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

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Son. Here’s a tissue. Get control of yourself, for Christ’s sake.”

  L’APRÈS-FUNERAL, AS THE RECEPTION FOLLOWING THE FUNERAL WAS CALLED in the invitations, was held in the prestigious old Sleepy Hollow Country Club on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. Skyler was exhausted and drained of emotion by this time but his father insisted that Skyler accompany him: “Nobles oblige means if you are an aristocrat, you don’t shirk your duty to your subjects.” And so Skyler in dark glasses that gave him the look of a peevish beetle and in his now rumpled funeral-suit allowed himself to be led into the midst of a clamorous gathering of strangers eager to commiserate with him: “Oh is it—Skeel-er? Betsey spoke so warmly of you in her memoirs, and on TV! Please accept my heartfelt condolences!”—“Son, your mother was a rare woman. ‘I believe in happiness,’ Betsey told our book club, ‘for my special angel is in heaven already, beckoning me to her’”—“Scooter, is it?—poor boy, you’ve been crying, let Aunt Madeleine give you a hug.” Very soon, Skyler saw that canny Bix Rampike seemed to have slipped away, drink in hand.

  Most of the mourners were women, middle-aged and older, with here and there a young woman, often overweight, or frankly obese; there was a scattering of middle-aged and older men most of whom, unless Skyler in his mildly deranged state was imagining this, resembled dapper little Nathan Kissler. It was surprising how these people ate and drank with such appetite, given the solemnity of the occasion. Skyler saw a bevy of Christian teens stuffing themselves with food from the twenty-foot buffet table in the dining room: lobster croquettes, Tex-Mex chicken wings, sweet potato-marshmallow puffs, banana fritters and strawberry shortcake (recipes available in Betsey Rampike’s Honeymoon Homemaker’s Handbook, available from Heaven Scent Products, $22.95). Skyler saw no other person remotely resembling Skyler himself. No one remotely like Heidi Harkness. On wall-TV screens videos were playing photo-montages of the life of Betsey Rampike as in an art museum installation in which viewers shuffle gravely from screen to screen. Skyler stared up at fleeting images of his Fair Hills past: Rampike-family photos taken in front of the twelve-foot Christmas tree in which in miniature, so very young, Skyler himself appeared sweetly innocent, smiling. (Was it possible? Skyler could scarcely believe that that small child was him; or, that he had once been that small child.) In one of the photos, pretty young Mummy was hugging Skyler, who clutched a stuffed animal; in another, handsome young Daddy appeared to be guiding Skyler on a tricycle. Vaguely Skyler remembered the tricycle, but he had no memory of that child…And there was the baby in Mummy’s arms: Edna Louise.

  Hymnal music wafted in from overhead speakers. Amid the food odors was a powerful scent of calla lilies. Skyler drifted from room to room, staring at the TV screens. From a brochure handed to him by a Heaven Scent staffer Skyler learned that Betsey Rampike’s “dream funeral” had been created by Betsey herself; in spring 2007, Heaven Scent Products was launching its new Heaven Scent Life Services Caterers whose motto was It is never too early to plan for life’s special occasions. Let us help you celebrate that special wedding, anniversary, christening, bat or bar mitzvah, graduation, funeral.

  Skyler was staring at a wall-TV screen on which, graceful and seemingly weightless as a butterfly, his very young sister Bliss was skating on the ice. He had seen this footage many times and yet, he dared not look away. Sweet little four-year-old Bliss in her white satin skater’s costume, fairy wings on her shoulders…

  “Why—is it ‘Sky-ler’? Betsey’s son? Oh please: can we take just a few shots of you and Bliss?—if you stand here by the screen—”

  Middle-aged couple, doughy-animated faces, thrilled eyes, some sort of camera device in the man’s uplifted hands, and Skyler heard himself say in a reptile voice: “If you don’t turn that fucking thing off, I will strangle you both.”

  Sharp cries as of frightened waterfowl. Some commotion as of a firecracker carelessly tossed. There came Bix Rampike grim-faced to rescue the psychotic son gripping him by the upper arm and leading him from the room: “Son. This way. Out the back. And don’t fucking limp.”

  IN THIS WAY, DER ENTFREMDUNGSGEFUHL DEEPENED.

  “OF COURSE, SON: IT CAN’T BRING HER BACK.”

  The flatness in Bix Rampike’s voice, the haggard look that, fleetingly, came into the big-boned guileless face, Skyler had no doubt now that it was Bliss to whom his father was referring.

  Skyler nodded, grimly. Skyler was pressing an ice-cold glass of club soda against his heated and slightly swollen face.

  It was early evening. The men were sitting across from each other in the musty-romantic Old Dutch Tavern of the Washington Irving Inn where Skyler was spending the night. Bix was on his second, possibly his third Scotch whiskey. And now thirstily Bix swallowed a large mouthful of this precious amber liquid. Almost, Skyler could taste the whiskey going down, lovely fiery comforting sensation. Almost, Skyler wished he’d been a drinker instead of a drug-user. Alcohol was legal, you had only to be old enough to buy it. Now that he’d pledged sobriety to Pastor Bob, it was too late.

  Upstairs in his room Skyler had slept a stuporous sleep for several hours. Bix had brought him back to the hotel, walked him to his room, tenderly laid him on the bed and partly undressed him and left him to “sleep it off”—as if Skyler, and not Bix Rampike, had been drinking at the reception. Now Skyler’s head throbbed with an obscure and ominous pain. He’d come downstairs to the Old Dutch Tavern to meet his father who had “something crucial” to tell him and (it seemed) to give him. Skyler was to have dinner that evening with Bix and Bix’s “new” wife Danielle whom Skyler had never met and had little wish to meet but who was, as Bix said pointedly, “very eager” to meet Skyler who was “after all, her stepson.”

  Stepson! Skyler shuddered. So strangely thirsty, he’d finished his second bottle of club soda.

  Brooding Bix leaned forward on his elbows, on the wood-plank table. Skyler saw how his father’s eyebrows had grown thick and tufted as an animal’s vestigial markings. There was a gleam of Daddy-affection in the soulful hazel-brown eyes, unless the gleam was Daddy-malice. “Son, you don’t drink, eh? Not ever?”

  Skyler shrugged. “Told you, no.”

  “Sure, you’ve ‘told me’—but frankly, son, I find it a little hard to believe. The demographics on this subject are epidemic: your age-group drinks. And a kid with your background—‘drug user’—‘recovering addict’—hell, Skyler, let’s not mince words, this has been one existential hell of a day.” Seeing the alarmed look in Skyler’s face, Bix relented, bared his teeth in a reassuring-Daddy smile, placed a heavy warm hand on Skyler’s chill hand. “Just want you to know that you can talk to me, son. Your father.”

  Skyler muttered Okay Dad.

  So long Skyler had determined to call his father Father and not Daddy nor even Dad and yet: in the man’s presence, Dad came to Skyler’s lips, irresistibly.

  Bix was saying in the slow, dragging way that seemed new to Skyler that he, too, had a problem with “substance abuse”—in his case, alcohol—and he, too, had been “recovering” for the past ten years. “Son, when a man loves what he has lost, best—” Bix paused, and began again: “When a man loses what he has loved best—his soul is rent forever.”

  Skyler was shocked by these words. Never since Bliss’s death had his father spoken to him like this. Skyler could scarcely recall his father speaking to him in any intimate way at all.

  “Do you think of her often, son? Your beautiful little sister?”

  Quickly Skyler shook his head to signal yes. Or was it no. Squirmed like a giant worm impaled upon a hook shaking his (bowed, guilt-stricken) head to signal no, he did not want to take up this subject, now.

  Bix had moved the Italian-leather briefcase aside as if he’d forgotten it. Speaking so earnestly, he’d seemed to be pleading with Skyler. Out of a pocket he withdrew a wallet stuffed with credit cards and out of the wallet he withdrew several small photographs which he spread out on the tabletop with tenderness and pride for
Skyler to peer at: were these photographs of Bliss?—or photographs of the “new” family? Skyler’s eyes filled with stinging moisture, only vaguely he could make out a curvaceous female figure, blond hair and clearly not Betsey, and there was a small child, possibly a little girl, blond also, smiling up at the camera…Skyler had no idea what his father was saying. From across the dim-lighted Old Dutch Tavern in the area of, possibly, the enormous fieldstone fireplace in which gas-fueled yule logs were merrily blazing, Skyler heard his father’s words, a rush of urgent-Daddy speech, pleading-Daddy, righteous-Daddy, and through a scrim of headache pain he saw his father’s jaws moving, a sudden pike-smile.

  “…hope you are happy for me, son. Could be, this is your ‘new’ family, too.”

  “…OLD ARE YOU, SON?”

  “In a few weeks, twenty.”

  Skyler spoke in the flat dread voice of one foreseeing a crash and unable to forestall it. For he knew that his father would say next What have you done with your life?

  Instead, Bix signaled the waitress for another drink. Saying, with a massive-bison sigh, “You still limp, I see. How is your ‘recovery’ coming?”

  Skyler laughed uneasily. “You mean my leg, or—?”

  “Son, your recovery. ‘Recovering’ your life.”

  Bix hunched forward, like a sudden landslide. He was wearing a very expensive, elegantly tailored suit so dark a gray as to appear black in the dimly lighted Old Dutch Tavern; he’d removed the coat, to lay across the rear of the booth; he’d removed his necktie, and opened the collar of his long-sleeved white dress shirt. It occurred to Skyler that his father might have been drinking for much of the time Skyler had been sleeping upstairs.

  Skyler told his father that his “recovery” was coming along very well. He rarely used a cane now. He could “run”—if not far, and not very fast. He did “experience pain”—but nothing he couldn’t live with. He was off painkillers and he was off all “meds” and he’d been “sober” for forty-nine days.

  “Son, that sounds good. That sounds damned promising. ‘Sober’ is how you look. I hear there’s a high degree of ‘redivicism’ after drug rehabilitation, though.”

  “‘Recidivism,’ Dad.”

  “If I’d taught you to drink. There might not be this weakness in you. Drugs!” Suddenly Bix was snorting in bemused-Daddy contempt. Skyler recalled how scornful his father had been of Betsey’s myriad tranquilizers and mood-elevators.

  “I am sober, I said. And I intend to stay that way.” Skyler spoke with more aggression than he felt. Through the headache scrim he saw his father shifting his shoulders ominously.

  Now came their waitress to bring Bix another drink. And another club-soda-with-lime, Skyler didn’t recall ordering. In keeping with the period-decor of the Old Dutch Tavern, their waitress wore what was intended to be a sexy-tavern-wench costume, ankle-length burlap skirt, waist cinched tight in a black leather strap, white lace-up corset baring the tops of her fatty breasts. She was an attractive snub-nosed woman in her late thirties with shingled glamour-hair and some prior knowledge of Skyler’s father for she called him “Mr. Rampike” with a flirty-reverent flutter of her eyelashes. Skyler felt a pang of sexual resentment, that the waitress took so little notice of him, and only of his father. Between the two adults passed rapid-fire dialogue and gazes of the kind two would-be amorous dogs might exchange while being tugged in opposite directions by their owners.

  As soon as the tavern-wench waitress left, Bix’s smile faded. Reading his gangling son’s mutinous thoughts he said, “This girl you were ‘involved with’ at Basking Ridge—Leander Harkness’s daughter? What came of that?”

  Quickly Skyler said he did not want to talk about Heidi Harkness. Not ever.

  “Are you in contact with her, son?”

  “No.”

  “When the girl left school she wasn’t pregnant, was she?”

  Skyler flushed. “Jesus, Dad. You sure are blunt, aren’t you.”

  “Well, was she?”

  “No.”

  “And would you know that, with certainty?”

  Skyler bit his lower lip, mortified. He could not believe this conversation and yet, he seemed not able to push himself out of the booth, and escape. Something like a fistful of blood had rushed into his face. “Yes I would know. She wasn’t. And I don’t w-want to t-t-talk about it, Dad. I told you.”

  In fact, was Skyler certain? Had Skyler ever been certain of anything? Very likely there were ways for a girl to become pregnant of which naive/innocent/clumsy/ill-coordinated Skyler Rampike had had little knowledge at sixteen, as he’d had little experience.

  For some minutes, Bix spoke of Leander Harkness. Marveling at the pitcher with the “demon arm” and “steely-cold nerves” and how “unjust” it was that Leander Harkness would never be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and in this way the great American tradition of the Hall of Fame itself was “compromised” for Harkness’s pitching skills were nonparallel and “after all” Harkness had never been found guilty of the crimes charged against him in any court of law.

  Through this impassioned speech, Skyler cowered before his father looming above him like a death-dirigible. Bix Rampike had long been a Yankees fan and a particular admirer of Leander Harkness and so Skyler was waiting for his father to ask him if he had ever actually met Leander Harkness and (maybe) shaken his hand; and trembling Skyler prepared to say in the cool wry tone of a young film actor delivering a dynamite line to an elder Hell no Dad, one murderer in one lifetime is enough for me.

  Instead, following a mysterious stream of associations, Bix took up the subject of his own life, about which Skyler had not asked him a single question; not only Bix’s new family but Bix’s “terrific” new job as CEO of New Genesis BioTech, Inc.

  Skyler thought He’s hurt! He wants me to care for him.

  Grateful to be spared the ominous subject of Leander Harkness, Skyler obliged his father by asking about New Genesis BioTech, Inc.

  For some minutes then, with something of his old animation, Bix spoke of the “exciting”—“revolutionary”—“state-of-the-art” research being done by a team of international scientists at the company’s laboratory in New Harmony, New Jersey. With boyish pride Bix told Skyler that, of the numerous, very profitable subsidiaries of Univers, Inc., New Genesis was the “most heavily capitalized” and that he had been invited to head the new company by the CEO of Univers, Inc. himself—“That midnight call from Hank took me totally by surprise, Skyler. Has to be the piece-resistance of my professional life.”

  “Dad, that’s swell!”

  (Was “swell” still idiomatic? In his actual childhood Skyler had never uttered this childish expletive but he had the idea that, in the comic strips and cartoons enjoyed by Bix Rampike, “swell” remained an American favorite.)

  “…‘miracles of genetic engineering’…‘donor specimens handpicked to grow your new kidney!’…‘organ transplants soon to be common as dentures, toupees’…‘organ regeneration à la mode of self-replicating amphibian-lizard genus Caudata (your common lizard)’…‘VSP’: ‘Volunteer Specimens Project’…”

  Something about this last item roused Skyler to bratty-adolescent curiosity. “‘Volunteer Specimens Project’? What the hell is that, Dad?”

  In a grumpy-Daddy lowered voice, as if the Old Dutch Tavern with its scattered and inconsequential patrons might be avid to overhear the secrets of corporate America, Bix explained to Skyler that the “VS Project” was his particular brainchild. In “restricted environments” in the United States and abroad, individuals were “invited to volunteer” in New Genesis experiments, and were “pretty well-paid” for doing so.

  Frowning Skyler asked what sorts of “restrictive environments” were these. He’d begun to notice that his father’s words were just slightly slurred and a tic-like smile played about the Rampike pike-mouth.

  “Prisons, treatment centers and psychiatric facilities, state hospitals and VA hospitals and some church-related hos
pices exempt from over-zealous federal and state regulations. As I said, ‘VSP’ has been my personal brainchild, son, and in our first twelve months of implementation, in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and Florida alone—”

  “Dad, wait. What do you mean, these are ‘volunteer specimens’? Do they have any choice about ‘volunteering’? Do you tell them that the experiments might be dangerous?”

  A dramatic pause. At the bar, a tipsy female patron was laughing like a runaway zipper. Bix hunched his fullback shoulders and said, with the imperial air of a chief-executive-officer reciting a script to a vast audience: “New Genesis volunteers are duly informed of any risks involved in our projects. They are given waivers to sign, and these waivers have been thoroughly vetted by our legal team in strict accordance with federal and state regulations, when applicable. Under the current administration, there has been much-needed ‘reform’ of over-zealous regulatory legislation designed to hamper and place unnecessary financial burdens on business. Of course, foreign countries are another matter. And there are frequently beneficial side effects to our experiments, of course—the ‘regeneration’ of destroyed brain cells, for instance, or a diseased liver—and many more instances—in addition to the generous payments New Genesis volunteers receive for their participation in scientific progress.”

  “Jesus, Dad! Are these helpless, incarcerated people? Prisoners, psychiatric patients? Retarded people? ‘Specimens’ in hospices, on their deathbeds?” Skyler’s hoarse voice rose in alarm. He had not been so excited in a very long time and had no idea what was happening except he saw that he’d spilled club soda onto the wood-plank table and had gotten his shirt sleeves wet.

  Bix said furiously, “Keep your voice down, son. You are disgrace enough already to the Rampike name.”