My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In fact, Mummy felt the need to hire another female assistant (Ardis Huddle, real estate/PR background) to help manage Bliss’s increasingly complicated career, with a special emphasis upon exploring tie-ins with child-modeling agencies, advertising agencies, and fund-raiser appearances; and since Maria could not be expected to handle so many calls and so much mail, nor could Maria be expected to clean the house, cook for the family, shop for, prepare for, cook and clean up after the elaborate dinner parties Mummy began to schedule on the average of one every two weeks, a second Maria, from Peru, younger than the first Maria, with a darker skin, startlingly beautiful dark eyes, and yet more exotically accented English, came to work for us.

  Little Maria, Big Maria. By purest chance Skyler happened to observe the initial encounter, in the upstairs hall, between Daddy (only just returned, jet-lagged and sour-smelling, not in the greatest of Daddy-moods, from Bangkok, or Singapore) and Little Maria (carrying the orange plastic laundry basket heaped with laundry just out of the drier): Daddy stared, and Daddy blinked, and Daddy stopped dead in his tracks, and a smile broke over Daddy’s chunky front teeth as Daddy shifted his suitcase to his left hand to free Daddy’s large strong bonecrusher hand for a handshake, which poor Little Maria, struggling with the laundry basket, could barely manage. In a warm-welcoming deep-baritone voice Daddy murmured: “Bu-ena vis-ta, senorita! Or—what the fuck time is it?—nach-a? I am Bix ‘Gringo Honcho’ Rampike and who might you be, très-bella senorita?”*

  What choice had Little Maria but to surrender her brown-skinned hand to the gringo honcho’s Caucasian hand?—what choice but to smile shyly, as her new employer loomed above her smiling and licking his lips? And what choice had little Skyler but to duck quickly back into his room before Big Daddy sighted him, and walloped the breath out of him in a Big Daddy greeting…

  “IT IS LIKE CHRISTMAS, DARLING, ISN’T IT? THREE PARTIES THIS WEEKEND! And Imogene Stubbe has invited me to ‘co-chair’ the Volunteers of Fair Hills Spring Madness luncheon with her, and Gwendolyn Burr has just called to invite ‘your darling little boy’ over for a playdate with her son Baxter…”

  Of course, Bix Rampike had been well-liked in Fair Hills from the start, but it was unmistakable how, in spring 1995, and yet more conspicuously in the fall/winter social season, the Rampikes were suddenly on everyone’s guest list; and Betsey Rampike, yet uneasy and hesitant among her more glamorous Fair Hills neighbors, was made to feel welcome: as if it were as much Betsey Rampike, as the handsome charismatic brisk-hand-shaking Bix Rampike, whom hostesses were vying for, and wished to befriend. Skyler had no need to sneak into Mummy’s desk to understand that certain of the asterisked names making up the magical pyramid of names on the pink construction paper had been recently circled in triumph: STUBBE, BURR, MARROW, McCONE, HAMBRUCK, KRUK. And there were EDSON, ROMNEY, BLOOMGREN, FRASS, HULTS. And even WHITTAKER. And KLEINHAUS! (Though not McGREETY. And, to Betsey’s continued chagrin, not CHAPLIN.) For a surreal period during the gay, giddy, protracted holiday season that in Fair Hills extended from pre-Christmas through New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day to Twelfth Night (January 6), it seemed that several very wealthy and usually remote residents of the large country estates/horse farms in the lush rolling countryside north of Fair Hills, including such fabled old-money New Jerseyans as ex-Senator Mack Steadley and his wife Irma, and the media baron Si Solomon and his wife Mimi, and billionaire Fritz Vizor and wife Fanny, were eager to befriend Bix and Betsey Rampike, or at any rate to invite the young couple to their homes. On such lavish occasions even Bix was uneasy, and prone to drinking too much, for Bix understood that these were individuals who rarely mingled with multi-millionaires like Bix’s superiors at Scor Chemicals; these were individuals who knew nothing of the crucial distinctions in Fair Hills among the Fair Hills Golf and Country Club, and the Pebble Hill Tennis Club, and the Village Women’s Club, and the Sylvan Glen Golf Club, because these were people who would not have wished to join these clubs no matter how “exclusive” and “prestigious.”

  Daddy understood, but Mummy did not. Mummy agonized: How could they invite “Mack” Steadley and his wife Irma (Forbes heiress!) to a dinner party at the Rampikes’ so unoriginal Colonial, with such “ordinary” furnishings—and on a mere two-acre lot!—when the Steadleys owned hundreds of acres of New Jersey countryside above Lake Hopatcong; how could they invite the Vizors who lived in a baronial “Country French” house the size of a castle, and raised pedigree Black Angus cattle; how could they invite the fabled Solomons who owned newspapers, magazines, television stations and lived in a four-level “classic contemporary” on a private mountain, though Mimi was “so much fun, eager to tell me about her ‘amateur skating career’ when she was a girl—” and Daddy interrupted, “Get real, Bets. Grow a brain. If your I.Q. caught up with your bra size, you’d be the Einstein of Ravens Crest Drive. These people were just checking us out. No more. They’d seen some of the media about us Rampikes—‘Parents of ’—‘Skating prodigy.’ ‘Next Sonja Henie.’ They won’t be inviting us back. That was clinched even before you opened your mouth for the first time and raved on about ‘what a beautiful house.’ Just the look of you, sweetheart. And maybe me, too. They won’t be inviting us back and sure as hell none of them would accept an invitation to dine on Ravens Crest Drive. Comprehendez, sweetheart?”

  Comprehendez.

  (ADMIT IT, SKY: CAN’T END THIS SCENE. CAN’T STAY WITH IT A MOMENT longer but can’t end it, either. Need to cut away quickly but then the suspicious reader would know that the amateur author can’t handle his own material when it gets too painful. Surely the scene between my parents came to an end, eventually; but not for several more minutes, as they were undressing for bed; what I’d overheard came through the (shut) door of my parents’ bedroom and I wasn’t present to register Mummy’s shocked eyes, Mummy’s stricken face; nor did I see Daddy waving her away, backing off in that way that Daddy had, in this case stomping into his bathroom. Must’ve been late-night, a weekend, Daddy and Mummy had been out, drinking for hours at one or another of the dazzling Fair Hills parties they were always going to, and giving.)

  QUICK CUT TO: “IT SEEMS SO LONG AGO, SKYLER, DOESN’T IT? ANOTHER lifetime! When Mummy wasn’t very happy, and we went on our little drives in Fair Hills, and nobody ever called me, and I was so lonely, and the—what was that baby’s name—was always crying, crying, crying. If I could have seen ahead to now, Skyler! I might have saved myself some tears.”

  In Mummy’s triumphant hand, an engraved invitation to New Year’s Eve at the Whittiers.

  ABSENCE OF FURNITURE. SORRY ABOUT THIS!

  When Mummy complained that her house was “unoriginal”—“ordinary” the reader should have been provided with a “visual setting” (as in a movie) so that the words registered as ironic. For in fact, the Rampike house was expensively/obsessively furnished in “period furniture” in most of the downstairs rooms which were for show, as in a museum. Readers, likely to be female, with a morbid interest in furniture and home decorating should consult photographs in Stately Homes of New Jersey: A Guided Tour by Jacqueline Bigelow, where pages 48–53 contain furniture that resembles some of the furniture in our home.

  IN WINTER 1995 TO 1996 IN THE WAKE OF BLISS RAMPIKE’S AMAZING NEW triumphs, titles, and trophies (most publicized: Atlantic States Regional Girls’ Ice Figure Skating Challenge in which, in Division One, Bliss Rampike placed first with a score of 5.7 out of a possible 6) there came in rapid succession like fulfilled wishes in a Grimm’s fairy tale of ambiguous import yet more invitations, letters bearing the heraldic coats of arms of such Fair Hills bastions of privilege as the Fair Hills Golf and Country Club, the Pebble Hill Tennis Club, and the Fair Hills Village Women’s Club; and Mummy was thrilled, and gave a cry of girlish joy, on her knees thanking Jesus—“You had faith in me, when I had no faith in myself.” Eagerly Mummy would have joined each of these clubs—immediately!—except Daddy advised “holding out” for the more prestigious Sylvan Glen
Golf Club which, as everyone knew, had among its “very select” membership each of Fair Hills’s most revered megamillionaires, and trumped all other clubs. Mummy pleaded, “But what if the Sylvan Glen doesn’t ask us to join, and the others withdraw their invitations?” and Daddy said, “O.K.: accept the women’s club. That’s just women. But don’t screw this up for me, sweetheart. Let me play this right.”

  (SO: D’YOU THINK BIX “PLAYED IT RIGHT”? D’YOU THINK THAT BIX WAS right? Are you on Bix’s side? Do you sneer at the Fair Hills Golf and Country Club with its sizable membership, that includes, since the late 1980s, a discreet scattering of “ethnic minority” members, and do you favor, as Bix does, the smaller, more elite, less conspicuously “integrated” Sylvan Glen Golf Club?* What pisses me is: no matter how dramatically, with what closely observed moral indignation, I present a character like Bix Rampike who is intended to be an unmitigated/unredeemed son of a bitch, a “charismatic” bully and an asshole and a predator and (who knows?) the brutal assailant of his own six-year-old daughter,† some of you, a reliable fraction of the female readership, will admire Bix anyway; and will imagine, as women who are drawn to such men invariably imagine, that such men would never hurt them but love them dearly.)

  QUICK CUT TO: “OH ISN’T SHE DARLING! ISN’T SHE! AND SO BLOND. AND SO small.” For little Bliss Rampike—and little Skyler, too—are helping pass appetizers (stuffed mushrooms, yummy little spicy sausages, crab-puff-pastries) at Mummy and Daddy’s gala big party which is the largest party that Mummy and Daddy have ever given in Fair Hills, a spare-no-expenses party Daddy has declared, a truly classy party with valet parking—a small platoon of eager high-school-age boys hired by Daddy: “You can’t expect guests like ours to park on the street, and walk.” From the street, the spacious old Colonial at 93 Ravens Crest is ablaze with lights like a Christmas tree. Inside the house are lavish floral displays, not one but two “full-service” bars manned by professional bartenders, making their way through the crowd are attractive young servers in white uniforms. Amid the babel of high-pitched voices and laughter, the wistful Gaelic strumming of a harp from the first-floor staircase landing where an ethereal-looking female harpist is playing with long slender fingers. So much excitement! So many people! For when you are popular like Bix and Betsey Rampike, and invited out often, naturally you must invite back: “reciprocate.” You must “entertain.” Skyler has been hearing this, frequently. A party is like many playdates simultaneously, involving as many names on Mummy’s pink-construction-paper pyramid as possible. Daddy is too busy to be involved in party plans of course though Daddy loves parties, returning sometimes from the very airport, from “abroad,” to hurriedly shower and shave and rush back downstairs even as the first guests arrive, shoving a big-friendly-Bix Rampike hand out for a bone-crushing handshake. And Daddy has the “final veto” on the guest list, of course: No one is to be invited to the Rampikes’ just because Mummy likes them, or feels sorry for them, or because they’ve been “nice.” First rule of social life! When Mummy protests weakly, “Oh but gosh, Bix, can’t we make an exception for—” Daddy wags his big-Daddy forefinger with comical menace like Jack Nicholson in The Shining: “Batta, sweetie. Bat-ta.”

  Bat-ta? Seems to mean case closed, Skyler has learned.

  “Oh! Are you—‘Bliss’? I saw your picture in the paper, I think! Bessie, or, no—Betsey!—you must be so proud of this child.”

  Within the hour, now that it’s dark outside the gala-reflecting windows of the house, little Bliss and little Skyler are to be scooped up by one of the Marias, taken away upstairs to be bathed and put to bed, just now there is a feverish thrum in Skyler’s blood, a pained smile on Skyler’s little-boy face, for Skyler has got it into his hardball-head that Mummy, who is Betsey Rampike in this gathering, Betsey who is Bix’s wife, and Bliss’s mother, must be protected against harm, or hurt: from what source, Skyler has no idea. For a party is a happy time, isn’t it?—a gay giddy roller-coaster occasion, where adults drink because they are happy and want to be even happier, a magical occasion, fraught with mystery like a ship embarked upon unknown waters, choppy, turbulent, its prow pitching, its decks tilting, impossible to know if such excitement is a good thing, or not-so-good. Skyler, bearing a tray of appetizers, is drawing some attention, too: at least, his parents’ guests pause to snatch up the delicious tidbits, and to thank him. What an adorable little man! Is this—Scooter? Bix and Betsey’s son? Skyler’s wavy-fawn hair has been damply combed, Skyler has been fitted out by Little Maria in his hunter-green Fair Hills Day School blazer with school insignia on the breast pocket, his shirt is white cotton in emulation of Daddy’s white shirt, his clip-on tie is a dark-green school necktie, his trousers are little-boy corduroy from Junior Gap. Entrusted by Mummy with the responsibility of “helping out”—bearing a tray of appetizers among the guests—Skyler is anxiously aware that both Mummy and Daddy might be watching him and has vowed not to limp!—nor even to shift his weight to one leg, to make an inadvertent laughable sight (for, at Fair Hills Day School, Skyler has been mortified to see certain of his mean-boy classmates mocking him by lurching about as if one of their legs was shorter than the other, to the amusement of observers), as adult strangers with drinks in hands loom above him, jostling him and his sister holding her appetizer tray at dangerous slant, for Bliss is such a clumsy ill-coordinated girl on land, however graceful and determined on the ice, and stricken with shyness like measles, though eager to help Mummy on this crucial occasion for Mummy has been planning this party for weeks, Mummy is celebrating the triumph of Bliss’s career and yet more triumph to come—there are “deals” pending, of which no one knows except Mummy!—and Mummy has dressed Bliss as a doll-like replica of Betsey Rampike: both mother and daughter are wearing glamorous zebra-stripe dance dresses of crinkly, clingy velvet with provocatively tight bodices and flaring skirts, diamond-patterned black stockings and shiny black patent leather dance shoes adorned with red cloth roses. Quite a sight! Might’ve been painted by Velázquez, or by Goya in a benign mood! (Renoir? Whistler? Otto Dix?) Mummy’s helmet of glossy dark-brown hair sparkles with “stardust”—Bliss’s blond, ringleted hair sparkles with “stardust.” Expertly, with a very light touch, for Betsey Rampike is strongly disapproving of those figure-skating mothers who “make up” their daughters like “little painted harlots”—Mummy has transformed Bliss’s plain-little-girl face into a beautiful-little-girl face by penciling in Bliss’s pale, almost nonexistent eyebrows with a light brown pencil and by “dabbing”—“just a touch”—of coral-pink lipstick on Bliss’s pale lips. And maybe a little liquid makeup, and an artful “dabbing” of powder. (For the irony is, as few persons know, certainly not Bliss Rampike’s adoring fans, that Bliss isn’t especially pretty, not even what you’d call cute; but a child-face is far easier to beautify than an adult face, if you know how. And Betsey Rampike has learned!) Mummy herself is very beautiful tonight, Skyler thinks, for Mummy’s eyes glow like gems, dramatically outlined in inky-black mascara; and Mummy’s lips are full, fleshy, shinily crimson, and the lines and “crow’s feet” in Mummy’s face that have made her so vexed and sulky in recent months—complaining what is more unfair, more unjust, than lines caused by smiling?—by being nice, and smiling?—have mysteriously vanished after appointments with Dr. Screed, the Fair Hills dermatologist/otolaryngologist much recommended by Mummy’s new friends. Especially, Mummy is thrilled to lead eager new arrivals to her daughter who has been positioned like a fairy-tale princess in a corner of the living room, how thrilled Betsey is when her friends marvel at Bliss with the widened eyes of awe/envy: “Ohhh. Is this child adorable! And that matching mother-and-daughter outfit—amazing.”

  Beaming Mummy is yet sharp-eyed Mummy observing that her daughter isn’t lifting her angel-face to Mrs. Frass ( judge’s wife) nor making eye-contact with Mrs. Muddick (mega-millionaire’s wife) but staring fixedly into space like a mechanical doll. With a part of her hyper-vigilant mind (where is Bix? where has Bix crept
off to, and why?) Mummy is aware of much that is happening at her party out of her field of vision, even as Mummy is unobtrusively pinching the soft flesh of Bliss’s forearm and lightly chiding Bliss to give Mrs. Fenn a kiss, please! (Mrs. Fenn, another mega-millionaire-developer’s wife who only a few months before had snubbed poor Betsey Rampike at the Fair Hills Literacy Volunteers gala fund-raiser.) Bliss consents, but with a shivery little wince detectable only by sharp-Mummy eyes; as Bliss consents to being hugged, cuddled, lifted in arms, “smooched” by Harry Fenn himself. Yet Mummy senses how reluctant Bliss is to please Mummy’s guests, Mummy does not like this (secret, surreptitious) little core of her daughter’s resistance (like bone-marrow cancer, invisible to the unsuspecting eye) as Mummy does not like Bliss removing the plastic “bite” from her mouth during the night and hiding it beneath her pillow or worse yet—as if Mummy wouldn’t know, for Mummy has continuous access to her daughter through the nursery door-in-the-wall opening into Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom—tossed beneath her bed. “Bliss: take care, sweetie. Hmmm?” (Just a light warning, disguised by a Mummy-kiss, and a Mummy-adjusting of the zebra-stripe bodice.)

  But Mummy is in a good mood tonight! Mummy is! Drinking the most delicious red wine, expensive French wine Daddy has purchased by the case through his mentor-friend at Scor Chemicals, Mel Hambruck. Mummy has vowed, she will not become vexed/upset/agitated because of Bliss’s insubordination, she will not. Skyler is feeling protective of Mummy, and Skyler is pained to see that Mummy is drinking too much, and has unknowingly splashed red wine onto the swelling bosom of her zebra-stripe dress; Skyler is determined not to be jealous of poor little Bliss tonight, though Bliss is the child whom guests want to see, or anyway some guests, mostly women, exclaiming over the “angel-child” who reminds them of their own daughters no longer now so young, and not nearly so like doll-angels. Mostly these exclamatory females are women like Mattie size-fourteen wife of Reverend “Archie” Higley, and Mrs. Cuttlebone the real estate agent who’d sold the Rampikes their house and Mrs. Whittier (Mummy’s mentor-friend who’d nominated her for membership in the coveted Village Women’s Club), and Mrs. Stubbe, and Mrs. Burr, so powerfully do these women smell of perfume that Skyler feels a sneeze imminent, a tingling-ticklish sensation in his nose, or maybe this is the result of naughty little Skyler surreptitiously sipping from left-behind glasses, red wine, white wine, Scotch diluted by melted ice cubes, quick before Mummy sees! quick before Daddy sees! A pair of (male) legs collides with Skyler—“Oh hey, sorry—is it Scooter?—sorry, son, din’t mean to spill my drink on you, don’t blame you for making an ugly face at me son, but I am sorry, Scoot. I am.” Not far away on the other side of a coffee table heaped with dirtied glasses and plates Mummy takes no heed of Skyler’s distress for Mummy is showing off Bliss to several new arrivals, must be VIP guests judging from Mummy’s quavering voice as she introduces Bliss to Mrs. Klaus (one of the lockjawed size-two wealthy-patrician Fair Hills blondes, of whom more later), and to Mrs. Kruk (“Biffy”—an officer of the Village Women’s Club and mother of the fat-faced budding-psychopath Albert Kruk, a notable ex-playdate), and to stylish Mrs. O’Stryker (a neighbor on Woodsmoke Drive, wife of “Howie” O’Stryker, Morris County D.A. and squash partner of Bix), urging Bliss to look up and say hello, honey? and smile? as a woman with bright lipstick looms over Bliss—Mrs. Marrow?—thrusting a cocktail napkin at her: “Will you autograph this for my daughter, dear? It would mean so much to my Mildred, the poor child has her heart set on ‘figure ice-skating’ though she lacks all physical coordination, I’m afraid.” Mummy assists Bliss by flattening the wrinkled napkin on a table so that Bliss is able to print on it, in the shaky hand of a child much younger than six—