My Sister, My Love (21 page)
Had to be Bliss, he supposed.
“Yes, Grandmother. That is all that I am: proud of Bliss.”
(Skyler hadn’t been sneering! He was certain.)
(In the new/rapidly accelerating grip of R.C.S. [remember? Repetitive Compulsion Syndrome, said to be spreading like the bubonic plague of old among middle- and upper-middle-class Americans of all ethnic types, especially afflicting adolescents and “precocious” juveniles] Skyler peered at his reflection in mirrors and in mirroring surfaces a dozen times a day, more likely two dozen times a day, to see if he was making what his exasperated mother called
your damned pain-faces
and it seemed to Skyler that he was not.
He was not.
)
Yet Grandmother Rampike had to be disappointed with Bliss who never exhibited, in the several days of her visit to Palm Beach, any per
sonality you’d call special: at Mummy’s urging, Bliss was never less than sweetly/shyly polite with her grandmother, though stiffening in the old woman’s embrace as if she were being hurt; smiling the most wan, wistful smiles in response to persistent if well-intentioned questions, and mumbling near-inaudible replies meant to be
Yes Grandmother. No Grandmother. Thank you Grandmother.
Skyler overheard some of these exchanges and smiled meanly: the
prodity
on ice wasn’t a
prodity
on land, was she? The most painful of these scenes occurred when Edna Louise invited over a dozen of her rich-widow Palm Beach neighbors to meet her son’s family, in the absence of her actual son (Daddy was expected to arrive the next morning, at last): the Palm Beach ladies were meant to feast their eyes upon Edna Louise’s prized granddaughter, and to ply Bliss with questions, but, despite Mummy’s encouragement, the six-year-old was stricken with shyness when asked “what is it like” to skate so beautifully, and to be applauded by so many people, and to see her picture everywhere?
Quietly Bliss sat, sucking at her thumb, or several fingers.
The next morning, there came Grandmother Rampike to lead Bliss away after breakfast, gripping her hand. On the oceanside veranda of Grandmother Rampike’s house she instructed Bliss to please call her “Grandma”—not “Grandmother Rampike”—for it would mean so much to her, far more than she’d ever expected it might mean.
“Just ‘Grand-ma,’ dear. Please?”
What was this? The steely-eyed pike-mouthed old woman who’d insisted upon being called Grandmother Rampike by all her grandchildren, and Mother Rampike by her terrorized daughter-in-law Betsey, was begging now, in a clumsy-coquettish voice, her skating prodity granddaughter to call her Grandma? A muscular spasm passed over Skyler’s face, transforming it (Skyler had to suppose) into an ugly-gargoyle face.
“‘Grand-ma.’ Please try, dear: ‘Grand-ma.’ When you win that ‘Ice Princess’ title and you are interviewed on TV, you can wave and smile and say ‘Hi Grandma!’ and I will be watching, dear—I promise. No one has
ever called me ‘Grandma,’ I have no idea why, I am eighty-two years old and so very
lonely.
”
*
WETTING HER BED. (EVEN AT GRANDMOTHER RAMPIKE’S.)
Trying to hide the evidence.
BAD GIRL! AT YOUR AGE! YOU MUST BE DOING IT TO SPITE ME.
*
Poor Skyler! When Bliss had her bed-wetting/bed-fouling “accidents” to whom did she come but him?—pushing open his bedroom door (which, door to a mere child’s room, had no lock), waking him rudely and pleading with him—“Skyler help!”—“Skyler something happened in my bed!”—“Skyler there is something bad in my bed”—wanting Skyler to remove the wet/smelly/disgusting sheet for her and replace it with a clean sheet; and Skyler was cranky being wakened but usually agreed to help because his sister was so agitated, and repentant, though the mattress of Bliss’s bed was still damp, and stained, and smelly, and Maria, whose never-ending task was to make up all the Rampike beds, would probably report this fact to Mummy.
*
Yet to this day, despite Mummy’s efforts, scattered through the cesspool of cyberspace you will find the misinformation that Bliss Rampike was adopted as an infant by Bix and Betsey Rampike who could not have children of their own. In some quarters it is believed that our parents adopted both Bliss and me in order to “exploit”—“abuse”—us. Naturally, there have been a number of “biological mothers” who have come forward boldly to claim us, and if any of you “biological mothers”—or, as the case may be, “biological fathers”—are thinking to approach Skyler Rampike following the publication of this memoir, PLEASE DO NOT. I am no one’s son any longer, I swear!
*
What do you think: was this some kind of sinister steroid? Was Mummy colluding with Dr. Muddick to inject steroids into a six-year-old, to “enhance” her performance on the ice? In my half-assed amateur way I’ve tried to find out more about the controversial performance-drug CAGHC but it was taken off the market in 1999 and the trail seems to have gone cold.
*
D’you wonder how old Edna Louise reacted when Bix revealed to her, reluctantly/apologetically we have to suppose, that her four-year-old namesake-granddaughter Edna Louise was no longer “Edna Louise”—no longer named after her—but was, from that time forward, legally, “Bliss”—a name for which, in the patrician Rampike family, there could be no precedent? D’you wonder if the vain old woman was so shocked that for a long moment she could not speak, then snorted in derision, and hung up the phone? (For Bix had called her, soon after he’d given in to Betsey’s demands.) D’you wonder if, for some uncertain time, prospects of winning back the old woman looked grim? worse than grim? Until at last, “Bliss Rampike” began to win skating competitions, and began to be “known,” and old Edna Louise changed her mind. And, as Bix explained, in any number of apologetic-son calls, renaming their daughter, making the change legal, was after all a
fate accomply.
*
Simultaneous with this awkward scene overlooking the unruly Atlantic Ocean, an equally awkward scene is taking shape at gate nine of the West Palm Beach Airport. For Mummy has insisted upon driving to the airport to pick up Daddy. But the 11:08
A.M
.
flight from J.F.K. has just landed, and by 11:19
A.M
.
all the passengers have left the plane, and where is Daddy? Where is Bix Rampike? Mummy is trying not to panic, Mummy fumbles to make a call on her cell phone but on the luminous little blue screen emerge the cryptic words
CALL WAITING
.
“IT IS A CURSE, IN A YOUNG ATHLETE. I HAVE SEEN IT MANY TIMES, IN THE
best young skaters for they are frightened of their gift. We must fight, fight, fight to prevent it!” So Masha Kurylek spoke passionately, the small gold cross at her throat glittering like fire. And Mummy grimly amended: “We must
pray.
”
How she exasperated them, in the midst of a near-perfected routine, suddenly wobbling on her skate blades, flailing her thin arms, falling. Masha Kurylek stared in disbelief. Mummy could not bear it, a red mist passed over Mummy’s brain
Jesus why? To spite me but why? When I am the only one who knows that child’s wicked heart, and loves her anyway? Why?
As Bliss tried to scramble to her feet, up on her skate blades as quickly as possible as if she hadn’t fallen though white-faced, biting her lower lip to keep from whimpering in pain.
Exchanging a look with Mummy, in Bliss’s eyes a look of guilty shame, unmistakable.
Such a bad careless girl: why?
To hurt yourself, to hurt me? Why?
No one could understand. At the practice rink, often the other skaters paused in their routines to watch Bliss Rampike under the tutelage of the demanding Masha Kurylek, skating with such precision, such grace, such courage, and yet—sudden as a sneeze it might come, ugly and ungainly as a sneeze, a moment’s loss of concentration, a misstep, a fall.
Eagerly the child stammered: “M-Mummy, I’m not h-hurt. I’m
not.
”
And “Mummy, I don’t want to stop, I’m not hurt. Please, Mummy, I can keep skating.”
How the child’s thin wavering voice pleaded, Skyler will recall through his life Please Mummy I can keep skating.
Depending upon Masha Kurylek’s advice, Mummy sometimes allowed Bliss to continue. At other times, when the child was too obviously limping, or wincing with pain, Mummy murmured in exasperation what sounded like
Jesus give me patience!
, bundled Bliss up in her soft-down red coat (that was a birthday present from Daddy, or from Daddy’s “personal assistant” at work) and drove her to the Fair Hills Medical Center emergency room for X-rays; if the fall seemed to warrant such a measure, Mummy would arrange for an MRI at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center in New Brunswick, where Betsey Rampike had begun to be known. Mummy’s great fear was that Bliss’s careless skating would result in serious injuries to her spinal column, her neck. What of a head concussion? Broken ribs? If Bliss turned an ankle and broke it, that might be the end of the skating prodigy Bliss Rampike.
“Cost doesn’t matter! We’re insured for ‘personal injury.’ And where the insurance doesn’t cover everything, my wonderful mother-in-law Edna Louise has said she will ‘help out.’”
*
After Bliss had a skating mishap practicing her routine for the 1996 Royale Ice Capades, stricken in the midst of executing a “butterfly gyre” to the frenetic rhythms of the crowd-pleaser
The Firebird
, and having to be taken (via ambulance) to New Brunswick, it began to be whispered at the Halcyon rink that Bliss Rampike of all girl-skaters was becoming accident-prone.
Accident-prone!
As Masha Kurylek noted, the curse of the gifted skater.
And yet: Bliss loved to skate. This was no exaggeration, no false claim by her manager-mother. You could see, quite simply Bliss loved to skate. Never mind the shy, withdrawn, seemingly-not-so-bright-nor-so-pretty
little girl with the maddening habit of sucking at her fingers, here was a girl transformed on the ice, eager and fearless and flying on her hissing skate blades, a delight to observe. Even seasoned veterans of the girls’-figure-skating circuit smiled at the spectacle of Bliss Rampike. Even the older brother Skyler who had seen Bliss skate almost as often as their mother had seen her, could be capable still of being enchanted by her. And so very proud of her.
She is what I would be. If God had loved me instead.
Both Skyler and his sister were vastly relieved to be back home, after the sun-glaring strain of Palm Beach. Skyler understood that something was amiss between Mummy and Daddy, had been amiss for some time but was (maybe) worsening, though Mummy would not speak of it except to say with her bright-lipstick-Mummy smile
You know how Daddy is: bizzzee!
nor would Daddy, when Daddy was home, speak of it except to take Skyler aside man to man, press a beefy forefinger against his (Skyler’s) lips, and murmur in enigmatic-Daddy tone:
Sky-boy! Hell of it is
Homo sapiens’
troubles began when we started to walk on our damn hind legs and the female buttocks became repositioned vis-à-vis the male olfactory organs. It’s a bitch
!
After Palm Beach, Bliss was VERY HAPPY to be back in the cold climate of New Jersey. (The time: late March 1996.) VERY HAPPY to be back on the ice. (As Bliss said: “The ice can hurt you but the ice is your friend, Skyler.”) SO VERY HAPPY to be back in her size-two little-girl skates and no longer in exile in Grandmother Rampike’s Spanish villa on the Atlantic Ocean where there seemed to be no ice rinks and no interest in ice-skating and nothing to do all day long but
be.
Truly Palm Beach for all its beauty was a hateful place for Daddy had not joined them after all for a few days “R & R” as he’d promised. There were phone calls, there was a “private” discussion between Mummy and Grandmother Rampike (which Skyler could not manage to overhear), at last red-blinking-eye’d Mummy had explained to her children that Daddy had had to fly suddenly to Singapore, or was it Sydney, on emergency-business matters, Daddy was so very sorry to be missing his family and his mother but hoped to “make it up tenfold” to everyone when he returned.
And Daddy promised to watch “my bestest-best gal” skate in her next competition, and
win.
“’PHANTOM PAIN.’ IT IS THAT CURSE, MRS. RAMPIKE. I HOPE THAT MASHA
is mistaken!”
(It was a charming character trait, or an alarming character trait, that Bliss’s new trainer Masha Kurylek, fierce pale skin, fierce hyperthyroid eyes, fierce-palpitating nostrils, sometimes spoke of herself in the third person: “Masha.”)
Executing the tricky “butterfly gyre” to the fiery pounding music of
The Firebird
in preparation for the high-profile televised 1996 Royale Ice Capades in Wilmington, Delaware, Bliss had suffered one of her more serious falls, she’d been x-rayed and MRI’d and no “visible” injuries had been detected in her backbone, her neck, her skull, her right wrist; her injuries were mostly just bruises, bumps and minor abrasions which Dr. Muddick, Fair Hills’s most admired sports-pediatrician, treated with discreet doses of the handy painkiller Codeine 7. Bliss insisted that she wasn’t in pain, she was eager to resume skating, yet it soon became clear at practice that something was wrong with her: after about forty minutes on the ice Bliss began to tire, to breathe through her mouth, to favor her right leg. (Where previously she’d been favoring her left leg.) In even the simplest routines—figure eights, double-skate-turns, single-skate spirals—Bliss’s coordination was conspicuously off, the “fairy sparkle” that had elevated Bliss to the title of Tiny Miss StarSkate 1995 was sadly dimmed. Observing the child-skater closely, Masha decided that Bliss was “secretly” in pain though she denied it, for fear of disappointing Mummy; Masha believed that this “phantom” pain was very like the elusive “cervical spine strain” which she herself had suffered at the age of sixteen—“That had almost destroyed Masha’s career, there at the bud.” Masha insisted upon outfitting Bliss with a flesh-colored foam-rubber collar which would support her head, lessen the strain on her neck and upper spine, yet not interfere with her skating.
Mummy fretted: “But Bliss looks so piteous out there on the ice, like
an invalid. What if she’s photographed! What if a camera crew from New Jersey Network hears of this!”
Masha advised: “It is only just for now, Mrs. Rampike. So the child’s ‘cervical spine’ regains its strength, and she resumes her old confidence again, and we can remove the collar a few days before the Royale Ice Capades.”
Trussed up in her foam-rubber collar, Bliss skated dispiritedly and insisted she wasn’t in pain. She was
not
! The nasty pills Dr. Muddick prescribed for her made her “head heavy,” that was all. And her stomach “queasy.” She hated to take Codeine 7—slimy clam-colored capsules—as she hated all her other “meds” and the nasty weekly injections in her “bottom” and the nasty plastic-and-wire “bite” that made her mouth hurt and having to go to the beauty salon with Mummy to have her hair lightened with harsh-smelling chemicals that made her eyes sting and her nose run and at this point Mummy interrupted Bliss’s litany of hated-things uttered in a rising voice, that dangerously rising tantrum-voice Mummy could not risk allowing to erupt anywhere outside the privacy of the Rampike household, especially not in such a public place like the Halcyon rink where others would hear, other skaters and their trainers and mothers, how shocked they would be, how scandalized and delighted to witness angelic little Bliss Rampike fly into a temper tantrum like any other spoiled girl-skater: “Bliss, darling! I have you. And Jesus has you.”
Instinctively Mummy knew to embrace the quivering child. To contain the convulsive fury that made the child’s muscles twitch, and her jaws clench tight. No one had known to embrace Betsey Sckulhorne as a child of six, no one had loved her in such a way. No one had known her heart. For Betsey, who was now thirty-three years old, all that was over. But for Bliss who was Betsey Sckulhorne in this new far more beautiful and blessed form, it would be her destiny.
Mummy stroked Bliss’s hair that was so fine, and luminous-blond, smelling of chemical bleach. Mummy kissed Bliss’s forehead that was clammy, yet sweaty. Mummy spoke chidingly in Bliss’s ear, as one might speak to a small child.
“Jesus loves you, Bliss! Jesus loves us both. We know that, there is nothing else to know.”
AND WAS SKYLER JEALOUS, LOOKING ON? WAS SKYLER JEALOUS, SEEING
how everyone at the rink watched Bliss both on the ice and off, murmured
Hello, Bliss!
and
Good night, Bliss!
as if the very utterance of that magical monosyllable
Bliss
gave them pleasure, as a lover takes pleasure in speaking the beloved’s name? Was he jealous seeing how strangers smiled after Bliss, looking through Skyler as if his body were transparent and of no more substance than his soul, that’s to say as if he did not exist? Was Skyler jealous on the drive home to Fair Hills, in the cluttered backseat of Mummy’s Buick while Bliss slumped beside Mummy in the passenger’s seat, her small luminous-blond head against Mummy’s shoulder.
Plunging south into the rapidly growing dusk on New Jersey route 15. Headlights of oncoming cars rushing at them. And the windshield of the Buick splotched with rain and each rain-splotch shining like an eye.
Bliss is what Skyler would be if God had loved Skyler instead.
If there was Skyler. If there was God.
Skyler asked Mummy what is “phantom pain” he’d heard Masha speak of and Mummy frowned into the rear-view mirror above the windshield seeking out Skyler’s eyes. Often it seemed to Skyler that his mother forgot his presence and his voice was to her a kind of nudge waking her from private thoughts. “Why, Skyler. I didn’t think you were listening, I thought you were doing your homework…‘Phantom pain’ is when you only imagine pain, as Bliss seems to be imagining it. When the pain isn’t really there.”
“‘When the pain isn’t really’—where, Mummy?”
“Isn’t
there.
In your neck, or ankle. In a joint, or in a muscle.” Mummy paused, looking at Skyler in the little rectangular mirror. In the shifting glare of oncoming headlights her face appeared strangely shaped as a moon that has been flattened and her eyes that normally seemed to Skyler so beautiful were bulgy and wetly shiny like the rain-splotches. Carefully Mummy said, “It is only in your head.”
With nine-year-old pedantry Skyler said: “Pain
is
in the head, Mummy.
It’s in the brain. Bliss’s tutor was telling me—he showed me a science article, about the human brain.”
“Bliss’s tutor? You mean Rob? What is that young man doing with you, it’s Bliss he’s supposed to be tutoring, and a poor job he seems to be doing of it.” Mummy was incensed, suddenly. Mummy pursed her lips in the way Daddy teased was Mummy’s pit-bull look. “Bliss’s pain—if she has pain, which she denies—you know how devious that child is!—is in her head only, meaning that she is imagining it, as Dr. Vandeman says: it isn’t real.”
Yet Skyler persisted, leaning close behind Mummy as Mummy drove through the splotching rain: “But the only pain we feel is in our heads, Mummy. Pain is registered only in our brains and if we feel it, it is ‘real.’”
Mummy laughed irritably. Skyler should have known this was a warning laugh.
“Jesus can take our pain from us, if He wishes. If we are worthy. I know you don’t believe, Skyler, I’ve seen you squinching up your little gargoyle face during church services, you are a budding little skeptic like your father, and Jesus could no more burrow into your heart than He could burrow into a wizened old raisin, nonetheless it is
true.
Bliss’s pain is not ‘real’ and if it is ‘real’—Jesus will take it from her. And Bliss Rampike will be crowned Little Miss Royale Ice Princess 1996, and Daddy will be with us at the rink to see her crowned, and that evening we will have a special celebration, and Daddy will come home with us. That is our destiny, Skyler: what is yours?”
*
*
It was so: to Daddy’s astonishment, old Edna Louise had taken an unexpected interest in her youngest granddaughter, at last. Must’ve been the publicity in the
New York Times
New Jersey section, or the five-page spread in
New Jersey Lives.
Shrewd-Daddy understood that this bode—boded?—well for him, too: the favorite son who’d pissed off his mother by marrying, as Edna Louise persisted, no matter the banality of the cliché, “beneath” the Rampike family. For maybe it was so, as Mummy had so extravagantly predicted,
Our daughter is our destiny.