the marionette's lament
"...and Max
the king of all wild things
was lonely
and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all."
The young girl that stands in the middle of the city square looks up at the stars that somehow pervaded through the haze of a metropolis, and for a second, she wonders how prettier things must be in the districts. They must be lucky, she thinks as she walks through the crowds of bumbling citizens who push and pull through the dazzling lights of the Winter Solstice Carnival. They can see the stars better than we can.
It never occurs to the girl that her nanny is looking for her through the masses of families. She stands at the base of the fountain, smack-dab in the middle of the city square, and squints her eyes to peer at the night sky. The stars seem to go out as soon as the fireworks start to explode, and that is when the young girl starts to hope that one day, she'll go to the districts and see the stars in their purest form.
But then the nanny takes her away from the fountain and brings her home against her will. She doesn't ask why, and she will never ask why, but her mother sits at the end of the table and cries the quietest tears she has ever seen in her young life. When the girl goes to her father's office to inform the man that her mother is upset, she is met with his footsteps bouncing off the linoleum and his goodbye hanging off his lips.
(In a week, her nanny will tell her that she stays too long in father's office for it to be healthy. In a month, her nanny will tell her that he will never come back. In a year, she will accept this, and his chair will finally collect dust along with rest of the furniture after she leaves the space for good. The stars never did shine as bright there, anyhow.)
X
Effie never learns how to ride a bike, because her mother is a poor stand-in for a supportive father, and when she falls she is reprimanded and she figures that there is no point in learning after that.
Effie never learns how to tie tennis shoes like her friends do, because her mother works three times harder than their parents do and is always too tired at the end of the day to pay her any mind. She takes up sandals and flats, because not only do they not require laces, they look vastly better than all the rest. On the playground, she is told she looks ridiculous with shoes that lace around her ankles rather than at her feet, but she learns to embrace her fashion-forward thinking. In five years, they'll all be wearing them, anyway.
Effie never learns to bandage her own wounds, because every scrape requires stitches and ever cut needs a diagnosis. Instead of handing her daughter a first aid kit to figure out for herself, her mother whisks her off to the hospital if Effie ever bleeds. Though this is not conducive to a steady backbone, Effie does not complain, and perhaps that is why she is so melodramatic.
Effie never learns to find good boys, because her mother never had one and Effie doesn't know what a good boy should look like. She picks the ones she likes to look at, the ones that seem to like her just a bit and she latches onto them like a well-meaning leech. She falls in love with the warrior boys, the soldiers who take to heart a saying concreted in Latin: veni, vidi, vici. They come, the see, and they conquer. And when they leave her, she thinks it is routine, but the stinging in her heart hurts her. So she surrenders herself wholly to every boy until they care enough to stay. And when they do, she gives them her all, and when they run, she is too tired to chase.
And though she manages to make it through twelve years without her father, her life isn't quite as glamorous as it should be. She learns to blame the man who left when she was six, and though is a smart, beautiful, wholesome young woman, she wonders which part of her sent her father away.
(She thinks it's the part of her that is him, with the blue eyes and blonde hair and the way she seems to disappear in thin air yet remain incredibly, absolutely present. It's the ghostly part of her that drove him away, she concludes. And it is always the ghostly part of her that she hates.)
X
At eighteen, Effie works to maintain the luxurious lifestyle her mother had provided her with. There are odd jobs she takes up — as a saleswoman, metro attendant, ticket-taker, barista, dozens of et ceteras — and somehow, through the dozens of menial things she claims as temporary careers, she lands a paid internship in the Games.
And still, after all these years, her wish to see the stars still persists. Though she cannot be an astronaut and clamber through the infinities of space, she will become an escort instead. That way, she can step out of her ghostly cofinements and burst like fireworks through the nation's hearts — she will become a household name, and maybe, just maybe, her father will recognize his little girl he left so long ago.
(Deep down, Effie knows that this is an absurd thought. Her father will remain hidden as he has been for years, and sooner or later, she will have to stop seeking. But for now, she pursues a relentless game of cops and robbers with him. She is losing, obviously, but she finds that if she will be able to watch the stars at the end of it, then it's not so bad.)
X
At twenty-two, she finally becomes an escort, and her mother's body finally gives out after sixteen years of overexertion.
The funeral procession is short and many people seem to mourn; everyone who had berated her broken family in headlines and tabloids and biting words over tea seem to cry at her grave and plead with God to bring her back. Everyone who had poked fun at the Trinket's fall from grace make a complete roundelay and claim that Heaven gained a new angel. Everyone who never once extended a hand to help now reach forward to grip Effie's shaking shoulders to make empty promises of charity.
Effie is sick to her stomach when she sees all these people fashion themselves in classless hypocrites before her mother's lifeless body. She wants to scream, but she doesn't. Instead, she accepts these words of comfort and cries with them, because even in the wake of her orphaning, she figures that she can make something out of this.
(Secretly, she is glad her mother is gone. No longer does Effie have to worry that she will end up in the hospital and waste away to nothing, like her grandmother had before them. There is not a more demeaning death than with IV's stuck in your veins and machines hooked up to your body, after all.)
X
The very moment that Effie steps on the stage to give her first Reaping, the crowd goes quiet. In the one second that Effie allows herself to have before she starts the grand occasion, she realizes that being an escort is not at all what it is cracked up to be. Her smile almost falls when she meets the eyes of some fourteen year old boy among the sea of quivering children. He stares at her like she's some kind of sickly-sweet, candy-coated monster, like she is the Grim Reaper dunked in fluorescent colors who has come to bring these children to their death.
It's all kind of macabre when she really thinks about it.
She begins to list the words that talk of things like loyalty and honor and how wonderful Panem is with gusto. Perhaps if she acts excited about the Games, the people in front of her will be excited, too.
They aren't.
And when she crosses over to the first reaping bowl, she swears you can hear the girls down in front suck in a collective breath. She digs around the bowl and picks the first name that kind of, sort of feels like it could bring the District some shining victory.
When a fourteen year-old girl with dirt still caked in her face and hands that haven't seen better days walks on stage, Effie is reminded that this District has not seen a victor in almost ten years. And it is then that Effie realizes that she is only bringing these children to their deaths and nothing more.
She feels like she is committing infanticide when a twelve year old boy joins the girl minutes later.
Later, as they board the train, she finally meets the infamous Haymitch Abernathy at the alcohol cart. He spits in her face when she stretches her hand for him to shake; she acts like she is not bothered by it, like this is just a part of the job, but that night, she cries herself to sleep.
(The books will not tell you how to cope with children dying at your hands and how to block the muffled sobs of a robbed mother and father from your memory. The books will not tell you that this career is all about being unwanted and knowing how to act like you are. The books will not tell you that you will lose yourself, eventually, if you end up staying after the first year. The only thing that these books will tell you is this: chins up, smiles on, and pretend that everything is going just as planned.)
X
She surrenders herself to insomnia and hopefulness in her second year.
The girl is sixteen years old and her bones fit her skin like a coat hanger, and there is no sign of strength or resilience within her. The girl reeks of fear, and she is crying the night before the Games.
Effie has it in her head that she can fix things when they are broken, which sets herself apart from all the fame-hungry escorts out there. She tells the girls these fantastic lies that she will make it, that Effie will place all her money in her name and that she will be crowned the victor of the 62nd Hunger Games. She will be able to go back home and feed her little daughter that she had a few months ago, and her life will resume.
When the girl dies mere minutes after the entire charade begins, Effie drowns herself in vodka and whiskey. Haymitch only supplies her with these weapons of self-destruction and quips of how heartless Effie had been in misplacing hope in that girl's mind.
He says, "I told you so." And then he leaves her to mull over the things that are already nagging at her conscience.
(She forces herself to not become attached after that. She numbs herself so much that she transforms into a new person altogether. In a way, she leaves, but she does not become a ghost. In place of her former self she leaves a marionette and moves only in the ways her government dictates her to move. She keeps her heart at bay for now.)
X
Effie remembers she is heartless.
This first occurs to her during her fourth year as escort, when Haymitch drinks his weight in whiskey and shouts and shouts and shouts until his words have buried themselves in the crevices of her brain: You're a killer, a monster, you're a heartless Capitol bitch. She initially brushes it off like she would with dust on picture frames and ignores him like she usually does. But his words echo and echo in her mind like her father's footsteps down a hallway and out of her life, repeating themselves over and over like a broken record. She replays his drunken slurs until she convinces herself that it is true. She is heartless. She is heartless, and no matter how many times she will say to herself that he is a liar, she knows that drunken men are the most honest; this, coupled with the fact that the first twenty-five years of her life were spent reveling in the deaths of children, is further evidence of her cruelty.
She is heartless. No — no, her heart is very much there, very much active, as it pumps and squeezes and relaxes at a variable speed at a variable time; she has a heart, but lacks a soul. And the electrical pulses that resonate through her body mean nothing when a soul does not echo back with spirit, and though blood runs through her veins, not a sliver of humanity will course back to the body through her arteries.
(In response to this, she stacks her grievances on top of the other and shoves it to the part of her subconscious that collects cobwebs and dust. They will never be touched again. So it seems, her awareness of the cruelty of the Games has become well acquainted with her memories of her father's abandonment.)
X
Effie Trinket has her first existential crisis at age twenty-five, and maybe that's why she starts to see wrinkles line the curvature of her face and bags form underneath her eyes. Foundation and bronzer and blush will hide these from the flashes of cameras and people with vanity oozing out of every orifice, but at the end of the day, she will go home and wash her mask off and will be greeted with the tell-tale signs of age taking her for granted.
And while she could always inject some subdued form of poison into her skin to pull back the wrinkles and make her look young again, she won't. She tells herself it is because she cannot afford it, but that is not true. She likes to think that these wrinkles are her battle scars, as stupidly pretentious as that is, and that she will keep them for as long as she could get away with them.
(The first time that Haymitch sees her without makeup on is when she is twenty-six. He asks for her age, and when she gives it, he guffaws and tells her to get some work done. She doesn't.)
X
Years pass and the deaths do not get any easier. By the time she is thirty, she has the blood of more than a dozen children on her hands and she finds that it is near impossible to cleanse herself of her sins.
Her bond with Haymitch neither strengthens not weakens; he still treats her like she's the devil incarnate, like she is the physical form of death and that she is nothing more than a puppet the Capitol plays with. In fact, he calls her a pawn, a game piece, a pretty little expendable thing that as soon as her purpose has been realized, she will be as good as gone.
He tells her that he waits for that day.
He falls quiet when she tells him that she does, too.
And maybe it's the implications of her finding death as a sense of peace, or maybe it's the bottle of some liquor they can't pronounce guiding their movements, or maybe it's the fact that years of bickering has blanketed their desire for the other, but lips find lips and hands roam bodies and when they think no one but the moon outside the window is watching, they fuck under the guise of a one-night stand.
(And even though alcohol clouds both their minds, there is still enough sobriety for them to know that that isn't true.)
X
She finds her father eventually.
The game of cops-and-robbers wore off a long time ago, and she'd never have thought that she'd find the thief of her childhood innocence, but she does. She finds him standing by the same fountain she was at watching the stars the night he left her. He is looking up the sky with his hands cupped around his eyes, as if looking for something between the clouds and the sun.
Effie feels like a child, then, and wants so desperately to run up to him and say, "Daddy, remember me? I'm your daughter, twenty-five years later. I've made a name for myself, aren't you proud of me?"
But just as she closes in on the man that she has been missing her entire life, his name is called and a little girl runs up to him shouting, "Grandpa, Grandpa!" Her father scoops up the girl that looks exactly like Effie did all those years ago and cradles her in his arms.
It is then that Effie discovers that he made his own little family away from her, that she is not even his child anymore and that she shouldn't even try to call for his attention. She is an adult, for God's sake — she doesn't need a father, not now at least.
(But as she watches the little girl play with his grayed hair and coo in his arms, Effie realizes that she needed him. Maybe not now, but she did when she was six, when she was ten, when she was eighteen. She wonders why he never so much sent a letter. She wonders why he chose to leave her and not his other children.)
X
Effie soon finds her life going downhill and the momentum is too great for her to stop.
It is getting increasingly harder to turn a blind eye with every death she watches on screen. And even though years ago she vowed herself soulless and heartless, even she can't turn herself off for a couple weeks out of the year. She tries throwing herself into parties and manners and all these things that she would have found enchanting when she was twenty-one and bright eyed and standing on new legs, but now she's older and wiser and she's seen more deaths than she'd like to admit.
And now at thirty-three she sits on the couch with her chin on the crest of her bent legs while Haymitch throws a limp arm around her shoulders in mock celebration.
District Three crowns a victor this year, and she's quite pretty and exotic looking with skin yellowed by the sun and eyes that are shaped like almonds with the color of autumn swirling in her irises. The sponsors call her oriental, but it's all code for expensive on the Victor Market.
This game they play is very sad. She's never wanted to quit so badly in her life.
She had thought Haymitch unconscious until she feels his thumb circle her shoulder lazily and his voice almost lethargic in her ears. He asks her if she's happy.
She says no, not really, but it is lost in the quiet and stillness of the room. Outside, the fireworks in the sky are killing the brightness of the stars and the people on the streets are making money off the turmoil of this year's victor.
Haymitch only laughs and calls her the renegade escort because she isn't happy, not really, but he falls back asleep before she can even respond.
And tonight, her mask falls away as the oriental girl from District Three is shuttled to the hospital and in an hour, she will go through surgeries upon surgeries and tomorrow, the girl will be praised and prodded and expected to provide services to the politicians who find their wives a bore.
(Tomorrow, Effie will be all smiles and will laugh as she bumps elbows with Cheren, the escort of District Three, in congratulations.)
X
She's thirty-five and she's not getting any younger; her only sort of stability is found in a drunk that she sees for three weeks out of the fifty-two in a year, and even though she has suitors lined up at the door for her hand in marriage, she knocks them down like dominos because they aren't for her.
She never would admit this, but she wishes that she could spend the rest of her waking life with the damned mentor simply because she doesn't have to put up a front to impress him.
It's not that she loves him. No, she abhors the man and his alcohol and the way his fingers grip around the necks of bottles just as easily as he would with her own skin.
But it's that she loves the way that he makes her feel human. And though she keeps up the image of being a soulless, heartless machine, a carbon cut-out of the model Capitol citizen, he can see right through that. He knows that the moment she lets her mask fall away is a moment in which her humanity shines so, so brightly.
He sees her in her purest form, like a star in the District sky, and she figures that if there's anyone worth spending the rest of her life with, it's someone that can see through the translucent film she's surrounded herself as a barrier between her and the Games.
(And she supposes that in an ideal world, she could live in Twelve with him and trace the cookie-cutter stars with her fingers and live out those halcyon days everyone talks about.)
X
It's almost her fifteenth year as escort when the 74th Hunger Games rolls around. It's bittersweet and it's almost telling of her age, which is something she wouldn't like to disclose considering the fact that she's thirty-five, unmarried, and without any hopes for a brighter future.
It's pathetic, actually.
And it is not to say that she has gotten used to these annual deaths of twenty-four children (the survival of one does not take away from his or her soul decaying with the bodies of twenty-three others) but she has. Just like Haymitch has. Just like all the other escorts and mentors and the entire culture of the Capitol has.
She has learned to not expect much for the year, because it's been damn near a quarter of a century since the last time Twelve brought in a victor and at this rate, they are just as likely to bring home two victors as one and that's saying something.
This year, she reaps a twelve year old girl and that's almost disturbing, if not for the sixteen year old sister screaming to volunteer in her place. The change of pace nearly sends her in shock, and she stumbles upon her words and of it weren't for the mayor's interjection, she would have passed out right then and there.
The boy she picks is quiet and looks to the girl (Katniss, is it?) with such an endearing look that it's almost tragic. The two of them shake hands and, despite her rules of not expecting much, she thinks this year might be the year.
(This is the year that she finally wins, and when the two make it out alive, she kisses Haymitch hard on the lips. She almost forgets why she did, if not for Cinna barging in at exactly the wrong moment.)
X
It is during the Victory Tour when Haymitch asks her why she still acts like a marionette when in fact she can do so much more with herself that she finally takes a good look in the mirror. She supposes it's just a passing comment, an insult umbrellaed in his bumbling words that smell of stale alcohol. But she takes it how it is and internalizes it, halfway letting it consume her in sleep as she does.
Is she a marionette?
No, she isn't.
(When Effie has ingested enough whiskey to staunch all forms of doubt, she realizes that she is. The Capitol still tugs the strings at her limbs and makes her walk the way they want her to walk and makes her say the words they have written down for her. But later, she will use these limbs to wrap around Haymitch and the words she says are no less than sins. He will find her voice in the middle of it all and draw it out like a secret.)
X
So when Haymitch and Plutarch and Cinna ask her to join the Rebellion, she takes her chance and plummets in with them.
And though she won't be doing much, she will be shrouded with a veil at the end of the day and she will be able to die knowing she picked the right side to fight on. Deep down, she has always known that the Capitol really isn't as good as they claim, and that everyone is better off without Snow's regime.
Effie has no doubt in her mind that she has made the right decision in joining the Rebels.
(But then she remembers what happens to people like her. That alone is enough to make her shudder with regret.)
X
The announcement of the Third Quarter Quell shocks her right to her core, and she almost falls over if not for Portia and Cinna standing right next to her.
And though she's been picking the names for death row for fifteen years now, she cannot bring herself to say that choosing two out of three people that she loves dearly is just like picking strangers out of a lottery.
It shatters her, this announcement.
And it is when she finds herself calling his house in the middle of the night that she realizes that she isn't cut out for this sort of stuff.
(Haymitch will answer and she will start crying and the only thing he swears he understands is her sob-shaken "I love you." While he will not say it back, he will tell her to stay safe and goodnight, and hell, that's good enough for her.)
X
She finds herself trying to not cry at the Reaping, which is actually horrid and horrendous because all the cameras are trained on her. She guesses her face is all scrunched up like it usually does when she's about to cry, and her upper lip is quivering and she finds that it is hard to say "Katniss Everdeen" without having her words come out chopped and watery and broken.
Reading Haymitch's name is worse.
But then Peeta volunteers and she realizes that she isn't as nearly as sad as she should be, and it makes her feel soulless and heartless all over again. There's some truth in the notion that love can make you selfish, and this is a case in point.
It almost disgusts her.
(She does have horrible taste in men, after all.)
X
In a way, she is still a marionette, and that is a fact of life that she can never truly escape.
The Capitol wants her prim and proper and keep a sickly smile plastered on her face through every single situation. If there's a funeral to attend, she damn well has to find a way to spin it in a positive way or die trying. In return for her morbid optimism, she is given wealth and status and the benefit of the doubt.
The Rebels want her to keep the mask upon her face and continue to be hated by the people she will help free. If there's a situation to be taken seriously, she damn well has to say something incredibly shallow, incredibly vapid or risk her humanity shining through. In return for her pretend loyalism, she will be revelled as a two-faced woman who betrayed the city that loved her in favor of the people who scorned her for so long. Or, if everything goes wrong, die as a martyr for her cause.
Sometimes, she can see why there are so many loyalists and Capitol sympathizers.
But then she listens Katniss and Peeta scream and shout in their rooms at the most ungodly hours of the night. And no matter how long she will stand at their doors with a cup of water at the ready and her bathrobe tied tightly around her waist, nothing will draw those nightmares away.
They are only seventeen, she thinks to herself.
And the night terrors of these kids do not hold a candle to the thousands of parents that have suffered through the deaths of their children who never got chance to live, and if they are so unlucky to win, then they would spend a lifetime in the aftermath of a survivor's guilt.
The lucky ones are the ones who maintain their humanity after so long.
So maybe the stars do shine brighter in the districts, but that doesn't take away from the pain that they will feel for centuries until someone puts a stop to this atrocity.
Perhaps, if she looks at it this way, then being a rebel isn't half bad.
(Tonight, she will be forced away from her tributes and the bruises that will form on her arms from the Peacekeeper's hands will only be the beginning of her life as Effie Trinket, rebel. Tonight, her strings that chain her as the Capitol's marionette will be snipped by a man that finally loves her and a war that will pave the way for a better future. Tonight, she will sleep in Haymitch's bed, and tonight, she will dream of greener grass on this side of the fence.)
X
And when the war is over, she sees that the stars have gotten brighter, too.
X
"...then all around from away across the world
he smelled good things to eat
so he gave up being king of where the wild things are."
A/N: This is the product of being up at 3 AM playing Pokemon. I decided to do something useful with myself since going to sleep was fruitless at that point.
I could not help writing another Effie character study. I also could not help including quotes from my favorite children's book of all time. Italicized quotes are taken by Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
I hope you guys enjoyed this! ^.^ Review~