My Sister, My Love (18 page)

HE MEANT IT FOR ME! HE LIKES ME, MUM-MY, AND NOT YOU. HE’S MY FRIEND.
I want to be with him!

The alert reader has picked up on these mysterious and riddlesome words flung out in the midst of my sister’s unexpected tantrum. But what to make of it? What do you, the alert and “objective” reader, think?

Wish I knew what the hell to think! My skin is crawling with these riddles, like lice swarming over me, as with lice it’s futile to try to pick them off with your fingers, the lice-swarm continues undiminished, new generations of lice are being hatched even as you claw frantically at them, so too with obsessive/repetitive thoughts
Did Bliss really know G.R. as she claims, was G.R. somehow Bliss’s friend, or was Bliss simply taunting our mother as young children sometimes do, even
“
good
”
children, in the temporary madness of a tantrum
?

Or, yet more upsetting possibility: that little Skyler was so stunned by his sister’s behavior that he misheard what she said or, trying to recall it afterward, he simply got it wrong?

By the end of
My Sister, My Love
the reader will know why such details are significant. Why, if Bliss had actually “known” G.R., meaning that G.R. had (somehow) contacted her, spoken with her, established a rapport with her, such a fact—if it is a fact—would be crucial to the (yet-unsolved) mystery of who murdered Bliss Rampike.

THOSE YEARS! GIDDY-HAPPY YEARS! AND NOT MANY YEARS FOR WHAT BEGAN
with Tots-on-Ice 1994 would be finished in late January 1997 and so is scarcely a fraction of a lifetime, yet in a way a very American lifetime: obscurity, fame, end.

In those years of the ascendency of Bliss Rampike it happened that Bix and Betsey Rampike were pulled in their daughter’s wake, as scraps of paper are pulled in the vortex-wake of a rushing tractor-trailer truck. For wonderfully it was happening, as Mummy could scarcely have dared to hope on her long-ago
little drives
with Skyler past the splendid homes of certain of her Fair Hills neighbors, that the Rampikes were becoming popular among their snooty Fair Hills neighbors.

Even Skyler was becoming sought-after for playdates among his Fair Hills Day classmates, or anyway their mothers. Even the prune-face runt with one leg shorter than the other.

Popular!
In America, what else matters?

Local newspapers had carried flattering little “human interest” pieces on Bliss since Tots-on-Ice and in the giddy spring of 1995 glossy upscale
New Jersey Lives
published a five-page spread including photographs on “the 5-year-old skating prodigy some are comparing to Sonja Henie.” In the fall of that year the
New York Times
New Jersey section published a feature on Bliss and her “devoted manager-mom Betsey Rampike,” soon then followed a cover story in glossy upscale
Garden State Galleria
, a new publication in the showy faux-aristocrat mode of
Vanity Fair.
In
Galleria
, there appeared eight pages of crisply fawning prose—“Skating experts are predicting that before her 10th birthday this gifted and very pretty little
blond ice-skating prodigy from Fair Hills will win the Trifecta of girls’ figure skating with a triple crown…”—and theatrically posed photographs of little Bliss in one of her sequined skating costumes, on the ice highlighted by a halo of heavenly light; Bliss in the same skating costume, with Mummy behind her, hugging her and partly swathing her in a cashmere wool cape like folding wings, Mummy’s chin lightly resting on top of Bliss’s small blond head; Bliss in little-girl dress-up clothes, jumper, blouse, tiny white shoe-boots, with her family—Mummy, Daddy, eight-year-old Skyler smilingly posed
*
in the family room of the Rampikes’ “beautiful part-restored 18th-century Colonial nestled in a cul-de-sac in one of Fair Hills’s most prestigious neighborhoods.” (Prestigious? Was this so? Mummy must’ve been thrilled, if uneasy. Ravens Crest Drive was only just O.K., in Fair Hills real estate terms.) Most of the feature was an interview with Mummy: “‘Family comes first with us! Bliss’s career is not our primary concern, only Bliss’s happiness’—‘We Rampikes are a very close-knit family, we never miss Sunday church services at Trinity Episcopal’—‘Oh yes: we are shielding our daughter from the glare of publicity’—‘Practice and prayer, prayer and practice—that is our formula for success so far!’” Bix Rampike too was quoted: “‘Crucial to keep perspective, as Betsey says ‘Family comes first!’—‘The bottom line is our love for our daughter, not our ambition’—‘Never say never: it runs in the family, a Rampike never gives up.’” The interviewer, a woman with the byline Adriana Fyce, seemed taken with Daddy whom she described as “tall, athletic-built, with a handshake to crush your fingers”—“could pass for a Pittsburgh-born cousin of one of the Boston-born Kennedys”—“a handsome up-and-coming junior executive in that hottest of corporate sectors, project development, at Scor Chemicals, Inc. with a sharp sense of humor and a touching doting-dad devotion to his daughter.” Though little was stated of Betsey Rampike’s background except that she’d been born in “remote” upstate New York and had “skated competitively, briefly” in high school, it was noted admiringly that Bix Rampike had been a “star
athlete” through school; he’d played varsity football at Cornell University and in his senior year he’d been “aggressively recruited” by several pro football teams, among them the Pythons of Indianapolis and the Stingrays of St. Petersburg.

The
Galleria
feature concluded, in a final paroxysm of a paragraph of quivering-female prose: “Asked what he most wished for his talented but very young daughter, Bix Rampike paused for a long moment, as a look of brooding tenderness came into his warm brown eyes, and the strong-boned features of his face softened. ‘May she be granted beauty and yet not beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught.’ It’s what some Irish poet said, and I say, Amen.’”
*

POPULAR! FOR NOW THE PHONES AT
93
RAVENS CREST DRIVE THAT HAD
for so long tormented Betsey Rampike by not-ringing, seemed to be
ringing-all-the-time.
And the calls that Mummy placed so strategically, following the logic of the elaborately hand-printed pyramid of names of those residents of Fair Hills and vicinity whom Mummy understood to be Very Important People, were now
being returned.
And nearly each day’s mail delivery brought, in addition to cards and packages painstakingly addressed to MISS BLISS RAMPIKE, invitations to dinner parties, luncheons, receptions and gala open houses, for MR. AND MRS. BIX RAMPIKE. “It’s like Christmas every day,” Mummy told Skyler, with a dazed-Mummy smile, hand pressed against her heart, “—I can feel the love from our neighbors, I could just cry.”

In fact, Mummy felt the need to hire another female assistant (Ardis Huddle, real estate/PR background) to help manage Bliss’s increasingly complicated career, with a special emphasis upon exploring tie-ins with child-modeling agencies, advertising agencies, and fund-raiser appearances; and since Maria could not be expected to handle so many calls and so much mail, nor could Maria be expected to clean the house, cook for
the family, shop for, prepare for, cook and clean up after the elaborate dinner parties Mummy began to schedule on the average of one every two weeks, a second Maria, from Peru, younger than the first Maria, with a darker skin, startlingly beautiful dark eyes, and yet more exotically accented English, came to work for us.

Little Maria, Big Maria. By purest chance Skyler happened to observe the initial encounter, in the upstairs hall, between Daddy (only just returned, jet-lagged and sour-smelling, not in the greatest of Daddy-moods, from Bangkok, or Singapore) and Little Maria (carrying the orange plastic laundry basket heaped with laundry just out of the drier): Daddy stared, and Daddy blinked, and Daddy stopped dead in his tracks, and a smile broke over Daddy’s chunky front teeth as Daddy shifted his suitcase to his left hand to free Daddy’s large strong bonecrusher hand for a handshake, which poor Little Maria, struggling with the laundry basket, could barely manage. In a warm-welcoming deep-baritone voice Daddy murmured: “Bu-ena vis-ta, senorita! Or—what the fuck time is it?—
nach-a
? I am Bix ‘Gringo Honcho’ Rampike and who might you be, très-bella senorita?”
*

What choice had Little Maria but to surrender her brown-skinned hand to the
gringo
honcho’s Caucasian hand?—what choice but to smile shyly, as her new employer loomed above her smiling and licking his lips? And what choice had little Skyler but to duck quickly back into his room before Big Daddy sighted him, and walloped the breath out of him in a Big Daddy greeting…

“IT IS LIKE CHRISTMAS, DARLING, ISN’T IT? THREE PARTIES THIS WEEKEND
! And Imogene Stubbe has invited me to ‘co-chair’ the Volunteers of Fair
Hills Spring Madness luncheon with her, and Gwendolyn Burr has just called to invite ‘your darling little boy’ over for a playdate with her son Baxter…”

Of course, Bix Rampike had been well-liked in Fair Hills from the start, but it was unmistakable how, in spring 1995, and yet more conspicuously in the fall/winter social season, the Rampikes were suddenly on everyone’s guest list; and Betsey Rampike, yet uneasy and hesitant among her more glamorous Fair Hills neighbors, was made to feel welcome: as if it were as much Betsey Rampike, as the handsome charismatic brisk-hand-shaking Bix Rampike, whom hostesses were vying for, and wished to befriend. Skyler had no need to sneak into Mummy’s desk to understand that certain of the asterisked names making up the magical pyramid of names on the pink construction paper had been recently circled in triumph: STUBBE, BURR, MARROW, McCONE, HAMBRUCK, KRUK. And there were EDSON, ROMNEY, BLOOMGREN, FRASS, HULTS. And even WHITTAKER. And KLEINHAUS! (Though not McGREETY. And, to Betsey’s continued chagrin, not CHAPLIN.) For a surreal period during the gay, giddy, protracted holiday season that in Fair Hills extended from pre-Christmas through New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day to Twelfth Night (January 6), it seemed that several very wealthy and usually remote residents of the large country estates/horse farms in the lush rolling countryside north of Fair Hills, including such fabled old-money New Jerseyans as ex-Senator Mack Steadley and his wife Irma, and the media baron Si Solomon and his wife Mimi, and billionaire Fritz Vizor and wife Fanny, were eager to befriend Bix and Betsey Rampike, or at any rate to invite the young couple to their homes. On such lavish occasions even Bix was uneasy, and prone to drinking too much, for Bix understood that these were individuals who rarely mingled with multi-millionaires like Bix’s superiors at Scor Chemicals; these were individuals who knew nothing of the crucial distinctions in Fair Hills among the Fair Hills Golf and Country Club, and the Pebble Hill Tennis Club, and the Village Women’s Club, and the Sylvan Glen Golf Club, because these were people who would not have wished to join these clubs no matter how “exclusive” and “prestigious.”

Daddy understood, but Mummy did not. Mummy agonized: How could they invite “Mack” Steadley and his wife Irma (Forbes heiress!) to a din
ner party at the Rampikes’ so unoriginal Colonial, with such “ordinary” furnishings—and on a mere two-acre lot!—when the Steadleys owned hundreds of acres of New Jersey countryside above Lake Hopatcong; how could they invite the Vizors who lived in a baronial “Country French” house the size of a castle, and raised pedigree Black Angus cattle; how could they invite the fabled Solomons who owned newspapers, magazines, television stations and lived in a four-level “classic contemporary” on a private mountain, though Mimi was “so much fun, eager to tell me about her ‘amateur skating career’ when she was a girl—” and Daddy interrupted, “Get real, Bets. Grow a brain. If your I.Q. caught up with your bra size, you’d be the Einstein of Ravens Crest Drive. These people were just checking us out. No more. They’d seen some of the media about us Rampikes—‘Parents of ’—‘Skating prodigy.’ ‘Next Sonja Henie.’ They won’t be inviting us back. That was clinched even before you opened your mouth for the first time and raved on about ‘what a beautiful house.’ Just the look of you, sweetheart. And maybe me, too. They won’t be inviting us back and sure as hell none of them would accept an invitation to dine on Ravens Crest Drive. Comprehendez, sweetheart?”

Comprehendez.

(ADMIT IT, SKY: CAN’T END THIS SCENE. CAN’T STAY WITH IT A MOMENT
longer but can’t end it, either. Need to cut away quickly but then the suspicious reader would know that the amateur author can’t handle his own material when it gets too painful. Surely the scene between my parents came to an end, eventually; but not for several more minutes, as they were undressing for bed; what I’d overheard came through the (shut) door of my parents’ bedroom and I wasn’t present to register Mummy’s shocked eyes, Mummy’s stricken face; nor did I see Daddy waving her away, backing off in that way that Daddy had, in this case stomping into his bathroom. Must’ve been late-night, a weekend, Daddy and Mummy had been out, drinking for hours at one or another of the dazzling Fair Hills parties they were always going to, and giving.)

QUICK CUT TO: “IT SEEMS SO LONG AGO, SKYLER, DOESN’T IT? ANOTHER
lifetime! When Mummy wasn’t very happy, and we went on our little drives in Fair Hills, and nobody ever called me, and I was so lonely, and the—what was that baby’s name—was always crying, crying,
cry
ing. If I could have seen ahead to now, Skyler! I might have saved myself some tears.”

In Mummy’s triumphant hand, an engraved invitation to New Year’s Eve at the Whittiers.

ABSENCE OF FURNITURE.
SORRY ABOUT THIS!

When Mummy complained that her house was “unoriginal”—“ordinary” the reader should have been provided with a “visual setting” (as in a movie) so that the words registered as ironic. For in fact, the Rampike house was expensively/obsessively furnished in “period furniture” in most of the downstairs rooms which were for show, as in a museum. Readers, likely to be female, with a morbid interest in furniture and home decorating should consult photographs in
Stately Homes of New Jersey: A Guided Tour
by Jacqueline Bigelow, where pages 48–53 contain furniture that resembles some of the furniture in our home.

IN WINTER
1995
TO
1996
IN THE WAKE OF BLISS RAMPIKE’S AMAZING NEW
triumphs, titles, and trophies (most publicized: Atlantic States Regional Girls’ Ice Figure Skating Challenge in which, in Division One, Bliss Rampike placed first with a score of 5.7 out of a possible 6) there came in rapid succession like fulfilled wishes in a Grimm’s fairy tale of ambiguous import yet more invitations, letters bearing the heraldic coats of arms of such Fair Hills bastions of privilege as the Fair Hills Golf and Country Club, the Pebble Hill Tennis Club, and the Fair Hills Village Women’s Club; and Mummy was thrilled, and gave a cry of girlish joy, on her knees thanking Jesus—“You had faith in me, when I had no faith in myself.” Eagerly Mummy would have joined each of these clubs—immediately!—except Daddy advised “holding out” for the more prestigious Sylvan Glen Golf Club which, as everyone knew, had among its “very select” membership each of Fair Hills’s most revered mega
millionaires, and trumped all other clubs. Mummy pleaded, “But what if the Sylvan Glen doesn’t ask us to join, and the others withdraw their invitations?” and Daddy said, “O.K.: accept the women’s club. That’s just women. But don’t screw this up for me, sweetheart. Let me play this right.”