My Sister, My Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

  FREE FALL

  “’I BELIEVE: HELP THOU MY UNBELIEF.’”

  He drove. On I-95 he drove. Gripping the steering wheel of the battered old Dodge station wagon he drove. In the right-hand lane of the thunderous Turnpike he drove. He drove at no more than the speed limit as eighteen-wheel trailer-trucks overtook his vehicle and passed him in derisive clouds of toxic exhaust. He drove! He drove bravely gritting his teeth. He drove sitting straight behind the wheel as the driver of a military vehicle loaded with explosives. Yet he drove fearless! He drove with determination and with concentration. He drove into the bright wintry-windy day. He drove into a bright wintry-windy day of a month/year he could not now have named. Son, today is the twenty-seventh. Son, you don’t want to put yourself in danger, or her. He drove into wintry sunshine glaring from the chrome of hurtling vehicles. He drove beneath a fantastical sky of high-scudding white clouds beautiful as no clouds he’d ever seen except, as Heidi Harkness giggled and squirmed in Sky’s ropey-muscled boy-arms, on the insides of his eyelids after ingesting a few grainy grains of exotic-named foxy methoxy his girl had smuggled back from a Thursday in Manhattan but why think of this now, now it’s too late. Grimly he drove. Undaunted he drove. Not-thinking of Heidi Harkness and not-thinking of Elyot Grubbe required enormous concentration as he drove. At age nineteen years, eleven months and three weeks he drove. He drove in despair that he would live to his twentieth birthday. He drove in despair that he would ever make sense of his life. He drove now hunched slightly forward as if clinging to the steering wheel. He drove gripping the steering wheel of Pastor Bob’s old Dodge station wagon tight in both big-knuckled hands as if expecting the wheel to twist suddenly and catapult the clumsy rattling station wagon emblazoned NEW CANAAN EVANGELICAL CHURCH OF CHRIST RISEN through the concrete median and into oncoming traffic and fiery oblivion. He drove thinking It could be so quick. He drove thinking With Skyler’s luck, it would not be quick. He drove hearing Grandmother Rampike’s sharp voice Going to be a cripple? Going to limp, for life? He drove with exasperating slowness in the right-hand lane for he was not a confident driver. He drove at less than sixty-five miles-per-hour for beyond that speed the station wagon began to shake and shudder. He drove past the exit for EDISON and at once his brain (hippocampus?) began to throw off sparks of Repressed Memory* quickly blocked. He drove past EDISON, and he drove past METUCHEN. He drove past such lyric New Jersey exits as RAHWAY†—ELIZABETH—NEWARK—NEWARK AIRPORT—UNION CITY—WEEHAWKEN—HACKENSACK. He drove with mounting anxiety not knowing why. He drove recalling the first time he’d attended prayer services at the New Canaan Evangelical Church of Christ Risen at Pastor Bob’s invitation and how mesmerized he’d been by the minister’s sermon to the mixed-race, mixed-age congregation on the “eternal good news” of the Gospels. Recalling Pastor Bob’s weirdly scaly burn-scar face and deep-baritone voice he drove. In awe of the man’s shrewd/kindly eyes that seemed to single out each individual in the hall he drove. He drove recalling his conviction This is it, where I belong. He drove hearing again the minister’s voice echoing as in the aftermath of a powerful dream: “‘I am come a light into the world that whosoever believeth in me shall not abide in darkness.’” He drove wiping tears from his eyes. He drove without hope and yet—with what hope! Seeing GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE 2 MI. he drove beginning to sweat inside his odd-fitting clothes. He drove beginning to think yes, probably it had been a mistake, this journey. To set off without having called his mother first, as Pastor Bob had suggested. Yet he drove somehow convinced that he would see her, he could not be prevented from seeing her, for she had summoned him. Hearing his fumbling voice—“M-Mother: remember me? I am Sk-Sk-Skyler”—he drove. Rehearsing the words he would utter if a stranger greeted him at the door of 9 Magnolia Terrace, Spring Hollow, New York: “I am Sk-Skyler Rampike. I am B-Betsey Rampike’s s-son.” He drove unable to remember when he’d last seen his mother. Not TV-Mummy but in life. Two years ago? Three? In the life of an adolescent three years is a very long time for adolescence itself is infinity. After TV-Mummy and the break-up with Heidi Harkness Skyler could not bear to think of his mother and refused to accept any call from her even when he was summoned to Headmaster Shovell’s office to accept such a call he’d refused No! no I can’t, not ever I hate her and now he drove recalling these angry words with shame for had not Pastor Bob warned him We must forgive those who have wronged us, Skyler lest our hatred turn to poison in our bowels.

  Distracted by such thoughts he lost his way. For a confused moment he lost his way. Having glimpsed an exit sign for GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE impulsively he exited and discovered belatedly that he’d made a mistake, had no idea what he’d done wrong but it was wrong for now he was headed not for the bridge but for FORT LEE, New Jersey. And abruptly now in slow-congested traffic moving with the sluggish peristalsis of a blocked colon his speed was reduced to five miles an hour. Above, the sky was choked with clouds like distended/discolored tumors. Heavy stacked cumulus rain-clouds, shit-clouds shaped like hydrogen-bomb explosions. How had it happened, Skyler who was so anxious to arrive at Spring Hollow, New York, had missed the George Washington Bridge? How is it possible to “miss” so mammoth/magisterial a structure as the George Washington Bridge? Yet neither the “upper level” nor the “lower level” could Skyler approach for he was lost in Fort Lee, New Jersey: a rat’s maze/sinkhole of narrow, one-way, dead-end and under-excavation streets. He would never get to Spring Hollow! He would never arrive at his destination! He began to sob in hoarse guttural sobs like choking. He began to curse—“Fuck! Fuck fuck!”—for there was no one to blame except Skyler himself, his own stupidity and ill-luck which is but a form of stupidity and yet: Skyler had no choice but to continue, had he? As the Möbius strip has no choice but to turn endlessly? In a slow crawl of exhaust-smitten traffic on N. Syke Street in Fort Lee, New Jersey…

  POOR SKYLER! THWARTED MIDWAY IN HIS JOURNEY TO SPRING HOLLOW, NEW York, and for all we know, maybe he never arrives there. While Skyler is lost in medias race in Fort Lee, New Jersey, we can use the lull in the narrative to present a miscellany of items too unwieldy to have “worked into” previous chapters.

  For instance, throughout this seemingly candid document Skyler has been purposefully reticent about his relations with his parents. The unsuspecting reader would think from “First Love, Farewell!” that Bix and Betsey rarely made any attempt to contact their troubled son, having more or less abandoned him to psychiatric facilities and “high-security” prep schools; the fact is, Betsey did telephone Skyler from time to time at the Academy at Basking Ridge; if not Betsey personally, one of Betsey’s cheery female assistants at Heaven Scent, Inc., leaving messages for Skyler to please call back. (But Skyler never did.) Shortly before Betsey’s appearance on the Randy Riley show, the first step in Betsey Rampike’s twenty-city book tour for her new memoir From Hell to Heaven: 11 Steps for the Faithful, Betsey’s Heaven Scent partner/financial advisor/romantic companion Nathan Kissler placed several urgent calls to Skyler in the hope of introducing himself over the phone to Betsey’s son, of whom he had heard numerous troubling things, but of course Skyler had not returned these calls; Mr. Kissler had sent a lengthy, thoughtfully written e-mail to Skyler explaining his role in Skyler’s mother’s life as her “closest friend and advisor”; this e-mail Skyler had in fact received, jeeringly skimmed and deleted within seconds, as one might delete an obscene advertisement from the computer screen. Poor Mr. Kissler, deeply in love with Betsey Rampike and determined to be a “father, of a kind” to Betsey’s problem-son, sent Skyler the hard copy of this e-mail, via certified U.S. mail; which Skyler accepted, imagining that the envelope might contain a check from Betsey and when it did not, tearing up the heartfelt letter in typical adolescent pick.

  Reader, what was I to do? Believe me, if I had introduced this distracting material into the melancholy love story of Skyler Rampike and Heidi Harkness, teen-exiles of Tabloid Hell who had, for a brief enchanted spell, “found each other”
at the Academy at Basking Ridge, the result would have been as jarring as, let’s say, a sudden eruption of John Philip Sousa into the ethereal musical meditations of Estonian Arvo Pärt. You would all have hated it, and reviewers would have savagely denounced such a blatant change of tone in all violation of Aristotelian unity.

  Another omission from “First Love, Farewell!” is Skyler’s silence on the subject of finances: who is paying for such exorbitantly expensive private schools as the Academy at Basking Ridge,* for the sulky Skyler; who is paying for Skyler’s exorbitantly expensive medications, most of which, in defiance of doctors’ orders, he refused to take, or—is the reader shocked?—sold to certain of his Old Claghorne fellow residents, who felt the need to self-medicate at any opportunity. (The reader will be shocked to hear that Skyler dealt the powerful antidepressant Zilich on a regular basis to a boy on his floor so physically and psychically impaired, the diagnosis HSR might have been branded on the boy’s forehead; Skyler took from this “collateral kid”—as the offspring of disgraced public figures were called, by themselves as by others at Basking Ridge—as much as one hundred dollars per week, and felt little guilt, or none, when the boy overdosed, whether deliberately or accidentally, and was hurriedly removed from the school as, a few weeks later, Heidi Harkness would be removed. But not a hint of this shameful episode did you hear from Skyler, right?)

  Though Skyler was rarely other than slovenly dressed at Basking Ridge, showered only sporadically and wore the same grungy clothes for days in succession, the reader should know that his parents, especially Betsey, provided him with a generous “clothes and living allowance”; neither Betsey nor Bix ever forgot Skyler’s birthday in March, directing their assistants to acquire appropriate happy-birthday-son cards for him, that they signed with love, to accompany birthday presents: from Betsey, usually an expensive cable-knit pull-over sweater, and from Bix, a sports-related gift, for instance a nifty genuine cowhide catcher’s mitt, or a Canuck Red-Eye hockey stick with Skyler’s initials branded into the wood. At the time of Skyler’s withdrawal from classes at Basking Ridge, as we’ve seen, Bix insisted upon Skyler remaining at school with the hope that Skyler might “snap out of it” and “recover”; when Skyler failed to recover, and may have grown worse, Bix called several times personally to leave messages for Skyler in a grave voice: “Skyler! Headmaster Shovell has been telling me some very upsetting things about your behavior there and I am registering my extreme disappointment that you should let me down another time, son. He claims that you became involved with a girl there—the daughter of Leander Harkness!—and that this ‘seriously disturbed’ girl tried to kill herself—and drugs seem to have been a part of it. Your therapist there says you’ve stopped coming to see her, but I am still being billed. You had better answer this call, Skyler. Maybe you can manipulate your gullible mother, but you can’t play your sick-psycho-kid tricks on your dad, got it? Quid pro quod!”

  Another omission in Skyler’s account of his Basking Ridge year has to do with the exact nature of his relationship with Elyot Grubbe; or, rather, Elyot’s relationship with Skyler. For it must have become painfully clear as the weeks passed that while Skyler thought condescendingly of Elyot as simply a friend, Elyot thought of Skyler as something more than a friend; only a prig-homophobe could have failed to interpret Elyot’s shy smiles and lovesick manner, which Elyot tried to disguise, not very convincingly, by listening obsessively to music on his headphones. And so it was a crude and cruel gesture for Skyler to bring Heidi Harkness into the picture, as if to flaunt his girlfriend to poor Elyot, and the fact that, unlike Elyot, beneath his weirdness Skyler Rampike was a normal guy.

  Poor Elyot Grubbe, I.Q. 159, destination Harvard Medical School, made to be a hapless observer of those two love-smitten teens Skyler and Heidi so visibly hand-in-hand, whispering together, kissing; the most defiantly unattractive of couples, and both, to Elyot’s chagrin, so tall; in the very throes of what the cool-headed reader with a Gallic flair recognized immediately as a folie-à-do!* Worse yet, as we’ve seen Elyot seemed to have fallen in love with Heidi Harkness, too. (Fortunately, a folie-à-trey did not develop. Skyler saw to that.) No wonder that, finally, after Heidi’s collapse, Elyot reacted against his self-involved insufferable friend who, though Elyot’s oldest companion from idyllic pre-trauma Fair Hills days, frequently smelled of his body, and his breath; and wrote him a chill little note ending their friendship.

  How proud I was of Elyot Grubbe, at that moment! I did not see this coming, but it felt just right. Guilt-wracked Skyler got exactly what he deserved in this succinct riposte.

  And all this escaped even the canny reader’s notice, didn’t it? Do you know why?

  For instance, not one of you was sharp-eyed enough to have noted how, in a silly-tender moment typical of teens, Heidi Harkness beguiled Skyler Rampike by playfully unlatching a pearly “cap” on her charmingly crooked front teeth: “See? My mother wanted my smile to be ‘perfect’—so is it?”

  Skyler laughed, swooping in to kiss.*

  But no readers took note of this sweetly silly little incident since Skyler neglected to report it. In fact, most of what Skyler experienced, and continues to experience, since December 1991, beginning with the chapter “In the Beginning”—(“In the beginning—long ago!—there wasn’t Bliss”) has been left out of this document. Most of Skyler’s life has not been recorded, and has become lost; as all our lives become lost. And how much worse the situation if, like poor Skyler, the narrator seems to be locked in a consciousness ceaselessly under siege by what S. Freud so aptly called the unconsciousness.

  For Skyler does not know all that Skyler’s brain cells know; and you, who are Skyler’s readers, can know only what Skyler chooses to tell you. Though presumably I am the “author”—I, too, know only what Skyler can tell me.

  For instance, Skyler has failed repeatedly to acknowledge the myriad consequences—legal, personal—following his sister’s death. For the most part, the legal complications did not directly involve him, for Skyler was, of course, a minor at the time. Skyler has skittishly alluded to the crude reportage of Tabloid Hell, that has kept Bliss Rampike’s glamorous-waif likeness in the public eye, as it has kept Bix and Betsey Rampike in its sights; but mainstream/legitimate publications and media outlets have also turned their sporadic attentions upon the Bliss Rampike case, as it has come to be known, as well. Not one but two grand juries had been convened in Morris County to investigate every aspect of the controversial case, that had come to a premature impasse of sorts when the leading suspect Gunther Ruscha suddenly died, and had languished under the jurisdiction of longtime district attorney Howard O’Stryker, in legal circles known for his reluctance to bring criminal cases to trial unless he was absolutely certain of winning. Succumbing to pressure from the public and from the New Jersey attorney general, Mr. O’Stryker finally convened a second grand jury in the fall of 2002 which met at regular intervals for three months, in utter secrecy; a succession of witnessses was called, Fair Hills police officers, the original investigating detectives Sledge and Slugg (now retired), local/state/FBI forensics experts, sex offenders and pedophilia experts, sepulchral Dr. Elyse (“Of all child homicide victims in my career as a medical examiner, it is Bliss Rampike who continues to haunt me. My fear is that I will die before that poor child’s murderer is found”); numerous individuals (therapists, prison guards, fellow Rahway inmates, parole officer, relatives, neighbors, etc.) associated with Gunther Ruscha; Fair Hills neighbors, acquaintances, friends, former employees, Trinity Church associates of the Rampikes, and many others; yet not, ironically, Bix and Betsey Rampike, for their ever-vigilant attorney M. Kruk succeeded in blocking all requests for interviews with his clients, who had, by this time, both moved out of New Jersey. As no physical evidence or witnesses had ever placed either of the elder Rampikes at the scene of the actual crime, no subpoenas could be issued to force the Rampikes to cooperate with the grand jury; nor was Skyler Rampike, represented by a lawyer named C
rampf, a partner in Kruk’s law firm, served a subpoena. A majority of jurors may have believed that Gunther Ruscha who had confessed to the crime had told the truth in his confession, yet, as forensics experts claimed, there was no physical evidence linking Ruscha to the crime scene, nor even to the interior of the Rampike house, and there were no witnesses to testify that they’d seen him that night. And so, in December 2002, the second grand jury in the now-notorious Bliss Rampike case was dismissed by the district attorney of Morris County without handing down a single indictment, and without establishing that Gunther Ruscha was the murderer.*

  In the media, particularly in tabloid papers and on TV, this second failure of a grand jury to reach any conclusions in the Bliss Rampike case was greeted with scarcely concealed derision, or, as in the New York Post, outright derision, as in this front-page banner headline:

  N.J. GRAND JURY TO BLISS: “WE CAN’T HELP YOU”

  In his defense, it should be said that Skyler was but dimly aware of the grand jury, as, in one or another treatment center at this time, Skyler was but dimly aware of the world of “news.”

  More mysteriously, Skyler failed to include in “First Love, Farewell!” this enigmatic episode:

  One November afternoon in 2003, a summons came for Skyler in the midst of his fifth-period math class, to go immediately to Headmaster Shovell’s office where, to Skyler’s surprise, a middle-aged man who looked vaguely familiar to Skyler, one of Bix Rampike’s golf-, tennis-, or squash-playing friends perhaps, greeted him with a smile and a brisk handshake: “Skyler! You’ve grown, I see. It has been a while—six years, four months to be exact—but I hope that you remember me: your attorney, Craig Crampf.”

  Skyler’s attorney! Skyler had not given a thought to Crampf in the intervening years. It was a shock to him that Crampf seemed still to be retained by Bix Rampike in the role of “Skyler’s attorney.”