My Sister, My Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Betsey is invited to explain to viewers how she’d inaugurated Heaven Scent Products in 1998 as a way of “helping to heal the festering wounds” of her personal tragedy. On display are a number of Heaven Scent products: Heaven Scent Cosmetic Kit—Heaven Scent Perfumes—Heaven Scent Bubble Bath—Heaven Scent Christmas Chocolates—Heaven Scent Accessories (scarves, belts, bracelets et al.)—Heaven Scent Betsey’s Special Recipe Christmas Fruitcake: all these items available for immediate shipping. Next, there’s an admiring buzz in the studio audience as Betsey proudly displays a Heaven Scent Bliss Rampike Doll: a startlingly lifelike replica of Bliss Rampike in miniature, with vivid blue glass eyes that open and shut, a sweet rosebud mouth, ultra-realistic skin and fine blond shoulder-length hair, movable arms and legs, detachable doll-size ice skates for the tiny feet. The Heaven Scent Bliss Rampike Doll is available with a selection of wigs, tiaras, and skating costumes (ballerina tulle, pleated silk, chiffon, satin-and-sequins, Cinderella, Snow White, cowgirl, Las Vegas showgirl, ballroom, disco, flamenco et al.)—“‘Bliss’ is being offered pre-Christmas for a base price of just $99.99; with a complete wardrobe plus ice skates, for just an additional $49.99.”

  Betsey speaks earnestly, wiping at her eyes, holding the lifelike Bliss-doll in her lap just as Heidi enters the room toweling her long damp hair—“Ohhh that woman! Who is that awful woman! She is so—so totally—utterly—gross.” Heidi is laughing, that brittle edgy laugh that so irritates Skyler; as Skyler continues to stare at the screen, Heidi hovers over him, jeering—“That woman, I’ve seen her before, she had a little girl—like that doll—who was an ice skater, she dressed the little girl like a slut and some sex maniac came and murdered the little girl—isn’t she awful? And him, that nasty pig-snout man ‘Riley’—why on earth are you watching these awful people, Skyler?” Skyler stumbles to his feet, there is a roaring in Skyler’s ears, like a zombie Skyler makes his way to Heidi’s door, can’t breathe, choking and can’t breathe, has to get out, Heidi calls after him, “Skyler? What’s wrong? You look so—” coming to touch him, but Skyler can’t bear to be touched, Heidi Harkness is wearing an electric blue thermal undershirt, flannel p.j. bottoms, her thick scuzzy wool socks, Heidi’s hair is damp, her eyes hurt, petulant, peevish and her oddly crossed front teeth glisten as if jeering, Skyler pushes away her hand, Skyler murmurs what sounds like, “—mistake,” out the door and Heidi follows after him incensed and disbelieving, “Skyler? What is—? Why—” and Skyler hears himself say, in a flat cold voice, “—don’t love you, never loved you, it was a mistake, good-bye.” Heidi is so astonished Skyler can hear the sharp intake of her breath. Skyler doesn’t turn to her but limps away. If he has hurt her, good! She should be punished, like Skyler. Blindly Skyler pushes through the door to the stairs at the rear of the residence, blindly Skyler descends the stairs and limps outside into a ferocious wind.

  No idea where he is. Valley of the Shadow of Death, maybe.

  AFTER BLISS, HE CAN’T LOVE. NOT ANYONE. NOT EVER.

  A sweaty fistful of pills, capsules, tablets Skyler manages to swallow down with several glasses of tepid water before he begins to puke, leaking water through his nose and in a delirium of exhaustion collapses onto his bed like debris dumped into rushing black water while as in an arty split-screen film of the 1970s a quarter-mile away on the far side of the nighttime campus Heidi Harkness manages to swallow down nine large OxyContin tablets and sinks into a heavy sleep discovered comatose in her room, rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital in Summit, New Jersey, where she is reported to be in critical condition as Skyler sleeps in sweaty, tangled, and soon urine-soaked sheets unable to awaken, sleeps through the morning in his cramped little room at the top of Old Craghorne until early afternoon at last waking groggy, dry-mouthed and stunned as one who has been struck a powerful blow to the head thinking Am I still here? O Jesus.

  Eventually, Skyler would learn of Heidi Harkness. He would come to learn the meaning of HSR.*

  V.

  1 January 2004

  Dear Skyler—

  This is a letter of condolence on the death of our friendship. It is my decision after much thought that I do not want to speak with you ever again nor even see you. I am not accusing you of provoking Heidi to act despairingly as she did because I do not want to know the extent of your guilt. I do not want to hate you for I do not believe in hatred, it is the curse of our species.

  Skyler, good-bye.

  Your former friend,

  * For instance, Dr. Roll. In violation of professional ethics, to spite her uncooperative young patient, and for who knows how many thousands of dollars, this therapist at the Verhangen Treatment Center almost certainly had to be the “anonymous psychiatric source” for a lurid feature in Up Close & Personal titled “Repressed Memory Recovered: Did Skyler Rampike Confess to Killing His Sister Bliss?” (No! Never read it.) (Bix Rampike filed a $10 million lawsuit charging defamation of his [minor] son’s name; a few months ago, the suit was settled out of court, for how much, how would I know?)

  * The (mature, not-neurotic) reader will find it difficult to believe that Skyler, at sixteen, is yet so immature. That this boy who assumes a pose of scowling indifference, picking at his face as the adults discuss his future, is so hesitant to acknowledge what is, by this time, a fête accompli: for hadn’t Skyler glimpsed a lurid banner headline on the cover of SleazeWatch Week proclaiming

  PARENTS OF SLAIN ICE-SKATE CHAMP BLISS RAMPIKE DIVORCED

  Asked Is There Another Woman Bix Says: “No Comment”

  * “Panic”: “Of, relating to, or resembling the mental or emotional state induced by the pagan god Pan who dwells in the forest in wait for the unwary.” Like us!

  * Flash-forward into the (near) future to collapse “cheap suspense”—the very coin of merely popular/best-selling fiction—and to assure the uneasy reader that Skyler’s behavior was truly not what it seems to have appeared to be, to Heidi Harkness!

  * Could anyone have guessed? Skyler’s old playdate Elyot Grubbe! Another time so cleverly I am avoiding the “cheap suspense” shunned by purveyors of Serious Literature.

  * For those few readers with kinky-morbid-literary tastes, you might be interested to learn that just as sixteen-year-old Skyler’s face began to bleed in Dunwoody’s classroom, nineteen-year-old Skyler so picked and scratched at the stitches in his face, his face began to bleed onto this very page.

  † Reader, I’m sorry! I can’t continue this.

  Don’t even know why I am writing about Lionel Dunwoody!

  I’d meant to write about Heidi Harkness and somehow here I am writing about Lionel Dunwoody. As the reader should know from a long-ago chapter, it was Dunwoody who assigned our class E. A. Pym’s notorious “The Aesthetics of Composition” in which it is stated that The death of a beautiful girl-child is the most poetic topic in the world. Out of pure sadism for “Sylvester Rampole,” Dunwoody assigned this, knowing how it would upset his student. This is the individual who would consent to an interview (in July 2004) with a reporter for No Holds Barred as an “anonymous source” commenting in painful detail on the “psychological profile” of Skyler Rampike; asked by the reporter if he believed that the “troubled boy” might have been capable of murdering his six-year-old sister, he’d said: “When I gazed into those steely eyes, I gazed into an abyss. No further comment!”

  * Does the prurient reader assume that Skyler and Heidi—in the crude vernacular usage—“had sex”? Maybe yes, maybe no. You won’t find out from me.

  * Of course, Elyot didn’t say “Harkness” but Heidi’s actual name.

  * Disturbing memory—“recovered” (I guess)—loosed and rising to consciousness out of the tidal muck, as S. Freud disdainfully called it, of the Repressed. Skyler must’ve been at least twelve at the time since clearly his “hysterical muteness” had vanished.

  * Is this comforting to know, or not-so-comforting? That, in the simmering cesspool of U.S. political campaign history, at least one previous electi
on, (Republican) Rutherford Hayes vs. (Democrat) Samuel Tilden, was “stolen”?

  * Wonder where Skyler went at Thanksgiving? Skyler went nowhere at Thanksgiving. Nor was it so very lonely at Basking Ridge for there was a sizable number of his classmates who had nowhere to go on this American-family-glutton holiday, including Elyot Grubbe; and Headmaster Shovell and his cheery wife Gwendolyn invited us all to Thanksgiving dinner in the Headmaster’s house. As I am clumsy with warm, friendly, “nice” occasions, as with expressions of gratitude, I will pass over Skyler’s Thanksgiving in silence.

  * I know: the reader is offended by such heavy-handed irony. Yet the worst of it is, I intend no irony at all . Skyler and Heidi felt exactly like this.

  * The canny reader will have deciphered “HSR” in the previous chapter but for those others who, like Skyler, hadn’t a clue, it means High Suicide Risk.

  EPILOGUE: FIRST LOVE, FAREWELL!*

  * Hey: down here. Skyler is down here. A long time then Skyler dwelt in footnotes at the bottoms of pages. After Heidi Harkness disappeared from Basking Ridge, and was never to return, in whatever “condition” Heidi Harkness was even the avid scribblers of Tabloid Hell were in disagreement, even where she was, if hospitalized, or somewhere “private” with relatives, or keepers—even after Heidi, Skyler Rampike was allowed to remain at the Academy at Basking Ridge though he no longer attended most of his classes, and the surreal-high grades of brainy “Sylvester Rampole” plummeted to the nether regions in which dwelt the most severely disabled/“challenged”/plain weird of his classmates. No need to inform the reader, Skyler scored plenty of drugs while dwelling in such nether regions. You would, too. Yet, unlike the other users at Basking Ridge, who craved one another’s company like aphids, Skyler Rampike shunned the company of others. He did not ever hear from Heidi Harkness of course. (He may have believed she was dead. He didn’t keep up with news.) He had lost his only friend Elyot Grubbe. (He did not make any attempt to reconcile with Elyot for he believed that Elyot’s judgment of him was just.) (In any case, Elyot soon became friendly with another solitary boy, gifted like himself, and musically inclined; Skyler glimpsed them from afar sometimes, listening to music through twin earphones and frowning over a shared musical score.) It’s reasonable for the reader to wonder why the Academy at Basking Ridge did not hurriedly expel Skyler Rampike and the reason is a simple one: Bix Rampike had paid the considerable tuition and room-and-board for his son through June 12, 2004, and had no intention of allowing Skyler to leave early; threatened with an enormous lawsuit, Headmaster Shovell quickly acquiesced. (For neither Betsey nor Bix Rampike wished to make a home for a chronically disturbed adolescent boy of five-feet-ten with sociopathic and possibly suicidal tendencies, do you blame them?) Later, Skyler would be recycled to yet another prep school. Or was it a treatment center. At which time prowling stores in which such publications are sold, Skyler was rewarded for scavengering in sewage by discovering, in an October 2004 issue of SleezeWatch Week , a tantalizingly blurry photograph allegedly taken at the Academy at Basking Ridge of Leander Harkness’s daughter Heidi as she stood in the shelter of an enormous oak tree with exposed roots, in the impassioned embrace of an “unidentified male” believed to be an instructor at the “exclusive” prep school famous for “catering to” the sons and daughters of the wealthy disgraced. The photo was of Skyler and Heidi!—presumably taken in stealth by an audacious paparazzo as the unsuspecting teen couple hugged, kissed, whispered together in lightly falling snow. Shameless Skyler tore the page out of SleezeWatch Week without paying for the magazine, cherished this sole photograph of himself and Heidi Harkness for some time though eventually he lost it as Skyler lost most things.

  VI

  Pilgrimage to Hell, and Back

  THE SUMMONS

  PLEASE COME! SO LONG I HAVE PRAYED

  we would be reconcilled darling

  soon to undergoe surgery pray to see you before

  loving Mother meant well Skyler

  He hadn’t gone. Weeks ago she’d summoned him. And more recently, she’d summoned him. He had not gone to her. He had not. Yet now, he was going. He was going. He’d waked from a sleep leaden like death and now: he was going to her.

  And if it’s too late, and she has died. And if. She’d said surgery. That word and no more and like a knife it had cut him for his first thought was cancer.

  Cancer was the thought. And death.

  HE HAD PROMISED PASTOR BOB, HE WOULD GO TO THE WOMAN. HE WOULD GO to her. He would not forgive her but he would go to her. And Pastor Bob had said, A man is strong to the degree to which he can forgive those who injured him. A man is weak, to the degree to which he can’t forgive. Crudely Skyler laughed. Panicked Skyler laughed. Skyler had a nervous habit of jamming a thumb nail between two of his lower front teeth as if to pry them out. Saying, Pastor Bob, fuck forgive, okay? I am trying just to comprehend what there might be required to forgive. My quest is epistemological,* before it can be moral. My quest is to know why I am so fucking confused, at the age of nineteen I will have to be told by the one who has destroyed me what it is I know.

  HE HAD NOT SHOWN PASTOR BOB EITHER OF THE LETTERS HIS MOTHER HAD sent him. Not the letter received by Skyler weeks ago in January signed Your Loving Mother Mummy. Not the second letter which was dated Valentine’s Day. (And why Valentine’s Day? We know, Mummy and Skyler!) These handwritten letters on perfumy-peach-stationery Skyler had wrapped in newspaper sheets to block the powerful scent from his sensitive nostrils and to hide on a closet shelf. These letters he had not so much as glanced at since receiving them yet could not destroy. As the hapless reader can attest, he’d been preoccupied with spilling his guts out in these pages. Ever more lurid, these pages. Shameless tabloid-sewage, these pages. For Heidi Harkness had begged him not to write about her and in his desperation to purge himself of the poison in his guts, he has betrayed her. For in writing about Heidi in this way, Skyler has discovered that he loves her. That he has betrayed her, he loves her. That he is sick with guilt for having betrayed her, he loves her. Heidi if you are alive and if you read these words Heidi forgive me.

  Hunched over his worktable, over these scattered pages like a deformed foot.

  THIS FINAL SECTION OF MY HARD-WON DOCUMENT, TRACING SKYLER’S QUIXOTIC pilgrimage to Spring Hollow, New York, will surely be much shorter than preceding sections, and will bring Skyler’s “epic” journey to an end. For those readers who persist in believing that tragic art yields katharsis (Gr.)—at least, great tragic art—I will dangle before you the hope that katharsis will be achieved in the concluding pages of My Sister, My Love. If not…

  Reader, I can’t bring myself to contemplate If not.

  * Classy word! Pertaining to “the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge, esp. with reference to its limits and validity.” (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary) Yet Skyler is correct in using it for there is no other so appropriate word as, when Skyler claims that he is so fucked-up he will have to be told by his mother what he already knows, he is essentially correct.

  THE ARK

  NOW HE HAD TO HURRY! NOW EVERY PULSE IN HIS BODY WAS THROBBING IN exultation, and in dread.

  Ran/limped a quarter-mile to The Ark on Hurtle Avenue. “The Ark”—the barn-sized house/rectory in which Pastor Bob Fluchaus lived with an ever-shifting household of assistants, church volunteers, “family.”

  Skyler Rampike had been given to know You are of my family, son.

  From the street, The Ark looked like an old sailing ship dumped in a city lot. It was a run-down old mansion of three floors and numberless rooms with steep slate roofs, Victorian turrets and trim, a front entrance framed by pillars like a Greek temple. Hurtle Avenue was a neighborhood of large showy houses now shuttered, abandoned, or converted to apartments and small businesses. Before Skyler had met Pastor Bob, well-intentioned New Canaan volunteers had begun painting the rectory as a gesture of good will for their much-beloved pastor but the daffodil-yellow paint they’
d chosen for the house dried to a sharp mustard color and so only the front of the house had been painted, the sides and rear remained the original gunmetal-gray. From the pulpit Pastor Bob declared in his deadpan-comic manner: “Jesus would feel right at home in The Ark. ‘The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.’”

  His ministry, Pastor Bob said, was for all who required healing. “In this way, I hope to be healed myself.”