moment, Skyler worried that he might be smiling, too. But Mummy only just staggered forward, colliding with the back of Daddy’s massive taffy-colored leather chair as if she hadn’t seen it, sighing, and saying: “Your daddy has another life, it seems. Which he prefers to his life with us. ‘I will always love my little family,’ Daddy has said. ‘But I can’t breathe in that house.’”

  Instinctively Skyler and Bliss drew in short panting breaths.

  “‘Can’t breathe’? Daddy? Is he sick?”

  Bliss gave a convulsive little cry, as if struck by phantom pain in her lungs.

  “‘Can’t breathe.’ That’s what your father has declared. After you fell and hurt yourself at Atlantic City—that was the first time. Daddy saw the video, you know. Daddy insisted upon seeing. I tried to prevent him but he insisted. And last week at Wilmington, when you cancelled your performance, I think it was too much. Your father was planning to attend, Bliss! He was planning to be with us at the hotel. He’d rearranged his schedule, to be with us. ‘To see my bestest-best little gal skate, and to see her win.’ But it didn’t happen that way. Your father isn’t a man of faith, children. He isn’t like me! Oh, he says he is: ‘I believe in a Supreme Being’—‘I believe in a Personal Savior.’ But things must be proven to that man, repeatedly. Like all American men—at least, ‘alpha-plus’ males!—his heart is fickle. That his family is worthy of his love must be proven to him again, and again. He says he loves us—but does he? He knew how hard we’ve all been working for the Royale Ice Capades competition—how we’ve been living, breathing, dreaming The Firebird for months!—and when Bliss was rejected, it was a rebuke to your father, to his male way of thinking.” Mummy paused, her mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “But it isn’t your fault, Bliss, and no one blames you. Masha is very disappointed, of course—but doesn’t blame you. And I don’t blame you. ‘Phantom pain’—whatever that is!—can strike any of us, at any time. If we are weak in our faith. If we succumb.”

  The previous week, Bliss had failed to qualify for the Royale Ice Capades competition. For somehow it had happened that, contrary to Mummy’s expectation, Jesus had failed to take Bliss’s phantom pain from her, and so, during her qualifying performance, Bliss had been in such conspicuous pain that the Royale Ice Capades officials refused to allow her to compete, and threatened to formally register a complaint against Mummy with the United States Figure Skating Association, for violating one or another of the bylaws of their official Rulebook. And so Bliss Rampike wasn’t crowned Little Miss Royale Ice Capades Princess 1996 as many had predicted she would be. And so Daddy hadn’t been with his little family in Wilmington that evening, and Daddy didn’t seem to be anywhere in the vicinity of 93 Ravens
Crest Drive now.

  Calmly Mummy said: “No one blames you, Bliss. Skating accidents happen all the time. The most promising careers end abruptly if we lack faith. ‘Many are called but few are chosen’—Jesus has warned. And, ‘From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’”

  Mummy may have had more to say on the subject but a phone ringing impatiently in the next room distracted her. Skyler’s eyes were shut tight and when he opened them, Mummy was gone. And Bliss was still cringing on the sofa beside him, taut and unmoving and her knees drawn up to her chest. Skyler pushed at her—

  “Your fault, Daddy isn’t here! Damn you.”

  OW! THIS IS A PAINFUL MEMORY.

  (Yet Ow! is a comical sound, isn’t it? Ow! you see exclusively in cartoons and comic strips. Ow! ow! owwww! the freaky humanoids in R. Crumb cry. But their pain is laughable, contemptible. Anthropologists might tell us that we can laugh at another’s pain only if the other is sufficiently other and in no way us.)

  “BLISS? HEY C’MON. I’M SORRY, I DIDN’T MEAN IT…MUMMY ISN’T here. Bliss?”

  Later that evening searching for his stricken little sister upstairs in her bedroom and downstairs and again upstairs—had he missed her the first time?—hiding beneath her bed. Barely visible in the dim light of the Mother Goose lamp there was Bliss lying unmoving on her side, knees drawn up to her chest and thumb in her mouth, the raggedy old doll Edna Louise clutched in her arms. Skyler reached for her but his arms were too short. “Bliss, don’t feel bad, okay? Mummy didn’t mean it.” In the dim light Bliss’s small moist eyes were barely discernible and Edna Louise’s eyes were empty sockets. How many times had Mummy in exasperation taken the old doll from Bliss and disposed of it yet somehow Bliss managed to retrieve it—“like a pack rat”—unless maybe Bliss had found a similar battered old doll abandoned in one of the skating rinks, appropriated it as her own and brought it home with her inside her coat and whispered to it in secret as if to taunt her mother who laughingly admitted to being “at my wit’s end” over her six-year-old daughter who was both the most wonderful thing in Betsey Rampike’s life and the most vexing. As if God, or Jesus, had sent Bliss to Betsey: Here! Your salvation, or your damnation. For so Mummy complained to Skyler, with a brave-Mummy laugh. For it was so, the Royale Ice Capades officials had threatened to register a complaint against Betsey Rampike, mother/manager of Bliss Rampike. It was so, Bliss was under orders to “rest”—“stay off the ice”—for at least two weeks. Dr. Vandeman was prescribing daily doses of the new “wonder drug” F.D.A.-approved for children, the anti-convulsive Serenex, and Dr. Muddick was prescribing daily doses of the anti-depressant Excelsia and the painkiller Codeine 7, and Dr. Bohr-Mandrake (female, M.D. in abnormal child psychopharmacology) was prescribing high-concentrate doses of Zomix for Bliss’s C.A.A.D. which, in the past year, clearly seemed to be worsening.* “Bliss? Please. I’m sorry, and I bet Mummy is sorry, too.” Yet Bliss remained unresponsive and unmoving beneath the bed. Skyler could hear her quick shallow panting. The trapped air beneath the bed was overwarm, stale, smelly. Skyler’s nostrils pinched at the familiar ammoniac-smell of Bliss’s mattress and bedding. Dr. Bohr-Mandrake believed that Zomix would “minimize” Bliss’s nighttime “accidents” and Skyler dearly hoped that this was so. “Bliss, Daddy loves you. Daddy loves us both, he says so all the time. It’s just Daddy is ‘busy’—Daddy might be changing jobs. But Daddy is going to see us next week—he promised. When I hurt myself at the gym, it was a stupid mistake but Daddy didn’t stop loving me.” Skyler paused, wondering if this was true. As a bright (if dyslexic/A.D.D.-afflicted) child of nine he could figure that any kid’s father might love him just a little more if he’d turned out to be a prodigy-gymnast and not a runt-cripple whom other boys scorned. Yet urgently Skyler reasoned: “If Daddy says he ‘can’t breathe’ here why is it our fault? In Mummy’s magazines you can read about what adults do all the time: ‘adult’ry.’ It’s something nasty called ‘adult’ry’ because that is what adults do.”