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

by Joyce Carol Oates

  There was a tremor in the young woman’s voice which Skyler did not wish to interpret: flirtatious reproach? angry reproach? yearning? hope? He hurried away without glancing back.

  Abruptly the gray carpeting underfoot had changed to dark green. Without leaving the building Skyler had entered another wing: DEPT. OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT. Yet it was the third floor he was on—wasn’t it? The words Alison is here—working hard on Sunday afternoon echoed inside his head with a tone now mocking, accusatory. He was meant to be the bearer of a coded message but he would not cooperate. As when Mummy questioned Skyler about what he and his father did on their outings together Are you with Daddy every minute? Does Daddy slip away? Does Daddy “run into” anyone? Does Daddy talk about me? He’d begun to feel the sensation of crawly numbness in his scalp, which made him want to dig his fingernails into his scalp and scratch, hard. As sometimes Bliss scratched with her nails in a similar way. These were very bad habits. Mummy despaired of such bad habits in her children. Skyler felt a tinge of pain in his left leg—which was his “good” leg—meaning that the pain wasn’t real but what Mummy called fantim pain; like Bliss’s fantim pain in her left ankle that had returned since she’d begun double practice sessions at the Halcyon rink in early January, in preparation for the Hershey’s Kisses competition which was to be televised on ABC-TV. Bliss’s fantim pain was a secret from Daddy for Mummy was afraid that, if Daddy knew, he would not want Bliss to be practicing so much; worse yet, he might not want Bliss to skate in the competition.

  It doesn’t hurt! My ankle doesn’t hurt! Bliss insisted wiping tears from her clenched little face.

  Skyler understood that something bad had happened between Daddy and Mummy on New Year’s Eve. It was meant to be a happy time, for Daddy and Mummy had been invited to three New Year’s Eve parties including a party at the home of Si and Mimi Solomon which was a very special party to which other friends of the Rampikes had not been invited. In their glamorous “dress-up” clothes—Daddy in his tux, Mummy in a dazzling gold lamé gown with a very low, tight neckline—the elder Rampikes had been very happy kissing Skyler and Bliss good night but sometime past midnight Mummy had returned home alone stumbling and cursing and when Daddy returned, Skyler wasn’t sure for he’d fallen asleep, and was wakened groggy and confused hearing Mummy’s fierce voice You are not starting this again, Bix. Please you are not, for Bliss’s sake you know what pressure we are under. And Daddy’s voice pleaded Betsey I am not. You have the wrong idea. Sweetheart I swear.

  By accident Skyler found the Fitness Center! He was too short to peer through the window in the door to see if anyone was inside but when he pushed the door open, the cavernous space, only partly lighted, appeared to be empty.

  Against the farther wall were several treadmill machines. There were stacked weights and the usual machines with leather seats and straps and the air was both chill and stale-smelling. Skyler smiled uncertainly. Daddy would be pleased that he’d managed to find the Fitness Center…As he stepped farther into the room he saw, floating in a long horizontal wall-mirror, a child’s small pale face floating as if cut off at the shoulders.

  Skyler fled.

  With a mounting sense of panic Skyler tried to retrace his steps back to his father’s office. Which floor was Daddy on?—the fifth floor? But Daddy’s office had been on the top floor of the building and now the fifth floor did not seem to be the top floor. And views from windows did not look familiar. And the sun was slanting in the sky. After ten, fifteen, twenty frantic minutes Skyler was drawn to a man’s voice and found himself at the end of an unfamiliar corridor staring into an office at a man, seen from the rear, leaning far back in a swivel chair cupping one hand to the nape of his neck and speaking in a low intimate incensed voice into a phone, “—can’t risk leaving—right now—she’s obsessed with our daughter—she’s made a ding-’n’-such out of this skating, and out of Bliss, no telling what the woman might do, if—”

  The man was Daddy! Skyler backed away stricken to the heart.

  Our daughter! And not a word of our son.

  * Damn! I haven’t wanted to allude to the depressing subject of Skyler’s ongoing medical maladies. To his parents’ dismay, three years after his gym accident Skyler was still suffering “intermittent chronic” pain in his twice-broken right leg: femur, fibula. Also, knee. Also, neck pain. And “crawly numbness” on the right side of his scalp, occasionally “drilling into” his brain. These various pains were treated with an ever-shifting battery of painkillers and (Skyler had reason to suspect) placebos. (How many children of nine are fully aware of what “placebos” are? In Fair Hills, quite a few.) Bix Rampike was especially upset by his son’s physical condition and can you blame him? How does a father feel, in the company of a limping son? A limping son with a midget-cane? No wonder, by the time gabby Mrs. Fenn, or Mrs. Frass, enters the scene, the “guy-stuff” interlude was rapidly approaching its end.

  …NOT A WORD OF OUR SON*

  * Moment at which nine-year-old Skyler Rampike realized irrevocably that in the lives of his parents whom he loved so desperately as in the vast world beyond the Rampike household Skyler Rampike was, at the most, but a footnote.

  FOOTNOTE!*

  * In a text that more accurately reflects its subject, the remainder of this narrative would consist exclusively of footnotes. For it’s down here, IN FOOTNOTES, that Skyler Rampike actually lived. (And what about you, the skeptical reader? Is it painful to realize that you, too, are but a footnote in others’ lives, when you had wished to imagine you were the text?)

  H.I.P.!

  “THEY DON’T LOVE ME. NEITHER OF THEM.”

  In this dazed/sulky-resentful/muttering-to-himself state at times approaching a kind of ambulatory catatonia, Skyler would make his way like a somnambulist (classy word for “sleepwalker”) through what remained of his life.

  Wait. Not his life. His sister’s life.

  “SKYLER! CONGRATULATIONS, SON.”

  Was this a cruel joke? Headmaster Hannity’s moist meaty adult hand gripping Skyler’s moist-midget-hand in a handshake?

  For—so strangely!—in these quick weeks leading to his sister’s brutal death in the early hours of January 29, 1997, at Fair Hills Day School Skyler Rampike evidently managed to appear no different than usual; no more “stressed”—“agitated”—“unstable”—than ever, among his high-strung classmates: it was in fact a sixth-grader who “went ballistic” in his homeroom, attacking another boy with a sharp-pointed geometry compass and, when their instructor tried to intervene, attacking him as well, and having to be overpowered and carried away. Another boy, and not Skyler Rampike!*

  Somehow—don’t ask me how!—Skyler managed stoically to disguise from his classmates as from the inscrutable adults surrounding that he was but a footnote; managing, through sheer compulsive concentration, to score so high in the battery of tests known as “fifth-form sweeps” that he was designated H.I.P.—at last.

  “Skyler, this is very good news. Clearly you have made a determined effort to improve your academic performance in a highly competitive series of tests. Your instructor has informed me that you are currently prescribed for several ‘meds’—and these ‘meds’ are working very well. So, it seems, diligent student, devoted instructor, and canny pediatric-neurologist are to be congratulated! We are sending an official letter to your parents to inform them of the good news that, next semester, you will be moved up into our advanced-placement curriculum. ‘Higher Ivy Potential’ is a designation you will carry with you through your school years, Skyler. For the Ivy League is itself a ‘hierarchy’—a ‘hegemony’—not a mere democracy. Not just any ‘Ivy League’ college should be our goal, but only the very highest: Harvard, Princeton, Yale. In the American meritocracy, Fair Hills Day is betting on students like you, Skyler, to go the distance for us.”

  In the headmaster’s large meaty-moist hand was a small box embossed with the school’s coat of arms.

  “Take it, son. You’ve earned it.”r />
  In wonderment Skyler took the little box and opened it and—inside was a gold-gleaming little H.I.P. lapel pin for his Fair Hills Day School blazer!

  THINKING NOW WILL THEY LOVE ME BETTER? A LITTLE?

  * The boy was Albert Kruk, son of Fair Hills’s high-powered criminal defense attorney Morris Kruk, a one-time “playdate” of Skyler’s and amateur pathologist.

  QUICK CUTS

  “WHY, SKYLER! WHAT A NICE SURPRISE.”

  Distractedly, Mummy kissed her little man on the side of his flushed forehead just as, unfortunately for the little man, a much-awaited call from StarBright Modeling Agency came in on Mummy’s cell phone.

  “SKY-BOY! CONGRATS! ’H.P.I.’—IS IT? AND A TERRIFIC LITTLE GOLD DAGGER for your lapel, eh? This is some sort of ‘secret society’ at that school of yours, I guess? I’d thought those were forbidden at Fair Hills Day but what the hell, good for you, son. A little pin in your lapel, years from now, it’s like Daddy’s Ep Pi pin who knows what doors might swing open for you.”

  Distractedly Daddy ran playful-Daddy knuckles over Skyler’s head on his way to pour himself a much-needed drink.

  AND THERE WAS BLISS, MADE TO BLINK NEAR-SIGHTEDLY AT THE TINY GOLD upright-flame lapel pin her brother held out to her. “Is it for me, Skyler?”

  Skyler laughed harshly. “No! For once, it’s something for me.”

  This was unfair. This was cruel. Bliss adored Skyler. Skyler knew better.

  “It’s pretty, Skyler. Is it like—a pin? To wear?”

  Skyler explained: “H.I.P.”—“Higher Ivy Potential”—what the headmaster had said to him and how the headmaster had shaken his hand. How special it was to wear an H.I.P. pin if you were a student at Fair Hills Day for it meant that you were in the highest percentile.

  “‘Per-cen-tile’—what’s that?”

  “The highest of the high.”

  Even as Skyler boasted he felt the hollowness of his boast. For there was his little sister gazing at him with wistful admiring eyes, sucking her finger.

  Poor Bliss! Much of that day she’d been practicing at the rink. Hour upon hour, practicing her routine for the Hershey’s Kisses competition which was only five days away. In the late afternoon, Mummy had taken her to Dr. Bohr-Mandrake for a therapy session and to Dr. Muddick for injections. From the gingerly way in which Bliss was sitting on the edge of her bed, Skyler surmised that her bottom was hurting.

  From what Skyler had been overhearing lately, Bliss’s skating was not going so well as Mummy wished. Skyler supposed it was that damn fantim pain in Bliss’s left ankle again, that leapt from Skyler’s right leg to Bliss’s ankle, and from Bliss’s ankle to Skyler’s leg, like a flu passed back and forth between siblings.

  Skyler said, relenting: “The smart kids at school would all rather be you, Bliss! A champion skater.”

  Faintly Bliss smiled. “They would? Why?”

  “Because then they’d get attention! Their pictures would be in the paper and they’d be on TV.”

  Still Bliss smiled, faintly. (Sometimes Skyler felt a rush of impatience: you’d think Bliss was a retard.)

  In one of those gestures of big-brother magnanimity that reverberates to this very hour, as a sign that bratty/envious Skyler could be nice, sometimes, Skyler pinned the H.I.P. flame to Bliss’s collar. “This will protect you, Bliss! Next Saturday.”

  Bliss thanked Skyler! Blinking back tears.

  “Will you make me a red-ink heart, too? Like yours?”

  (Scattered in secret places on Skyler’s body, including the palm of his left hand, were silly little red-ink “tattoos” of the kind Skyler’s gangsta classmates sported. But no one was supposed to know about Skyler Rampike’s “tattoos” because Skyler belonged to no gang; and Skyler believed that, if the other boys knew, they’d have been angry at him.)*

  “No! Mummy would find out, and Mummy would be mad.”

  For Mummy knew every inch of Bliss’s body. All that had to do with Bliss, Mummy knew.

  “For when I skate, Skyler! A red-ink heart.”

  But Skyler shook his head, noooo.

  As Bliss was between tutors, Skyler had volunteered to help her with the same first-grade material her tutors had tried to teach her without success: ABC’s and primer reading and (very) primer writing, numerals and the most basic arithmetic. But Bliss made very little progress and was easily discouraged. Skyler perceived a fundamental, you might say a metaphysical rejection of the very concept of Objective Reality, on the part of his sweetly stubborn little sister: for Bliss could not comprehend why, for instance, six times six “must be” thirty-six, and not sixty-six; and how is it possible, if you subtract (“take away”) twelve from ten, the answer “must be” minus-two. (And how to explain “minus-two” to a skeptical child? Bliss smiled as if suspecting a joke, a kind of sly-Daddy joke, to make her believe something silly and then laugh at her. And often Bliss asked Skyler, “Would Daddy believe this?” with a doubtful look. Or, “Does Mummy believe this?”) How frustrating to Skyler, whatever he managed to teach her, a few days later she’d have forgotten: “It’s like my head is a glass bowl of slippery things, Skyler, and if you push new things in, the old things will fall out.”

  It was so. Bliss’s head seemed very crowded. When Mummy was not with Bliss and Bliss was allowed to be alone, and quiet, Skyler perceived that his sister was deeply involved in her thoughts and he knew, from little twitches and tics in her limbs, and the stiff little doll-smile that Mummy insisted upon for Bliss’s skating performances, that Bliss was practice-skating in her head; and that such practice-skating could be as exhausting as the real thing.

  As in his own fevered thoughts Skyler often found himself reenacting again, again, and yet again those catastrophic moments in which his young life was irrevocably altered in the Gymnastics Lab under the tutelage of the Russian Vassily Andreevich Volokhomsky as Skyler bravely/brashly/desperately grasped the rings and leapt into the air.

  But no: that was over. Long over.

  Bix Rampike had received an “undisclosed” sum of money from the beleaguered Gold Medal Gym & Health Club and as Daddy would say with sly-Daddy-smirk: Fin-it-o.

  Today’s lesson with Bliss was a very simple one: Bliss was to spell out, in block-letters, words that Skyler pronounced (“horse”—“dog”—“girl”—“house” etc.), that Bliss was supposed to be able to spell; but Skyler decided to experiment by printing out their last name R A M P I K E and asking Bliss to copy it “exactly as you see it”; and so, gripping a crayon tightly in her right hand, painstakingly Bliss reproduced

  “WELL. WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

  As Daddy had spread out his Rampike Dream House plans on the dining room table with a flourish some weeks ago, now breathless Mummy spread out Bliss’s “contact sheets” from the StarBright Agency. These were dozens of color photos of Bliss Rampike in modeling poses, in an assortment of Junior Miss Elite Skates Fashions: practice sweatpants and fuzzy pullovers, turtleneck sweaters and little pleated skirts, leotards with colorful sashes, knitted caps with tassels, tartan kilts, tulle tutus, satin-and-sequin “showgirl” costumes. In the most dramatic of the photographs Bliss was posed on a bluish-glittering ice surface, in her beautiful little white kidskin Junior Miss Elite Skates. Yet, though Bliss was in skates, and on the ice, where ordinarily Bliss Rampike felt most comfortable, here she seemed stiff, almost awkward, and her sweet-shy little doll-smile was unconvincing.

  “Looks good, sweetie! My bestest-best li’l gal.” Daddy had but given the contact sheets a cursory glance, for Daddy had a drink in his hand, and somewhere (Daddy’s “home office”?) to get to, but Daddy took time now to kiss Bliss lightly on the top of her head.

  “Bix, wait! These pictures are good, don’t you think? Bliss is very—winning, isn’t she?”

  Brightly Mummy spoke but keen-eyed Skyler could see how, like Bliss whom so often Mummy scolded, Mummy was digging nervously at her thumbnail.

  “Sure! Bliss always is. What’s the problem, Betsey
?”

  Daddy spoke in the most affable/patient of domestic-Daddy tones. With a wink to Sky-boy, signaling These women!

  “Well, they are saying, at the Agency, that Bliss is ‘stiff ’ and ‘looks older than her age.’ That she might need modeling lessons before we can expect a contract from Elite Skates.”

  “‘Modeling lessons.’ Models have got to be taught, to stand there and have their pictures taken? Chri-ist!” Daddy laughed to suggest that (1) he was being funny, but (2) he was not being funny.

  Mummy protested, “Bix, don’t be silly! Modeling is a—profession. Not just anyone can ‘model.’”

  “Like not just anyone can be an astrophysizist, or palyontologist or brain surgeon, eh? Or an alpha-mummy like you.” Daddy laughed, pleasantly. A dull flush was rising into Daddy’s big-boned big-boy face.

  “Oh, Bix! Your sarcasm hurts.”

  Now Daddy protested, “Who’s being sarcastic? This is just Daddy asking: what will ‘modeling lessons’ set me back, on top of ‘skate lessons’ etcetera?”

  Mummy’s cheeks reddened. Mummy was standing close behind Bliss, loosely embracing her as Mummy pushed the contact sheets about to be better viewed. “Bix, everything in life is not the damned ‘bottom line.’ There is beauty, and there is—art. For art, people have sacrificed over the centuries! After the Hershey’s Kisses Festival next week, where our daughter is favored to win the junior-miss crown, and the Hudson Valley All-Girl Challenge in two weeks in Newburgh, Bliss should have plenty of time for what’s called a ‘total-immersion’ course taught by StarBright, and the Agency will allow us a discount.”

  Daddy laughed ruefully. “Well! That’s good news. For a moment I was worried, I might have to shell out the full price.”