My Sister, My Love (10 page)

JESUS KID I’M SORRY

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 now 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 calls 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.

It was arranged that Mummy would drive to the Chaplins’, and Trix Chaplin would drive everyone to the ice rink in her eight-seater Road Warrior S.U.V. Hesitantly Mummy asked if she could rent skates for Edna Louise at the rink, and there was a pause of just a moment before Trix Chaplin said, “Well, no. I wouldn’t think so. But I’ll bring a pair of Carrie’s last-year’s skates for Edna Louise, Carrie has outgrown. I’m sure that they will fit her.”

Mummy bit her lower lip! Had Mummy made, as Bix would say, a
foe paw
?

(How reluctant Mummy was to purchase ice skates for a four-year-old, especially expensive ice skates of the kind you’d naturally expect to see at the Halcyon Hills Ice Rink; after Mummy had paid so much for little Skyler’s skates, that had come to nothing.)

Charlemagne Drive was less than two miles from Ravens Crest Drive yet on the far side of a social abyss, as Betsey Rampike knew well. The meandering private drive crested the northern ridge of the Village of Fair Hills and the Chaplins’ house was a custom-built multi-level structure by the architect Shubishi, that descended a small mountain looking across Sylvan Lake (
not
man-made) to ex-Senator Mack Steadley’s horse farm/estate on three hundred acres of prime New Jersey land; their house, as Trix Chaplin ruefully complained, had become “out-grown”—“crowded”—for the family, with only six bedrooms (the Chaplins had four children of whom Carrie was the youngest) and Mr. Chaplin’s elderly mother living with them; an indoor swimming pool, a guesthouse, a gazebo, tennis courts and a pond (too small for the girls to skate seriously on, and any
way the ice was rippled and not smooth enough for skating). All this, on just five acres! Mr. Chaplin, Bud to his friends, was an investment officer at Fiduciary Trust of New Jersey and Trix Chaplin, with a law degree from Fordham, was a “full-time mom”—“or do I mean an ‘over-time’ mom?”—just like Betsey Rampike.

It was so, on her wistful
little drives
in the lime-green Chevy Impala Betsey Rampike had several times cruised along Charlemagne Drive undeterred by signs warning
PRIVATE ROAD NO WAY OUT
but she’d never seen the Chaplin house set back from the road and teasingly hidden by evergreens. Now when Mummy turned into the Chaplins’ gravelled driveway and approached the multi-level glass-and-stucco house on a hill overlooking Sylvan Lake, Mummy stared and seemed about to speak but did not speak; and in the passenger’s seat beside her Edna Louise said, fearfully, “Is that where Carrie lives, Mummy? Is that a
house
?”

AT THE HALCYON HILLS ICE RINK, WHICH WAS SO MUCH LARGER AND NICER
than the outdoor rink at Horace C. Slipp Park, Mummy tried not to be intimidated by the other mothers and their skater-daughters, all of whom were older than Edna Louise; she tried not to expect too much of Edna Louise, as foolishly she’d expected too much of Skyler. There were girl-skaters at the rink of middle-school and high-school age who were skating as well as, or better than, Betsey Sckulhorne had skated as a girl, among them Carrie Chaplin’s older sister Michelle who was seventeen and a senior at Fair Hills Day. Edna Louise seemed nearly feverish with anticipation as Mummy laced up Carrie Chaplin’s outgrown skates (white kidskin, high ankle supports, exquisite stitching) on the girl’s tiny feet and walked her hand in hand out onto the ice where other younger children, both boys and girls, were skidding, staggering, losing their balance and falling onto the ice, and being hoisted up to try again amid a good deal of noise; and there was Edna Louise frowning in concentration, her strange stark cobalt-blue eyes narrowed, at first wobbling on the new, unfamiliar skates, but by degrees as tightly she gripped Mummy’s hand and
followed Mummy’s instructions—“Go slowly, honey: Mummy has you”—“Right foot forward, sweetie: ‘glide’”—it seemed that Edna Louise already knew how to skate, by instinct.