It was good that Chérie was escorting Daddy and Skyler to their destination, for the interior of the Gold Medal Gym & Health Club was vast and labyrinthine. There were brightly lit courts marked RACQUETBALL, BASKETBALL, VOLLEYBALL. There were areas marked ACUPUNCTURE, CHIROPRACTIC, VITAMIN & HORMONE THERAPY. There was SAUNA, there was MASSAGE, there was STRENGTH TRAINING and there was FITNESS CENTER: a large, brightly lit space into which jaunty rock music was being piped, where individuals of various sizes were struggling with machines (Skyler recognized NordicTrack, Nautilus, treadmills and stationary bicycles, but there were more sinister machines trussed with leather straps like torture-chairs, he shuddered to see), their frantic efforts doubled in mirrors as if in mockery. There was an enormous swimming pool, bright aqua water in which individuals swam in lap lanes like demented seals and next was WEIGHT ROOM where individuals, mostly men, were perceived struggling to lift weights, grimacing, grunting, sweating as covertly they eyed their reflections in floor-to-ceiling mirrors that seemed to shimmer with inaudible laughter. A cruel punishment it seemed to Skyler, that adults had not only to struggle so, but were made to watch themselves in mirrors.
At the farthest corner of the building, as in an anteroom of hell, was GYMNASTICS LAB. Here the jaunty rock music had been supplanted by somber electronic music, a slow, wan pulse barely discernible above the vibrating hum of air-conditioning. “Vassily! Here is Mr. Rampike and his son Skyler,” Chérie called gaily to a gnome-like little man who was overseeing the predicament of a lanky boy who seemed to have gotten one foot caught inside a leather ring hanging from the ceiling, while the other foot had come free, so that the boy dangled helplessly upside down a few inches above a floor mat, like a mangled worm on a hook. Skyler tasted panic: Was Daddy going to make him do that?
Before departing Chérie wished Skyler “the best of luck” and gave Daddy her “personal card” which Daddy pocketed in his khaki pants in a fluid, intimate gesture.
Deftly Daddy guided Skyler forward, his fingers lightly gripping the nape of Skyler’s neck. Skyler’s frightened eyes observed that he was by far the youngest, and the smallest, individual in the Gymnastics Lab. There appeared to be about twenty or twenty-five gymnasts—boys, girls?—difficult to tell for all were painfully thin. The most energetic were those swinging on rings, kicking their feet high, arms and shoulders straining and in their faces looks of pinched concentration. Others were working out on parallel bars, and on horizontal bars, and on fearsome-looking ropes that hung from the ceiling high above. There was a large trampoline upon which several individuals were noisily jumping, flailing their arms, somersaulting forward, somersaulting backward, in wayward leaps and lunges as if at the mercy of fierce gusts of wind. (Weren’t trampolines supposed to be dangerous? Didn’t children break their necks, their backs in falls from trampolines? Skyler took comfort knowing that Mummy would never let him climb up on any damn old trampoline, ever!) On long mats laid on the hardwood floor a number of gymnasts were “tumbling”: multiple somersaults, handstands and cartwheels, straining back-bends, terrifying “splits.” A lone young gymnast (evidently male, adolescent, with puny, grape-sized genitals outlined in spandex tights, upside-down) balanced himself on his head and forearms, motionless as a stalagmite.
In “Phs. Ed.” class at Fair Hills Day, Skyler had been made, with other first-grade boys, to “tumble” on similar shinily-gray mats laid on the floor, mostly somersaults, frantically rolling to the end of the mat where if he wasn’t careful, or even if he was, Skyler invariably struck a knee against the floor and winced with pain.
It was the mats he hated: the sight of them, and the smell.
Like flattened snakes, they were. Or worse, those flat-bodied seemingly eyeless undersea creatures called rays. The distinctive smell—rubbery-plastic, moist and sweaty—made his nostrils pinch.
Skyler tugged at Daddy’s arm whispering, “Daddy, I don’t w-want to be here,” but Daddy was already addressing the gnome-like Vassily: “Hi! I’m Bix Rampike and this is my son Skyler who wants to be the best God-damned gymnast you can make him.”
Vassily smiled, startled. His smile exposed damp gums and oddly spaced tea-colored teeth. He seemed in awe of this American Daddy who loomed over him, extending a hand to shake his hand, vigorously. The gymnastics instructor was perhaps five-feet-five, to Daddy’s six-feet-three, and at least seventy pounds lighter than Daddy. He was of any age between thirty-five and fifty-five, with a tight, compact body covered in ropey muscles like scar tissue. His face was creased and shrewd, his thumbnail eyes wary, watchful. In exotically accented English he said, “‘Ram-pick.’ ‘Skeel-er.’ Yes hello. I am instructor here: ‘trainer.’ I am Vassily Andreevich Volokhomsky. I am ‘White Russian.’ I am winner silver medal, gymnastics, World Olympics Japan 1972, when I am eighteen. I am departed Soviet Union, 1973. I am U.S. citizen now. Frankly said, I am the best trainer of young athletes, for hundred miles.” Daddy said, impressed, “First time I’ve shaken hands with an actual Olympic medal winner. This is great, Vassily! And ‘White Russian’—we’re ‘White American.’ Mostly this part of New Jersey is except in some fields, like for instance computers, and engineering, and medical technology, and ‘research’…” Daddy’s voice trailed off, it was time to nudge Skyler forward, to shake Vassily Andreevich Volokhomsky’s hand, too.
“‘Skeel-er’? Is not usual name, eh?” Quickly Vassily released Skyler’s limp little hand as if fearful of breaking it. “He is very very young, Mr. Rampike. There are preschool classes for gymnasts, but not here. ‘Every gymnast a star’—that is their boast. But not here, we are more serious as you can see.”
Daddy said, “I’m serious. My wife and I are eager to support our son who has a dream of being a gymnast and can’t get the right kind of professional training at his school, for sure. We don’t have time to dawdle, frankly. Skyler is almost eight.”
“Eight?” Vassily regarded Skyler doubtfully. “Very young for eight, and his muscles are soft tissue, you can see.”
Daddy laughed heartily, Vassily was so mistaken. Deftly Daddy flexed Skyler’s right bicep for him, and squeezed the minuscule flesh between his massive thumb and forefinger. “See? The kid’s got muscle. Budding-muscle. And these leg muscles”—Daddy gripped Skyler’s right calf, hard—“are even more impressive. Not bad for a suburban kid who sits on his ass doing homework and perusing his Mummy’s sex magazines, eh?” (Daddy winked at Skyler who stared at him open-mouthed. Just kidding!) “Sure, Vassily, I’m aware: there are gymnastics classes for younger kids. But Skyler is not like other kids his age. This ‘peer-group’ bullshit, marching in lockstep like socialist robots, is not for us. (Sorry: you might be a ‘Marxist,’ eh? Except if you’re one of us U.S. citizens now, could be capitalism is looking more attractive?) Like I said, we don’t have time to dawdle. I’ve paid for one hour’s instruction today and we’re wasting time talking. Start the kid out with ‘tumbling’ like those kids are doing, that doesn’t look too hard. Small kid like Skyler, he’ll be great on the mats and at those kinds of showy routines the Olympic gymnasts do on the bars. Skyler can work his way up to rings and ropes, I’m assuming those are more challenging. Me,” Daddy laughed, shifting his shoulders in an abashed gesture, “I’d be lousy at gymnastics. Already in grade school I was playing football and I went on to play fullback at Cornell and had a few pro offers, now I’m a decent golfer, I play tennis, squash with guys like myself, but gymnastics?—hell, I’d break my neck on the mats, or pull down the ceiling on the rings. So I’m going to entrust you with my son’s athletic future, Vassily, because you’re not just a pro who comes highly recommended, you’re an Olympic winner and obviously you know the ropes of amateur sports and whatever progress Skyler makes in the next few months, if it’s what I hope for, the bottom line is there’s a bonus for you, comrade! ‘Sky’s the limit,’ see?”
During this impassioned outburst, the gnome-like White Russian gaped upward at Bix Rampike towering over him: this fervent American with his frank,
boyishly open face and intense soulful eyes, something shrewd and carnivorous about the mouth. “I will try, Mr. Ram-pike. ‘Skeel-er’ and I, we will try very hard.”
ALL THIS WHILE, SKYLER HAD BEEN STARING AT A YOUNG GYMNAST CLOSE by—bony-chested, prominent pelvic bones inside a tight blue-black spandex doublet, a fixed, fanatic expression in the angular face—possibly a girl, of about fifteen—hair scraped back into a meager ponytail—who was lifting herself with excruciating slowness onto a horizontal bar and then, somehow, by sheer tremulous strength, above the bar, the tendons in her neck taut and her arms quivering with strain. The girl’s glassy eyes locked with Skyler’s Run away! Run out of here! It isn’t too late for you, run away!
Instead, Skyler shut his eyes.
* Tabbouleh rasa. Damn “foreign phrase” isn’t in my dictionary which is an ominous sign maybe I’ve misspelled it. No matter: for those of us haphazardly (if expensively) educated and pretentious as hell, dropouts eager to be mistaken as O current, O fate, and O fund, of the cognozenti, polylingual and polymorphous and non plus ultra, it means, possibly in Latin, “a smooth or erased tablet”: that’s to say “the mind in its hypothetical primary blank or empty state.” (Sounds good!)
* Do we give a damn about Bix’s blurred boozy sports-buddies? Do we care to know their last names, what they looked like, where they lived and whether their wives were friendly/not-so-friendly to Mummy? We do not. For Jim, Dan, Wade, Russ and Rich will be dropped within a few months by Bix Rampike as the “up-and-coming” junior exec is promoted above and beyond their income range/social status with naught but a mildly abashed-boyish backward glance of regret.
* What the hell is this? A used condom? A condom? In Daddy’s new Jeep Crusher? That bastard! That deceitful son of a bitch! Only now it dawns on me, Daddy must’ve been screwing one of his girl assistants, or, who knows, some hooker he’d picked up somewhere. Skyler, poor dumb kid, wouldn’t have had a glimmering of a clue what any of this meant for all Skyler knew of “sex” was that it involved doing desperate things to “keep your hubby from wandering.”
GOLD MEDAL GYM & HEALTH CLUB II
YOU, THE CANNY/PERCEPTIVE READER, INFUSED WITH A (SECRET, SUBTLE) streak of sadism, are pretty sure you know where this is headed, aren’t you? Poor hapless Skyler left in the Gymnastics Lab with Vassily Andreevich Volokhomsky while Daddy ambles off elsewhere in the Gold Medal Gym & Health Club with the admirable intention of, as he says, lifting weights, maybe run on a treadmill, whatever daddys do, restless and randy daddys like Bix Rampike who are frequently told by adoring young women like Chérie that they resemble the Terminator Schwarzenegger himself; poor Skyler whose fate careens toward him like a tractor-trailer truck with failed brakes plunging down a steep mountain road. You steel yourself for the inevitable crash. You might even shut your eyes as Skyler did, back in whenever this was, an unnamed season in 1993 when Skyler walked without the slightest suggestion of a limp and “Bliss Rampike” had not yet been invented.
A happier time, it must have been. A more innocent time.
For What if Skyler had thrived as a young gymnast? What if that day at the Gold Medal Gym & Health Club, Skyler had unexpectedly revealed athletic promise, hitherto unguessed-at? What if the Rampike son and not the Rampike daughter had become the child-prodigy celebrity of Fair Hills, New Jersey?
What if. These tattered and corroded memories are being presented in this document as if only just unfolding, which gives to the document a cinematic sort of “present-action” that is misleading, for of course all this is over. Skyler in the Gymnastics Lab where, that first day, he is made to exhaust himself in repetitive “stretching exercises” on a rubbery-plastic mat, with only a few clumsy somersaults overseen by the disdainful White Russian, and no injuries; Skyler’s Daddy mysteriously elsewhere, who knows where, or with whom, so that Daddy is forty minutes late returning to the Gymnastics Lab to call out with a large, lopsided, abashed-but-unapologetic grin, “So, comrade, how’d the kid do?”*; the Gold Medal Gym & Health Club dominating an entire corner of the Cross Tree Shopping Center with its stucco fortress and “mosaic” humanoid athletes long since bankrupt, the very building razed, gutted to the ground and replaced with a steel-and-aluminum high-rise office building. (For the Cross Tree Shopping Center, dazzling-upscale in its era, could not compete with the far more dazzling-upscale, gigantic Mall of Liberty only three miles away near a handy exit of Interstate 80.) Sick transit gloria or whatever the (Latin) expression is, maybe my editor will know.
Jesus! These vertiginous fast-forwards into what’s called the future, they scare me, too.
Let me return to that first Saturday. And slow-motion forward as in a dreamy cinematic montage: as Daddy led me, fingers at the nape of my neck firmly guiding me in a reverse course through the labyrinthine corridors of the Gold Medal Gym & Health Club on that first occasion of my gymnastics training, and back outside into daylight, as we headed back to the Jeep Crusher XL amid a sea of similarly shiny, expensive, American S.U.V./military-style vehicles, Daddy asked how I felt about my “workout” with my “personal trainer” and, in typical eager-Skyler manner (despite a dazed dizziness in my head from somersaulting on the mat and sharp pains in both knees from striking the gym floor, I did truly feel a glimmer of—was it hope?), I said, “Good, Daddy! I l-loved it,” and Daddy gave a little Whoop! of pleasure, grabbed me in the crook of his strong arm and kissed me wetly on the mouth, saying, in a choked-Daddy voice, “Son, I’m damned proud of you. Hell, I’m impressed.”
Daddy! I guess I adored the son of a bitch, like everyone else.
(MUMMY AND EDNA LOUISE ASKED WHAT HAD SKYLER LEARNED AT THE GYM and so, on the thick-piled rug of the family room, clumsily Skyler replicated somersaults, a handstand or two, or attempts at handstands, culminating in a collision with a chair, an overturned lamp. Mummy laughed, and Mummy scolded. And Edna Louise who was just a little girl, so much smaller than Skyler, and more nimble, imitated her big brother by somersaulting across the floor in an almost-fluid motion of her wiry little body. Her handstands were less certain, at first. Said Skyler, “Not bad for a girl.”)
SUBSEQUENT VISITS TO THE GYMNASTICS LAB, AS THE CANNY/PERCEPTIVE reader with the sadistic streak might suspect, were not always so festive, nor did they end with Daddy hugging-and-kissing his son. Not invariably!
Though, to give him credit, Vassily tried valiantly and without evident irony (excepting, at times, an upward roll of his inscrutable eyes, a look of clenching about his jaws) in the rigors and rewards of “elementary” mat-work; and to instill in him, in grave, heavily accented English, the gymnast’s catechism: “Strength. Flexibility. Control. These are our goals. To which we add: grace, harmony of movement, and control. To which we add: to overcome uncertainty, and to overcome the fear of pain. ‘In gymnastics, each pupil is a potential star.’ That is Vassily Andreevich Volokhomsky’s belief, Skeel-er. Who fails, does so for lack of will.”
Skyler smiled faintly. Was that a good thing, to overcome a fear of pain? Wouldn’t it be better, the shrewd six-year-old reasoned, to overcome pain? Better yet, to avoid pain?
Who fails, does so for lack of will.
This, grimmest of Russian folk-proverbs, causes a shiver to ripple up my spine, to this very day.
Yet: you’d be wrong to think that, despite how things turned out, I have no happy memories of the Gymnastics Lab and the hours of “training” under the tutelage of the gnome-like White Russian, because I do. Truly, I do!
• The heart-stopping occasion when, aided by Vassily’s practiced, patient hands, I managed to balance myself on my head and forearms on the mat, quivering legs stretched aloft, and feet together, for enough seconds to warrant a spontaneous round of applause from several observing young gymnasts (“Great work, Skyler!”—“That is so cool, Skyler!”) and gushing insincere praise from Vassily (“Skeel-er! You are seeing it is not so hard is it?”)
• A dazzling demonstration of gymnastics by Vassily’s star tumbler Kevin, at Vassily’s
request, that involved a running leap onto the mat, a sequence of flawlessly executed cartwheels the length of the mat, and back; yet more remarkable body-flips, front-, back-, courageously performed and seemingly effortless; coaxing a rare smile from Kevin at the sight of my astonished face, and the mumbled prediction that, if I “kept at it,” I’d be “just as good, someday.”
• A murmured query from the usually reticent Vassily, shortly after Daddy breezed out of the gym one morning: “Your papa, Skeel-er, must be VIP, I think? ‘Ram-pike’—a politician?”
• Vassily’s kind encouragement when, gripping the horizontal bar, I finally succeeded in pulling myself up to—nearly!—the level of my chin, not once but several times; and even, trembling with the strain, holding myself for several suspenseful seconds until my grip weakened, and I fell onto the mat: “Very good, Skeel-er! Each small step is a step to success.”
(Please don’t sneer: these casual words in Vassily’s exotic English yet reverberate in the murky air of this squalid room on Pitts Street, New Brunswick, more than thirteen years later. Sure I know Vassily didn’t mean it, not for a nanosecond, and yet! for those of us so rarely praised, even insincerity can touch the heart.)
AND THEN.
Unexpectedly.
So strangely…
Grimly smiling/carelessly shaved Bix Rampike jet-lagged and cranky from a trip to Saudi Arabia (which Skyler misheard as Sandy Arabia) on oil business, was late driving Skyler to the Gymnastics Lab on that final Saturday in some dismal New Jersey season (winter? overcast sky like the interior of a soiled canvas tent) with his big beefy shoulders hunched over the steering wheel of the Jeep Crusher XL and his fleshy lower lip outthrust. Where on previous Saturdays, Daddy had been cheery and talkative and in a good-Daddy mood, today it seemed that Daddy was not good-Daddy, and scarcely glanced at Skyler trussed in the safety harness beside him. Earlier that day, Skyler had overheard muffled voices in Daddy and Mummy’s bedroom and (unless he’d dreamt it) from time to time during the night. Outside their parents’ bedroom, sitting on the top step of the stairs, her Colonial American Girl Doll in her arms, was little Edna Louise in pajamas, barefoot and shivering. Skyler scolded, as Mummy would have done: “Edna Louise, you shouldn’t be barefoot. It’s cold.” Skyler liked to scold his little sister, for Edna Louise looked at him so pleadingly, as if begging to be forgiven; and Skyler liked to forgive. Skyler took his sister’s limp chill little hand and led Edna Louise back into the nursery, as Edna Louise’s room was still called, and found fuzzy yellow slippers for her to put on. It was 7:50 A.M. and Edna Louise’s Mother Goose lamp that was the size of an actual goose had been burning through the night. Skyler, so much bigger, older, and smarter than Edna Louise, and now training to be a gymnast, did not require a “night-light” in his room in order to sleep. No longer!
My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike Page 8