My Sister, My Love (52 page)
You would think that Skyler would know better (Skyler does know better) than to continue to watch this interview, it is forbidden for Skyler to watch TV-Mummy and yet: Skyler will watch TV-Mummy as a large powdery-winged moth is drawn to open flame, to be extinguished. Brawny Randy Riley is surprising in his warmth toward Betsey Rampike—“heroic Betsey Rampike”—“bravest woman I know, Betsey Rampike”—indeed Betsey Rampike is smiling bravely at the loudly applauding studio audience, bravely Betsey smiles into the TV camera at the vast American heartland, Skyler sees that his mother is looking just perceptibly older, yet still girlish and attractive with a new hairstyle cut to flatter her moon-shaped and somewhat jowly face, Betsey’s hair has been “lightened” to a coppery hue like a new-minted penny; Betsey’s eyebrows have been artfully reshaped, and are more delicately arched; as always Betsey’s lush red lips are glistening and fleshy and kissable; all of Betsey is glistening and fleshy and kissable; glamorous/maternal Betsey Rampike in a revealing knit dress of purple zigzags with a low neckline displaying the ruddy cleavage between her breasts. Randy Riley is congratulating Betsey Rampike on her “brilliant, bold new book”—“gut-wrenching fearless prose”—Randy Riley holds up to the camera a Christmassy green-and-red book From Hell to Heaven: 11 Steps for the Faithful. Randy Riley speaks with Betsey Rampike about her new memoir, “intimate reminiscences” of her champion-ice-figure-skater daughter who’d died “so hideously”—“victim of a sex maniac paroled after an outrageously light sentence by secular-progressive Democrats in New Jersey.” As Betsey speaks in her breathy halting way, Randy Riley nods vehemently. So true! So true! All that Betsey Rampike says, so true! Betsey speaks of her Christian faith that has never failed her in even the darkest of times, when her innocent six-year-old beloved daughter was taken from her very bed, assaulted and murdered in the Rampikes’ very house while her family slept unknowing above: “‘Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death’ rang in my ears for many years, through the loss of my marriage and the estrangement of my troubled son…we all
must walk through that Valley, Randy; and we all must emerge. It is God’s plan for us, that we survive.” How Betsey’s voice quavers! A single lustrous tear leaks from her shining left eye to run down her rouged cheek and disappear into a crack at the corner of her mouth. Randy Riley, visibly moved, surprises his guest by naming her “Christian Heroine of the Week”—Betsey hides her face like a little girl, as the audience applauds. Quick cut to Betsey Rampike at a White House ceremony—“Spirit of America Authors Awards 2003”—Betsey’s hand is being shaken by a beaming President Bush, beaming Mrs. Bush, hefty American Eagle medallions are presented to several best-selling “inspirational” memoirists, the California minister-author of The God-Driven Life, and sci-fi author Michael Crichton. Back to Randy Riley who shifts the subject to politics: for Randy Riley is incensed at the “proliferation” of sex offenders in the United States, convicted hard-core criminals paroled and allowed to prowl our cities, stalk our innocent children, what are these sickos but symptoms of moral rot, the true agents of Satan are those left-leaning judges across the country, left-leaning educators, news media—the “hot-bed” is in the Northeast—New York City, the “sicko liberal capital”—“godless left-wingers”—“mockers of family values”—“pro-abortion fanatics”—“Ivy League kooks”—“Ivy League Marxists”—a crucial need for “get-tough-on-crime” legislation—“three strikes and you are dead.” Randy Riley has worked himself into a sweat of patriotic indignation, thanking Betsey Rampike for being “such a shining role model” for American girls and women, congratulates her on the “spectacular success” of her Heaven Scent Products—“Out of the ashes of tragedy, a harvest is reaped—that is the American way.”
Betsey is invited to explain to viewers how she’d inaugurated Heaven Scent Products in 1998 as a way of “helping to heal the festering wounds” of her personal tragedy. On display are a number of Heaven Scent products: Heaven Scent Cosmetic Kit—Heaven Scent Perfumes—Heaven Scent Bubble Bath—Heaven Scent Christmas Chocolates—Heaven Scent Accessories (scarves, belts, bracelets et al.)—Heaven Scent Betsey’s Special Recipe Christmas Fruitcake: all these items available for immediate shipping. Next, there’s an admiring buzz in the studio audience
as Betsey proudly displays a Heaven Scent Bliss Rampike Doll: a startlingly lifelike replica of Bliss Rampike in miniature, with vivid blue glass eyes that open and shut, a sweet rosebud mouth, ultra-realistic skin and fine blond shoulder-length hair, movable arms and legs, detachable doll-size ice skates for the tiny feet. The Heaven Scent Bliss Rampike Doll is available with a selection of wigs, tiaras, and skating costumes (ballerina tulle, pleated silk, chiffon, satin-and-sequins, Cinderella, Snow White, cowgirl, Las Vegas showgirl, ballroom, disco, flamenco et al.)—“‘Bliss’ is being offered pre-Christmas for a base price of just $99.99; with a complete wardrobe plus ice skates, for just an additional $49.99.”
Betsey speaks earnestly, wiping at her eyes, holding the lifelike Bliss-doll in her lap just as Heidi enters the room toweling her long damp hair—“Ohhh that woman! Who is that awful woman! She is so—so totally—utterly—gross.” Heidi is laughing, that brittle edgy laugh that so irritates Skyler; as Skyler continues to stare at the screen, Heidi hovers over him, jeering—“That woman, I’ve seen her before, she had a little girl—like that doll—who was an ice skater, she dressed the little girl like a slut and some sex maniac came and murdered the little girl—isn’t she awful? And him, that nasty pig-snout man ‘Riley’—why on earth are you watching these awful people, Skyler?” Skyler stumbles to his feet, there is a roaring in Skyler’s ears, like a zombie Skyler makes his way to Heidi’s door, can’t breathe, choking and can’t breathe, has to get out, Heidi calls after him, “Skyler? What’s wrong? You look so—” coming to touch him, but Skyler can’t bear to be touched, Heidi Harkness is wearing an electric blue thermal undershirt, flannel p.j. bottoms, her thick scuzzy wool socks, Heidi’s hair is damp, her eyes hurt, petulant, peevish and her oddly crossed front teeth glisten as if jeering, Skyler pushes away her hand, Skyler murmurs what sounds like, “—mistake,” out the door and Heidi follows after him incensed and disbelieving, “Skyler? What is—? Why—” and Skyler hears himself say, in a flat cold voice, “—don’t love you, never loved you, it was a mistake, good-bye.” Heidi is so astonished Skyler can hear the sharp intake of her breath. Skyler doesn’t turn to her but limps away. If he has hurt her, good! She should be punished, like Skyler. Blindly Skyler pushes through the door to the stairs at the rear of
the residence, blindly Skyler descends the stairs and limps outside into a ferocious wind.
No idea where he is. Valley of the Shadow of Death, maybe.
AFTER BLISS, HE CAN’T LOVE. NOT ANYONE. NOT EVER.
A sweaty fistful of pills, capsules, tablets Skyler manages to swallow down with several glasses of tepid water before he begins to puke, leaking water through his nose and in a delirium of exhaustion collapses onto his bed like debris dumped into rushing black water while as in an arty split-screen film of the 1970s a quarter-mile away on the far side of the nighttime campus Heidi Harkness manages to swallow down nine large OxyContin tablets and sinks into a heavy sleep discovered comatose in her room, rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital in Summit, New Jersey, where she is reported to be in critical condition as Skyler sleeps in sweaty, tangled, and soon urine-soaked sheets unable to awaken, sleeps through the morning in his cramped little room at the top of Old Craghorne until early afternoon at last waking groggy, dry-mouthed and stunned as one who has been struck a powerful blow to the head thinking Am I still here? O Jesus.
Eventually, Skyler would learn of Heidi Harkness. He would come to learn the meaning of HSR.
*
V.
1 January 2004
Dear Skyler—
This is a letter of condolence on the death of our friendship. It is my decision after much thought that I do not want to speak with you ever again nor even see you.
I am not accusing you of provoking Heidi to act despairingly as she did because I do not want to know the extent of your guilt. I do not want to hate you for I do not believe in hatred, it is the curse of our species.
Skyler, good-bye.
Your former friend,
*
For instance, Dr. Roll. In violation of professional ethics, to spite her uncooperative young patient, and for who knows how many thousands of dollars, this therapist at the Verhangen Treatment Center almost certainly had to be the “anonymous psychiatric source” for a lurid feature in
Up Close & Personal
titled “Repressed Memory Recovered: Did Skyler Rampike Confess to Killing His Sister Bliss?” (No! Never read it.) (Bix Rampike filed a $10 million lawsuit charging defamation of his [minor] son’s name; a few months ago, the suit was settled out of court, for how much, how would I know?)
*
The (mature, not-neurotic) reader will find it difficult to believe that Skyler, at sixteen, is yet so immature. That this boy who assumes a pose of scowling indifference, picking at his face as the adults discuss his future, is so hesitant to acknowledge what is, by this time, a
fête accompli:
for hadn’t Skyler glimpsed a lurid banner headline on the cover of
SleazeWatch Week
proclaiming
PARENTS OF SLAIN ICE-SKATE CHAMP BLISS RAMPIKE DIVORCED
Asked Is There Another Woman Bix Says: “No Comment”
*
“
Panic”: “Of, relating to, or resembling the mental or emotional state induced by the pagan god Pan who dwells in the forest in wait for the unwary.” Like us!
*
Flash-forward into the (near) future to collapse “cheap suspense”—the very coin of merely popular/best-selling fiction—and to assure the uneasy reader that Skyler’s behavior was truly not what it seems to have appeared to be, to Heidi Harkness!
*
Could anyone have guessed? Skyler’s old playdate Elyot Grubbe! Another time so cleverly I am avoiding the “cheap suspense” shunned by purveyors of Serious Literature.
*
For those few readers with kinky-morbid-literary tastes, you might be interested to learn that just as sixteen-year-old Skyler’s face began to bleed in Dunwoody’s classroom, nineteen-year-old Skyler so picked and scratched at the stitches in his face, his face began to bleed onto
this very page.
†
Reader, I’m sorry! I can’t continue this.
Don’t even know why I am writing about Lionel Dunwoody!
I’d meant to write about Heidi Harkness and somehow here I am writing about Lionel Dunwoody. As the reader should know from a long-ago chapter, it was Dunwoody who assigned our class E. A. Pym’s notorious “The Aesthetics of Composition” in which it is stated that
The death of a beautiful girl-child is the most poetic topic in the world.
Out of pure sadism for “Sylvester Rampole,” Dunwoody assigned this, knowing how it would upset his student. This is the individual who would consent to an interview (in July 2004) with a reporter for
No Holds Barred
as an “anonymous source” commenting in painful detail on the “psychological profile” of Skyler Rampike; asked by the reporter if he believed that the “troubled boy” might have been capable of murdering his six-year-old sister, he’d said: “When I gazed into those steely eyes, I gazed into an abyss. No further comment!”
*
Does the prurient reader assume that Skyler and Heidi—in the crude vernacular usage—“had sex”? Maybe yes, maybe no. You won’t find out from me.
*
Of course, Elyot didn’t say “Harkness” but Heidi’s actual name.
*
Disturbing memory—“recovered” (I guess)—loosed and rising to consciousness out of the tidal muck, as S. Freud disdainfully called it, of the Repressed. Skyler must’ve been at least twelve at the time since clearly his “hysterical muteness” had vanished.
*
Is this comforting to know, or not-so-comforting? That, in the simmering cesspool of U.S. political campaign history, at least one previous election, (Republican) Rutherford Hayes vs. (Democrat) Samuel Tilden, was “stolen”?
*
Wonder where Skyler went at Thanksgiving? Skyler went nowhere at Thanksgiving. Nor was it so very lonely at Basking Ridge for there was a sizable number of his classmates who had nowhere to go on this American-family-glutton holiday, including Elyot Grubbe; and Headmaster Shovell and his cheery wife Gwendolyn invited us all to Thanksgiving dinner in the Headmaster’s house. As I am clumsy with warm, friendly, “nice” occasions, as with expressions of gratitude, I will pass over Skyler’s Thanksgiving in silence.