My Sister, My Love (15 page)

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.

And there is—can it be Skyler?—on a dwarf settee in the foyer, hunched like a fetus, shivering in a blanket that would seem to have been wrapped
hastily and carelessly around him, Mummy’s
little man
shivering and whimpering, deathly-pale; he is dazed and incoherent and, so strangely, his clothes and hair are soaking wet. (It will turn out that his playdate host Ty, panicked at what appeared to be a lethal reaction to the meds-mix he’d taken, dragged the convulsing eight-year-old into the bathroom adjoining Ty’s room, and into the shower where Ty turned on “full blast” the cold water in an effort to “calm” Skyler.) At this time, when Betsey Rampike arrives to take her stricken son away, Tyler, Jr. is nowhere in view.

“Oh my God! Oh Skyler! Oh what have you
done.
”

Fortunately, Skyler does seem to revive in Mummy’s car, on the way to the Fair Hills Medical Center, vomiting up a yellow gruel-like liquid onto the floor and Skyler insists to Mummy that he’s all right, he is feeling much better, so Mummy decides against the ER as she will decide against recounting any of this unfortunate episode to Skyler’s dad when he returns home from Toyko, or Singapore, could be Bangkok. At home Skyler overhears her speaking agitatedly on the phone, in the stilted voice in which Mummy leaves voice mail messages she suspects will be futile, “Theodora? This is Betsey Ranpick—Rampike!—may we speak? Please will you call me as soon as you get this message? I’m a little upset about what happened at your house—what my son has told me happened at your house this afternoon—I don’t mean that I am terribly upset but yes, I am upset—so will you call me, please? Skyler is much, much better now—you will be relieved to hear—please tell your son—and he is hoping—and I am hoping—that the boys can t-try again—we can plan another p-playdate—soon?”

Though Mummy telephones Mrs. McGreety several times, her calls are never returned; and when the women encounter each other in Fair Hills, which is not frequent, and always in the presence of others, Mrs. McGreety will seem not to know who Mrs. Rampike is.

Wiping a tear from Skyler’s eye he hasn’t known he has shed, Mummy whispers fiercely, “Skyler! Don’t cry. Next time, we will try
harder.
”

SKYLER! WE ARE NOT GOING TO GIVE UP ON A SOCIAL LIFE FOR YOU, I
promise.
And so there were others. Numerous others. Playdates with other Fair Hills children, mostly boys, and mostly classmates of Skyler’s at Fair Hills Day School or the yet more prestigious Drumthwrack Academy for Boys, or children of families belonging to Trinity Episcopal Church, these dates arranged by Mummy at her most exacting, ambitious, and hopeful in the interstices of Mummy’s ever-more busy life as the mother-manager of Bliss Rampike in those frantic years 1995 through December 1996 for after January 1997 there would be no more playdates for Skyler Rampike, no indeed.

Ah, but memories! What is childhood but a giddy repository of memories! Quick cut to: fat-faced/sullen-giggly Albert Kruk who was a year older than Skyler, in fourth grade at Fair Hills, not H.I.P. track, not G.C.S.S., whose father was Morris Kruk the “highly regarded” criminal attorney and whose mother Biffy Kruk was membership chair of the Village Women’s Club and one of Fair Hills’s “movers and shakers,” whose photographs appeared frequently in the Style section of the
Fair Hills Beacon
: Albert Kruk who clearly had not wanted a playdate with Skyler Rampike but took him “fishing”—as he called it—on the immense flagstone terrace at the rear of the Kruk house on Hawksmoor Lane, stomping on luckless worms marooned on the terrace after a recent rainstorm but Skyler hadn’t much enthusiasm for “fishing” and the playdate with Albert Kruk was not a success, and would not be repeated. And there was Elyot Grubbe, fourth grader at the Drumthwrack Academy with whose heiress-mother Mummy was acquainted through Reverend and Mrs. Higley: Elyot was a boy of
precocious mental gifts (it was claimed) yet strangely slow in speech, slow in movement and sinuous as a sloth, prone to staring off into space, as if mildly sedated; a playdate friend with whom Skyler could sit quietly for an entire playdate, in fact mutely, at either Elyot’s home or Skyler’s, each boy deeply absorbed in his own homework with no need for the usual phony small talk: “D’you like school?”—“It’s okay. You?”—“It’s okay.” Of Skyler’s playdate friends, Elyot Grubbe was his favorite; if Skyler had had a brother, Elyot Grubbe was his brother; perhaps because, unknown to Skyler at the time, of course, Elyot Grubbe was one day to become a child of media scandal (in April 1999, Elyot’s heiress-mother Imogene would be “brutally bludgeoned to death” by an intruder in the Grubbes’ Neo-Edwardian mansion on the Great Road at the exact time when Elyot’s father A. J. Grubbe was deep-sea fishing in the Caribbean off the coast of St. Bart’s with friends on his thirty-foot sailboat) as if anticipating that his life, like Skyler Rampike’s, would be but a footnote ever after.
*
And there was Billy Durkee, a Fair Hills classmate of canny mathematical skills who taught Skyler to play poker (“This game is five-card stud, son: you in?”) in order to win from the naive boy his meager allowance (meager by Fair Hills Day standards, just twelve dollars weekly) and meds (by this time Skyler was taking Ritalin for his now-active A.D.D. in addition to the new F.D.A.-approved-for-children painkiller Balmil much touted for its minimal side effects); and there was fifth-grader Denton “Fox” Hambruck whose father was an older Scor Chemicals associate/squash partner of Bix Rampike and whose mother had befriended Betsey Rampike, to a degree. Fox Hambruck was famous at school for bringing with him, inside his loose-fitting clothes, small screw-top bottles filled with his father’s blended-Scotch whiskey, which he shared with a very few select
fifth- and sixth-graders. At school, Fox would not have been caught dead in the company of a third-grade runt/cripple like Skyler Rampike but, cajoled into a playdate with Skyler by his mother, Fox seemed friendly enough, offering to show to Skyler, on the occasion of their first and only playdate, what he called his father’s home movies: “These are tapes of my dad’s special friends, that nobody knows about but me”—adding with a wink—“and Dad doesn’t know about me.” A dozen videos were kept locked in a small safe in Mr. Hambruck’s office (to which, by what sleight-of-hand Skyler could not guess, foxy Fox had the combination) in somber black cases identified only by initials and dates. “Know what X-rated is, Rampike?” Fox teased the younger boy, “—well, this is XXX. Hang on!” As soon as Fox began the first tape, and starkly black-and-white images leapt onto the large TV wall screen, Skyler was unnerved: no mood-music? no voice-over? only just a crudely photographed scene of—was that an adult woman? an adult naked woman? a fleshy woman like Mummy with large softly sagging breasts cupped in both her hands, dark eye-like nipples, an alarming swath of something dark and bristly as a beard, but in the wrong place for a beard. As Skyler stared slack-jawed the naked woman lurched toward the camera opening her arms as if to embrace him, as Mummy used to do when Skyler was younger, and Mummy’s
little man
; the woman made kissing/sucking gestures with her thick lipsticked lips and a wave of panic washed over Skyler—Was this Mummy? Even as Skyler could see clearly that the woman was heavier than Mummy, not nearly so pretty as Mummy with a bumpy nose not a snub nose like Mummy’s, and yet—Was this Mummy? What if this was somehow Mummy? Jerkily the camera moved to show a second female figure, much younger, a girl?—of about eleven?—a girl with long straight hair and pouty lips who resembled a sixth-grader at Fair Hills Day School yet could not be that girl of course, for this girl was naked, and you never saw naked girls, this was a girl made up glamorously as the woman, in fact made up to resemble the woman, Skyler thought, who was she?—the girl’s mother, as Mummy was lately making up Bliss to resemble her when Bliss was performing on the ice and the lights, as Mummy said, bleached all color from a child’s face, and made a child’s eyes disappear so you had no choice really except to put on makeup including eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara; and now the camera
swung drunkenly around to show a pot-bellied middle-aged man who appeared also to be naked, though wearing black socks like Daddy’s, that came halfway to his knees, and a watch of the kind Skyler had learned to identify as Rolex, for Daddy wore a Rolex watch, and the man in the film was not Daddy because the man in the film was older and his body slack and sagging and the man’s face was blurred, for the camera was unsteady, and Fox was saying, snickering, “That’s Dad! That’s Dad!” and “watch what Dad does,” giggling and wiping at his mouth; and Skyler pushed desperately away from Fox, as Fox laughed crudely and grabbed at Skyler saying he had to stay! had to watch! and Skyler shielded his eyes from the screen as often watching TV in the family room when neither Mummy nor Daddy was with them Bliss would shield her eyes with her fingers—yet peeking through her fingers?—even when, by Skyler’s standards, nothing was happening on the screen that was scary or upsetting, but Bliss was just a little girl, easily made anxious by loud noises, jarring intrusions and swift changes of scene and of mood-music and huddled on the sofa blinking and staring at so much that seemed to be rushing at her—from where? from the Adult World?—a whirlwind of sights, sounds, sensations you could not hope to make sense of, not when you were four years old, or scarcely five, the only remedy was to shield your eyes, better yet shut your eyes
Is it over, Skyler
?
Is it gone now?
in a faint quivery voice to make Skyler jeer
What a baby! There’s nothing there, silly baby
but now Skyler wasn’t jeering and Skyler wasn’t laughing for Skyler had had a glimpse of someone, another man, a blurred and mirthful face?—
*
beyond the fattish figure of the naked man said to be Fox Hambruck’s father and so broke away from Fox’s clutching hands and ran from Fox’s room (as large and as cluttered with expensive boy-things as Tyler McGreety’s room) to hide frightened and panting in a bathroom of perfumed soaps and gleaming white walls, the door locked to protect him until sometime later there was a sharp rap on the door and a female voice called to Skyler: “Your momma is downstairs, Sk’ler. It is time for you to go home.”

What nice people! Skyler you know your father works with Mr. Hambruck who is a senior executive at Scor Chemicals! Oh I hope I hope that you and that fascinating little Denton got along well and he will want to see you again and that you did not disappoint Mummy again, darling!

SORRY TO GIVE THE IMPRESSION THAT MOST OF SKYLER’S PLAYDATES WERE
disasters,
*
or took place at others’ houses. In fact there were plenty of playdates in which nothing happened—“forgettable” interludes, you could say—which is why I’ve forgotten them. And there were plenty of playdates at our house under the eye of the current Maria, when Mummy was out; and sometimes, when Mummy was home, Mummy hovered over Skyler and his little visitor like an anxious hostess asking would they like something to drink? Would they like some fresh-baked (by Maria) chocolate-chip cookies? Some banana-nut bread? One of Skyler’s visitors said politely, “Thank you, Mrs. Rampike. But I am on the Atkins diet.” Another was innocent freckle-faced Calvin Klaus, Jr. the ten-year-old son of scrawny-sexy-blond Morgan Klaus who would one day soon give Bix and Betsey Rampike’s shaky marriage a final nudge into ruins, of which more later. I guess.

“WISH YOU WERE MY BROTHER, SKYLER.” BREATHY MILDRED MARROW
paused, wiping at her damp eyes. “Wish I had a brother, and he was you.”

Mildred Marrow was one of Skyler’s very few girl playdates. (Why was this? Did our mothers anxiously fear pre-pubescent sexual gropings, “experimentation”? Even among the walking-wounded of the upcoming generation?) A moony fifth grader a year older than Skyler, Mildred was famous for her high—“off-the-radar”—I.Q. at Fair Hills Day, and was generally disliked. How could you tolerate a smirky girl who’d not only been tapped for the H.I.P. track (in pre-school!) but was ranked in the “highest one-percentile” of all H.I.P. students at the school,
K through twelfth grade? Mildred was the daughter of a New Jersey state senator of independent means and his socialite wife: a lanky girl with brooding damp eyes, a quivery mouth and rounded shoulders who’d been designated both G.C.S.S. and R.A. (“recovering anorexic”) by fourth grade. Mildred’s schedule was as crammed and purposeful as Bliss’s, though more varied: a special nanny-driver transported Mildred to and from school, to and from her Mandarin Chinese tutorial; to and from equestrian lessons, tennis lessons, dance lessons; sessions with her acupuncturist, and with her (Jungian) therapist; and, at least once a week, a playdate with a child like Skyler Rampike who was deemed to pose no threat, intellectual or otherwise, to Mildred’s delicate sensibility. To Skyler’s surprise, Mildred seemed actually to like him, perhaps out of pity?—for Skyler was known not to be H.I.P. nor even G.C.S.S. and though he tried hard to disguise it, one of Skyler’s legs was obviously shorter than the other, causing him to limp, occasionally even to walk with a cane (“Sprained my Akills tendon in the gym, this is just temporary”) thereby endearing him to his girl-classmates even as it roused to scorn most of the boys.

High-strung at school, Mildred relaxed in Skyler’s presence. Her “favorite thing” was helping him with his homework, especially arithmetic which Mildred said was “restful” to her: “To slow my mind down, to keep pace with you, Skyler. I love that!” Once in a thoughtful moment Mildred confessed that she wished that Skyler could be her brother, and live at her house: “My neurotic parents would then have someone else to obsess over, not just me.” Mildred was Skyler’s sole playdate to speak of his sister, with frank admiration and envy. “Bliss is just a little girl, and she has a career. In a few years, she can live
by herself.
”

Skyler laughed uneasily. “Live by herself? Bliss is five years old.”

Mildred, who hadn’t actually seen Bliss in person, only just photographs of her in local publications, seemed not to hear. She was showing Skyler a clipping from the
Fair Hills Beacon
with the headline
FAIR HILLS “PRODIGY” WINS GIRLS SKATING TITLE.
The article included a photograph of both Bliss and her mother: the occasion was the Junior Miss Girls’ Skate Challenge 1995 held in Roanoke, Virginia, a few months before. Wistfully Mildred said: “Your sister is so pretty, and so little. I wish that I was pretty
like her and not ugly like I am; I wish that I could skate like her, and get my picture in the paper. She is
so lucky.
”

Skyler wondered if Mildred was joking. Mildred Marrow, a rich-girl famous for her I.Q., the highest one-percentile of H.I.P students, both G.C.S.S. and R.A., was envious of Skyler’s little sister?

“I hate who I am!” Mildred said. “Of course I am superior to just about everyone at school, at damn old tests anyway, but who cares? I don’t care! I’d rather be a champion ice-skater with blond hair.”

Skyler, staring at Bliss and Mummy in the newspaper photo, had to suppose that, if he hadn’t known that the beautiful little doll-girl in the photo was Bliss, he wouldn’t have recognized her. For her performance, Bliss had been transformed into a fairy princess in white tulle, white satin, white feathers, with a glimpse of white lace panties beneath the little skirt; in her plaited hair was a sprinkling of what Mummy called “stardust,” and on top of this plaited hair a small silver—or silver-plate—tiara had been placed. It was so, Bliss looked beautiful. And behind her, embracing Bliss with her chin resting lightly on Bliss’s shoulder, Betsey Rampike looked beautiful, too.

Skyler had attended the Roanoke competition. Skyler had seen his sister win an “upset victory” over exquisite little ten-year-old Chinese-American prodigies, as she’d won over all other girl-skaters in the junior competition. Skyler had frankly doubted that Bliss would win, skating to a slightly syncopated “Sleeping Beauty Waltz”; more than once, Skyler had shut his eyes, and clenched his fists; thinking
Now she will fall! now it will end
but somehow God had protected Bliss on her hissing skate-blades, as Mummy had prayed He would do. The little girl with the “fairy sparkle” had won the audience’s fickle heart away from the Chinese-American twins, and she’d won the judges’ hearts: out of a perfect score of 6, Bliss was awarded 5.88 and the title Miss Girls’ Skate Challenge 1995 (Junior Division). And now Mildred Marrow, brainiest of brainy Fair Hills children, feared by her classmates and even by some of her teachers for her sarcastic tongue, was saying, sighing, “Skyler, your parents must be
so proud
of your sister. ‘Bliss Rampike’ must be the happiest little girl on earth. Gosh!”