My Sister, My Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Heidi was both fearful of and fascinated by TV, to which, to Skyler’s disapproval, she seemed to be addicted. Of course, Heidi never watched “live news”: the possibility of seeing a familiar face, or faces—including Heidi’s own—was too great. She had a weakness for afternoon TV talk shows, with the sound muted; her favorite programs to watch were reruns; such programs as The Young and the Restless, Only One Life to Live, St. Elsewhere, Sorrows of the Rich and Damned; unlike Skyler, who avoided TV, especially late-afternoon TV, as one who has become violently ill from eating restaurant food avoids the restaurant in which he’d become ill, Heidi was capable of cutting classes, dreamily bloating herself with Diet Pepsi and watching TV reruns through the day: “Skyler, don’t scold! These were programs my mother watched. And if I was sick, when I was a little girl I could stay home from school, and watch with her, and it was a happy time, and so nice to be sick! And now, so comforting to see how the stories turn out. This time.”

  Skyler kissed his girl. Heidi was likely to lift her arms to summon Skyler to her, in a cozy tangle of quilt, pillows, flannel p.j.’s, thick fuzzy socks sturdy as bedroom slippers on her long angular feet, to be kissed; and many times. In his girl’s “down” mode—which alternated with her bright buzzy high-voltage “up” mode—Skyler had to be protective of her, and so he was. Yet not wishing to confide in her that his mother, too, had watched afternoon soaps, in a long-ago time of bliss-before-Bliss when Skyler was Mummy’s own little man and what Daddy didn’t know would not hurt them.

  OF THE TRIO OF EXILES WHO SHARED MEALS IN A REMOTE CORNER OF Clapp Dining Hall, it was Elyot Grubbe who’d bravely, or was it brazenly, enrolled at the Academy at Basking Ridge under his own—“real”—name, and not a cover name. Somberly Elyot explained: “‘Grubbe’ isn’t famous enough to disguise. Few people outside Fair Hills know ‘Grubbe’—like they know ‘Rampike’—‘Harkness’.* You can see how people look through me here, as they did in Fair Hills when I was in grade school. And anyway, why should I care?”

  Only the most obsessively observant of readers, as morbidly anal-retentive as this author, is likely to remember Skyler’s playdate friend whom Skyler had wistfully imagined as a brother. (See the remote chapter “Adventures in Playdates II.”) It had been a considerable shock to Skyler when, on the evening of the first, miserably interminable day he’d arrived at Basking Ridge in disguise as “Sylvester Rampole,” a brisk compact boy with goggle glasses and magnified fish eyes approached him in the dining hall to say, sotto vice, “It’s Skyler—is it? Rampike? Remember me? Elyot Grubbe.”

  A shock to Skyler, but a happy one. “Sylvester Rampole” had nearly burst into tears.

  Implicit in the first handshake between the two child-casualties of Fair Hills was the promise No one will know who we are, or once were.

  It was Elyot’s custom, no doubt an affected-Brit custom, but one Skyler came to find comforting, to shake hands with Skyler when they met at mealtimes. When others were within earshot, Elyot never failed to call Skyler “Sly”; at other times, Elyot called Skyler “Sky”; so that, even if overheard by the sneering others who surrounded them, the privacy of “Sly”/“Sky” might be preserved.

  Seven years since Skyler had last seen Elyot Grubbe! Seven years since he’d received the terse but touching letter of condolence from his friend:

  DEAR SKYLER,

  PLEASE ACCEPT MY CONDOLENCES FOR THE LOSS OF YOUR SISTER. I WOULD LIKE TO BE YOUR BROTHER AGAIN BUT IT WOULD BE TOO SAD YOUR MOTHER SAYS.

  SINCERELY,

  ELYOT GRUBBE

  The domestic catastrophe that had befallen Elyot five years before was but vaguely known to Skyler who’d been (most likely) sedated at the time, and no longer living in Fair Hills, but Skyler understood the grim skeleton of the tale: Elyot’s heiress-mother Imogene had been mysteriously murdered, “bludgeoned to death,” in her bedroom in the Grubbes’ mansion on the Great Road; somehow, Elyot’s father had been involved; or maybe, since he’d been acquitted of all charges having to do with the murder, Mr. Grubbe had not been involved…? Certainly, Skyler wasn’t going to ask Elyot where his father was, or what his relations were with his father, any more than Elyot was likely to ask Skyler where his parents were, and what his relations were with them. No one will know who we are, or used to be had been sealed with a handshake.

  (Skyler recalls: Mummy had started to tell him about “that awful thing” that had happened to Elyot’s mother Imogene, as if to suggest to the broody brat there is plenty of misery to go around, and we are Christians who should know better than to give in to sorrow, but Skyler pressed his hands over his ears, screamed “Shut up, Mummy!” and ran from the room like a crazed little elephant.)*

  This was Elyot’s second year at Basking Ridge. Like Skyler, Elyot had missed lengthy patches of school and had, Skyler would learn, been “briefly incarcerated” in the Verhangen Treatment Center; still Elyot was a year ahead of Skyler, and appeared settled in, to a degree. In the lapel of his Basking Ridge blazer was a small glittery-silvery snake upright on its tail to signify the honorific APS (“Advanced Placement Senior”); his duo-majors were science (that is, “pre-med”) and music (“antiquarian”). In retrospect, Skyler supposed that, as a child, Elyot Grubbe had been heavily medicated, for he’d invariably seemed drowsy, with a slow drifting manner of speech and a dreamy smile; now, in adolescence, seventeen years old, Elyot was more animated, and certainly spoke more rapidly; the way in which Elyot’s mouth twitched in anticipation of smiling suggested to Skyler the presence of “uppers” in his bloodstream which Skyler himself had frequently been prescribed, in “bi-polar” mode; at mealtimes, Skyler sometimes saw his eccentric friend surreptitiously swallowing pills, quite a quantity of pills, and though some of the pills looked familiar (Prizzil? Xaxil? Vivil?) Skyler understood that Elyot would not welcome any commentary from Skyler; as, when Skyler rummaged through his pockets for his God-damned meds, cursing to himself when he could locate but used tissues and lint, Elyot pretended not to notice, or, fussily preoccupied with proofing homework, or listening to his Walkman, did not notice. Though the boys sat together in Clapp Dining Hall, frequently they passed entire meals without speaking more than a few murmured words. Hi. H’lo. How are you. Okay, you?

  Yet Skyler felt (oblique, undeclared) affection for his old playdate friend. For Skyler had few friends, in fact Skyler had no friends, and certainly no “old” friends. In the intervening years Skyler had grown tall, angular, gangling, lopsided and, no other word, freaky; while Elyot had grown warily, to a height of five-feet-three; though compactly built, with the rigid-posture bearing and smooth cheeks of a boy-mannequin; he looked more like twelve than seventeen, a bright prepubescent with weakly intelligent eyes and a forgettable face like a smudge. How vulnerable Elyot would be to the Beavs and Butts at Basking Ridge, if he had not seemed to intimidate them, by some habit of bearing; and by the fact that, though “Grubbe” seemed not to be a known name at the school, “Grubbe” yet suggested an aura of wealth, family connections, and litigation.

  And A. J. Grubbe had counter-sued! As A. J. Grubbe had filed a flotilla of lawsuits demanding financial restitution from publications, journalists, and private individuals who had “defamed” his name.

  Elyot in no way resembled the fiery, flamboyant A. J. Grubbe whom Skyler had but glimpsed at a distance, at a cocktail gathering at the Rampikes’; poor Elyot resembled his unhappy-heiress mother Imogene who’d been one of those soft-boneless-mollusc females who quiver with emotion no one wants to share; an eagerly smiling wife/mother who senses that she will be mangled by life no matter how kindly—generous—“maternal” and “loving” and “good”—she is; for she is a wealthy heiress, and has attracted, fatally, the wrong kind of husband.

  “And you have the most adorable little angel-sister, Skyler! How lucky your mother is.”

  One drizzly playdate afternoon at the Grubbe mansion on the Great Road there came Mrs. Grubbe stumbling downstairs in what appeared to be a Japanese kimo
no, that disguised her soft fatty folds, and in an exclamatory voice Mrs. Grubbe interrupted the boys’ chess game, seizing Skyler’s small-boy-face in pudgy-clammy fingers as an eagle seizes small-mammal prey in its talons; Mrs. Grubbe exhaled Chardonnay-sweet breath in Skyler’s face, exclaiming over Skyler’s sister, and marveling at Skyler’s mother’s luck. Afterward, with some embarrassment, Elyot had said: “Please excuse my mother. She has been diagnosed as ‘tri-polar’—and she is medicated—but sometimes the medication fails, and she becomes excitable. I think that what Mother meant just now was that, if she were to lose me, she would have no child; whereas your mother, if she lost you, would still have your sister; and so your mother is ‘lucky,’ as Mother is not. But I doubt that Mother is capable of fully articulating such a thought, even to herself.”

  (Yes! Elyot Grubbe spoke in such grammatical little-pedant sentences even as a child.)

  At Basking Ridge, the boys renewed their somewhat theoretical friendship. Each was grateful for the other’s company, though not excessively. Rarely did they see each other outside of mealtimes in clamorous Clapp Dining Hall where they sat at an unoccupied end of a table of losers/exiles, eating their meals mostly in silence. Elyot’s usual mealtime practice was to eat slowly and distractedly while listening to music on his Walkman, and frowning over pages of elaborate musical notations; when Skyler first joined him, Elyot was making his way through the sacred music of Josquin des Prez; he then moved on to Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, performed by Yo-Yo Ma: “The most exquisite of composers, conjoined with the most exquisite of cellists.” Skyler remembered that Elyot had been taking cello lessons in Fair Hills, but when Skyler asked him about music lessons, Elyot stiffened: “No longer. No.” Skyler could see that Elyot didn’t wish to elaborate, yet Skyler couldn’t resist asking why he’d stopped taking lessons, and Elyot said, sadly: “Mother believed that I was something of a cello prodigy. I was not. But I had ‘promise.’ And so music became too important to me. Especially after—you know. I practiced, and practiced, and practiced and yet—I was not perfect. When I played for my teacher invariably I struck a wrong note. Sometimes I would make it to the very end of a lesson—and then my bow would slip, and I would make a mistake, and have to start over. And the same thing would happen again, and if my teacher didn’t allow me to start over again immediately, I would become ‘agitated.’ We tried to defuse the situation by having me make a mistake—deliberately!—at the outset, and get it over with, but—” As Elyot spoke in his matter-of-fact glum voice, smile-twitches playing at the corners of his mouth, Skyler listened in sympathetic silence thinking Worse than me! Poor bastard.

  Where Elyot immersed himself in exquisite music, Skyler immersed himself in Boring Things. No surprise—were you surprised?—that freaky “Sylvester Rampole” became an A student at Basking Ridge, for his courses provided a corncoopia of Boring Things for him to memorize, that he might, with clockwork precision, like few others at the school, regurgitate out on exams and quizzes. For example, Skyler excelled in his American History class by memorizing lengthy columns of dates: wars—battles—peace treaties; explorers—conquerors—territories; states, when admitted to the Union; dates of elections—inaugurations—deaths of Great Men; Whigs—Federalists—Democrats—Republicans—Free Soil Republicans—Abolitionists—Copperheads—“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”; “Teapot Dome”—“We Stand at Armageddon”—“The Stolen Election” (1876).* Yet more comforting was the mind-numbing Periodic Table, for Skyler’s chemistry class; lists of vocabulary words and verb declensions, for Skyler’s French class; lengthy passages put to memory from Macbeth and Julius Caesar, to confound Mr. Dunwoody who sprang frequent “pop quizzes” on his students, to keep them in a perpetual state of edginess, and who could not be dissuaded from believing that somehow, “Sylvester Rampole” had to be cheating.

  Once Skyler met Heidi Harkness, and fell in love with her, his zeal for Boring Things quickly ebbed.

  “Elyot? I’d like you to meet…”

  Now there was a trio of exiles at the remote table beneath the high mullioned window. Skyler thought We are all we need.

  But relations between Heidi and Elyot seemed always under negotiation, unsettled as a wind-sock. At first, when Heidi joined Skyler at mealtimes (which was unpredictably, for Heidi “hated food, on principle”), Elyot was unsmiling, and stiffly responsive; clearly he was dazzled by her, by the mere fact of her; what a shock, that Elyot’s oldest/closest friend, whom surely Elyot had assumed was as unattractive to girls, and as unattracted by girls, as he was! On her side Heidi was wary of Elyot Grubbe whom Skyler had described as his oldest/closest friend from Fair Hills who’d had “something terrible” happen to him—in fact, to his mother—that wasn’t to be talked-of, ever; and was “some kind of weird genius.” Badly Skyler wanted his two friends to like each other, for he could not bear to shun Elyot, now that he had Heidi; and, given Heidi’s moodiness, and unpredictable behavior (of which Skyler was only just beginning to learn), he was fearful of slighting Heidi…“Elyot likes you,” Skyler told Heidi, who bit at her thumbnail until it bled, “—he’s just shy, and isn’t used to girls.”

  “I feel that he’s judging me. He is this ‘Eye That Sees’—judging me.”

  Skyler was startled by his girlfriend’s words that had the air of being improvised, flung out on the careless shovel of her emotions. “‘Eye That Sees’—what do you mean?”

  “Well, two eyes. The way he looks at me.”

  “But why did you say—‘Eye That Sees.’ Where did that come from?”

  “I—I don’t know, Skyler. Things just come to me.”

  “Yes, but from where? ‘Things come to me’—from where?”

  “Skyler, I don’t know! You’re hurting me.”

  Heidi pulled away. Without knowing what he’d been doing Skyler had gripped her thin wrist tight, might’ve been turning—twisting?—it. But not on purpose.

  SEARCHING SKYLER RAMPIKE IN CYBERCESSPOOLSPACE. HAD SHE?

  SHAME!

  For there was Skyler in grungy black T-shirt, khakis, rotted Nikes and grimy baseball cap in the guise of a local high-school kid hanging about the 7-Eleven on the outskirts of the Historic Village of Basking Ridge. Sucking at a Coke, innocently eyeing the display rack of tabloid papers as he knew he should not, must not, like swallowing an unidentified pill, could be the worst mistake of your life, do not do it. Yet Skyler thumbed through pulp-paper Star Watch, Star Weekly, US Spy, where in October 2003 more than six years after his sister’s death it wasn’t unreasonable for him to assume—or was it?—that he would not come upon a photograph of Bliss Rampike another time, that heartrending little girl-skater captured in a graceful glide on the ice, glamorously made-up little fairy child, a glittery tiara in her curly blond hair Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess 1996 would not leap out at him another time, nor would he be surprised another time by a photograph of his ghastly smiling parents emerging from Trinity Episcopal Church flanked by their staunch Christian supporters Reverend Higley and Mrs. Higley, identified in red banner headlines BETSEY & BIX RAMPIKE: MURDEROUS MUMMY & DADDY OR BEREAVED PARENTS?—surely would not come upon, another time, the ghastly smiling likeness of his own child-self, SKYLER RAMPIKE: THE SECRET HE HAS NEVER REVEALED—nor those coyly juxtaposed photos of GUNTHER RUSCHA, CONFESSED PEDOPHILE-MURDERER and SKYLER RAMPIKE: RUSCHA’S FIRST SEX VICTIM? With a part of his mind monitoring the Indian clerk at the checkout counter at the front of the store even as he pages through sleazy US Spy trying to hold his breath against the sewage-stink of Tabloid Hell wafting to his nostrils, sickening sense of loss, sorrow, defeat, vanity of all human desire, utter helplessness of the kind the minimal consciousness of the ever-flapping wind-sock must feel, or the careworn Möbius strip turning, turning endlessly with the spinning earth around its sun in a remote galaxy near to collapsing upon itself to the point of a pin, fumbling to turn a page in US Spy to discover what he has been seeking: HARKNESS. Not RAMPIKE but HARKNESS. With vast relief thinki
ng Poor Heidi! But not me for here is a six-page spread of mostly photographs, red banner headline SEXY EX-YANKEE LEANDER & SUPERMODEL STEFFIE: EXPECTING? Skyler studies the photos of good-looking Leander Harkness, on the pitcher’s mound rearing back to pitch, World Series 1988; in another, Harkness has a shaved head, murk-colored eyes, sneering mouth; in another photo, in his Yankee uniform, he’s leaning over to spit; there are photos of Harkness and his attractive blond wife Alina, and of Harkness’s little daughter Heidi; Harkness, Alina, and Heidi at their town house on East 86th Street, New York City; another of Harkness and daughter Heidi at the waterfront house in Oyster Bay; how tender this Big Daddy is holding Heidi’s little hand; how trusting the little girl gazing up at Big Daddy with an adoring smile; Skyler is struck by his girl’s little-girl self, so very different from her angular, taut, wistful self; at sixteen, Heidi more resembles her murdered mother than she resembles the little girl in these photographs. And, on another page, an unflattering photo of Alina Harkness seemingly unaware of a paparazzo hovering near as, vexed-looking, decidedly dowdy, Alina emerges awkwardly from a car revealing a length of chunky leg: ALINA HARKNESS, 35. Cruelly close by is SUPERMODEL STEFFIE, 23: gorgeous, pouty Steffie with astonishing breasts, narrow waist and hips, near-naked and preening for the camera in a black silk “slip dress” for Armani. Steffie has satiny straight blond hair, bosomy lips and coy-candid eyes, a younger, slimmer, more beautiful sister of the slain Mrs. Harkness.