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

by Joyce Carol Oates

  As Daddy was about to turn away, Mummy tugged at his sleeve.

  Skyler saw Daddy’s jaws tighten. Now Daddy will shake off Mummy’s arm, Skyler thought; but, as if to refute Skyler, and Mummy herself, who may have expected this, Daddy did not.

  “Bix, you do think these photographs are good, don’t you? I mean—beautiful? We worked so hard to make Bliss up, and to pose her…”

  “I said, sure. Daddy’s bestest-best li’l girl always looks gorgeous.”

  “But, Bix—”

  “Yes, Betsey?”

  “They are saying—some of them—at the Agency—that Bliss’s hairline is just a ‘centimeter of a centimeter’ too low.”

  “Like hell! Our daughter’s hairline is just fine.”

  “They’re suggesting electrolysis, to raise it just slightly. The effect would be magical, I think: Bliss’s forehead would be higher, and her eyes larger. Electrolysis is a simple procedure in a doctor’s office with a very mild sedative and virtually no recovery required.”

  Now Bliss, who’d been staring at the showy likenesses of herself spread on top of the table, wriggled inside Mummy’s embrace and touched her forehead at the hairline. “I don’t want ’lectrolysis, Mummy. No.”

  “Sweetie, we’ve gone over this. It doesn’t hurt at all, it just tickles.”

  “I don’t want ’lectrolysis! Please, Mummy.”

  “Honey, we can have it together. My forehead has always been too low, too! It’s too late for me to be a model—or a skater—but I can have my hairline raised anyway. All right, sweetie? We can have the procedure done together, in New York City, and have such fun—”

  Daddy intervened: “No. I don’t think that fucking ‘electrolysis’ is a good idea for our daughter.”

  “Bix! Your language. Please.”

  “Betsey! Your language. Pl-ease.”

  “The Agency wouldn’t recommend electrolysis—or modeling lessons—if they didn’t think that Bliss has genuine potential as a child model, or even a child actress. They have seen her on ice and they are wild about her—I mean, literally. And electrolysis isn’t expensive, and it isn’t dangerous, and—”

  “I said no, Betsey. Can you spell? N-O.”

  “Bix, you are not the dictator of this household. Damn you Bix, you are not the despot.”

  “No, I am not. I am that child’s father, and I pay the fucking bills around here, and I say no.”

  “Bix, you make so much money! Your Christmas bonus, alone—”

  “Okay, I’m a millionaire. Multi-millionaire. And I intend to be a billionaire. So what? I say N-O, and N-O it is.”

  Clumsily Mummy gathered up the contact sheets as if Daddy had befouled them, biting her lip to keep from whimpering. In disgust Daddy stormed out of the room but returned almost immediately to continue the quarrel, as Bliss backed off jamming several fingers into her mouth, and Skyler looked on in

  (OKAY: I CAN’T END THIS SCENE. BELIEVE ME, I HAVE TRIED, AND I HAVE tried, and I am exhausted trying, and I give up. It is rare for an author to concede to the reader that he has given up—probably it is unknown in the annals of literature, or whatever sub-category this is. But Skyler Rampike, nineteen years old going on fucking* ninety-nine, gives up here.)

  * Damn! This is banal kiddie-stuff, and I am stuck with it. The alert reader will perceive some logic in its clumsy placement here, however. As in a formal mystery, both “clues” and “red herrings” must be planted beforehand.

  * Don’t blame me for Bix Rampike’s foul mouth! Every crude fucking word that has ever issued from my mouth can be traced back to Rampike père, you can be sure.

  WIN BIG (I)

  DOORBELL!

  The Rampikes’ housekeeper Lila Laong hurried to the door. How peculiar this incident was, Lila Laong would recall only in retrospect.

  It was mid-morning of January 8, 1997: a bright cold winter morning just three days before Bliss Rampike was to compete with nine other hopeful young-girl skaters for the coveted title Hershey’s Kisses Girls’ Ice-Skating Princess 1997 and less than twenty-four hours since Bix Rampike left the house at 93 Ravens Crest Drive (but only temporarily, it was believed, since Mr. Rampike had packed only a single suitcase and had but one pair of shoes, which he was wearing). Another time the doorbell was rung, impatiently it seemed, and Lila opened the door, to her surprise seeing on the front step a tensely smiling delivery man “not dressed right for a delivery man”—“a youngish man, very pale”—“red-haired, with no hat”—“smiling so hard, his mouth looked stretched”—with a large bouquet of spring flowers (tulips, daffodils, jonquils, richly scented paperwhites and hyacinth) which he presented “for Miss Bliss Rampike” and which Lila took from his slightly tremulous hands, put in one of Mrs. Rampike’s largest vases and placed on a marble-topped table in the foyer, beside it a card neatly hand-printed as if by a scrupulous child:

  DEAREST BLISS I KNOW THAT YOU WILL WIN

  ON SATURDAY AND YOU WILL WIN BIG

  FOR YOU ARE ANGEL ON EARTH MY DARLING

  G.R.’S PRAYYERS ARE WITH YOU FORVER BLISS

  LOVE G.R.

  What was strangest about this incident was that the “youngish man”—“not dressed right for a delivery man”—had not brought the flowers for Bliss Rampike in a delivery van but, cradled in the crook of one arm as he pedaled, on a bicycle.

  WIN BIG (II)

  ANGEL ON EARTH MY DARLING.

  By bicycle he came! And the winter morning so brightly cold, and the distant sky so purely blue, and an arctic taste to the air! A lone romantic figure on a decades-old English racing bike amid, on the thunderous Great Road, dull suburban traffic, yet ingeniously managing (for he was double-jointed, and something of an acrobat, if fatally clumsy in what is called actual life) to cradle the unwieldy bouquet of spring flowers in the crook of an arm; traversing Woodsmoke Drive, and Hawksmoor Lane, and Pheasant Run, now turning onto serpentine Ravens Crest Drive, and pedaling to the very end of this narrow, curving, bumpy road passing only a single vehicle, a FedEx van; maintaining a steady speed on the bicycle, in a fawn-colored faux-suede jacket snugly fitting his slender body, a gaily-striped muffler around his neck, bareheaded despite the cold so that his coppery-red hair, like Percy Shelley’s, is a patch of flame in that drab Dürer winterscape.* What a striking figure he is, if anyone on Ravens Crest Drive is watching (as on a TV monitor in his head always he is observing for he never lets himself out of his sight), asked by an invisible interviewer why he has made his task so difficult, if not treacherous, bringing this bouquet of flowers to his little angel Bliss Rampike via bicycle from his mother’s house at 29 Piper’s Lane in the modest “working-class” section of Fair Hills two miles away, he’d have said with a toss of the flamey-red hair, and a disarming smile, “A bicycle is more personal. I bicycle everywhere I can, even in winter.”

  And is it true, the invisible interviewer inquires, that he has made this perilous journey more than once in the past, more than several times along serpentine Ravens Crest Drive, often at dusk, undetected, bringing with him his small lightweight Japanese-made video camera to record what fleeting glimpses of his little angel might be available through the downstairs windows of the sprawling Colonial house at 93 Ravens Crest Drive, asked so thrilling a question point-blank, what reply except a wordless toss of the flamey-red hair, and the disarming smile?*

  * Shelley, Dürer: impressive, eh? Just the tip of the iceberg of Skyler Rampike’s haphazard but classy prep school education of which, lucky reader, you will be spared 99%.

  *Ugh! So abruptly inside the mind of a sicko where for sure I do not wish to be any more than you do, reader.

  CHOCOLATE KISSES

  “NEXT TIME, WE WILL ALL PRAY HARDER.”

  For in her chic dark-chocolate velvet costume with tight-fitted sleeves and “tinsel” bodice, Bliss didn’t make it. In her short, airy, flirty tulle skirt with a teasing glimmer of white-lace panties peekaboo beneath, Bliss didn’t make it. Despite the small gold cross around her nec
k on a slender gold chain, and tiny gold earrings to match, Bliss didn’t make it. Despite the very blond hair (bleached, just perceptibly brittle) charmingly plaited with tinsel ribbons (to suggest Hershey’s Kisses wrappers) and her small face meticulously made up like the face of an old-fashioned and very expensive ceramic doll, Bliss didn’t make it. Despite her white eyelet stockings, and her white kidskin Junior Miss Elite Skates, and the tense smile frozen on her perfect little rosebud lips, she didn’t make it.

  So many hours!—days, weeks!—of figure-skating practice at the drafty Halcyon rink, with Mummy scrupulously videotaping so that Bliss’s performances might be analyzed by her trainer Anastasia Kovitski and her choreographer Pytor Skakalov; so many hours of skate-dancing to the sultry thumping of Boléro, that kitsch-classic of girls’ competitive ice-skating; so many sessions with Dr. Muddick, and Dr. Vandeman, and Dr. Bohr-Mandrake, and Dr. Rapp, and Kai Kui (acupuncturist/nutritionist, in case the reader has forgotten); so many injections of SuperGrow, Hi-Con Vit-C, CAGHC and HTT et al. in Bliss’s most tender places, and so many milligrams of Nixil, Nilix, Serenex, Excelsia, Zomix et al; so many hours of the hateful “dental bite” and so many hateful sessions at the Fair Hills Beauty Salon (where Bliss’s hair was “lightened” and where Bliss was fitted with ten perfect faux-nails to hide the broken and tattered nails beneath); so many ardent prayers beginning “Heavenly Father” and “Dear Jesus”; and yet—she didn’t make it.

  From the start, Skyler knew.

  Even before Bliss skate-glided out onto the ice, as the crowd erupted in applause, and the spotlight fastened greedily upon her, Skyler knew.

  Though in fact Bliss began her skate-dancing performance with what appeared to be her usual agility and speed, within sixty seconds you could see that something was wrong. Bliss’s long looping glides, both forward and back, usually flawless, became hesitant and erratic, as if Bliss’s left ankle was giving her pain. A turn, a spin, a leaping spin—Bliss’s glossy-pink lips parted with the effort, she was breathless, panting. Her small hands flailed like stricken birds. Her eyes shone with surprise, fear. The audience that had so warmly greeted MISS BLISS RAMPIKE, FAIR HILLS, NEW JERSEY, only a few minutes before became subdued, silent. As the recorded Boléro thumped to its climax like a convulsing boa constrictor Bliss suddenly tripped, and fell; fell hard; yet managed to scramble back up onto her skate-blades, clumsily, with a look of shock and chagrin. How pitilessly the spotlight held her, to expose her to strangers’ staring eyes! How hushed the arena had become, as at an execution! At last the ordeal was over, the humiliated girl-skater limped off the ice amid a scattering of hollow-sounding applause, and there came Betsey Rampike to seize her daughter and bear her out of the spotlight, hugging the little girl hard as if to shield her with her own body and saying, with a bright, brave, undaunted smile, loud enough to be picked up by the ABC-TV camera crew: “Next time, we will all pray harder.”

  BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA

  THIS BLUNT FACT: EIGHTEEN DAYS AFTER BLISS RAMPIKE PLACED SEVENTH at the Hershey, Pennsylvania, competition, she was dead.

  RED-INK HEART

  MAKE ME A LITTLE RED HEART SKYLER? WITH CHILDISH PERSISTENCE begging Make me a little red heart like yours Skyler? please and so Skyler did: a small red-ink heart-“tattoo” on the palm of Bliss’s left hand. For it was the night before the night before Bliss’s seventh birthday when Daddy would be returning for Daddy had promised and there was the wish that Bliss’s birthday would be a happy one since the terrible thing that had happened at the skating competition in Pennsylvania of which no one in the Rampike household would speak, not Mummy, not Skyler, not Lila and not Bliss, for it was so shameful, you could not think of it without a sick-sinking-sensation in the pit of the stomach, Mummy herself would not speak of it except to say in her bright-Mummy voice Next time we will all pray harder! And we will have greater faith.

  Since what-had-happened in Pennsylvania, Bliss had begun to behave like a much younger child. A fretful child, a willful child, a sulky child, an anxious child, a thumb-sucking bed-wetting child who exasperated her older brother by hanging onto him, following him around the house and even into his room though he tried to shut the door against her—“Bliss, go away.” Yet Skyler felt sorry for her too: as Skyler felt sorry for the hapless squirrels run over so frequently on Ravens Crest Drive. (If Daddy ran over a squirrel, Daddy winced and shrugged: “Sorry, pal. Nothing personal.” Mummy cried: “Oh no not again, God damn.”) So Skyler “tattooed” a little red heart on his sister’s soft moist palm to match the little red heart on his own left palm and Bliss shivered and giggled (for “tattooing” in such a soft place tickled) and hugged him tight around the neck: “Thank you, Skyler!” Her kisses were breathy and sticky, Skyler felt as if his own breath was being sucked from him. Obsessively Bliss peered at the little red heart on her palm opening and closing her fist and the expression on her pale, thin face was one of such intense concentration you would think That child is in pain.

  You would think There is nothing that can be done for that child.

  Guiltily Skyler wondered: if he had inked a little red heart on his sister’s palm, or somewhere else secret on her body, as she’d begged him, would Bliss have been protected from harm at the skating competition? Would the shameful thing-that-had-happened, broadcast on network TV, not have happened? But cowardly Skyler hadn’t dared for Mummy would have seen and Mummy would have been furious with him and Mummy would have scrubbed off the red-ink heart immediately, in any case. When Mummy was angry at her little man Mummy had a way of speaking sharply to him as if he’d hurt her—“Skyler, there must be a devil in you! A very big devil for such a small boy”—that made Skyler feel terrible.*

  Since what-had-happened-in-Pennsylvania Mummy was often away when Skyler returned home from school (where? Lila had only Mummy’s cell phone number, to call in an emergency) and when Mummy was home, Mummy was likely to be in her private room on the second floor speaking urgently on the telephone in no mood to be disturbed by her children: “Go away! Keep each other company! That’s why there are two of you.”

  Mummy was just joking—of course! Mummy loved her little man and Mummy loved her little daughter more than ever.

  For there was a quarrel with Daddy: Daddy wanted Bliss “never to skate again—not ever” but Mummy was determined that Bliss’s career would continue (immediately after the defeat in Pennsylvania, Mummy had fired both Anastasia Kovitski and Pytor Skakalov both of whom were suing her for breach of contract as Mummy herself was suing the StarBright Agency for breach of contract following their abrupt lack of interest in representing Bliss Rampike’s modeling career) and Skyler overheard them quarreling in the master bedroom at the far end of the second-floor corridor You will not take her from me, damn you! She is my daughter, she is mine, and Skyler is mine, please don’t destroy us! Mummy’s uplifted voice like the shriek of a stricken bird and Daddy’s voice was lower, muffled so that Skyler could distinguish only isolated words Hey look I love you, I love all of you, but this is non-negotiable, got it?

  Non-negotiable. Skyler liked the heft of these syllables.

  At this time Daddy was sometimes “away” and sometimes “home” and you could not always tell the distinction. Impossible to track Bix Rampike during these crucial weeks of January 1997 except to note that when Skyler’s father did return home after work, and had dinner with his family, often he and Mummy seemed to be on very good terms with each other as if nothing was wrong between them but only imagined by their children; at other times, there was such strain, Bliss was too agitated to eat and Skyler had to excuse himself to scuttle away from the table like a wounded crustacean and hide away upstairs in his room overseeing battles to the death between platoons of Robo-Army Warriors.

  “What does it mean, Skyler?—Daddy is ‘dad’?”

  Skyler shrugged. “He just is.”

  “And Mummy?”

  “Mummy—what?”

  Bliss peered searchingly at Skyler as if trying to decode hi
s meaning. Now Bliss wasn’t practice-skating for hours every day, and was still between tutors, her days at home were very lonely. Grandmother Rampike had sent her a children’s picture book called The Floating Dirigible which was a book for a much younger child but Bliss studied it with fascination, ran her fingers beneath the spare text and shaped her lips to the words. By now, Bliss must have memorized the simple story of a little girl in old-fashioned white attire who (unwisely, out of curiosity) steps into the basket of a huge black dirigible and is carried off into the sky as her overbearing aristocratic parents run shouting after her, yet still she insisted that Skyler read it to her, repeatedly.

  As she’d insisted that Skyler draw the little red-ink heart on the palm of her hand, as if she couldn’t have drawn it there herself.

  Bliss asked, sucking at a finger, “Skyler? Why are we with them?”

  “With who?—Mummy and Daddy?”

  “Why are we theirs?”

  Skyler shrugged again, stumped. If Mummy had been here, Mummy would have slapped Bliss’s finger out of her mouth. Not hard, but forcibly. Skyler was tempted.

  “Because Mummy and Daddy are our parents. That’s why we’re theirs. Don’t be stupid.”

  “But, Skyler—why? Why are they our parents?”

  “Because they just are. Everybody knows this.”

  “Yes, but—why? Skyler? Why are they?”

  “Because—they had us. That’s why.”

  “Did they buy us?”

  Skyler was beginning to feel disoriented, as if the floor was tilting beneath his feet. Bliss was peering at him with such yearning, her watery cobalt-blue eyes fixed so intensely on his face, he wanted badly to run from the room.