My Sister, My Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Wide-eyed Edna Louise said, “Skyler, where does Daddy go when Daddy goes away?” and Skyler said importantly, “Sandy Arabia. On oil business.”

  Aren’t kids cute? At least, before the age of ten.

  IN THE GYMNASTICS LAB, DADDY FAILED TO GREET VASSILY ANDREEVICH Volokhomsky with his usual beaming-Daddy smile, and failed to thrust out his mammoth-Daddy hand for a bone-crushing handshake between macho males, if of contrasting sizes, body types. Instead, Daddy greeted the diminutive Vassily coolly: “H’lo.” And Daddy lingered longer than usual—ominously longer, Skyler could have told Vassily—observing his son being instructed on the mats; at last interrupting Vassily in a lowered voice, yet not so lowered a voice that others in the gym might not overhear: “’Scuse me, Vas’ly Andervitch—Kolonoskopi—whatever—I’m not seeing much progress here. I know you’re a pro, you’re a bonafid Olympic medal winner, I know because, comrade, I did a little background check, but at these prices, I have to admit that I am just a little disappointed, verstayen? My son isn’t a ‘natural-born’ athlete, I grant you. His gifts are more what you’d call ‘intellectual’—‘cerebral.’ I can accept that. But you, Vas’ly, are not challenging him sufficiently. Damn kid is as clumsy today as he was last week and the week before and that’s the bottom line. Either you are making progress or you are not. Either you are improving or you’re screwing up. See, watching Skyler this morning, I’m thinking that he isn’t ‘improving’ at any reasonable pace. Kids younger than him are already world-class gymnasts and look at him—panting like a dog. At these prices, comrade, I want better for my son than a turd farce,* see? I was an athlete all through school. I had a succession of damned good coaches, and they worked us like hell. Kicked our asses, we didn’t put out for them. Bottom line is, Vas’ly, I’m not impressed with what’s going on here. I’ll be checking back in a while and I will expect to see some visible ‘progress’ in this kid’s performance, Vas’ly. And no panting like a dog, ver-shstayzen-zie?”

  Daddy departed. You could feel the air cleaving as Daddy passed through. Poor Vassily stood as if stunned, unmoving like one who has been penetrated by a bolt of lightning that has fixed him in place even as he’s been gutted. Skyler did not need to look at the gnome-like trainer to know that a hot blush had come into his creased face suffusing upward into his scalp even as the little man’s posture remained ramrod straight.

  On the flattened-snake mat with its faint sickening smell frantic Skyler began somersaulting fast, fast, FAST.

  FUCK IT: LET’S FAST-FORWARD. TERMINATE THIS SORRY EPISODE IN SKYLER’S childhood some twenty minutes later: the (mouth-panting) kid has fallen, hard. Like a sack of damp sand he lies stunned beneath gaily swinging rings, beginning now to whimper, and to writhe on the hardwood floor where the momentum of his reckless flight has propelled him—fatally—beyond the mat. Most stupid of mistakes for a gymnast, you don’t land on the mat. A scant few seconds before the kid had seemed not to hear his trainer telling him to stop, wild careening swinging Hey this is fun! I can do this! Look at me I can do this until as one might expect his left hand lost its grip and Skyler fell, fell hard, harder than you’d expect such a puny body to fall, in an instant his right wrist is sprained, right side of his skull slams against the floor, right leg twice-broken (femur, fibula), this kid will be a medical novelty at the Fair Hills Medical Center. And there comes tragic Vassily Andreevitch Volokhomsky stumbling to his fallen charge, seeing, in the child’s writhing figure, the dream of the Bonus fading like a mirage in hot sunshine, poor Vassily screaming in an incomprehensible tongue for someone to dial 911.

  * “Never apologize, never explain!” was one of the cheerier cornerstones of Bix Rampike’s personal ethic. So in the Rampike household you’d never know where Daddy was, particularly at any time when, you’d thought, Daddy was supposed to be with you. (So Mummy had come to realize. Not very happily.) In this case, in the Gymnastics Lab, to be replicated on each subsequent Saturday there, four in all, Daddy was somewhat short of breath, flushed in the cheeks and seemingly distracted but in very good spirits as if, possibly, he and the glamorous streaky-blond Chérie had crept off somewhere for a romantic/erotic tussle (there was a wheelchair-access lavatory in the corridor beyond the receptionist’s counter, a sizable space and totally private; there was a soiled-towel laundry room; there was the domain of the masseuse K. Chee, currently unoccupied); or, less intriguing, and a disappointment (sorry!) to the voyeur-reader, Daddy had actually been lifting weights (“pumping iron”) or panting away on the treadmill or another of the dread cardiovascular machines; or, who knows, Daddy had slipped away from the Gold Medal Gym & Health Club entirely, to have a beer or two at the Cross Tree Bistro close by. Maybe Daddy called back whoever it was who’d dared to call him, on a suburban Saturday morning, on his car phone. Hey: didn’t I tell you? Never call me on my home turf.

  * Turd farce? This one has me stumped.

  CRIPPLE?*

  JESUS KID I’M SORRY

  Skyler darling? this is Mummy Mummy loves you so

  swear to you, son never meant push you son

  pray for you darling both of us Mummy and God-damn very best orthopetric pediatic

  good as new, darling! Mummy and Daddy promise damn Vas’ly can’t trust Commie bastard

  Edna Louise is here honey can you open your eyes honey?

  million-dollar lawsuit that Commie bastard and Gold Medal Gym (got to be Jews: “Gold”)

  we are all praying for you to be well again Skyler

  love you so honey

  hadn’t been so reckless, showing off on the rings

  love you so honey

  very best medical care or somebody’s ass will be kicked

  Mummy’s little man

  * This is an artful rendition of disembodied voices that floated to me in my hospital bed in the Maimed Children’s Wing—or was it just the Children’s Wing—of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center in New Brunswick, N.J. These quasi-recognizable voices barely penetrated a haze of weirdly throbbing pain (think neon/strobe lights) spun to airy thinness/foamy & frothy through the pharmaceutical magic of the codeine painkiller Nixil. There were numerous other voices (doctors, nurses, orderlies, visitors, etcetera) which I won’t trouble to record. A few days after I was admitted to the hospital there came, unexpectedly (when you are floating in gauzy white cumulus clouds high above your mangled little body most things are “unexpected”) a steely-haired old woman with a wide pike’s mouth to stare at me stricken with a hitherto unsuspected ungrandma concern/anxiety: “Is my beautiful grandson going to be a cripple? Is this child going to limp, for life?”

  THE BIRTH OF BLISS RAMPIKE I

  FOR READERS WHO’VE BEEN IMPATIENTLY MUTTERING WHERE THE HELL IS Bliss Rampike, why’s it taking so long to get to our little ice princess this chapter will introduce Bliss, at last: within five months of the little man’s demise, “Bliss” is born.

  OUT OF THE ASHES OF THE BROKEN SON, THE PHOENIX OF THE SHINING DAUGHTER.

  (I’d thought maybe this catchy phrase might be used on the dust jacket of my book, on the lurid paperback cover at least, but nobody in marketing much liked it. I concede that it’s not only overblown and pretentious but illogical. Yet it is “poetic speech” and most of my writing so far has been flat-footed reportorial speech hardly adequate to convey the more subtle/paradoxical ambiguities of our psychic lives.)

  It is a fact, though, that while Skyler was still in rehab, an “outpatient” hobbling gamely if often sulkily/brattishly about on runt-sized crutches dragging a massive white mummy-leg in a cast, like some portion of Skyler’s grave marker-to-come, it happened, as in a fairy tale, one of the crueller tales of the Brothers Grimm, that Skyler’s little sister Edna Louise, scarcely four years old, first put on a pair of ice skates and—

  “The rest is history.” (Imagine a sonorous male voice-over.)

  Except not poor Skyler’s history: for Skyler, firstborn, long-cherished and favored little man of the Rampike family, fades no
w as rapidly and as irrevocably as poor Vassily’s mirage-dream of the Bonus so tantalizingly promised by Daddy. As we say in American-youth-vernacular Skyler is dead meat.

  “MUM-MY! LOOK.”

  On the enormous TV screen that appears to hang suspended on a wall of our family room a young girl figure skater is gliding, leaping, pirouetting to lush romantic music. A very graceful and very pretty young skater in a beautiful short-skirted glittery costume now lifting her slender arms, bowing her head, smiling with becoming modesty as the large audience in the arena bursts into applause.

  “Mum-my, can I skate, too? Mum-my plea-se.”

  You have to imagine—that is, I have to imagine, since Skyler wasn’t in the family room at that time—the child’s voice quivering with hope and yearning; and her smile plaintive, cast at Mummy who seems scarcely aware of Edna Louise, staring at the TV screen on the wall.

  Edna Louise is uncertain if she is seeing the warm-Mummy face or the other-Mummy face.

  Warm-Mummy is Mummy-who-loves-Edna-Louise. Other-Mummy is Mummy-who-does-not-love-Edna-Louise.

  (But why? Why is this? On the brink of four years of age, Edna Louise has discovered that most mummys love their little girls all the time. You can see this in their eyes, you can hear it in their voices, even when they are scolding their daughters, you just know. Edna Louise would ask Why don’t you love me all the time Mummy except she does not dare for fear of Mummy’s answer.)

  Still Edna Louise can’t help persisting: “Mummy? Can I skate, too? I know I can, Mummy. I promise, I can.”

  Was it the U.S. Olympic Festival 1993 that both mother and daughter were watching that evening? The nationally televised event that marked the dazzling emergence of thirteen-year-old Michelle Kwan, who placed first? Or was it Skate America 1993, where Michelle Kwan was one of the stars?

  “Mum-my! Mum-my! Mum-my! Plea-se.”

  It’s a fact: Mummy says no.

  In how many “frank”—“confiding”—“intimate” interviews in the course of how many years including even those years following her prodigy-daughter’s tragic death, would Betsey Rampike laugh incredulously, press a row of red-manicured fingernails on her breasts shaking her head in disbelief Only imagine: I said no. No! to Bliss Rampike. In my ignorance.

  For Mummy could hardly bear to watch the astonishing young girl-skaters on TV. For Mummy—hunched in her chair, hugging herself in a way to suggest how badly she wished she might make herself smaller, again a girl—was made to recall how, long ago, she’d had such hopes for an ice-skating career until she’d sprained her ankle: “And that was the end of the dream.”

  Wistfully, and frequently, Mummy spoke of her “lost dream” to Skyler and Edna Louise who were made to feel, perhaps mistakenly, that they were somehow to blame, for making Mummy into a “Mummy” and depriving her of a career. Mummy had learned not to allude to her lost dream-career or to any alternative life of Betsey Rampike to Daddy, whose reaction was likely to be a booming laugh and a wet smacking kiss for his “big busty gorgeous gal” and say, with a downturn of his lips to indicate profundity, “Got to cut your losses, honey. ‘Don’t pour money down a rat hole.’”

  Bix was right of course! Bix was always right.

  Yet: Betsey had had a vague hope—“Oh I knew it was naive, I think I knew even at the time”—that little Skyler might have had some talent for ice-skating.

  Wanting to think that the talent-gene might run in the family. Mother to son?

  (Now Skyler is thumping around upstairs on his crutches. Even when Skyler is trying not to make noise, keeping to carpets, his Mummy can hear him.)

  So when Skyler’s little sister Edna Louise asks about ice-skating, Mummy bites her lower lip not to speak sharply at the child who stands before her eager and exasperating, jamming half the fingers of a hand into her mouth, a nervous habit Edna Louise’s instructors at the Montessori school have noted, like Edna Louise’s habit of pulling at her hair, and scratching herself inside her clothes, just pure nerves, or maybe the child does it to annoy, make Mummy want to grab her by her small shoulders and shake! shake! shake! some manners into her as manners had been shaken into Betsey years ago by her exasperated mother except shaking children, especially small children like Edna Louise, is not a practice condoned in Fair Hills, New Jersey. Absolutely not.

  Mummy smiles at Edna Louise to soften the harshness of what she has to say: “Sweetie, I don’t think so. You’re too little and you’re not very graceful. Look how you’re always colliding with things, and you still make messes eating, and forget to flush the toilet. Those girl-skaters are years older than you. And very special girls, you can see.”

  On the TV screen the girl-skaters continue to glide without seeming effort, several of them now, first-, second-, third-place winners, astonishingly graceful as they glide, leap and turn, spin, skate backward lifting their slender arms, smiling with becoming modesty as the crowd applauds another time. You can see how such applause is life to the girl-skaters and without such applause there can be no life.

  This blunt wisdom the child Edna Louise grasps by instinct, who could not have formulated it in words.

  This task has fallen to me, the “survivor.” As Pastor Bob has said Put into words Skyler what can’t be spoken because there are not adequate words and so you must create these words out of your own guts.

  That day, years ago, before there was Bliss Rampike, or even the thought of Bliss Rampike, only just Edna Louise gazing at Mummy with a look of commingled hurt and hope, Mummy says, with the air of one obliged to speak the truth for her daughter’s own good, “And you have to be pretty, Edna Louise. Look at those girl-skaters, their lovely faces. Every one of them. Your face is bony and your eyes are too small and so strange, and stark. You seem always to be staring, and it makes people uneasy. Best to learn this before your heart is broken.”

  “But Mummy, you could make me pretty, couldn’t you? Like you make yourself, Mummy. Ple-ase.”

  Mummy laughs, startled. Mummy has not expected Edna Louise to protest. And not in such terms.

  “Well! Maybe. Someday.”

  In the meantime Mummy switches off the TV and the giant screen that appears to be floating on the wall goes black.

  ONLY IMAGINE! I SAID NO.

  In my ignorance.

  BUT—DIDN’T I TELL YOU, THIS IS A FAIRY TALE OUT OF GRIMM?—IT HAPPENED nonetheless that one of Edna Louise’s little friends at the Montessori school, Carrie Chaplin, was, at the age of five, a novice ice-skater; and that the Chaplins, a well-to-do Fair Hills family, had two older daughters, both “promising” figure skaters, taking lessons with a 1980 Winter Olympics bronze medalist at the Halcyon Hills Ice Rink.

  Now when Edna Louise excitedly told Mummy that she’d been invited by her little friend Carrie to go skating with her, how could Mummy say no? For Betsey Rampike was eager to accept such (relatively rare) invitations from the mothers of Edna Louise’s classmates at the Montessori school, as Betsey Rampike was eager to accept (yet more rare) invitations from the mothers of Skyler’s classmates at Fair Hills Day School. “Edna Louise, did you say ‘Chaplin’? The Chaplins who live on Charlemagne Drive?” Mummy’s voice quavered for Mummy knew of Henry and Patricia Chaplin from the Fair Hills Beacon where photographs of these prominent local residents often appeared on both the front page and in the Style section. “Why yes, Edna Louise. Of course you can go skating with Carrie Chaplin. And I’ll come with you, to see you don’t get hurt.”

  Edna Louise blinked away tears. Edna Louise loved Mummy so.

  (So sentimental! And so awkwardly rendered in prose. Yet Skyler remembers how his little sister would dissolve into childish tears when overcome with childish happiness; how she would hug Mummy, or try to hug Mummy; how she would cry, “Mum-my I love you.” There is just no way to render this in respectable adult-literary prose, is there? Yet I must try.)

  Taking preschool girls to the Halcyon Hills Ice Rink twelve miles east of Fair Hills required any number of telephone cal
ls of course for nothing in Fair Hills was ever easily accomplished, especially where children were involved. (“Children: Our Most Precious Commodity” was the watchword of more than one Fair Hills school, private and public.) Mrs. Chaplin called Mummy, and Mummy called Mrs. Chaplin. Here was a call for Betsey Rampike that Betsey Rampike prized! How astonishing it was, Mrs. Chaplin (whose name was Patricia, “Trix” to her friends) turned out to be so warmly friendly with Betsey Rampike, it seemed to Mummy that, overnight, her homely exasperating little Edna Louise became easier to love.