Estelle

by E. Marmer
posted Sep 11, 2015

found at creepypasta.wikia.com

The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is so much a part of our popular culture that virtually everyone knows its key premise, without ever having read it, or even knowing who wrote it (Robert Louis Stevenson). For some reason (I’m guessing insanity), Jekyll wants to segregate the selfish, depraved and conscience-free half of his nature from his altruistic, civil and dutiful side. He dreams of how wonderful it would be if each half could function without inhibition, free from the influence of the other. Sounds to me like a rationalization to let the dark side go nuts. Jekyll invents a potion to achieve the schism, the actual scientific means by which he accomplishes this left a mystery to the reader. After Jekyll drinks the foul brew, hideous, corporeal Hyde begins to roam the night. Unrestrained by the goodness and civility of Jekyll, Hyde not only degenerates into a murderous fiend, but becomes harder and harder to control. A cautionary tale, indeed.

Well, it turns out that I too have a “screw that!” conscience-free side to my personality, though thankfully she is neither villain nor murderous fiend. I have decided to call her “Estelle.” The most subversive thing Estelle ever did was to buy the loudly ticking antique pendulum clock that is now hanging just to the left of our family room television, despite knowing darn well that the men in the household didn’t want anything distracting from their view of whatever sports game or movie was on, let alone something that made noise and moved. She may also have had a hand in my apparently sudden decision, while accompanying my daughter to a piercing shop, to get a nose stud at age 52 (C’mon! You’ve wanted one for YEARS, you gutless suburbanite!), but I’m not sure about that one.

found at bokehphotography.uk.com

Estelle isn’t out to make trouble. She is just the morality-free, propriety-free, completely selfish truth teller who has finally learned how to jab her way forward to “keep things real.” She tells it like it is… loudly. Indeed, the longer I pretend not to hear her, the louder she gets. Like that ticking clock she insists “Oh yeah? Well here I am! Get used to it!” I first came to know her in the wee hours, when she’d awaken me in the dark, hoarsely whispering to me about how I’d been on autopilot for much of my adult life, navigating according to values or standards that never quite fit me. About how, as a result, the current configuration of my life was suffocating me. About how for years I’d been a pretender in my marriage, my own home, to my family and friends, trying to convince everyone and myself that I was happy.

My inner truth-teller, Estelle

Naturally, at first, Estelle frightened me, and I tried to hush her up. But she wouldn’t relent. Estelle was the first one to tell me that there was no way I could pull off preppy, country club clothing. (With those bazooms and that unmistakably Semitic visage??) To flat out say that I’d never be friends with the women in my synagogue’s Sisterhood so why did I keep trying (You don’t even like them!!). To pester me into admitting out loud that I had developed somewhat of a drinking problem. Nothing gets by Estelle. Her inconvenient and sometimes painful truths are often disruptive, but they are always liberating, even if at times anti-social. For example, Estelle helps me understand that when I nagged everyone in my family not to eat potato chips from the bag, it was really just because I resented being the only one who cared about a clean sofa or being the one left with the broken, saliva encrusted detritus at the bottom of the bag, but now that I have the house to myself, I too can happily jam my hand into the bag, cram chips in my mouth and lick my fingers, all while watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes at an unsustainably loud volume on the surround sound. Estelle says, “This is awesome!”

But while I am thankful that Estelle keeps me honest and helps me cast off the “supposed to’s” that dull, dishearten or, worse, crush me, I have realized that, of course, Stevenson is right. Even when it comes to my loud-no-bullshit-can’t-help-but-love-her Estelle, free reign would be a disaster. She must remain an internal force, a passenger on my crowded bus of characters. There will be no potion taking for me. For though she keeps the constructs of others from making me miserable, Estelle unleashed would be a misery to everyone else. She is blunt, inconsiderate, obnoxious, unintentionally but unsparingly hurtful. I learned this when, over the last two years or so she began taking more liberties, perhaps giddy with her vindication that she had been right about so many things.

On one such occasion, my daughter and I had just concluded a long, overwrought argument in a restaurant, my husband and son trying desperately to act like they weren’t with us, even though we were all at the same table. It finally seemed like my family would be able to move on to a nice dinner; peace and harmony had been thrown up in the air, but were once again beginning to settle on us like a blanket. Nevertheless, upon hearing the last half-hearted diss my daughter flung at me, which ordinarily I would have easily ignored for the greater good, Estelle came roaring forth. I found myself actually snorting and loudly muttering, in the most unmotherly way imaginable, “Give me a break.” Fortunately, all at the table, including my daughter, were so astonished at this aberration, the complete abandon of such a declaration, its sheer reckless nerve, that everyone started laughing and dinner was saved. But in another surfacing of Estelle, I wasn’t so lucky. My son was fervently and sincerely, if a just a wee bit sanctimoniously, trying to explain why something had mattered to him, and Estelle burst free, changing my aspect so completely that she was virtually corporeal like Hyde. Momentarily whisking me to some far away place, where she apparently knew I’d secretly rather be, she blithely sighed, “Blah, Blah, Blah,” in an absent-minded, sing song kind of way. My son and I were both shocked. We had just seen and heard something or someone that wasn’t at all the entity usually in charge, and this force, whatever it was, was completely unconcerned with his feelings. Estelle, it seems, doesn’t give a good goddamn about anyone but me. My son told me it was probably the coldest, and therefore the most hurtful thing I had ever done or said to him, and I could see why. Yow.

Poor Estelle! She only wants me to remain true to myself. She champions my causes. But she has indeed led me to hurt people I love when I’ve let her steer the bus. She takes me to the other extreme. So, to actually remain true to myself, my entire self, I’ll take her under advisement, but negotiate compromise and find my center. Thanks Estelle! Now, will you shut up?