Thanks, FD.
Because It's In:
Reflections of Esme Squalor
By Lemona Snicket
Part the First:[/left][/color][/b]
“Esme?” Carmelita Spats asked the former financial advisor as they stood together in the little girl's new barracks on the large submarine that had recently come into their possession. “What do you think?” It was early in the morning, and Carmelita was clearly asking Esme Squalor’s opinion on the ridiculous outfit she had constructed for her next day aboard the sub. She was obviously trying to portray several different things at once - which always leads to confusion and unpleasantries – for she was sporting a pale pink tutu that spread out like a large, crumpled, mesh doughnut around her waist, topped by a pink blouse with pink wings on the back of it. A small stethoscope, decorated with dark pink puffballs, hung around her neck. She had drawn a small heart in pink pen on each cheek, and was carrying a long pink wand and a crown decorated with pink ribbons and flowers. Such an outfit looked so absurd, and so senseless, that I’m sure I could not have made head or tail of it, and it seemed that even Esme was a little puzzled. “Ah – tell me about it,” she said finally, using a tactful phrase which here means “I simply cannot make head or tail of this”. “I’m a tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian, Esme!” Carmelita announced in her voice that sounded like a squeaky hailstorm. “You look adorable, sweetie, and very in,” the villainous lady said, patting the girl on the shoulder. “Yes,” said the tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian, “but I don’t have any shoes yet, Esme”. “Shoes? Do you want ballet shoes, precious?”. “I’m a
tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian!”. “Alright, fine. Let’s come to my dressing room and I’ll see what I’ve got for you”.
Esme led Carmelita up a corridor to her stylish dressing room. Esme’s dressing room was merely a small area near the barracks of the submarine, in which the wicked and fashionable woman stored her clothes, shoes and weapons. There was also a large pinstriped makeup box and a mirror with a wooden frame on the wall. Carved into the wooden frame, I’m sorry to say, were hundreds of tiny pictures of eyes that seemed to stare doubtfully out at the room. “Sweetie?” Esme said, pulling out a pair of light pink ballet slippers with long ribbons attached to wind over the dancer’s legs and look utterly ridiculous, “do you like these?”. The tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian eyed them critically. “Do you have pink tap-shoes?” she demanded. Esme sifted through the shoe collection. “I have these, precious,” she offered, holding out a pair of very old fashioned, knobbly black tap-shoes with large black ribbons to hold them in place. “What are
those cakesniffing things?” asked Carmelita, horrified. “Never mind, sweetie. They’re out, anyway, I promise,” Esme purred, mollifying – a word which here means “reassuring Carmelita that she would not have to wear the shoes” – the little girl. “What about these?” Carmelita dived past Esme toward the shoe collection and pulled out a flat, dark pink shoe decorated with fake pink and white flowers. “That’s not a tap shoe, darling,” the villainess pointed out. Carmelita banged the shoe on the floor with great force. “It taps!” she stated, pleased. “Alright, precious,” said her guardian. The tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian slipped the makeshift tap-shoe onto her left foot, and Esme helped her tie the long ribbons of the ballet slipper around her right leg like centipedes. Then they pinned up her frizzy red hair and set the crown atop it. “You look adorable, sweetie,” Esme cooed. “I’m going to practice my tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian dance recital, now I’ve got shoes!” I’m sure it’ll be very in,” said Esme, although the very concept makes me wince. “Why don’t you perform it for our rowers later?” she suggested. “Good idea. It’s – um – a six-part recital, Esme.” “Lovely, darling.” “Is Countie going to watch me too?” asked the dancer. “Oh, of course he will, precious. What did you think?” The tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian charged away to prepare her recital, and Esme stood up.
The villainous girlfriend was wearing a short, tight dress with eight long sleeves. Her arms occupied two of them, and the result was fashioned to look something like an octopus. Esme was also sporting a pair of heeled boots that came almost to her knees, with rows of suction cups on them. She wandered out of the dressing room and crossed the corridor to the small area that she and Olaf were using as a kind of sitting room. Several empty wine bottles of the innest labels were lying around from the celebration they had staged there the previous night, in honour of the Baudelaires apparently meeting their deaths in the Stricken Stream. It was during this that Esme and her boyfriend had invented a new kind of laughter, to be reserved for special occasions only. “Tee hee tirade,” the villainess murmured to herself as she strolled into the room. There was a huge cardboard box, stained with ink and wearing at the edges, reposing on the floor. Esme leaned down to look inside, and found that its contents was quite a cornucopia – a word which here means “a massive load of more or less unrelated things”. Sifting through, Esme noticed several things that had belonged to her at one point. There was an empty photo frame, a set of dice in a blue box, and a sheet of white paper, very crumpled and old, empty except for a photograph stapled to the middle of it. Esme drew in her breath sharply and let it out shakily as she sank down onto the floor to examine the picture more closely.
It depicted three young women, standing together formally in a large arched doorway with fancy plasterwork. They were wrapped up in long overcoats, thick stockings and gloves, and two of them were wearing scarves. The picture made Esme’s throat close up as she stared at it. The girl in the middle of the three smiled happily, her arms around the shoulders of her companions. Her hair was quite short, cut with a fringe, and was mid to dark brown. She wore a deep brown scarf over the collar of her black coat, and what made Esme’s breathing falter was the fact that the girl was herself. Esme at fifteen years of age, posing in some fancy building with two of her friends. That was Esmeralda Salinger, not an overly stylish villainess, but merely a young woman with a good eye for clothes and a temper that got the better of her a little too often. Esme gave a small, shuddering sigh as she looked at herself, and then turned her attention to the faces of her companions. On the young Esme’s right was a childhood friend who Esme remembered well. They had had unpleasant encounters in their adult lives, but looking at this person’s sixteen-year-old face, Esme tried to push it from her mind. Her name was Beatrice, though she had usually been called Bea. Bea was quite short, with lovely dark hair done up in soft curls. Her face was very delicate and mild, with a defined nose and high forehead. She wore a fuzzy white scarf over her coat, and her head was tilted to the side. On the left was a young lady Esme had almost forgotten, though she found memories coming back quite strongly as she stared. This girl was the tallest of the three, with brown hair and eyes that gave her an almost Latin-American appearance. Her name, it came back to Esme, was Lemona Snicket. This photograph must have been taken while the three girls were in VFD training. Esme put the photograph down and did something she hadn’t done for a long time. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she put her head into her hands and began to remember.
Lemona and Bea… how well I remember their voices. Where are we here? I can’t recognise the place, but we were cold. I used to wear my hair short – it actually looks alright. Not IN, of course – and here Esme’s thoughts broke off, and she slammed her hands miserably onto the floor.
You, Esme, she said to herself,
are ruining the memories of what you were like at fifteen. You are spoiling them by trying to compare what you thought then with how you look at things now.
Put the picture away. But the villainous woman wouldn’t put the picture away, and stared hard at the faces in it, remembering her friends.
They had gone about in a group of five, mostly, and this picture was of the three girls. One of their cohorts had been Lemony, the shy formal boy with an intermittent sense of humour, of about a year younger than Esme. He was apparently a relation of Lemona. The other was Lemona’s boyfriend, a young man called Daniel. He was an aspiring musician, and a close friend of Lemony. The two, incredibly, shared the same birthday, both date and year, and they had planned to be business partners at some point. Esme sighed miserably.
How, she wondered,
did I go from being someone who people like Lemona, Daniel or Lemony would be happy to call a friend (she didn’t want to think about Beatrice),
to THIS? By “THIS”, Esme was referring to her current position as a villainess. Being villainous, of course, like being noble, or being a unicycle standing alone in a snowstorm, can have many variations, but Esme couldn’t help feeling that she had pushed away a lot by becoming what she had described as “THIS”.
She stared down at her ridiculous boots. Making a fashion statement gave her a kind of confidence, as if she had become the boldness of the design, and constantly being in made her feel as if she had an assured place in fashionable society. These were comforting things to feel, but Esme thought now, remembering herself at fifteen, that she would rather know she was at least trying to be noble, than experiencing the comfort of villainy. She remembered what a woman several years older than her once said when Esme had been making a large decision; one of the decisions that had led her to her current life. “If you don’t choose the wicked thing,” Euphemia Skye had said in her unusually deep voice, “what in the world will you do?” Esme had first encountered this woman in the Hotel Finalé, and she was quite surprised that she had remembered the woman’s name, as most people refer to the woman and her husband using only rather wordy titles that focus solely on hair.
I don’t know enough, Esme said sadly to herself. She frowned thoughtfully down at her own face at fifteen, and thought perhaps she only knew grew to less and less about good and bad, wicked and noble, as she aged. The young woman in the photograph seemed to think she knew enough to make her way in the world without too many regrets, and though Esme now knew that wasn’t so, she wished she still thought it was.
A man of my acquaintance once wrote a novel called
The Picture of Dorian Grey, about a very tiresome and stuck-up young man who has a portrait painted of him. Expressing a wish to never physically grow old, the man manages, by some strange means, to transfer his aging to the portrait. He retains a totally youthful appearance for years, indulging in various corrupt activities, while his picture bears the marks of his age and sin, becoming very unpleasant to look at. The novel ends in something commonly called a plot twist – a phrase which her means “sweet mother of God, what is going on?” – when the man accidently kills himself while trying to destroy the portrait. The story of
The Picture of Dorian Grey is often comparable to the situations of other people, even if theirs are not quite as dramatic, and as Esme looked at herself in her jade-encrusted hand mirror, she wished she could have frozen her appearance as she was in the photograph, rather than look into the eyes of a lost villainess.
You might think that after all this reflection, Esme Squalor might reform – a word which here means “make some definite effort toward nobility” – but, as she heard Count Olaf’s footsteps in the next room, and his raised voice as he yelled at one of his associates, she knew she may deserve a second chance, but she simply couldn’t see her way to it.
“People don’t always get what they deserve in this world.” – Esme Squalor,
The Carnivorous Carnival