My Sister, My Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “I did? Jesus.”

  Daddy seems genuinely surprised. Guilty-Daddy has obviously forgotten this extravagant promise entirely, made to his son, if made at all, in a casual aside, possibly when Daddy had been drinking, and not to be taken seriously; but Skyler seizes upon it, indignant as a criminal defense attorney whose case isn’t going well. (Is it possible, Daddy has forgotten the notorious Palm Beach episode, acid-etched in stone in the memories of Skyler, Mummy, and Bliss?) Daddy stammers in confusion, “—maybe not ‘deep-sea fishing,’ Skyler—‘marlin fishing’—but, this summer, if you and Bliss come visit me at the Jersey shore—or, no—” Daddy pauses, gnawing at his lower lip. What is Daddy saying? What the hell has Daddy acknowledged? Skyler knows beforehand that Mummy will want to interrogate her little-man spy about Daddy’s offhand remarks, the more offhand, the more Mummy will wish to know, so Skyler is resolved not to listen too closely, but to fix flush-faced Daddy with a look of childish resentment shading into childish credulousness as Daddy plunges on, “—or, at my mother’s place on Nantucket, we could go fishing for—what?—bluefish, bass? How’s that sound, Skyler? And Bliss, you’re welcome on board too, sweetie. You can bait our hooks.”

  With his mauled-at napkin, Daddy wipes at his mouth. Jesus, Daddy-bullshit is hard work, almost you forget.

  “Dessert, kiddies? Or”—a frank glance at Daddy’s Rolex—“maybe not.”

  This historic luncheon at the Sylvan Glen—the first time, as it will be the last time, Daddy has taken his children here—is nearly over. However arduous it has been for Bix Rampike, to have a sense of what it felt like to Skyler, and to Bliss, we must multiply the time-expended by two or three, or four, for young children experience time far more slowly than adults. (Let me confess: I can remember only in wayward patches what Skyler endured, and am at a loss trying to imagine how the ordeal felt to Bliss. In this document of loss and yearning, even Skyler’s past is elusive to me as a moth battering itself against a high window: all is guesswork.) Despite his unease, signaled by a film of perspiration at his hairline, and a hint that he’s sweated through his oxford-cloth shirt inside the blazer, Daddy has managed to devour nearly every crumb of his Sylvan Glen Ground-Round Special, gourmet French fries and avocado-cranberry garnish, and to drain two, or has it been three? fist-sized glasses of Johnnie Walker.

  As Daddy frowns over the check, Skyler summons up his cocky-little-boy courage to ask something he has rehearsed asking Daddy for weeks: “Daddy? What is ‘adult’ry’?” and Daddy glares up at him, blinking, an ox pecked by a sparrow, “‘Adult’ry’—did you say ‘adultr’y,’ Skyler? Jesus!” Skyler repeats his dumb-kid question and Daddy regains his Daddy-composure managing to smile: “‘Adult’ry’ is for adults, Sky-boy. One day you’ll know.”

  On this cryptic note the Rampikes might leave the Sylvan Glen dining room except out of nowhere a woman appears suddenly at their table, prompting Daddy to leap gallantly to his feet and exchange animated greetings that include, from the woman, a flirty-friendly kiss grazing Daddy’s strong-boned jaw; effusive greetings to the adorable little Rampike children, wasting no time on the geeky boy but gushing over Bliss: “Oh! You are such a darling, Bliss! Look at this plaited hair! And your eyes!—so blue. We are all so terribly sorry that you injured your neck, we’ve read about it in New Jersey Monthly and we hope hope hope you will be completely recovered in time for the Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess competition, that is the biggie, isn’t it! I’ve taken my daughter Tracey to see you skate, Bliss, and win, at the StarSkate competition, and we’ve seen film clips of you on NJN. Tracey is ten and has her heart set on ‘competitive ice-skating’—just like you—you and Bei-Bei Chang are her idols—or do I mean, she is your idol?—Tracey will be so thrilled to learn that I’ve met you. If it isn’t too much trouble, Bliss, and if your Daddy doesn’t mind, if you could sign this for Tracey, we would all be so grateful.” With a grimly sweet little smile, as Mummy has trained her, Bliss unhesitatingly acquiesces, takes the slightly rumpled SYLVAN GLEN cocktail napkin from Mrs. Hennepin, and a sleek silver Univers Bio-Tech ballpoint pen from Daddy, and, clumsily, as the foam-rubber collar chafes against her tender neck, manages to print—

  as Skyler gazing on bemused feels a sudden rush of nausea, the sodden mass of undigested turkey club sandwich, greasy French fries, MoonGlo Kiddie Cocktail he’d sucked in its entirety through his straw lurching in his stomach This will never end, we are trapped here forever, I can’t protect her and I can’t protect myself* as he rises from his chair with a stammered apology to Daddy he has to use the restroom, fast.

  WISH I COULD END THIS EXCRUCIATINGLY PROTRACTED SCENE WITH THE RAMPIKES—big-shouldered Daddy, limping Skyler, limping-Bliss-with-foam-rubber-collar—gaily clambering into Daddy’s Road Warrior in the Sylvan Glen parking lot, a chuff of whitish exhaust, enormous black-rubber tires bearing the vehicle and occupants off into the melee of Saturday afternoon traffic on the Great Road, there to Route 15, there to I-80 eastbound to the Garden State Parkway and soon, as in a dreamy film, there appears the faery-alabaster-white of the VastValley Mall, and laff-riot Benji Goes Ballistic!—all three Rampikes, big-père und little-kinder, devouring a tub of “hot buttery” popcorn and laughing their heads off like normal Americans who find themselves in “multiplex cinemas”—but, unluckily for Skyler and Bliss, the scene doesn’t move in this direction at all. Wouldn’t you think that there was a reliable script here: (Stricken-With-Guilt) Daddy Takes Kids to Lunch, Asshole Movie?—but in fact even as Skyler shakily emerged from the first-floor men’s room at the Sylvan Glen Golf Club surreptitiously wiping something chalky-acrid from his mouth, which mouth he’d rinsed at a sink in the men’s room, or tried to rinse, not very thoroughly because there wasn’t time, and so smelling/tasting of vomit and hoping (desperately) that no one would notice, as glowering Daddy tossed Skyler’s jacket at him—“What the hell took you so long in there, kid? Vita-vita, pronto-fast,” snapping big Daddy-fingers at the humiliated little boy; to add to the air of confusion, so frequent in scenes in which Bix Rampike looms large in the foreground, at this dramatic moment a woman suddenly appeared in the club foyer, a familiar-looking dark-haired woman in a sumptuous fox-fur “fun coat” with suede belt, suede trim, and stylish high-heeled Italian boots very like Mummy’s boots except more slender and, on this woman, more stylish; a woman of about Mummy’s age but with a more sculpted, thinner face, charmingly breathless as if she’d been running to get to them: “Oh Bix! Did you think I’d be late?—am I late?”

  Gallant-chiding Daddy, sexy-swaggering Bix Rampike said, teasing: “Glenna, you’re exactly on time. I asked you to arrive by one-thirty P.M. assuming you’d get here by two P.M. and so you have.”

  Breathless Glenna in the sumptuous fun-fox-fur laughed in delight like one who has been exposed, a fleeting-naked glimpse, both guilty and guiltless: “Bix, you didn’t! You did. Well, Bix. Then I don’t need to apologize for being late, do I?”

  As Skyler and Bliss looked on utterly confused by the adults’ banter, in the way that one who’d never seen a swiftly-played Ping-Pong game might gape at the little white balls flying from right to left, left to right, the woman greeted Daddy in a variant of the Fair Hills ritual: brushing her lipsticked lips lightly against his cheek, quick little just-friends hug, quick squeezing of hands. How clear it was to both Rampike children, Daddy welcomed this ritual greeting more than he’d welcomed the greeting from (dowdy, mid-fortyish) Mrs. Hennepin a few minutes before. “Kids, this is Mrs. O’Stryker, Mummy’s friend. You know Mrs. O’Stryker, don’t you?” Skyler nodded vaguely, for he was sure he’d seen the showily dressed dark-haired woman before; Bliss stared rudely, sucking at a finger. For in essence, Fair Hills women tended to resemble one another to an uncanny degree. Amid the bustle of putting on coats, stepping out into the mineral chill of late-winter New Jersey, rapid-fire exchange of ritual adult queries—“How is Betsey?”—“How is Howie?”—“How are you?”—“How are you?”—it seemed to be emerging, to
the children’s astonishment, that they were being led not to Daddy’s Road Warrior but to Mrs. O’Stryker’s Suburban Charger: they were going to be driven back to the house on Ravens Crest Drive by the glamorous Mrs. O’Stryker and not taken to the VastValley Cinemax by Daddy to see Benji Goes Ballistic! after all. Skyler protested, “Daddy, you promised! You promised you’d take us to see Benji Goes Ballistic!” and Daddy said, as if genuinely surprised, “Benji who? What’s this?” and Skyler persisted, fierce as a Pomeranian snapping at a Saint Bernard’s feet, “You promised, Daddy! You promised!” and Daddy said, edging toward the Road Warrior, keys in hand, “I’m sure I didn’t, Skyler. The plan is that you and your sister are going to be driven home by Mrs. O’Stryker, as a favor to us, so that I can get in my Road Warrior here that’s packed with my things and I can drive straight from here to the Parkway and to Paramus in just enough time before the company limo arrives to pick me up for my six-forty-eight P.M. flight from Newark to New Delhi.” As Bliss numbly allowed herself to be led by one small mittened hand in the direction of Mrs. O’Stryker’s vehicle, Skyler contined to protest, daring to wave a little fist at Daddy: “Daddy! Daddy! You promised! You can’t break your promise—again!”

  Precisely what happened next is not clear: in one version, red-faced Daddy swerved back in Skyler’s direction, with an immense Daddy-fist thumped the brash kid on the side of his head WHONK! sending vibrations deep into the kid’s cerebellum that are felt even to this very moment; in another version, the more probable version, red-faced Daddy merely brandished the Daddy-fist as if to thump the brash kid on the side of his head, grimly muttering: “We will discuss this matter at another time, Skyler. Man-to-man.” In the meantime, Bliss had yanked her hand away from Mrs. O’Stryker’s to run limping to Daddy crying, in a hoarse, piteous voice, “Daddy! Don’t go away and leave us! Something bad will happen to us!” and Daddy, exasperated, but trying, for Bliss’s sake, to speak tenderly, said, “Honey, I’m not going away and leaving you, I am only going away—temporarily. You will stay with Mummy, you love Mummy and soon you will be skating again and winning all sorts of prizes and on TV and in People and when things are settled a little more sanely, and our interim of ‘atoms in the void’ has been resolved, you can come visit Daddy in Paramus, or—wherever. Bye now, kids! Love ya.”

  As Daddy clambered into the Road Warrior, gunned the motor and prepared to make a quick Daddy-getaway, in a sudden frenzy Bliss began clawing at the foam-rubber collar around her neck, kicking at Mrs. O’Stryker who tried to restrain her. “I want to come with you, Daddy! I don’t want to be with Mummy all the time, I’m afraid of Mummy!” In the Road Warrior, Daddy was edging toward the exit, as Bliss teetered in front of the vehicle, but Daddy was able to steer the Road Warrior around Bliss, calling out his window: “Kids! Your Daddy loves you more than ever!—that’s the bottom line.”*

  * By the end of this piteous chapter you will know what this title means. And if you don’t, sorry.

  * “Atoms in the void”: Roman philosopher/poet Lucretius (98–55 B.C.). Bullshit-Bix couldn’t have spent much quality time perusing Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things —could he?—but must’ve picked up this catchphrase from one of the popular-science books scattered about the base of the brute taffy-colored leather chair in which, to Skyler’s appalled fascination, you could discern the smooth-worn shallows of the man’s buttocks if you so wished.

  * Déjà vu all over again, right? The alert reader shares with Skyler the sickening sensation that he’s been here before? Well, yes. We have. For in the life of even a minor celebrity like my sister, events repeat themselves endlessly; even people—especially people—are endlessly recycled, say the same things, request the same things, thank you in exactly the same way. How much more nauseating, in the life of a major celebrity! (No one tells the truth about Major Celebrities: their lives are Major Bores.) This could not be what the German philosopher/precursor of Freud, existentialism, deconstruction Friedrich Nietzsche meant by Eternal Return, could it?—The Same God-Damned Things Happening Over Again.

  * Jesus! Can you believe this utter bastard? (The melancholy answer is, yes . Somehow, the Rampike children did.)

  III

  Little Miss Ice Princess

  You do not belong here.

  THREAT!

  “HEY RAMPIKE.”

  In grade school, is anything more terrifying than being addressed by your surname, in a jeering-hostile boy-voice?

  In the splattered mirror above a sink in the second-floor/east wing boys’ restroom at Fair Hills Day School, there loomed a bony-faced yet cutely freckled fifth grader, taller than Skyler by several inches, his icy-blue eyes fixed upon Skyler’s alarmed moist-brown eyes; his chin, triangular like a cobra’s, thrust aggressively forward.

  “I said—‘Hey Rampike.’ You deaf, asshole?”

  Bravely Skyler smiled and, in the spirit of boy-surname-exchange, stammered what sounded like, “Hey, K-Klaus.”

  This response, far from provoking a smile in the other boy’s stern face, or placating him, seemed to offend him. With both hands, Calvin Klaus, Jr. shoved against Skyler’s back and pushed him against the rim of the sink, hard.

  “‘Ram-puke.’ ‘Sky-ler Ram-puke.’ You and me, ‘Ram-puke,’ what’re we s’posed to be, brothers?—not!” Like a riddle these reproachful words leapt from Calvin Klaus, Jr.’s mouth that was twisted in an oddly adult fury, and before Skyler could defend himself, or duck and scuttle away as he’d learned to do in grade-school scuffles over the years, Calvin grabbed him by a sleeve of his hunter-green Fair Hills Day school sweater, and slammed him against the tile wall as other boys looked on, startled, alarmed, or smiling in excited expectation of a fight.

  A fight? At “prestigious”—“exclusive”—Fair Hills Day? Where expulsion was likely to be quick, and non-negotiable, and would adversely affect the expelled student’s admission to one of the Higher Ivies, and by extension his entire life?

  Skyler wasn’t going to fight back, for Skyler knew when he was outmatched. (Skyler was invariably outmatched.) In the confusion of the moment Skyler was yet able to register that, just visible on his angry assailant’s right wrist, beneath his shirt cuff, was a red-inked tattoo of some cryptic kind.

  Might’ve been a skull. Or a dagger dripping blood.

  Or a swastika.

  Was this a gang attack? Was ten-year-old Calvin Klaus, Jr. a “gangsta” initiate, put up to attacking nine-year-old Skyler Rampike, a “target selected at random,” by one of the school’s (secret) gangs/fraternities?*

  Skyler wanted to protest, wasn’t Calvin his playdate friend?

  Skyler wanted to protest But I always liked you.

  There came Billy Durkee pushing his way through the ring of staring boys, to grab Calvin by the shoulder and haul him away from Skyler now cowering on the floor.

  “Let him alone, Klaus—the kid’s a cripple, for Christ’s sake.”†

  S’POSED TO BE BROTHERS?—NOT!

  At Fair Hills Day there’d come to be, among other short-lived juvenile slang, buzzwords, and profanities/obscenities culled from the cesspool of popular-TV culture, a clumsy sort of irony involving statements with not! attached. As in, I think you’re really cool, Skyler?—not! Or, How’d you like a kiss, Skyler?—not!

  Yet, recalling the attack in the restroom, and Calvin’s mysterious remark, Skyler fixated on the word brothers.

  S’posed to be brothers?

  Brothers?

  “Maybe Calvin likes me? Maybe Calvin wants to be ‘brothers’ with me?”

  It didn’t seem likely. (Or did it?)

  Hadn’t Mildred Marrow spoken wistfully of having Skyler for a brother? So that, by a magical way of logic, clumsy unattractive Mildred might’ve been ice-skating prodigy Bliss Rampike?

  So Skyler brooded for days following the attack, as Calvin Klaus stonily avoided him, and Skyler had not the courage to approach Calvin to ask what he’d meant. Nor did Skyler mention the attack to any adult. (Hide your br
uises, as you hide your broken heart! Kids learn young. During this interim, when Daddy was no longer living with his family on Ravens Crest Drive but in a “condominium” that Skyler had yet to visit, Skyler was anxious to protect Mummy from further upset of any kind; and when Daddy called, as Daddy made a point of calling his family at least once a week, he certainly didn’t want to upset/annoy Daddy by confessing he’d been jumped, thrown against a wall, utterly overcome in a boys’ restroom at school, and before witnesses.)

  In a previous chapter titled “Adventures in Playdates II,” ten-year-old Calvin Klaus, Jr. appeared only briefly and was yanked away at once by the anxious author afflicted with a neurological variant of J.L.S. (Jumpy Leg Syndrome), who could not bear to dwell upon the impending crisis in the Rampike family. In fact, Skyler and Calvin had been brought to each other’s homes upon several occasions, to watch popular boy-videos (Chucky I, Chucky II, Chucky III, Terminator I, Terminator II, Robo-Boy Goes Ballistic! Revenge of Robo-Boy, etc.) and to be overseen by one or another Maria. Skyler, the younger and less assertive of the two boys, had no idea if Calvin Klaus enjoyed these visits or merely tolerated them, as Fair Hills children tolerated so much for the sakes of their anxious mothers. All that I can recall of the numerous words these boys must’ve exchanged is How’re things at school with you and the shrug-reply Okay, I guess. You?

  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.