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

by Joyce Carol Oates

  For days following the unprovoked attack Skyler unobtrusively (he hoped) trailed Calvin Klaus at a discreet distance like a lovesick/kicked dog, when their class schedules allowed. In the school “dining room”—not a “cafeteria,” for this was Fair Hills Day School where tuition rivaled tuition at the Higher Ivies—Skyler sat in a strategic position where he could unobtrusively (he hoped) observe the older boy with his fifth- and sixth-grade friends. How attractive Calvin seemed to Skyler, with his lean, angular, sharp-boned face, his “innocently” freckled skin like the skin of a boy in a Norman Rockwell illustration of bygone times in America, and his wolfish habit of lowering his head as he ate, or laughed. If from time to time Calvin glanced in Skyler’s direction and saw Skyler watching him, quickly Calvin looked away. The stalked has become the stalker.

  Wish I had time to pursue this theme. How we are drawn to and come to adore and will recall through decades of our lives teeming with a Milky Way of other individuals those very persons who, when we were children, terrorized us.

  Sly Skyler arranged for Maria to pick him up after school an hour later so that he could linger at the rear of the school, and observe Calvin Klaus being picked up—usually by a Hispanic housekeeper though occasionally by his mother; Skyler’s reward was to catch a glimpse, and more than a glimpse, of Morgan Klaus, a glamorous woman with prominent cheekbones, bemused icy-blue eyes, a throaty, lockjawed way of speaking, chic understated clothes and stylish crimped blond hair: the woman in the solarium!

  Skyler shut his eyes. Heart pounding seeing Bix Rampike’s outspread grasping fingers—Daddy’s big fingers, that could grab, and squeeze, and shake if they wished—on the woman’s back where the creamy-pale skin was bare—naked!—above the silky black dress.

  Jesus are you beautiful when can I see you crazy for you honey

  Poor Mummy! Where Mummy was insecure, smiled too much, over-made-up and over-dressed, with her glossy helmet of “tinted” hair even a nine-year-old could see was unfashionable, Calvin Klaus’s mother was so assured, so striking in her demeanor, you would scarcely notice that she wasn’t beautiful. Some days, Mrs. Klaus showed up at the rear entrance of Fair Hills Day in a low-slung gleaming-avocado Porsche, other days, in suburban-soccer-mom style, for Calvin Klaus did play soccer after school, in a gleaming black Reaper S.U.V. large enough to accommodate half the soccer team though it was only Calvin who climbed into the S.U.V., sulky-faced. Once, Skyler overheard Mrs. Klaus call out to her son in that throaty-sexy drawl: “Come on. None of that passive-aggressive shit with me. I’m your damn mother, not your damn chauffeur.”

  There was a mother! Crazy about you.

  Many times Skyler hoped that Morgan Klaus would take notice of him waiting alone by the curb, stoically bearing the weight of a book-crammed backpack on his narrow frame, still a “cute” kid by most maternal standards; but the bemused icy-blue eyes merely glided over him as if he were invisible; and Calvin Klaus, having caught on that Skyler was hoping to be seen, stonily ignored him. Only once, when Skyler was alone shivering in the rain when Mrs. Klaus pulled up in her massive Reaper, did his classmate’s mother take notice of him, with a startled little smile: “Is that—Scooter? Rampike?” As Skyler stepped forward eager to be offered a ride home, and the hell with whoever was coming to pick him up in a few minutes, rudely Calvin elbowed him aside saying in a loud raw voice: “No, Mom. This isn’t him.”

  The threat in Calvin Klaus’s voice, Skyler wasn’t about to dispute the issue of his identity.

  “YOUR DAD AND MY MOM, THEY’RE ’SCREWING’ EACH OTHER—KNOW WHAT that is?”

  Screwing? A giant—screw? Skyler winced not wanting to think what this might mean.

  Not sure, but Skyler mumbled yes.

  “You do?”

  Skyler mumbled yes sort of.

  “It’s like ‘fucking’—know what that is?”

  Fuck/fucking were words Bix Rampike sometimes muttered beneath his breath or, if really exasperated, out loud. Fuck/fucking had to be something that disgusted you, made you angry and impatient. Less certainly, Skyler mumbled yes maybe.

  “Hell you know, punk. You don’t know, I bet.” Calvin Klaus laughed derisively. “I know. I’ve seen pictures.”

  Pictures of Bix Rampike and Morgan Klaus? Or—pictures of strangers? Gamely Skyler tried to recall the blocked-out images of Fox Hambruck’s lurid “home movies.” In Skyler’s memory these had become confused with blocked-out images from Tyler McGreety’s lurid autopsy photographs.

  It was nineteen days after the assault in the boys’ restroom. Finally, Calvin Klaus had cornered Skyler Rampike another time, in a deserted corridor at school. Though Skyler was frightened, expecting to be pummelled and slammed against a row of lockers, he had not tried to run from Calvin; he’d decided I will be brave. Daddy would want this. But Calvin seemed less angry with Skyler now as if in the intervening days he’d become burnt-out with anger. Or, having seen Skyler Rampike trailing him about with a wistful-doggy look, he’d decided to have mercy on him.

  Skyler said impulsively, “‘Adult’ry.’ That’s what it is.”

  “‘Adult’ry.’ What’s that?”

  “What they do.” Skyler paused importantly. His voice quavered speaking of such matters. “‘Adults’ not married to each other.”

  Calvin regarded Skyler quizzically. Among his classmates, Skyler was acquiring a reputation for being weird in an intriguing way: a freaky kid, given to odd mannerisms, gnomic outbursts, and brooding silences, but not only just a freak. It had become known that Skyler’s father was a VIP in corporate business of some kind and that his younger sister, who was too special to attend school, was rapidly becoming a famous ice-skater to be seen on TV, her picture in the media. Vaguely it was rumored that Skyler had been a prodigy-gymnast who’d injured himself irrevocably in an accident. Vaguely it was rumored that the Rampikes were rich and had powerful political connections.

  Who knew?—maybe Skyler Rampike himself was a genius? One of those legendary Fair Hills pupils whose I.Q.’s were said to be “off the charts” though their class work, for neurological/psychological/pathopsychopharmaceutological reasons, might seem but ordinary.

  Sneering Calvin said, with the belligerence of a humanoid figure in a video game: “Yo smart-ass: what do adults do? You tell me.”

  Desperately Skyler tried to think: what do adults do? And why? As Calvin poked him in the chest with a bony forefinger, Skyler could see the boy’s red-inked tattoos (a heart dripping blood, a dagger dripping blood) on the underside of his wrist.

  If Calvin was a new initiate of the (secret, forbidden) Fair Hills Bloods, his issue with Skyler didn’t appear to be gangsta-related, but personal.

  “Okay, asshole. I’ll explain. It’s with”—Calvin said, gesturing at the crotch of his neat-pressed corduroy trousers, with a look both lewd and revulsed—“they ‘screw’ them together. The woman has a hole between her legs, the man’s cock fits in. Sometimes, they make a baby. That white stuff out of your little punk cock—that’s ‘sea-man.’ It gets shot up inside the woman like a spray can and can snag in there and turn into a baby, like a tapeworm that gets huge.” Calvin paused, swallowing hard; you could see a fleeting nausea in his pale freckled face. “Sometimes, like with my mom I overheard talking once, on the phone with one of her women friends, they ‘get rid of ’ this baby-thing, and it’s flushed down the toilet like shit. Could’ve been you, or me—like, we could’ve been brothers—twins—see? If your dad and my mom had been screwing, a long time ago. And if they get married, we will be.”

  Calvin spoke excitedly, not very coherently. Skyler stared at him in dismay. A sudden roaring in his ears, he wasn’t hearing this. Brothers?—twins? Married?

  “You little punk, why’re you looking at me like that?” Calvin said, flaring up. “Like you don’t believe me? My mom wants to get a divorce from my poor asshole-dad, who’s essentially clueless in all this, and marry your dad, except your dad is moved away from Fair Hills, I guess? ‘Bix Rampike�
�—used to be some kind of big-deal football player? My dad’s got guns, see. And my mom gets drunk, and mean, and tells him all kinds of things to make him mad at her, your dad better watch out somebody doesn’t blow off his head.” Now Calvin did shove Skyler back against the row of lockers, though not hard: you might say, companionably. His breath was warm and anguished in Skyler’s face. “If my dad doesn’t, maybe I will.”*

  * Though all Fair Hills Day School students had to sign a contract binding them to the school’s traditional honor code and to a promise not to enter into “any and all secret societies” at the school, yet there were rumored to be two predominant gangs/fraternities there: the Krippes (secret tattoos made with black ink) and the Bloods (secret tattoos made with red ink). In emulation of black-youth drug-dealing gangsta culture, purveyed to them largely through video games and TV, Skyler’s Caucasian/upper-middle-class classmates sometimes tied nylon rags around their heads as well, when not on school property.

  † Only the most abnormally retentive of readers will recall Billy Durkee of many pages back. This canny, math-minded, manipulative playdate of Skyler’s who’d taught Skyler to play poker, to a degree, so that he could win from the naive kid somewhere in the range of thirty dollars over a period of months. At school, Billy greeted Skyler with a friendly-insincere smile but never invited Skyler to join him and his friends for lunch. Skyler had no idea whether Mummy had “given up on” Mrs. Durkee, who’d ceased answering Mummy’s calls, or whether it was, in fact, Mummy who’d ceased calling Mrs. Durkee. The intense social lives of our parents!—mysterious, snarled, as taboo to contemplate as their sex lives.

  * Wow! Sounds like ten-year-old Calvin Klaus is threatening to blow off Bix Rampike’s head, doesn’t it? And by telling Skyler beforehand, he’s making Skyler complicit in the act; maybe even, in moral terms, a co-conspirator. In a work of fiction, such an utterance would presage violence to come, or at least attempted violence; in this document, though Calvin Klaus blurted out exactly these words, nothing will come of the distraught boy’s threat. Skyler went away shaken, with a premonition that something very bad was to happen to someone in his family, and that it would be his father’s fault; and that there was nothing to be done about it for it lay in the province of “adults”—“adult’ry”—and was beyond his control.

  MUMMY’S MAN FRIENDS?

  …WOMAN HAS A HOLE BETWEEN HER LEGS, THE MAN’S COCK FITS IN.

  So this is what adults do?

  There was a crude simplicity about it. A kind of geometry.

  Yet Skyler brooded, unconvinced.

  For why?

  “WHY, BETSEY RAMPIKE. DARLIN’, HOW ARE YOU?”

  In Fair Hills, New Jersey, as in every upscale American-suburban community, there is a distinctive male type: hearty, bluff, jovial, with cold blue eyes and a bone-crushing handshake. Short-legged, barrel-chested. One of those men whose skin pinkens as their hair—crew cut, to disguise its thinness—whitens. Bix Rampike moved easily with such men with whom he felt some kinship yet knew himself to be superior (taller and better-fit, good-looking, younger) but Betsey Rampike did not for Betsey Rampike was inclined to believe such men when they swooped upon her gallantly at social gatherings to which (bravely, defiantly) she’d come alone in the wake of her husband’s departure, seizing her soft pliable hand, saying, “Betsey. You are looking damn beautiful. Where the hell have you been keeping yourself?”

  In the Rampikes’ vast and ever-shifting circle of social acquaintances, it was Tigger Burr who fit this profile. So far as brooding Skyler knew, the burly white-haired Mr. Burr was married and had high-school-age children of whom one was Jimbo Burr, a senior at Fair Hills Day whom younger boys knew to avoid for his playful custom of grinding his knuckles against their heads, or shoving them into walls, so why was Mr. Burr so frequently “dropping by” the house to see Mummy, why was Mummy eager to go out with Mr. Burr “for drinks”—“maybe an early, light supper” at the Fair Hills Inn; why was Mummy so often on the phone, laughing shrilly as if being tickled: “Tigger, I can’t. Not tonight. I’ve got the children. I’ve been with Bliss all day at the rink and seeing doctors and—there’s Skyler—my son, I’ve told you: Sky-ler—he’s nine and very needy and so I can’t—I shouldn’t—Well, just for a little while, I guess. But I shouldn’t.”

  Needy! Skyler was not.

  Skyler made inquiries at school and learned that Jimbo Burr’s dad owned Burr Real Estate & Home Insurance and was in the condition of being separated from his wife; which condition resembled Bix Rampike’s so was that the connection? Skyler stayed up late to watch for Mummy returning from her “early evenings” with Mr. Burr ascending the stairs of the mostly darkened house with exacting care, in her stocking feet and carrying her high-heeled shoes, murmuring to herself, laughing under her breath, or making a harsh tsking! sound as if in disapproval, pausing to sway at the top of the stairs and press a hand against her forehead as if overcome by a spell of dizziness. “Skyler! What on earth are you doing up? I told Maria to put you to bed by nine and give you your medication and make sure that you stayed in bed.”

  “Mummy, are you drunk?”

  “Skyler! What! That’s a terrible thing to say to your own mother.”

  “Are you?”

  Mummy slapped at Skyler, lurched and would have fallen except Skyler bravely took the brunt of his mother’s warmly soft startled weight, and held her upright and tremulous with indignation. It was very late for a weekday night: past midnight. In the nursery Bliss was whimpering in her sleep and downstairs in the cave-like housekeeper’s room off the kitchen Maria had fallen asleep watching the midget TV that came with the room. A sweet pungent scent of Mummy’s breath, Mummy’s special perfume, and Mummy’s special Mummy-smell wafted to Skyler’s nostrils. “Yesss I am drunk. I am drunk with hope, and I am drunk with happiness. I am drunk with the freedom of being a woman, at last.”

  Skyler helped Mummy to bed. Mummy leaned heavily on Skyler as they stumbled along. Skyler was barefoot, and in pajamas. A terrifying thought came to Skyler as Mummy pushed open the door to the bedroom What if Daddy is back? What if Daddy sees Mummy like this? but the bedroom was empty.

  “Mummy, Mr. Burr is married.”

  “And so am I, smarty.”

  “You aren’t going to marry Mr. Burr, Mummy, are you?”

  “And what if I was? What has Mummy’s ‘love-life’ to do with you?”

  “’Cause I don’t want to be Jimbo Burr’s twin brother, Mummy. I’ll run away if I have to be.”

  Mummy was sitting on the edge of the massive four-poster bed trying to catch her breath. Mummy’s hair was in her face and her lipstick was smeared. Mummy stared at Skyler with a look of commingled guilt and defiance. “‘Jimbo Burr’s twin brother’—? What on earth are you talking about, Skyler?”

  “I hate him, Mummy. I hate him so much. Please say you won’t marry Mr. Burr, Mummy, please.”

  Skyler began to cry, and Mummy’s heart melted, and Mummy allowed her little man to sleep with her in the enormous king-sized bed for the first time in a very long time; and ever after this night, Tigger Burr never “dropped by” the Rampikes’ house again.*

  And there was Roddy McDermid.

  One of those wonderful bearded fathers other children have, big, blustery and rough but affectionate, like a bear: except not the real kind which would more resemble Bix Rampike, that would tear off your face with his teeth, but the cuddly kind. Mr. McDermid had a bushy beard streaked with gray that looked as if small birds might nest in it, and Mr. McDermid wore leather sandals with wool socks in the coldest weather, and Mr. McDermid was a research ecologist for the State of New Jersey as well as a member of the Fair Hills Chamber Orchestra whose instrument was the oboe. Mr. McDermid’s daughter Priscilla was in Skyler’s fifth-grade class at Fair Hills Day School and so it was, Mummy and Mr. McDermid met at Open House, and soon thereafter it happened that Mummy arranged for Priscilla McDermid to come to the Rampikes’ house for a playdate with Skyler, soon
afterward followed by a reciprocal playdate visit at the McDermids’ house which was a smallish brick residence on an undistinguished street in the Village of Fair Hills where Betsey Rampike knew no one; yet, to Skyler’s surprise, Mummy seemed to like the McDermids, both Mr. McDermid and Mrs. McDermid, who seemed to like Mummy in return; unless the McDermids felt sorry for Mummy who lived in so expensive a house in such a prestigious neighborhood of Fair Hills yet seemed to have no one to call but Mr. McDermid at his office, in a plaintive voice asking could Roddy please drop by the house on his way home from work to check out a “strange beeping thing” in one of the guest rooms: a faulty carbon monoxide detector, its battery dead, emitting a high-pitched squeak like a bat. In September, Mummy took Skyler and Bliss to a performance of the Fair Hills Chamber Orchestra in the public school, to watch Mr. McDermid blow away at his oboe and to talk and laugh with him at the punch-bowl reception afterward. How jealous Skyler was of his classmate Priscilla who seemed unaware that her big bear-like bewhiskered father was so wonderful! Skyler came close to fainting when Mr. McDermid stooped to give him a bear-hug—“Good night, son!”—after the McDermids invited Mummy, Bliss, and Skyler over for a Chinese take-out supper in their kitchen. Next day Skyler said wistfully to Bliss, “Maybe Mr. McDermid could be Mummy’s new husband, and our new daddy,” but Bliss said, not so much as glancing away from the giant wall TV screen where the Ring of Kerry Irish Dance Troupe in their scoop-necked velvet skating dresses and identical glittering tiaras were performing yet another time, “No. Daddy is our daddy forever.”

  * Though not because of this maudlin if heartfelt scene! In a work of fiction, her little man’s tearful pleading would have been the precipitating factor in Mummy breaking off her friendship with barrel-chested Tigger Burr; in this case, to Mummy’s disappointment, Tigger Burr seemed simply to lose interest in her, never called her again or returned her calls. (Maybe because, from Tigger Burr’s canny perspective, Bix Rampike’s abandoned wife was too needy.)