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

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Exchanging a look with Mummy, in Bliss’s eyes a look of guilty shame, unmistakable.

  Such a bad careless girl: why?

  To hurt yourself, to hurt me? Why?

  No one could understand. At the practice rink, often the other skaters paused in their routines to watch Bliss Rampike under the tutelage of the demanding Masha Kurylek, skating with such precision, such grace, such courage, and yet—sudden as a sneeze it might come, ugly and ungainly as a sneeze, a moment’s loss of concentration, a misstep, a fall.

  Eagerly the child stammered: “M-Mummy, I’m not h-hurt. I’m not.”

  And “Mummy, I don’t want to stop, I’m not hurt. Please, Mummy, I can keep skating.”

  How the child’s thin wavering voice pleaded, Skyler will recall through his life Please Mummy I can keep skating.

  Depending upon Masha Kurylek’s advice, Mummy sometimes allowed Bliss to continue. At other times, when the child was too obviously limping, or wincing with pain, Mummy murmured in exasperation what sounded like Jesus give me patience!, bundled Bliss up in her soft-down red coat (that was a birthday present from Daddy, or from Daddy’s “personal assistant” at work) and drove her to the Fair Hills Medical Center emergency room for X-rays; if the fall seemed to warrant such a measure, Mummy would arrange for an MRI at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center in New Brunswick, where Betsey Rampike had begun to be known. Mummy’s great fear was that Bliss’s careless skating would result in serious injuries to her spinal column, her neck. What of a head concussion? Broken ribs? If Bliss turned an ankle and broke it, that might be the end of the skating prodigy Bliss Rampike.

  “Cost doesn’t matter! We’re insured for ‘personal injury.’ And where the insurance doesn’t cover everything, my wonderful mother-in-law Edna Louise has said she will ‘help out.’”*

  After Bliss had a skating mishap practicing her routine for the 1996 Royale Ice Capades, stricken in the midst of executing a “butterfly gyre” to the frenetic rhythms of the crowd-pleaser The Firebird, and having to be taken (via ambulance) to New Brunswick, it began to be whispered at the Halcyon rink that Bliss Rampike of all girl-skaters was becoming accident-prone.

  Accident-prone! As Masha Kurylek noted, the curse of the gifted skater.

  And yet: Bliss loved to skate. This was no exaggeration, no false claim by her manager-mother. You could see, quite simply Bliss loved to skate. Never mind the shy, withdrawn, seemingly-not-so-bright-nor-so-pretty little girl with the maddening habit of sucking at her fingers, here was a girl transformed on the ice, eager and fearless and flying on her hissing skate blades, a delight to observe. Even seasoned veterans of the girls’-figure-skating circuit smiled at the spectacle of Bliss Rampike. Even the older brother Skyler who had seen Bliss skate almost as often as their mother had seen her, could be capable still of being enchanted by her. And so very proud of her.

  She is what I would be. If God had loved me instead.

  Both Skyler and his sister were vastly relieved to be back home, after the sun-glaring strain of Palm Beach. Skyler understood that something was amiss between Mummy and Daddy, had been amiss for some time but was (maybe) worsening, though Mummy would not speak of it except to say with her bright-lipstick-Mummy smile You know how Daddy is: bizzzee! nor would Daddy, when Daddy was home, speak of it except to take Skyler aside man to man, press a beefy forefinger against his (Skyler’s) lips, and murmur in enigmatic-Daddy tone: Sky-boy! Hell of it is Homo sapiens’ troubles began when we started to walk on our damn hind legs and the female buttocks became repositioned vis-à-vis the male olfactory organs. It’s a bitch!

  After Palm Beach, Bliss was VERY HAPPY to be back in the cold climate of New Jersey. (The time: late March 1996.) VERY HAPPY to be back on the ice. (As Bliss said: “The ice can hurt you but the ice is your friend, Skyler.”) SO VERY HAPPY to be back in her size-two little-girl skates and no longer in exile in Grandmother Rampike’s Spanish villa on the Atlantic Ocean where there seemed to be no ice rinks and no interest in ice-skating and nothing to do all day long but be.

  Truly Palm Beach for all its beauty was a hateful place for Daddy had not joined them after all for a few days “R & R” as he’d promised. There were phone calls, there was a “private” discussion between Mummy and Grandmother Rampike (which Skyler could not manage to overhear), at last red-blinking-eye’d Mummy had explained to her children that Daddy had had to fly suddenly to Singapore, or was it Sydney, on emergency-business matters, Daddy was so very sorry to be missing his family and his mother but hoped to “make it up tenfold” to everyone when he returned.

  And Daddy promised to watch “my bestest-best gal” skate in her next competition, and win.

  “’PHANTOM PAIN.’ IT IS THAT CURSE, MRS. RAMPIKE. I HOPE THAT MASHA is mistaken!”

  (It was a charming character trait, or an alarming character trait, that Bliss’s new trainer Masha Kurylek, fierce pale skin, fierce hyperthyroid eyes, fierce-palpitating nostrils, sometimes spoke of herself in the third person: “Masha.”)

  Executing the tricky “butterfly gyre” to the fiery pounding music of The Firebird in preparation for the high-profile televised 1996 Royale Ice Capades in Wilmington, Delaware, Bliss had suffered one of her more serious falls, she’d been x-rayed and MRI’d and no “visible” injuries had been detected in her backbone, her neck, her skull, her right wrist; her injuries were mostly just bruises, bumps and minor abrasions which Dr. Muddick, Fair Hills’s most admired sports-pediatrician, treated with discreet doses of the handy painkiller Codeine 7. Bliss insisted that she wasn’t in pain, she was eager to resume skating, yet it soon became clear at practice that something was wrong with her: after about forty minutes on the ice Bliss began to tire, to breathe through her mouth, to favor her right leg. (Where previously she’d been favoring her left leg.) In even the simplest routines—figure eights, double-skate-turns, single-skate spirals—Bliss’s coordination was conspicuously off, the “fairy sparkle” that had elevated Bliss to the title of Tiny Miss StarSkate 1995 was sadly dimmed. Observing the child-skater closely, Masha decided that Bliss was “secretly” in pain though she denied it, for fear of disappointing Mummy; Masha believed that this “phantom” pain was very like the elusive “cervical spine strain” which she herself had suffered at the age of sixteen—“That had almost destroyed Masha’s career, there at the bud.” Masha insisted upon outfitting Bliss with a flesh-colored foam-rubber collar which would support her head, lessen the strain on her neck and upper spine, yet not interfere with her skating.

  Mummy fretted: “But Bliss looks so piteous out there on the ice, like an invalid. What if she’s photographed! What if a camera crew from New Jersey Network hears of this!”

  Masha advised: “It is only just for now, Mrs. Rampike. So the child’s ‘cervical spine’ regains its strength, and she resumes her old confidence again, and we can remove the collar a few days before the Royale Ice Capades.”

  Trussed up in her foam-rubber collar, Bliss skated dispiritedly and insisted she wasn’t in pain. She was not! The nasty pills Dr. Muddick prescribed for her made her “head heavy,” that was all. And her stomach “queasy.” She hated to take Codeine 7—slimy clam-colored capsules—as she hated all her other “meds” and the nasty weekly injections in her “bottom” and the nasty plastic-and-wire “bite” that made her mouth hurt and having to go to the beauty salon with Mummy to have her hair lightened with harsh-smelling chemicals that made her eyes sting and her nose run and at this point Mummy interrupted Bliss’s litany of hated-things uttered in a rising voice, that dangerously rising tantrum-voice Mummy could not risk allowing to erupt anywhere outside the privacy of the Rampike household, especially not in such a public place like the Halcyon rink where others would hear, other skaters and their trainers and mothers, how shocked they would be, how scandalized and delighted to witness angelic little Bliss Rampike fly into a temper tantrum like any other spoiled girl-skater: “Bliss, darling! I have you. And Jesus has you.”

  Instinctively
Mummy knew to embrace the quivering child. To contain the convulsive fury that made the child’s muscles twitch, and her jaws clench tight. No one had known to embrace Betsey Sckulhorne as a child of six, no one had loved her in such a way. No one had known her heart. For Betsey, who was now thirty-three years old, all that was over. But for Bliss who was Betsey Sckulhorne in this new far more beautiful and blessed form, it would be her destiny.

  Mummy stroked Bliss’s hair that was so fine, and luminous-blond, smelling of chemical bleach. Mummy kissed Bliss’s forehead that was clammy, yet sweaty. Mummy spoke chidingly in Bliss’s ear, as one might speak to a small child.

  “Jesus loves you, Bliss! Jesus loves us both. We know that, there is nothing else to know.”

  AND WAS SKYLER JEALOUS, LOOKING ON? WAS SKYLER JEALOUS, SEEING how everyone at the rink watched Bliss both on the ice and off, murmured Hello, Bliss! and Good night, Bliss! as if the very utterance of that magical monosyllable Bliss gave them pleasure, as a lover takes pleasure in speaking the beloved’s name? Was he jealous seeing how strangers smiled after Bliss, looking through Skyler as if his body were transparent and of no more substance than his soul, that’s to say as if he did not exist? Was Skyler jealous on the drive home to Fair Hills, in the cluttered backseat of Mummy’s Buick while Bliss slumped beside Mummy in the passenger’s seat, her small luminous-blond head against Mummy’s shoulder.

  Plunging south into the rapidly growing dusk on New Jersey route 15. Headlights of oncoming cars rushing at them. And the windshield of the Buick splotched with rain and each rain-splotch shining like an eye.

  Bliss is what Skyler would be if God had loved Skyler instead.

  If there was Skyler. If there was God.

  Skyler asked Mummy what is “phantom pain” he’d heard Masha speak of and Mummy frowned into the rear-view mirror above the windshield seeking out Skyler’s eyes. Often it seemed to Skyler that his mother forgot his presence and his voice was to her a kind of nudge waking her from private thoughts. “Why, Skyler. I didn’t think you were listening, I thought you were doing your homework…‘Phantom pain’ is when you only imagine pain, as Bliss seems to be imagining it. When the pain isn’t really there.”

  “‘When the pain isn’t really’—where, Mummy?”

  “Isn’t there. In your neck, or ankle. In a joint, or in a muscle.” Mummy paused, looking at Skyler in the little rectangular mirror. In the shifting glare of oncoming headlights her face appeared strangely shaped as a moon that has been flattened and her eyes that normally seemed to Skyler so beautiful were bulgy and wetly shiny like the rain-splotches. Carefully Mummy said, “It is only in your head.”

  With nine-year-old pedantry Skyler said: “Pain is in the head, Mummy. It’s in the brain. Bliss’s tutor was telling me—he showed me a science article, about the human brain.”

  “Bliss’s tutor? You mean Rob? What is that young man doing with you, it’s Bliss he’s supposed to be tutoring, and a poor job he seems to be doing of it.” Mummy was incensed, suddenly. Mummy pursed her lips in the way Daddy teased was Mummy’s pit-bull look. “Bliss’s pain—if she has pain, which she denies—you know how devious that child is!—is in her head only, meaning that she is imagining it, as Dr. Vandeman says: it isn’t real.”

  Yet Skyler persisted, leaning close behind Mummy as Mummy drove through the splotching rain: “But the only pain we feel is in our heads, Mummy. Pain is registered only in our brains and if we feel it, it is ‘real.’”

  Mummy laughed irritably. Skyler should have known this was a warning laugh.

  “Jesus can take our pain from us, if He wishes. If we are worthy. I know you don’t believe, Skyler, I’ve seen you squinching up your little gargoyle face during church services, you are a budding little skeptic like your father, and Jesus could no more burrow into your heart than He could burrow into a wizened old raisin, nonetheless it is true. Bliss’s pain is not ‘real’ and if it is ‘real’—Jesus will take it from her. And Bliss Rampike will be crowned Little Miss Royale Ice Princess 1996, and Daddy will be with us at the rink to see her crowned, and that evening we will have a special celebration, and Daddy will come home with us. That is our destiny, Skyler: what is yours?”*

  * It was so: to Daddy’s astonishment, old Edna Louise had taken an unexpected interest in her youngest granddaughter, at last. Must’ve been the publicity in the New York Times New Jersey section, or the five-page spread in New Jersey Lives. Shrewd-Daddy understood that this bode—boded?—well for him, too: the favorite son who’d pissed off his mother by marrying, as Edna Louise persisted, no matter the banality of the cliché, “beneath” the Rampike family. For maybe it was so, as Mummy had so extravagantly predicted, Our daughter is our destiny.

  * Wow! Jesus! That’s telling off the annoying little bastard, isn’t it? In such sudden flare-ups, in such unexpected shifts from soft-pop-rock to Puccini, you had a sense that the Mummy/Betsey Rampike everyone took for granted wasn’t, actually, the individual we all thought she was.

  QUERY

  AND WAS BLISS RAMPIKE CROWNED LITTLE MISS ROYALE PRINCESS 1996, and was Daddy present to see his bestest-best little gal wildly applauded by an arena of admiring strangers, and was there a celebration afterward at Wilmington, Delaware’s “most prestigious/historic” downtown hotel; and did Daddy come home with his little family the next morning?

  Read on.

  GOOD MEMORY?*

  “HOMO SAPIENS WILL DEVASTATE THIS PLANET WITHIN THE NEXT FIFTY years but an ‘evolved’ Homo sapiens—enhanced by genetic engineering—may relocate to other planets. That’s our only hope.”

  How like Skyler’s father Rob Feldman sounded at such mordant/upbeat moments! Though Rob was a lanky twenty-two-year-old molecular biology graduate student (formerly of Columbia U., now back in Fair Hills boarding temporarily with his family) and Bix Rampike was surely one of those Homo sapiens specimens who has already evolved and would be “relocated” to another planet, to begin again the effort of capitalism’s terrestial despoilation.

  Rob Feldman, one of Skyler’s first loves. Or maybe this is an exaggeration, in a weak moment. For it is time for a Good Memory—isn’t it? In my wizened-raisin heart, I’m still that nine-year-old stunted-runt dreamer Skyler Rampike.

  Remembering how, returning home from school, lonely Skyler would attach himself to his sister’s homeschooling sessions in the solarium at the rear of the Rampike house. Innocently appearing in the doorway to murmur Okay if I sit with you? and the tutor seated across the table from little Bliss would glance up with a hopeful smile and murmur in turn Why of course!

  Relief that the unexpected visitor was little Skyler and not Mrs. Rampike coming to “check up on” the lesson. Relief that the visitor was Bliss’s older brother Skyler who was eager as a puppy for attention, conversation, “eye contact.”

  Since I’d mentioned Rob a few pages back, Rob Feldman who’d been the penultimate—classy word for “last-but-one”—in the sequence of young tutors hired/fired by Mummy—it seems fitting for me to say a few more words about him. The other night in this squalid room sweatily immersed in the “intensely felt”—“unsparingly intimate”—chapter titled “Bad Girl! I” suddenly I found myself remembering Bliss’s tutors, of whom I have not thought in nearly ten years: “Tiffy”—“Brooke”—“Sam”—“Lindsay”—but also “Jennifer”—“Jason”—and “Rob” who’d seemed to like me best.

  That is, Skyler. Not me—“me” is a nineteen-year-old junkie in self-imposed exile in a rooming house on Pitts Street, New Brunswick, grimily barefoot in grungy underwear embarked upon a quixotic—“hopeless”—mission to write the only true account of his sister’s life/murder/aftermath of/etcetera. “Me” would be a surprise/shock to Rob Feldman who would be in his late thirties by now and maybe married, gainfully employed, one of the admirable adults of the world. What to make of this freaky misfit/murder suspect tugging at his sleeve: Rob, hello! Remember me? Skyler Rampike who adored you as an older brother?

  (Idea for ano
ther project: a “wildly original”—“boldly postmodernist”—ingeniously spliced-together sequence of vignettes focusing upon individuals who’d “adored” a minor media figure like Bliss Rampike. Some of these individuals would be total strangers to the object of their adoration, others would be closer to her, still others—members of her own family!—would know her intimately, and perhaps not wholly adore her. And the figure at the center of the narrative, ideally a variant of “the most poetical topic in the world”—that is, a beautiful young girl-child of no more than ten years of age—would be inaccessible to the reader: a total mystery.)

  Rob Feldman: did you sense something “terribly wrong” in the all-American Rampike household, at 93 Ravens Crest Drive? Was that why, alone among the succession of attractive young tutors, you were the only one to quit before Betsey Rampike fired you?

  What did you perceive: bruises on Bliss’s exposed arms? bruises on Bliss’s neck? A slight limp, favoring her left leg? Explained away—so very convincingly!—as casualties of the “accident-prone” young athlete?

  Each of Bliss’s tutors quickly realized that trying to teach the six-year-old skating prodigy a minimal first-grade curriculum would not be an easy task. For when Bliss Rampike wasn’t laced up in her white kid-skin Baby Champ skates flashing and flying across the glittery surface of the ice, or being photographed/filmed/hugged/kissed/fussed-over and lavishly praised by adults, her very spirit seemed to retreat somewhere behind her moist cobalt-blue eyes; a melancholia more acute than the A.P.M. (Acute Premature Melancholia) of Skyler’s precocious classmate Tyler McGreety, Jr. overtook her. What a puzzle it was, for Bliss seemed, initially, to be alert, lively, intelligent, and a “good girl” who unaccountably could not seem to concentrate on her lessons, became “distracted”—“confused”—“easily discouraged”—“anxious/lethargic.” How many times did Skyler overhear Bliss telling her tutor in a shamed little-girl voice Can’t do it, can’t remember…I will only get it wrong.