My Sister, My Love (20 page)

And they did.

Quick cut to: solarium, rear of house. Mummy’s favorite room she has
decorated with white wicker furniture, cushions and pillows in bright parrot colors, rubber plants and orange trees in ceramic tubs. For the party, the solarium is candle-lit but most of the candles have burned low and a few have gone out and no one is here except Skyler who has drifted away from the now-waning party, way past Skyler’s bedtime but the wily child has managed to escape attention. Skyler has an uneasy feeling that Bliss is waiting for him upstairs in bed, Bliss sleeps with the Mother Goose lamp burning through the night for Bliss is afraid of the dark though her room is still the nursery with a door opening into Mummy and Daddy’s room, Bliss is feeling sad and lonely and her ankle has been hurting but Skyler isn’t going to think guiltily of his little sister, not right now. Swallowing down a mouthful of red wine out of one of the glasses—a mouthful of white wine—Skyler coughs, chokes—keeps swallowing—Skyler seems not to have learned his lesson about scavenging alcoholic party drinks—he has heard boys at school boasting of getting drunk on party leftovers like this—damn! Skyler wishes he was friends with Fox Hambruck, good old Foxie would appreciate Skyler’s boastful tale of how he got drunk not once but twice undetected by his parents—hearing someone approaching outside the room, awkwardly he crouches behind a wicker rocking chair, at the doorway there’s a couple whispering and laughing together, Skyler has a glimpse of a tall man, a woman with blond crimped hair and a throaty chuckle, the man’s hands are kneading the woman’s mostly bare back and even an asexual runt of nine understands that these two are not married to each other—

QUICK CUT. ANYWHERE OUT OF HERE!

The Skater.
In the nursery in the night floating in the little-girl bed with the white satin headboard decorated with pink and gold satin tiny girl-skaters, Bliss is sleeping. Not a quiet sleep but a twitchy sweaty moaning sleep for Bliss is skating in a place that is unfamiliar and inhospitable and a harsh spotlight is following her, if Bliss swerves suddenly on the ice, cuts her blades into the ice to turn in an unexpected direction yet the spotlight leaps after her, in fact the spotlight leaps ahead of her, uncanny and rapacious as a living creature. Bliss’s eyes are blinded, Bliss’s eyes fill with moisture, Mummy has been noticing lately, others have noticed, Bliss’s eyes seem to be filled with moisture much of the time, tears spill from her eyes and streak her face though she isn’t crying.
Bliss what is wrong with you?
Mummy pleads and there is no answer, Bliss has no answer turning to skate away, shutting her eyes to avoid the blinding spotlight. Though Bliss is six years old and no longer a really little girl yet Mummy has insisted that Bliss remain in the nursery close beside Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom with the door in the wall between the rooms that can be locked on one side (on Mummy and Daddy’s side) but not on the other. Mummy has had the nursery repainted and refurnished so that it has become a very pretty young-girl’s room with pink ruffled organdy curtains and white wicker-framed mirrors and on the pink and cream walls are framed photographs of Bliss’s skating triumphs, in chronological sequence beginning with now-historic Tots-on-Ice 1994 where the little-girl skater is a tiny figure between Mummy beaming with happiness and massive lizard-faced Jeremiah Jericho in his gaudy tux. In sleep Bliss has a habit of grinding her back teeth, breathing harshly through her mouth as if panting, for there is something wrong with the ice beneath her skate blades, the ice isn’t smooth but coarse and rippled and the glaring spotlight makes her eyes hurt. She has been zipped into a skating costume tight as a swimsuit, is it the white-sequined-swan cos
tume with the fluttery white feathers, is it the red-sequined-
Boléro
costume with the ( just slightly) padded bodice and slit-skirt, peek-a-boo black-lace panties beneath?—Bliss is beginning to sweat inside the costume Mummy has zipped her into so tightly, Bliss has begun to sweat inside the cosmetic-mask Mummy has applied to her face like putty, or maybe it’s bedclothes that have become twisted beneath Bliss, her pink flannel nightie that has become twisted between her legs. There is a twitch in Bliss’s left eyelid, a sudden stab of pain in Bliss’s left ankle, that familiar pain, it is Bliss Rampike’s left ankle that will betray her. Mummy has said
We must keep this a secret! Our rivals would gloat.
Except for sweet cherry pop and a few appetizers from the tray she’d been carrying, Bliss has gone to bed hungry, the more frantically she skates the less hungry she will be, turning on her skate blade, turning too sharply, the audience is murmuring somewhere in the shadows, or is the sound coming from the other side of the wall, voices through the shut door, it is very late, even in her sleep Bliss understands that it is very late now, her parents’ guests have gone home at last, car doors have been slamming, cars have departed, the loud gay laughing voices have departed, the uniformed servers are gone, the Marias are gone, Daddy has been away somewhere in his car and Daddy has returned stumbling on the stairs muttering to himself and in the big bedroom Mummy is awaiting him
How could you! humiliate me! at such a time! in front of our friends! I hate you!
even as Bliss skates to the very rear of the ice rink, trying not to hear the voices on the other side of the door, determined not to hear, skating/gliding/turning/though her left ankle has been throbbing with pain, and her head is throbbing with pain, and her cheeks are damp with tears, and her mouth is very dry, and, oh! that sensation in the pit of her belly that means danger, her bladder is pinching, but she can’t stop skating, must complete her routine,
Boléro
is accelerating its rhythm, ever faster, faster, as the audience begins to applaud, like a deafening waterfall the audience begins to applaud, Bliss feels her bladder burst, can’t wake from sleep in time to stop the first hot spurt of pee soiling her pink flannel nightie, soiling her pink-and-cream bedsheets, and the mattress beneath, this is the bad thing Bliss has been taught not to do, not since she was a little little girl being potty-trained
bad girl! bad Edna Louise! you are bad on purpose aren’t you, you are not trying
are you, what a dirty child, whose dirty child are you, Oh! look at the bad girl shame on the bad girl Edna Louise nobody wanted you in this house, Mummy and Daddy will send you back dirty ugly Edna Louise!
but she is Bliss now, she is Bliss and not Edna Louise, waking confused in her bed, frightened and guilty in her bed, for the wet is rapidly becoming cold, and smelly, and her mattress is soaked, and her bedclothes and nightie, and there will be nowhere to hide, that Mummy will not find her.

WETTING HER BED.

Trying to hide the evidence.
*

SLEEPWALKING.

Rising from her little-girl bed in the nursery, in the night.

Open-eyed yet sleeping—not seeming to know where she was, what she was doing—as she’d claim afterward—“like a dream”—“something was making me, not
me
”—prowling in the darkened house colliding with things, recklessly descending the stairs, falling on the (carpeted) stairs to lie stunned and whimpering on the first-floor landing mistaken then for her bed—“where I was meant to sleep.”

Were the sleepwalking episodes more prevalent when Bliss was preparing for a skating competition?—when Bliss was practicing at the ice rink for more than three hours a day?—so it was asked, by one or another of the child psychologists/neurologists/therapists to whom Bliss was brought, in that final year of her life.

DISAPPEARING.

Skyler where is your sister? Oh where has that bad girl got herself to now?

Mummy laughed, though Mummy was agitated: for Mummy had to know that, though Bliss wasn’t in her bed, wasn’t in her room, wasn’t in her bathroom or in any of the rooms in which Mummy had looked, nor beneath beds in those rooms, or sofas, or behind drapes, yet Bliss had to be somewhere in the house, for no one had broken in to kidnap her, Mummy had to know.

To worry me! To spite me! To make me upset! She does it on purpose that bad girl!

Yet sometimes Bliss was in (almost) plain sight, for instance curled up asleep like a little animal in a children’s storybook, in the shadowy alcove beneath the front staircase. And sometimes curled up on the homely nubby-fabric sofa in the basement family room never used by the Rampikes, like a room belonging to a ghost family that shared the house with us, whom we never saw: open the door and there’s Bliss sleeping, her wan little face upturned, disheveled hair, she’s breathing raspily through her part-opened mouth, barefoot and twitchy and her pretty pink embroidered nightie disfigured by stains.

Bliss’s strangest hiding place: the smutty floor of the furnace room where twin furnaces like great beasts throbbed and vibrated in cold weather.

Except Bliss protested she wasn’t
hiding.
She’d just been
dreaming.
And the dream took her to wherever it was,
she was meant to sleep.

SUCKING HER THUMB!

Sucking her fingers!

A nervous habit of course. An infantile habit a child of six should have outgrown years ago. (Like bed-wetting.) (Like worse-than-bed-wetting, which also happened, too, sometimes.) Such bad habits were annoying enough at home, when only Mummy and Skyler were witnesses, but to
tally unacceptable in public, where others could see, at the rink for instance, worse yet when Bliss was being interviewed!—interviewed on TV in bright-glaring lights!

Bliss how could you! Right on TV! Haven’t you been told, and told: keep your hands away from your mouth! Only babies suck their fingers! There are disgusting germs all over your hands! And it looks—oh honey, it looks terrible.

TWITCHY, FIDGETY! RESTLESS! WORST OF ALL WAS CHURCH, SUNDAY
mornings in the Rampike family pew almost directly in front of Reverend Higley’s pulpit, when Reverend Higley delivered his sermon, when the choir of Trinity Episcopal Church sang hymns in loud joyous voices that got inside your head like buzzing bees, then Bliss was most fidgety, prey to her “jumpy leg”—no matter how she tried to sit still, quietly like a good girl, invariably there came a tingling sensation in her left leg which Bliss tried to “keep back” as it became stronger and stronger until finally it “jumped out”—even if Bliss tried to hold her leg down with both hands, and pressing her foot hard against the floor, yet the rebellious leg would kick loose and cause people nearby to glance over at Bliss wondering what was wrong with her. And poor Mummy trying to smile, biting her lip to keep from crying, for nothing so upset Betsey Rampike than being embarrassed in public, in this upscale place of worship in Fair Hills, than bad behavior on the part of her children!

You can control that twitching if you try, Bliss. I learned to—we all did!—and so can you, if you try.

EVEN AT THE ICE RINK, BLISS SOMETIMES BEHAVED BADLY.

Suddenly breaking away, skating off to the farthest edge of the ice oblivious of the other girl-skaters staring at her and of Mummy and her (new) trainer Masha Kurylek calling after her.

She’d been practicing her routine for the upcoming 1996 Royale Ice
Capades (in which Bliss would perform to
The Firebird
), or maybe she’d been practicing her routine for the 1996 Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess Skate Challenge (in which Bliss would skate-dance to the sultry disco song “Do What Feels Right”) and suddenly with no warning or explanation she simply skated away, as if Masha Kurylek wasn’t out on the ice with her giving instructions, and Mummy wasn’t sitting in the first row of seats talking on her cell phone which immediately Mummy dropped, to run to the edge of the rink calling
Bliss where are you going? Bliss come back here at once!

Mummy in stylish tight knee-high leather boots dared not venture out onto the ice for fear of slipping, and falling. So Masha Kurylek (Olympic silver medalist, women’s figure skating 1992) had to skate hurriedly after Bliss to bring her back, gripping her pupil’s little hand tight. “Why did you skate away like that?” Mummy demanded in a quavering voice, and Bliss seemed at first not to know how to answer, shyly smiling, or defiantly smiling, mumbling, “…was my jumpy leg made me do it, Mummy. Not
me.
”

LYING
!

Saying terrible untrue things!

And in the most matter-of-fact little-girl voice, you’d swear such lies had to be true.

On a rare playdate, for instance, with a girl classmate she’d known at the Montessori school, whose surname—“Hover”—figured prominently in Mummy’s pyramid of magical Fair Hills names, while watching a video of Disney’s
Cinderella
, saying suddenly: “I was adopted. I was found somewhere.”

“Oh! You were? Where?”

“They don’t tell you where. Nobody will tell you.”

Bliss giggled. Then Bliss began to cry.

Little Miranda naturally passed on this shocking news to her own mummy and naturally Mrs. Hover spread the tale through Fair Hills by way of the Village Women’s Club where members met frequently for lunch,
and so the tale naturally found its way to Betsey Rampike who was livid—“That is not, not true! There is not an ounce of truth in such a lie!”—and felt the need, though knowing it was probably not a prudent idea to betray such emotion in a place like Fair Hills, to make numerous frantic telephone calls assuring her women friends/acquaintances that her little Bliss was certainly not adopted but had a naughty habit of inventing, making things up—“‘Confabulating’ is what Bliss’s neurologist calls it, Dr. Vandeman says that all children fantasize, it isn’t abnormal, or unusual, it’s the sign of a healthy imagination but in Bliss’s case there is not an ounce of truth in what she has said: I am Bliss’s biological mother, and Bix is Bliss’s biological father. We
are.
”
*

DISOBEDIENT. SNEAKY-SLY.

Couldn’t be trusted to eat the special-dietary foods Mummy had Maria prepare for her (high-protein/high-fiber/low-carb/low-sugar) for Mummy dreaded her little girl gaining weight, becoming “plump” as she herself had been as a girl, to the detriment of her skating career: “If Bliss could remain a tiny child forever, no more than forty-five pounds, how wonderful that would be!” Nor could Bliss be entrusted to take the numerous pills, tablets, and “dietary supplements” prescribed for her by the Fair Hills sports-pediatrician Dr. Muddick, which Maria—usually, Little Maria—gave her, or tried to give her, having to be especially vigilant that the cunning six-year-old didn’t just pretend to swallow her (expensive) meds and spit them out when she was alone, later. How frequently Skyler (who had his own battery of meds to swallow, or to pre
tend to swallow, three times daily) overheard this domestic-Beckett playlet:

Taken to Dr. Muddick’s office each Friday morning for her shots—SuperGrow, Hi-Con Vit-C, CAGHC (Child Athlete Growth Hormone Concentrate)
*
—Bliss was ever more sulky and resistant, as she was, in Mummy’s exasperated words, “self-destructive”—“irrational”—in the matter of the dental bite she was supposed to wear whenever she was home, to correct her “minor but disfiguring” overbite, that would prevent her, Mummy had been told by more than one figure-skating consultant, from achieving the very highest goals in women’s competitive skating: Olympic medals, World Skating and Grand Prix championships, the most lucrative product endorsements (Elite Sporting Goods, StarSkate Sportswear, Flawless Cosmetics).

When Daddy objected, as sometimes Daddy did, to what he called
Mummy’s “super-micro-managing” of Bliss’s career, Mummy said quickly, “Bix, you don’t know the first thing about girls’ skating and I
do.
No one wants to acknowledge that the competitions are basically beauty contests, but of course, take one look at the next big competition on TV, those camera close-ups, you will see it
is.
”

“So? If it is? Our daughter doesn’t have to compete, does she?”

For a moment Mummy simply stared at Daddy, who loomed (threateningly?) above her, too confused to speak.

Saying then, a hand to her breast, in a breathy-choked laughing voice, “Ohhh Bix! Damn you had me fooled, for a second I thought you were
serious.
”

OR SOMETIMES AT SUCH MOMENTS MUMMY WOULD SAY TO DADDY, DRAWING
a hand along his arm, sexy-pleading-vehement Mummy: “Darling, I’ve told you to trust me. Our daughter is our destiny.”

(OKAY, YOU’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE. BELIEVE ME, IF YOU’D LIVED IN THE
Rampike house on curvy Ravens Crest Drive, at the throbbing white-heat center of R.C.S disorder, you’d have heard it many, many more times.)

SULKY, SULLEN. STUBBORN.

In those devious cobalt-blue eyes,
not-there.

Mummy impatiently brushed aside the tutors’ excuses: “If you can’t teach my daughter basic skills, let alone a foreign language, I’m afraid that I can’t keep you on. And please don’t ask me for a recommendation, I am unable to
lie.
”

(AND THIS WAS TRUE, I THINK. BETSEY RAMPIKE WAS UNABLE TO CONSCIOUSLY
and deliberately and with premeditation
lie.
Such untruths as
Betsey told, and retold, were but variants of truth, as Mummy perceived it. Don’t judge her harshly!)

AT GRANDMOTHER RAMPIKE’S SPANISH-VILLA MANSION FRONTING THE UNRULY ATLANTIC
Ocean at Palm Beach, March 1996. Where Mummy, Skyler and Bliss were spending five days, to be joined by busy-Daddy for the weekend, damned if Bix is going to miss such a special occasion. Mummy wished for a “change of pace” for Bliss—and for her!—away from the ice rink for a few days at least so that Bliss could “relax”—“play”—“like an ordinary six-year-old.” But at Grandmother Rampike’s house that was showy-formal like a small hotel, to Mummy’s annoyance Bliss was both insomniac and prone to that damned habit of hers, sleepwalking; she was twitchy/anxious like one who is missing a limb without quite knowing which limb it is, unable to “rest”—“relax”—“sunbathe” on the terrace or the beach—“swim in Grandmother’s pool, or splash in the surf” with her brother—“play with her dolls, watch videos, read”—whatever it is ordinary six-year-old girls do: for Bliss missed the ice rink, that was obvious.
Bliss was miserable away from the ice rink
even in sunny Palm Beach amid such luxury where she’d been meant to bask also in Grandmother Rampike’s (revised) estimate of her as pike-mouthed old Edna Louise’s favorite grandchild. (Which elevated Mummy, too: though poor nervous Mummy had a very long way to go before becoming Edna Louise’s favorite daughter-in-law.) (And what of Skyler? The kid had to concede, his rich grandma scarcely took notice of him any longer, spoke to him only briefly and then about Bliss—“Oh aren’t you proud of your sister, Skyler! Your mother has been sending me the most amazing videos of that child’s skating performances! And one of these days soon, I hope to see her compete! I hope to see her crowned—what is it?—your mother has been telling me—‘Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess’—and on TV!—the most beautiful amazing prodity in the Rampike family, at last”—so emphasizing
prodity
with an excited clack of her formidable gleaming-white dentures, Skyler had to wonder if the mispronunciation was deliberate, as it
often seemed her son Bix’s mispronouncements/malapropisms must be deliberate.
*

“Well, Skyler? Why are you sneering like that? Aren’t you proud? You must be.”

Skyler blinked nearsightedly at the annoyed old woman. He’d been recalling how shocked and appalled his grandmother had been at his bedside in the Maimed Children’s Wing of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center in New Brunswick seeing her six-year-old grandson so frail and sickly and his badly broken leg in traction, moved to wonder if he would be a cripple for life…Now what was the subject? Who was the subject?