My Sister, My Love (14 page)

FOR THOSE READERS—POTENTIALLY, MILLIONS!—WITH AN AVID INTEREST
in American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you’ve been awaiting. For in one of the upstairs rooms in our house where Mummy had established a “private space” for herself, there was a stylish desk that gleamed with what looked like laminated plastic, lipstick-red, and in a center drawer of this desk was a large sheet of kindergarten-pink construction paper containing an elaborately hand-printed pyramid of names, some of them boxed, some distinguished by
^*
,
^*
*
, or
^*
*
*
, with mysterious codes and crisscrossing arrows, bewildering to the eye at first glance, yet, like any cryptic puzzle, yielding by degrees to the obsessive scrutiny of one, like eight-year-old Skyler Rampike, who focuses his attention on it, as if his life depended upon cracking the code. Out of loneliness/precocious morbid curiosity, Skyler often found himself in Mummy’s colorfully decorated, perfumy room when Mummy was absent, and Skyler had no more shame than to search through Mummy’s things, discovering this document in the center drawer to which
Mummy had given the title
^*
FHFF
^*
in tall letters, meaning, maybe, “Fair Hills Future Friends” (?), the poignant significance of which even an eight-year-old lately diagnosed with incipient dyslexia could discern. A meticulously constructed pyramid of names, as in

STEADLEY WHITTAKER WHITTIER McGREETY

KRUK HAMBRUCK FRASS STUBBE DURKEE O’STRYKER

FENN McCONE HOVER GRUBB MARROW KLAUS BURR KLEINHAUS

—and so forth, to the very bottom of the sheet of pink construction paper where names were more plentiful and (you had to think) less distinctive, exalted. I have made no attempt to replicate here the numerous codes attached to these names, for instance CH (church?), BX (Bix? contacts of Bix’s), SK (skating?), HOS (Fair Hills Hospital Auxiliary, one of the more accessible local “service” organizations comprised primarily by well-to-do, somewhat idle Fair Hills matrons), FHCC (Fair Hills Country Club?), PHTAC (Pebble Hill Tennis Club?), SGGC (Sylvan Glen Golf Club?), VWC (Fair Hills Village Women’s Club?), FHD (Fair Hills Day School?). To some of these, notably to the high-ranking McGREETY, the cryptic code PD was affixed:
playdate.

“SKYLER! PLEASE TRY NOT TO LIMP, AND TWITCH, AND MAKE THOSE
frightening ‘pain faces.’ A playdate is a
fun occasion.
”

Must’ve been March 1995 this happened. When Skyler was only just eight years old and in third grade at Fair Hills Day and his twice-broken right leg had not yet entirely healed but the settlement out of court from the Gold Medal Gym & Health Club had come through. (As the
Fair Hills Beacon
discreetly noted, for an “undisclosed” sum.) When Daddy was traveling weekly on business missions for Scor Chemicals, which aggressive American-owned company had entered, in Daddy’s words, “our global phase.” This harried season when Bliss was beginning to skate in regional competitions in which, if she didn’t place first, she placed second, or third, though her rivals were likely to be several years older than
she; a season when Bliss no longer attended school with her little classmates but was being “home-tutored” by a succession of tutors under Mummy’s supervision. (Bliss: “I miss school, Mummy! I miss my teachers and I miss my f-friends.” Mummy: “Don’t be silly, sweetheart: you will make lots of skater-friends—you will make professional contacts for life. Darling, you are one very lucky little girl.”)

Devoted as Betsey Rampike was to her daughter’s “burgeoning” career, Mummy was determined to provide “social contacts” for her problematic son Skyler, who seemed to be virtually friendless; or, in any case, lacking the kinds of valuable contacts Mummy wished for him, whose surnames Mummy had hand-printed on the pink construction paper charts. Zoom into a TV-type scene between Mummy and Skyler:

“‘McGreety.’ I’ve heard that there is a McGreety boy in your class, Skyler, is this so?”—a canny light coming into Mummy’s liquidy brown eyes, though Skyler mumbled a snuffle-reply intended to discourage. But shrewd-Mummy persisted: “What is this boy’s first name, Skyler?” and Skyler, squirming, foreseeing where this exchange must end, had no choice but to reveal: “T-Tyler.” And eagerly Mummy said, “‘Tyler McGreety.’ He must be the son of Tyler McGreety the ‘wizard financier’—his mother must be Thea?—Theodora?—whose picture is always in the Style section of the paper. I’m sure that I’ve met Mrs. McGreety at least once.”

Tyler, Skyler.
The very rhyme was ominous.

Cut now, as in stylish fast-forward, to Mummy driving Skyler to his playdate at the McGreety French Normandy manor house on East Camelot Drive; close-up on Mummy’s disappointed face, her stunned-blinking wounded-brown eyes, when she is greeted at the massive front door not by socially prominent Theodora McGreety but by an olive-skinned housekeeper who says, in a forced simulation of her
gringa
employer’s insincere-gracious smile, “Mz. Ranpick? Mz. McGreety so ‘regrets’ she is not here to ‘say hello.’ She asks will you please return by five
P.M.
to take home your son, thank you.”

Mummy smiles bravely. Mummy nudges Skyler inside the house, to be greeted by a smirking sallow-faced boy lurking in a doorway, Tyler McGreety who mumbles, barely audible, “H’lo.”

Tyler, Skyler. Glumly the two eight-year-olds stare at each other. Mummy kisses Skyler good-bye: “Have fun, boys!”

ONCE UPSTAIRS IN HIS BEDROOM, WHICH IS TWICE AS LARGE AS ANY CHILD’S
room that Skyler has ever seen, with an adjoining bathroom and Jacuzzi, Tyler relents somewhat, inviting Skyler to “look around anywhere, see anything you’d like to do, do it.” Tyler sprawls on his bed, observing Skyler with those small close-set smudged eyes that Skyler finds disconcerting. (As with Tyler’s bed, most of the available surfaces are covered with objects with the look of being both expensive and tossed-aside: battery-operated motorized toys, electronic games, model rocket ships and missiles, Robo-Boy, Terminator-Boy, Star-Boy, alarmingly realistic rat-sized models of dinosaurs and prehistoric reptile birds. Some of this is on shelves, some on windowsills and some of it is underfoot. Skyler stumbles on—can it be?—a headless doll-baby of the approximate size of an actual baby, cut open as if with a sharp knife, of amazingly lifelike flesh-toned rubber. Smirking Tyler on his bed says: “Just kick Dolly out of the way, Sky. No sweat.”

Skyler shudders, backing away. Skyler means to occupy himself with one of the motorized vehicle-toys, U.S. DEATH SQUAD, isn’t this what a normal playdate-guest might do? As Tyler informs Skyler he’s an “only” child: “My mom and dad are kind of old, see. ‘Specially my dad the ‘wizard financier’ people call him. They had me, see, and decided to call it quits.” Tyler chuckles, vastly amused. Skyler laughs, politely. “You?”

“‘M-Me’?—what?”

“Sky, are you kind of, y’know, ‘mentally challenged’? You keep asking ‘What’?”

“No. I just don’t know what you’re asking.”

“I was asking if you have ‘siblings’—or if you are a ‘singleton’ like me.”

Skyler isn’t sure. These words sound unpleasantly clinical, like something you overhear the orthopedic surgeon telling your parents and then wish you hadn’t.

With exaggerated patience as if speaking to a moron, Tyler asks Skyler
if Skyler has any brothers or sisters. Quickly Skyler says yes: “My sister is Bliss Rampike.”

Tyler makes a rude noise with his lips: “So? Who’s ‘Bliz Rampuke’?”

Skyler is shocked. For one wearing an H.I.P. pin in his lapel, and the son of rich parents, Tyler McGreety is unexpectedly crude. And how is it possible, he’s never heard of Bliss Rampike? Mummy would be astounded. Mummy would be disbelieving. In the Rampike household it has come to be believed that virtually everyone in Fair Hills, if not in all of New Jersey, knows of Bliss Rampike the four-year-old skating prodigy…

Tyler is saying, philosophically: “See, Sky: it’s a better deal, to be one. ‘Singleton.’ Your parents focus on
you.
Or if they don’t, ’cause they’re too busy, they know they should, and you can work that to your advantage. Like, all this”—Tyler makes a negligent gesture, taking in the hundreds—thousands?—of dollars of expensive toys scattered about his room—“not to mention cash. Mommy is always whining, ‘Tyler, why don’t you invite your little friends from school here, the way normal children do,’ but my impression is, at Fair Hills Day, nobody’s got that much spare time. Not in the H.I.P. track, for sure.” Tyler chews at his lower lip, smirking; then, with childlike bluntness, “How’d you get crippled?”

Skyler is taken wholly by surprise. Stammering, “I—I’m not. Crippled.”

“Hell you’re not! Everybody at school knows you limp.”

“I don’t
limp.
I’m not
crippled.
”

“You stutter, too.”

“I d-d-do
not.
”

“Is your right leg shorter than the other leg? It sort of looks like that might be the problem.”

Tyler is peering at Skyler pensively now. Not smirking.

Skyler protests: “It is
not.
There isn’t any
problem.
”

“C’n I examine the leg? I’m pre-med.”

Skyler shrinks away. “N-No.”

“Hey man, I wouldn’t hurt you. What I’d do is, like, measure both legs. How’s that going to hurt?”

“I said no. Stay away.”

“There’s this ’way cool test, Sky: the neurologist pokes pins in you, in ‘extremities’ like your toes, to see if you feel ‘sensation.’ It’s a game, like, if you feel the pin, to act like you don’t. C’n we try that?”

“No.”

Skyler is hurt, indignant. All these months he’d believed he had disguised his limp…Like the normal kids, he had been taking P.E.—dreaded Physical Education.

Like an eager young doctor-in-training Tyler persists, asking Skyler if his leg problem is “congenital” or “accident-related” and Skyler hears himself admit, yes: his leg was broken in two places when he was six, his knee was “messed up” also, but he has had surgery to fix it, his leg is “almost healed,” he never uses crutches any longer and almost never needs a cane…

Tyler asks how’d this happen and Skyler says, embarrassed, “I was t-training to be a gymnast. I fell.”

Tyler laughs. “‘Gymnast.’ You?”

“My dad wanted me to. It was his idea.”

This Tyler can respect. The ideas of dads, that go wrong.

“Hell, Sky: I’m a cripple, too. C’n you keep a secret?”

Sure.

“Since pre-school, I’ve been G.C.S.S.” Tyler confesses this with scarcely concealed pride, but Skyler has no idea what G.C.S.S. means.

“
You’re
not?” Tyler sounds disappointed. “I thought maybe, the way you act at school, kind of weird, twitchy and nervous and sulky, you’d be one of us: ‘Gifted Child Syndrome Sufferer.’”

Gifted Child! Skyler has to wonder: maybe he
is
? For there are facts about himself known only to Fair Hills administrators and to Mummy, who rarely tells Skyler the results of the many tests he has had to take since kindergarten, both “cognitive” and “psychological”; only those tests Mummy arranges for him to take over, sometimes more than once, in a general, never-ceasing effort to
raise his score.

The effort of
raising one’s score
! Fair Hills children understand that a lifetime is required.

Skyler asks what “syndrome” means and Tyler tells him, with clinical precision: “‘Syndrome’ is a congeries of ‘symptoms,’ seemingly related but
possibly not, in a cluster. The more symptoms, the higher the ‘pathology quotient’ of the subject. Some G.C.S.S. kids in our class are only just D-level; I’m A-level.” Tyler pauses to allow this fact to sink in. Skyler says apologetically that he has just been classified “I.D.” and “I.A.D.D.” (though to be precise Skyler has been ranked infinitesimally below the “I.A.D.D.” diagnosis). Tyler doesn’t seem very impressed: “‘Incipient Dyslexia’—‘Incipient Attention Deficit Disorder.’ Sure. But in high-quotient G.C.S.S. you have these disorders plus a minimum one-fifty-five I.Q. (It isn’t cool to reveal what your I.Q. is, Sky. So don’t!) I have so many symptoms in clusters, both ‘intermittent’ and ‘chronic,’ my pediatric neurologist at Columbia Presbyterian and my pediatric psychiatrist at Robert Wood Johnson are both writing papers on me. Maybe you’ve noticed, Sky, my left eye isn’t in a line with my right eye? It’s as if I’m looking in two places at the same time, except my brain can process only one vision-field at a time. ‘Uncanny child’—Headmaster Hannity remarked of me to my mother; you can be sure that Mommy has repeated it all over town. (Mommy suffers from ‘R.C.S.’—‘Repetitive Compulsive Syndrome.’ Especially if it’s something Mommy knows she shouldn’t be repeating. The poor woman can’t help herself, so I try not to blame her.) I’ve been diagnosed with an ‘impairment of the cerebellum’ which results in ‘poor motor coordination’ so I have a permanent medical excuse for P.E. while the rest of you chumps have to trudge around outdoors in the cold kicking a stupid soccer ball. (Did you know that the original ‘balls’ in field sports were human heads? Decapitated heads of enemies? How cool is that?) If you tried you could get ‘P.M.E.’ status at school—‘Permanent Medical Excuse.’ Have your mother put some pressure on Hannity, after all you are a cripple.”

Skyler winces: he is not a cripple.