Short Story / Etienne
They named her Etienne, because of how luxuriant it sounded, how rich it felt rolling off of their round pink tongues as they cradled her small pink body precariously against their arms. It was also derived from a family name, which is what they told everybody. But they named her Etienne because it sounded royal.
When she was at the age of four, they decided she should learn an instrument, and the violin was promptly chosen for its elegance and grace. Titi (for that was how the girl called herself; Etienne is a hard name to pronounce when one has a lisp) cried an pleaded and beseeched her parents to let her go to summer camp instead, where the children ran around outside and played tag and red rover and came home warm and damp with the smell of earth and sweat. But her parents told her no, she wasn’t to come home so dirty every day, and didn’t she want to learn an instrument that would help her excel in her ability to comprehend higher level mathematics and possibly even increase her exam performances by ten percent? Titi wanted to ask what a percent was, but she was a good little girl who loved her parents, and because she loved them, she agreed to play the violin.
The small contraption they rented for her from the music store down the street was made of a polished fancy wood, and Titi loved the way it sparkled in the sunlight that filtered from the bay window in her room. She had never seen an instrument like this before; in fact, she had hardly seen any instruments at all, except for the guitar that the street man played on Frenchtown Avenue, and his decrepit instrument looked so sad and faded that it could hardly be called that. She remembered it sounding so sad and plaintive that she had asked her mother if it was crying. And her mother had said no, of course not, people like that don’t have feelings. Titi decided her mother hadn’t understood what she meant.
When she was ten, Titi grew tired of the music her teachers laid out for her. She hated how the notes were barred off and fenced in and lassoed by the solid black ink of the sheet music, and she began to pluck pieces out of her head and practice them using only what she could pull from her memory and from the air around her. This made her parents very nervous, as they had only read that classical music enhanced your ability to comprehend complicated mathematical concepts, and because playing your own music seemed slightly less cultured than playing, say, Mozart or Chopin instead. Titi would only concede that the pieces were beautiful in their own right, and would play those she’d already memorized when called upon to entertain guests and family members of slightly elevated social status, but she refused to learn any new classical pieces, which irked and frightened her parents to no end. Their imaginations ran wild with nightmares of Titi, the street urchin, wandering from alley to alley, mournfully playing her own lachrymose originals to any poor blue collared fellow who would spare her his change. They relayed this warning to Titi in a hellfire and brimstone manner, but it didn’t seem to frighten her the way it did them. They speculated and prayed that it was naught but a little premature adolescent rebellion, and decided perhaps it was her public school peers, who smelled like earth and sweat and used improper grammar, that were putting these strange notions in her head, and promptly put her into Catholic school. It would be a strain on their none-too-bulging pockets, perhaps, but an investment well worth its net gains.
Of course, no one had told Titi’s parents that attendees of Catholic schools are commonly more wealthy than their public school counterparts, and therefore have extra pocket money to spend on more expensive recreational and experimental drugs. While Titi’s slang-speaking public school peers were occasionally intrigued enough to try marijuana, and a few bolder ones became regular smokers, Titi found herself exploring the world of snowy white powders and polished colored pills. She liked how her musical compositions sounded when she thought them up that way, so thick in the air now she was sure she could taste them. And the notes slithered onward and upward before her eyes, like a fervent prayer to whatever it was that kept things moving. Her parents were, of course, blissfully ignorant to all this, and fell in love with her charming new friends and their glimmering parents as they amassed incrementally larger and larger amounts of debt. Etienne’s father chose to shut out this consistent thorn in his side by taking to drinking expensive liquors, and her mother simply slept with her new wealthy associates, undiscriminating in regards to gender. If her unfaithfulness ever saddened Etienne’s father, he would simply mutter “Etienne,” and listen to how the soft, rich syllables rolled off of his pink tongue, numb with cognac. Her mother, too, would breathe her name out forcefully each time she exhaled in bed. And Etienne played on, her notes dancing thinly upon the smoke-filled air.
Of course, debts do not simply disappear; and nor do pasts, as Etienne’s mother learned. Unfaithfulness is fair grounds for expensive divorces, which call for more expensive lawyers and even more humiliating public debacles. All Etienne’s mother could recall of the ordeal was that her soon to be ex-husband wore a bright red tie, and vaguely reminded her of Hester Prynne, although perhaps somewhat less indignant. She never did find out about his suicide until the funeral was long over, but the simple affair was unmemorable, nothing more than a plain black box lowered into the plain black earth, with not even a few ugly carnations to garnish the coffin. She read about it in the obituaries, and turned the page over with a diamond-studded finger, the nail elegantly polished and curved, to catch up on the stock market.
Etienne never saw her parents after that. She still took the pills and the powder when she could afford them, but for the most part she stood at the corner of Frenchtown Avenue, beaming and playing her violin, pulling her notes from the air. The instrument didn’t gleam in the sun anymore, and it probably needed new strings, but the notes remained, and so Etienne was happy. They snaked through the air, crawling up invisible ladders and smoke trails, like an inquisitive prayer, seeking heaven.
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I like how it starts off like this typical rich girl story, but transforms into something so dark and depressing. It’s kind of like her parents caused Titi’s down fall. That name of hers doesn’t fit what she becomes in the end. I didnt spot any grammar errors…and thought this worked well as a short story. A lot of stage parents should check this out lol.
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