My Sister, My Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Pastor Bob was on the phone, on his feet in his office when Skyler arrived breathless and excited and eager to borrow one of the church vehicles to drive to Spring Hollow, New York. First thing Pastor Bob said was: “You may want a companion on your drive, son.”

  It was the way of the pastor of the New Canaan Evangelical Church of Christ Risen to confront excitable individuals with calm. For there was his young friend Skyler Rampike looking like a terrified diver on a high board about to catapult himself into space.

  Quickly Skyler shook his head, no. Didn’t want a companion.

  Skyler’s face was still bruised, weirdly swollen and discolored. Stitches in his left eyebrow and near his mouth were leaking blood. He had not washed in some time and smelled of his body. He had shaved for the first time in weeks and his jaws were scraped and splotched with tiny blood-beads. He wore a filthy pea-jacket, jeans and combat boots. His prematurely gray hair stiff as quills he’d slicked back damp and clumsily braided at the nape of his neck in a six-inch rat-tail.

  Trying not to stammer Skyler stated: “I’m nineteen, Pastor Bob. I will be twenty next month. God damn I am not a child.”

  Pastor Bob was not one to smile readily. Pastor Bob doled out his smiles with care. And when Pastor Bob smiled in a certain slant-way, a way of calculation, meditation, the burn-scar tissue on the left side of his face shone like scales. His large limpid perpetually damp eyes shone with something like sympathy, but not credulity. By profession he was a Born Again kindly-Christ sort of guy but by nature (you’d hear that Bob Fluchaus had been a sergeant in the U.S. Army in the 1980s, later a guard at Rahway State Prison) he had to laugh at bullshit. Like Skyler Rampike quivering before him claiming not to be a child.

  “Son, we all need companions. In our hours of peril.”

  Skyler gnawed at his lower lip. Fuck son. Who’s a son.

  “I’m not in p-peril! It’s only a few hours on the expressway. You know you can trust me, Pastor Bob. You’ve said you trust me.” Skyler paused, hearing these words: were they true? “—I have a license and I’ve driven the station wagon already, I can drive it now.”

  This was so. Improbable as it might sound to the skeptical reader, who has assumed that Skyler has spent most of his time in New Brunswick holed up in his lurid rented room composing this wayward and unpredictable document, in fact Skyler had acquired a New Jersey State driver’s license, with Pastor Bob’s assistance, the previous summer. He had helped Pastor Bob out from time to time. For always at The Ark there was work to be done, and mostly volunteers to do it. Skyler had not been wholly reliable for he was one to appear, and then to disappear. In Pastor Bob Fluchaus’s life as a volunteer counsellor at the Middlesex Rehabilitation Clinic and as minister of the New Canaan Evangelical Church of Christ Risen such abrupt appearances and disappearances were not uncommon.

  Sometimes the disappearances were permanent. One day to the next, you never knew.

  If (for instance) despairing Skyler Rampike had doused himself with lighter fluid and struck a match to himself not long ago in the chill city park overlooking the Raritan River. A flaming mannequin he’d have appeared to astonished onlookers, fiery and spectacular but short-lived and New Brunswick police officers would have contacted Bob Fluchaus over at New Canaan Sorry Pastor: looks like another one of yours.

  Another of the good pastor’s ex-junkie losers, lost.

  If! But it had not happened, and Skyler was feeling damned good about that now. HSR means you have always the challenge of resisting your fate for a while longer.

  In rehab, Skyler had told Pastor Bob about his HSR diagnosis, and many others. Skyler had confided in Pastor Bob to a degree to which Skyler would not have believed possible, and sometimes came to wonder if he’d spilled too much of his guts.

  (Too many of his guts? Whichever.)

  (Yet: the reader knows as much of Skyler Rampike as Pastor Bob was given to know. The fallacy being, the more you know of an individual, the less. As, knowing so much about yourself, reader, the less certainty with which you could summarize yourself. Yes?)

  Clumsy Skyler trying to joke: “Pray for me, Pastor Bob? That I don’t arrive at my m-mother’s house too l-l-late.”

  Skyler smiled a sick-smirk-smile to signal to the frowning older man that for sure he wasn’t serious, did not believe in prayer for What is prayer? but earnest deluded individuals talking to themselves and expecting to be answered.

  Not Skyler! Skyler harangued himself virtually non-stop but didn’t expect any answers.

  But Pastor Bob didn’t smile. Never smiled when such anxious jokes were made for one who has chosen to follow the path laid down by Jesus Christ knows that you can’t help the walking wounded by laughing with them at the possibility that their wounds can’t be healed. Especially the wounded know this, and are continually testing you.

  “Will you call your mother first, Skyler? I’d advise it.”

  Pastor Bob was rummaging through a drawer, in search of the station wagon keys. Skyler took heart.

  “I don’t have a number for…” Skyler hesitated not knowing what to call the woman who was, or who’d once been, his mother. Mother? Betsey? “…her.”

  Pastor Bob cursed mildly searching through the drawer which contained numerous keys. His worktable was situated in the center of a cavernous room that might’ve been, at one time, judging from a tarnished chandelier overhead, a formal dining room of some pretensions. The wallpaper had been painted over but the ceiling was white stucco, intricately and beautifully molded. A bay window overlooking noisy Hurtle Avenue was comprised of leaded glass panes. Underfoot was a scuffed hardwood floor, missing a rug. The front foyer was large as the front foyer in the Grubbe house, or the McGreety house, had been, but its furnishings were utilitarian and there was no mirror to greet you.

  “Son, here.” Pastor Bob laid the keys onto the table but in so tentative a way, Skyler understood that some instruction would accompany them. A glimpse at Pastor Bob Fluchaus, you understood that here was a man to preach the Gospel: and what is the Gospel of Jesus Christ but good news? Even Skyler who could not believe in much beyond 2 + 2 = 4 had to concede All things are possible to him that believeth.

  For always Skyler was pleading with Pastor Bob, in yearning glances I believe: help thou my unbelief.

  Pastor Bob was explaining to Skyler that, since he’d procrastinated visiting his mother, it might be the case that, by the time he arrived, she’d had the surgery, and was still hospitalized; or, and Skyler should be prepared for this—“The surgery might not have been successful.”

  Skyler wasn’t hearing this. A buzzing in Skyler’s head and he wasn’t hearing much that Pastor Bob was telling him except the reiteration of son/Skyler which was both an irritant and a comfort to one who’d been spending so much time alone.

  “Or, circumstances might have changed—and your mother isn’t home. My impression is, Betsey Rampike is a very busy ‘public’ woman, and travels a good deal.”

  Skyler wanted to protest But she has summoned me to her! She will be waiting for me.

  With childlike obstinacy Skyler said, “The last letter my mother wrote to me was dated February fourteenth. Today is the twentieth, that hasn’t been so long.”

  “Son, today is the twenty-seventh.”

  Twenty-seventh! Skyler swallowed hard.

  “You see, you’ve procrastinated. You’ve been afraid.”

  God damn Skyler would’ve liked to ease the car keys out from beneath the older man’s hand like an audacious teenaged son taunting/flirting with his frowning daddy, but Skyler knew better. Pastor Bob could play with you, but you could not play with Pastor Bob except by his decree. Pastor Bob wouldn’t have hesitated to pound Skyler’s hand flat against the table with his fist.

  Pastor Bob was a large intimidating six-foot-five barrel-chested man of some mysterious age—late forties? early fifties? older?—with a way of breathing heavily through his mouth as if his nasal passages were blocked and indeed his nose looked s
omewhat flattened, chastened. He exuded an air both rueful and dignified. His sculpted-looking head reminded Skyler of Roman busts he’d seen in a museum. Grizzled gray hair lifted from his head like brush-bristles. His mouth was distinct, chiseled. His eyes were what you’d call “piercing”—alert, avid. His voice was a thrilling deep-baritone that scarcely needed amplifying from the pulpit at the New Canaan church where on crowded folding chairs, for Sunday services, somewhere beyond eight hundred people often gathered. The entire left side of his face was layered in burn-scar-tissue like scales. You stared in fascination. You could not look away. The first time Skyler had seen Pastor Bob, when Skyler had been very sick, he’d stared at the ravaged man as a child might stare, rudely, naively, and Pastor Bob had chuckled saying: “Looks like a Hallowe’en pumpkin that caught fire, eh son? Want to touch it?”

  In fact, Skyler had wanted to touch the big man’s boiled-looking face. Pastor Bob took Skyler’s hand and drew it slowly over the snarled-smooth scales, that were very warm, as if such a gesture was the most natural thing in the world.

  Later, Skyler would understand that this was a gesture that Pastor Bob made frequently. Whenever anyone stared at him. There was something sweetly vain in it, boastful. At the county rehab clinic, everyone had wanted to touch the evangelical minister’s fiery skin. Everyone had wanted to be “saved” by Pastor Bob. He was frank in confiding in them that he’d for sure wanted to die for a long time after his accident—though other motorists had been involved, the accident, on the New Jersey Turnpike, was “his”—but eventually he’d come round to accepting how he looked. He’d had eight operations on his face alone for he’d suffered second- and third-degree burns over 30 percent of his body and what remained with him two decades later was the wisdom of Burn Ward: “‘Some skin is a damn lot better than no skin.’ Like, in matters of the soul, some ‘soul’ is a damn lot better than none.”

  Skyler had shivered. Such words stirred him powerfully. He was too enfeebled at the time for doubt, cynicism. Such intricacies of the spirit were exhausting, at such a time. When you’re a near-drowned swimmer sunken beneath the surface of the water and someone extends a straw to you—skinny, bent, near-to-breaking—through which to breathe, you breathe.

  And you were damn grateful. You didn’t complain about the cheap quality of the paper straw.

  You didn’t complain of your rescuer. You adored your rescuer.

  Pastor Bob was saying it wasn’t the Dodge station wagon he was concerned about, it was Skyler who he didn’t think should be driving alone right now. “I’d come with you myself except there’s a family crisis I have to deal with here but if you could wait maybe an hour, I think I can line up someone to drive with you…”

  “D’you think I’m using, Pastor Bob? You don’t trust me?”

  A fevered look to Skyler’s face, something mismatched about his eyes. But Skyler is not using, Pastor Bob must know.

  There came a woman named Miriam to set cups of coffee out for Skyler and Pastor Bob but Skyler was hesitant to lift the steaming liquid to his mouth, too hot, too strong. Caffeine would make him even crazier than he was.

  Skyler’s mouth was dry, he’d been swallowing compulsively.

  Eyeing the keys to the station wagon, on the table. Badly he wanted to snatch them up, and run.

  Nineteen. In a few weeks, twenty. And his life has come to this: ex-junkie loser, begging.

  Pastor Bob was saying: “Your face, Skyler? Are those stitches? Did someone assault you? Kick you? It doesn’t look as if those wounds are healing, son. You keep picking at them with your fingernails…”

  Skyler touched his face in chagrin. His fingers came away damp: blood?

  “Let Miriam look at you, Skyler. Miriam is a nurse.”

  “Pastor Bob, I need to see my mother. I have to see her now.”

  “Son, I know. But you don’t want to put yourself in danger, or her.”

  Or her: what’s that mean?

  Does Pastor Bob think that Skyler is so distraught, he might try to harm his mother?

  What a strange electricity there was to The Ark! Like the electricity in the New Canaan Church (formerly a food canning factory, remodeled as a vast meeting hall) when Pastor Bob roamed restlessly about the brightly lighted platform speaking earnestly and urgently and fixing each individual in each folding chair with his fierce somber gaze. Skyler was never equal to it. Skyler was frightened as hell of it. Though he’d flunked out of Basking Ridge—that is, doomed “Sylvester Rampole” had flunked out—he had learned in chemistry class that if you weren’t sufficiently grounded—or was it, if you were grounded?—electricity ran through you and stopped your heart in an instant.

  Charisma, it was. Big-Daddy Bix Rampike radiated charisma too, like sweat-drops shaken off Big-Daddy’s handsome head.

  Pastor Bob laid a hand on Skyler’s shoulder. To comfort, or to restrain.

  “‘The wind bloweth where it will.’ All right. But let Miriam tend to you, son. And take a shower before you leave, and change into clean clothes. We can provide you with clean clothes. You can’t go to your mother in her hour of need looking the way you do, son. You look like death, and you smell. You just can’t do that, son.”

  With a show of sudden confidence, though very likely the canny evangelical minister felt a deep distrust of the situation and of his own complicity in it, Pastor Bob pushed the keys to the Dodge station wagon in Skyler’s direction. A phone had been ringing, and Pastor Bob turned to answer it. “Yes? I’m here.” His voice betrayed a mild exasperation tempered by hope. Skyler signaled Thanks! Taking up the keys, he had to believe he had earned, though made to grovel and plead like any supplicant son.

  Skyler was led away by Nurse Miriam who chided him for having picked at his stitches. It must have been, Skyler and Miriam knew each other: Skyler hadn’t paid much attention to the woman in this scene, as, in recasting the exchange now, I have purposefully omitted others who’d been coming and going in the background, as in a very amateur or very arty film; for always at The Ark, there were people; faces familiar to Skyler, and faces wholly unknown; there was even a nervously barking dog, somewhere at the rear of the house; phones ringing, footsteps on the stairs, cries of, “Pastor Bob? Got a minute?”—so resented by Skyler Rampike, who wanted attention exclusively on himself, they were virtually filtered out, and are vanished from my memory.

  Except Miriam. Here was Miriam, one of Pastor Bob’s “inner” family, living at The Ark, as Skyler belonged to the “outer” family. Many times since leaving rehab Skyler had eaten meals prepared by Miriam and others, and Skyler had helped out in the kitchen grateful to be included. For all her authority Miriam had the look of an ex-user, too. That guardedness about the eyes, that eagerness to be wholly in the moment. Miriam was younger than Betsey Rampike but had a soft raddled face like Betsey Rampike’s face and a soft-sliding-voluptuous body like Betsey Rampike’s body except Miriam in stained work-trousers, man’s flannel shirt over a T-shirt, a kerchief around her head, was in no way glamorous like sexy-Mummy Betsey Rampike. Yet her eyes fastened on lanky-late-teen Skyler with a chiding-maternal intimacy: “These stitches! Lucky you aren’t infected, the way you’ve been picking at them with dirty fingernails.”

  In his psycho-sick-kid career Skyler had come to believe that most ailments are psycho-caused: psycho-somatic. What exactly is an infection? Something in the blood, like an invasion? Could an infection be fatal?

  Shamed Skyler was made to sit at a sink. Deftly Miriam removed the ghastly stitching with a small scissors. A torment of violent itching, he’d have clawed at with his nails except Miriam caught his hands. “No! Just stop.” Miriam washed his face, that throbbed as if with fever, in lukewarm water; Miriam applied All-Sterile 70% Isopropyl Alcohol First Aid Antiseptic to his wounds, and covered them with oddly shaped starkly white Band-Aids. In a mirror Skyler gaped at himself, shocked: That was him?

  “Pray your face will heal without scars. Try to keep your hands off.”

  N
ext, Skyler showered. First time in many days, shameful to admit. Without unraveling the rat-tail he managed to shampoo his straggly hair. How good it felt to wash himself, to stand beneath a pelting shower with his eyes shut, faint with gratitude. He loved Pastor Bob, who had treated him with such kindness. Almost, he loved Miriam who had bathed his wounds so tenderly. Of the great archetypes of which our spiritual lives are seemingly comprised, that of Father-Son/Mother-Son is ubiquitous. When Skyler blundered into The Ark that morning with his usual lack of foresight, like a naive swimmer diving into a ten-foot surf, he could not have anticipated a happy ending.

  Here is what I have learned, from the effort of composing this document: Not all “symbolic” occasions are contrived. Some spring naturally from “life.”

  Awaiting Skyler after his shower were fresh-laundered clothes: baggy cotton T-shirt, boxer shorts, brown trousers that fitted him too loosely at the waist and too short in the legs, a wool flannel shirt of Pastor Bob’s and heavy-duty white wool socks.

  In the kitchen, Miriam insisted upon providing Skyler with a light lunch for the trip, since he hadn’t wanted to eat breakfast at The Ark; she pressed upon him a Thermos filled with fresh-squeezed orange juice. As if Skyler were driving a thousand miles and not less than one hundred: Skyler stammered thanks. A sudden urge came over him, to seize the woman’s hand and kiss it.

  Miriam didn’t know who he was. Only Pastor Bob knew. Skyler’s secret was safe with Pastor Bob. He believed this.

  Love love love you all! Someday, I will know how to show this.

  But where was Pastor Bob? Not in his office? Skyler had hoped that the minister would still be around to say good-bye to him and to warn him about driving carefully but Pastor Bob had departed for his morning crisis. Miriam led Skyler through the rectory to a rear door opening into the garage where the battered old 2001 Dodge station wagon was parked. On its sides hand-lettered in bronze paint: NEW CANAAN EVANGELICAL CHURCH OF CHRIST RISEN.

  “Skyler, we love you. Jesus will be your companion.”