My Sister, My Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “SKYLER! PLEASE TRY NOT TO LIMP, AND TWITCH, AND MAKE THOSE frightening ‘pain faces.’ A playdate is a fun occasion.”

  Must’ve been March 1995 this happened. When Skyler was only just eight years old and in third grade at Fair Hills Day and his twice-broken right leg had not yet entirely healed but the settlement out of court from the Gold Medal Gym & Health Club had come through. (As the Fair Hills Beacon discreetly noted, for an “undisclosed” sum.) When Daddy was traveling weekly on business missions for Scor Chemicals, which aggressive American-owned company had entered, in Daddy’s words, “our global phase.” This harried season when Bliss was beginning to skate in regional competitions in which, if she didn’t place first, she placed second, or third, though her rivals were likely to be several years older than she; a season when Bliss no longer attended school with her little classmates but was being “home-tutored” by a succession of tutors under Mummy’s supervision. (Bliss: “I miss school, Mummy! I miss my teachers and I miss my f-friends.” Mummy: “Don’t be silly, sweetheart: you will make lots of skater-friends—you will make professional contacts for life. Darling, you are one very lucky little girl.”)

  Devoted as Betsey Rampike was to her daughter’s “burgeoning” career, Mummy was determined to provide “social contacts” for her problematic son Skyler, who seemed to be virtually friendless; or, in any case, lacking the kinds of valuable contacts Mummy wished for him, whose surnames Mummy had hand-printed on the pink construction paper charts. Zoom into a TV-type scene between Mummy and Skyler:

  “‘McGreety.’ I’ve heard that there is a McGreety boy in your class, Skyler, is this so?”—a canny light coming into Mummy’s liquidy brown eyes, though Skyler mumbled a snuffle-reply intended to discourage. But shrewd-Mummy persisted: “What is this boy’s first name, Skyler?” and Skyler, squirming, foreseeing where this exchange must end, had no choice but to reveal: “T-Tyler.” And eagerly Mummy said, “‘Tyler McGreety.’ He must be the son of Tyler McGreety the ‘wizard financier’—his mother must be Thea?—Theodora?—whose picture is always in the Style section of the paper. I’m sure that I’ve met Mrs. McGreety at least once.”

  Tyler, Skyler. The very rhyme was ominous.

  Cut now, as in stylish fast-forward, to Mummy driving Skyler to his playdate at the McGreety French Normandy manor house on East Camelot Drive; close-up on Mummy’s disappointed face, her stunned-blinking wounded-brown eyes, when she is greeted at the massive front door not by socially prominent Theodora McGreety but by an olive-skinned housekeeper who says, in a forced simulation of her gringa employer’s insincere-gracious smile, “Mz. Ranpick? Mz. McGreety so ‘regrets’ she is not here to ‘say hello.’ She asks will you please return by five P.M. to take home your son, thank you.”

  Mummy smiles bravely. Mummy nudges Skyler inside the house, to be greeted by a smirking sallow-faced boy lurking in a doorway, Tyler McGreety who mumbles, barely audible, “H’lo.”

  Tyler, Skyler. Glumly the two eight-year-olds stare at each other. Mummy kisses Skyler good-bye: “Have fun, boys!”

  ONCE UPSTAIRS IN HIS BEDROOM, WHICH IS TWICE AS LARGE AS ANY CHILD’S room that Skyler has ever seen, with an adjoining bathroom and Jacuzzi, Tyler relents somewhat, inviting Skyler to “look around anywhere, see anything you’d like to do, do it.” Tyler sprawls on his bed, observing Skyler with those small close-set smudged eyes that Skyler finds disconcerting. (As with Tyler’s bed, most of the available surfaces are covered with objects with the look of being both expensive and tossed-aside: battery-operated motorized toys, electronic games, model rocket ships and missiles, Robo-Boy, Terminator-Boy, Star-Boy, alarmingly realistic rat-sized models of dinosaurs and prehistoric reptile birds. Some of this is on shelves, some on windowsills and some of it is underfoot. Skyler stumbles on—can it be?—a headless doll-baby of the approximate size of an actual baby, cut open as if with a sharp knife, of amazingly lifelike flesh-toned rubber. Smirking Tyler on his bed says: “Just kick Dolly out of the way, Sky. No sweat.”

  Skyler shudders, backing away. Skyler means to occupy himself with one of the motorized vehicle-toys, U.S. DEATH SQUAD, isn’t this what a normal playdate-guest might do? As Tyler informs Skyler he’s an “only” child: “My mom and dad are kind of old, see. ‘Specially my dad the ‘wizard financier’ people call him. They had me, see, and decided to call it quits.” Tyler chuckles, vastly amused. Skyler laughs, politely. “You?”

  “‘M-Me’?—what?”

  “Sky, are you kind of, y’know, ‘mentally challenged’? You keep asking ‘What’?”

  “No. I just don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “I was asking if you have ‘siblings’—or if you are a ‘singleton’ like me.”

  Skyler isn’t sure. These words sound unpleasantly clinical, like something you overhear the orthopedic surgeon telling your parents and then wish you hadn’t.

  With exaggerated patience as if speaking to a moron, Tyler asks Skyler if Skyler has any brothers or sisters. Quickly Skyler says yes: “My sister is Bliss Rampike.”

  Tyler makes a rude noise with his lips: “So? Who’s ‘Bliz Rampuke’?”

  Skyler is shocked. For one wearing an H.I.P. pin in his lapel, and the son of rich parents, Tyler McGreety is unexpectedly crude. And how is it possible, he’s never heard of Bliss Rampike? Mummy would be astounded. Mummy would be disbelieving. In the Rampike household it has come to be believed that virtually everyone in Fair Hills, if not in all of New Jersey, knows of Bliss Rampike the four-year-old skating prodigy…

  Tyler is saying, philosophically: “See, Sky: it’s a better deal, to be one. ‘Singleton.’ Your parents focus on you. Or if they don’t, ’cause they’re too busy, they know they should, and you can work that to your advantage. Like, all this”—Tyler makes a negligent gesture, taking in the hundreds—thousands?—of dollars of expensive toys scattered about his room—“not to mention cash. Mommy is always whining, ‘Tyler, why don’t you invite your little friends from school here, the way normal children do,’ but my impression is, at Fair Hills Day, nobody’s got that much spare time. Not in the H.I.P. track, for sure.” Tyler chews at his lower lip, smirking; then, with childlike bluntness, “How’d you get crippled?”

  Skyler is taken wholly by surprise. Stammering, “I—I’m not. Crippled.”

  “Hell you’re not! Everybody at school knows you limp.”

  “I don’t limp. I’m not crippled.”

  “You stutter, too.”

  “I d-d-do not.”

  “Is your right leg shorter than the other leg? It sort of looks like that might be the problem.”

  Tyler is peering at Skyler pensively now. Not smirking.

  Skyler protests: “It is not. There isn’t any problem.”

  “C’n I examine the leg? I’m pre-med.”

  Skyler shrinks away. “N-No.”

  “Hey man, I wouldn’t hurt you. What I’d do is, like, measure both legs. How’s that going to hurt?”

  “I said no. Stay away.”

  “There’s this ’way cool test, Sky: the neurologist pokes pins in you, in ‘extremities’ like your toes, to see if you feel ‘sensation.’ It’s a game, like, if you feel the pin, to act like you don’t. C’n we try that?”

  “No.”

  Skyler is hurt, indignant. All these months he’d believed he had disguised his limp…Like the normal kids, he had been taking P.E.—dreaded Physical Education.

  Like an eager young doctor-in-training Tyler persists, asking Skyler if his leg problem is “congenital” or “accident-related” and Skyler hears himself admit, yes: his leg was broken in two places when he was six, his knee was “messed up” also, but he has had surgery to fix it, his leg is “almost healed,” he never uses crutches any longer and almost never needs a cane…

  Tyler asks how’d this happen and Skyler says, embarrassed, “I was t-training to be a gymnast. I fell.”

  Tyler laughs. “‘Gymnast.’ You?”

  “My dad wanted me to. It was
his idea.”

  This Tyler can respect. The ideas of dads, that go wrong.

  “Hell, Sky: I’m a cripple, too. C’n you keep a secret?”

  Sure.

  “Since pre-school, I’ve been G.C.S.S.” Tyler confesses this with scarcely concealed pride, but Skyler has no idea what G.C.S.S. means.

  “You’re not?” Tyler sounds disappointed. “I thought maybe, the way you act at school, kind of weird, twitchy and nervous and sulky, you’d be one of us: ‘Gifted Child Syndrome Sufferer.’”

  Gifted Child! Skyler has to wonder: maybe he is? For there are facts about himself known only to Fair Hills administrators and to Mummy, who rarely tells Skyler the results of the many tests he has had to take since kindergarten, both “cognitive” and “psychological”; only those tests Mummy arranges for him to take over, sometimes more than once, in a general, never-ceasing effort to raise his score.

  The effort of raising one’s score! Fair Hills children understand that a lifetime is required.

  Skyler asks what “syndrome” means and Tyler tells him, with clinical precision: “‘Syndrome’ is a congeries of ‘symptoms,’ seemingly related but possibly not, in a cluster. The more symptoms, the higher the ‘pathology quotient’ of the subject. Some G.C.S.S. kids in our class are only just D-level; I’m A-level.” Tyler pauses to allow this fact to sink in. Skyler says apologetically that he has just been classified “I.D.” and “I.A.D.D.” (though to be precise Skyler has been ranked infinitesimally below the “I.A.D.D.” diagnosis). Tyler doesn’t seem very impressed: “‘Incipient Dyslexia’—‘Incipient Attention Deficit Disorder.’ Sure. But in high-quotient G.C.S.S. you have these disorders plus a minimum one-fifty-five I.Q. (It isn’t cool to reveal what your I.Q. is, Sky. So don’t!) I have so many symptoms in clusters, both ‘intermittent’ and ‘chronic,’ my pediatric neurologist at Columbia Presbyterian and my pediatric psychiatrist at Robert Wood Johnson are both writing papers on me. Maybe you’ve noticed, Sky, my left eye isn’t in a line with my right eye? It’s as if I’m looking in two places at the same time, except my brain can process only one vision-field at a time. ‘Uncanny child’—Headmaster Hannity remarked of me to my mother; you can be sure that Mommy has repeated it all over town. (Mommy suffers from ‘R.C.S.’—‘Repetitive Compulsive Syndrome.’ Especially if it’s something Mommy knows she shouldn’t be repeating. The poor woman can’t help herself, so I try not to blame her.) I’ve been diagnosed with an ‘impairment of the cerebellum’ which results in ‘poor motor coordination’ so I have a permanent medical excuse for P.E. while the rest of you chumps have to trudge around outdoors in the cold kicking a stupid soccer ball. (Did you know that the original ‘balls’ in field sports were human heads? Decapitated heads of enemies? How cool is that?) If you tried you could get ‘P.M.E.’ status at school—‘Permanent Medical Excuse.’ Have your mother put some pressure on Hannity, after all you are a cripple.”

  Skyler winces: he is not a cripple.

  Skyler protests: he wants to take gym class like the other guys, he wants to be normal…

  “Freaky kids like us can’t ever be ‘normal,’” Tyler says smugly. “Our generation is some new kind of ‘evolutionary development,’ my shrink says. ‘Normal’ is just ‘average’—not cool. My latest diagnosis is ‘A.P.M.’—‘Acute Premature Melancholia,’ usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senior has had it all his life, too. You look as if you might be A.P.M. too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can’t spit it out. Want to try some of my meds? They’re ‘way cool.”

  Feebly Skyler protests he hadn’t better, he has meds of his own he takes three times a day, and you aren’t supposed to mix them. For the first time Tyler fixes Skyler a look of genuine interest: “You have meds? What kind?” When Skyler tells him Nixil, but his doctor has been cutting back his prescription, Tyler says, “Nixil is cool. But have you tried Excelsia?—this new anti-depressant, the F.D.A. has just approved. My mom and me are both into Excelsia.” With sudden energy Tyler rouses himself from his sprawl on the rumpled bed, clumps into his bathroom and returns with a handful of plastic pill containers which he arranges reverently on top of his bed, shaking out sample pills. Also, with a grunt Tyler rummages beneath his mattress to bring out his “stash”: a dozen or more “psychotropics” he has pilfered from other people’s medicine cabinets, including his parents’. Also, Tyler trades meds with kids at school. How like an avid little boy chunky Tyler is, showing a friend his prize marble collection: except, in Fair Hills, children don’t collect marbles any longer. “‘Tranks,’ uppers, ‘muscle relaxant,’ Ritalin. An old classic: Dexedrine. These weird-colored tabs are from Mommy’s prescription.” Skyler stares at shiny green pills, dull-green capsules, chalky white pills, chunky yellow pills, tiny beige pills and lethal-looking tablets the hue of faded blood. One or two of these look familiar to Skyler, painkillers/sedatives from the nightmare months following his fall in the gym. Why not? Maybe Tyler McGreety will like him better and want to be friends with him and Mummy will be happy with him, as Mummy hasn’t been happy with Skyler in some time. Skyler swallows down one shiny green pill, one chunky yellow pill, and one of the lethal-blood capsules. Tyler, observing, whistles thinly through his teeth, seems about to stop Skyler but does not stop Skyler. “Sky: cool. Way cool.” Tyler scoops up one of the faded-blood capsules and swallows it dry.

  There follows then, with the rapid skids, lurches, and leaps of an accelerated film, an indeterminate period of time during which Skyler’s talkative playdate confides in him, breathing moistly from his opened mouth, “…obsessed with me ‘following in his footsteps’ which is why I’m taking algebra this year and started Mandarin Chinese, the only third-grader H.I.P. in a class of asshole fifth- and sixth-graders…” as Skyler begins to feel a very strange buzzing/humming/vibrating sensation at the base of his skull, very likely in his cerebellum, and an erratic beating of his frantic heart like a moth trapped in a cobweb, “…Dad has his ‘heart set’ on me being a ‘wizard financier’ like himself, Yale B.A. like the old man, Skull and Bones like the old man, then to the Wharton School and beyond that—‘McGreety Père et Fils, Inc.’—delusions of grandeur! Except Ty Junior has his own plans for what he’s going to do with his freaky G.C.S.S. life, see—” Skyler’s mouth has gone dry as chalk. Skyler’s moth-heart is fluttering inside his rib cage. Weirder yet, the familiar pain-tinges in Skyler’s legs seem to have vanished—in fact, both Skyler’s legs seem to have vanished—even as Skyler is smiling a goofy-kid smile and blinking rapidly to keep his vision in focus. Don’t disappoint Mummy—again! Mummy had kissed/murmured into Skyler’s shamed ear for (as Skyler would prefer not to remember) several recent playdates arranged by Mummy with such hope were not what you’d call successes; for the mothers of Skyler’s playdate friends did not call Mummy back nor even, a matter of painful concern in Fair Hills, return Mummy’s repeated calls. And so Skyler is determined not to disappoint/annoy/offend/bore his strangely excited classmate who has pulled Skyler over to his bed to show him the opened pages of oversized medical books containing color plates of—Skyler squints, tries to see—moist-pink flesh, flesh veined terribly with red, eerily lard-colored flesh and sallow-grayish skin, a lattice-work of stark-white bones—Skyler gapes having seen nothing like these photographs in his life. “…pathology is way cool, see, Sky: you get to use surgeon skills but there’s no bullshit from your ‘patients’—they’re dead. Don’t need to talk to them, or to anybody mostly; you set your own hours and work on your own and nobody’s going to complain about you or sue for ‘malpractice’”—Tyler giggles, quivering and wiping at his mouth as he slowly, reverently turns pages of the medical book for Skyler to stare at—“Mommy is always raiding my room and taking these books from me, like there is something sicko about my chosen profession. Dad tells her, ‘Ty Junior will grow out of it, it’s just his age’—like they know the first thing about me! See, Sky?—
this is ‘steps of an autopsy’—you get to use an actual saw on the skull and rib cage, and the actual heart you kind of pull out in your hand and place in jars like these. If you want any of these pictures to take home I can photocopy them for you in Dad’s study, he’s got a color copier. On the Internet you can order ‘Junior Pathology Kits’ which I have tried to do—but somebody, has to be my damn mother, intercepts them. Three times I’ve tried but I’m not giving up, I was thinking, Sky, maybe I could use your address?—the kit could come to you?—and we could have a playdate here, you could bring it over, would that be cool? Here: this is my favorite. How she’s been opened up, they don’t show the faces but you can see it’s a girl, our age or a little younger. I mean, is this cool?” as Skyler is blinking in horror at what he sees, and Skyler’s little fists are raised, Skyler’s fists are pounding at the other’s astonished face in the fleeting moments before something like a slot—a slash?—opens up blackly to suck Skyler through.

  PROMPTLY AT 5 P.M. AS BIDDEN, NOT DARING TO BE EVEN A FEW MINUTES late, Skyler’s mother in her peach-colored cashmere coat that gives her a festive-girlish appearance at odds with her strained smile arrives at the oaken front door of the McGreetys’ faux-Normandy manor, to pick up her son: hoping that the Fair Hills mover and shaker Theodora McGreety will open the door even as with another, more somber part of her mind, Mummy knows that Theodora will not be greeting her. And when the door is opened, even as Mummy is still depressing the doorbell, as if someone inside has been watching urgently for her arrival, there stands the olive-skinned housekeeper in the (now somewhat soiled) white uniform, not snooty-aloof as before but frankly alarmed, shaken; and in a jumble of heavily accented words informing “Mz. Ranpick” that “your son” had become “sick”—“some kind of flu”—he’d been “throwing up”—“seizing”—“like with ep-lepsy”—and Mrs. Ranpick should take him away right now, before Mrs. McGreety comes home, for Mrs. McGreety is going to be “very upset” at the “nasty smell” from “him being sick all over”—clearly the housekeeper is far more frightened of her wealthy gringa employer than she is of the gringa playdate mother staring at her astonished.