After they leave, the studio falls silent. I lock the door, flip the sign to closed as if anyone is going to show up anyway, and finally let my shoulders drop from their permanent position somewhere near my earlobes.
The check in my hand is for three hundred dollars. Three sessions at one hundred each.
I move to my desk, a gorgeous antique secretary that my mother found at an estate sale, and put the check on a pitifully small pile waiting for deposit. Then I pull out the folder I have been avoiding all week.
Bills. So many bills.
The rent for the studio space is $4,000 a month. It is in a prime Buckhead location because my mom thought that location was everything, that you could not teach refinement in a strip mall. She was not wrong, but she also signed a lease before rent increases made the neighborhood financially impossible.
Utilities, insurance, the quarterly payment on the equipment loan that my mother took out when she renovated the space five years ago, and the credit card bill I have been slowly drowning under since the funeral expenses.
I do the math I have done a hundred times before, hoping that the numbers will somehow rearrange themselves into something I can manage, but they do not. They never do.
The truth is unforgiving and stark. Whitfield Etiquette is dying. Has been dying for years, really. A slow decline that my mom refused to acknowledge, and I have been desperately trying to reverse. But the world has changed. Nobody wants to learn how to address an envelope or which fork to use with fish.
The debutante balls still happen, but the girls who attend them would rather watch a YouTube tutorial than sit through my mother’s carefully crafted curriculum.
I had six students last month. Six. Down from a peak of forty when I was a teenager, helping my mother demonstrate proper posture while she lectured on the importance of a firm handshake.
“Don’t shake like you have a dead fish in your hand,” she would say.
I sink into my desk chair and let my head fall to my hands, not caring that I am probably ruining my hairdo. The silence of the studio presses in around me. This beautiful, expensive space is empty except for my failure.
My phone buzzes, and I grab it with embarrassing desperation. Maybe it’s a new client. Maybe it’s someone who saw my website, my Instagram posts, or my increasingly apathetic attempts at marketing. Unfortunately, it’s a text from my former fiancé.
Archie: Saw your post about the spring session. Hope business picks up. Let me know if you want to grab coffee sometime.
I stare at the message, trying to decode what it means.
Archie and I ended things over six months ago, after being engaged for two years. There had been a growing distance between us. He wanted a wife who would host dinner parties and charm all his clients, someone who would fit seamlessly into the world of investment banking and country-club memberships. But I wanted, well, I am still not entirely sure what I wanted. Just not the constant pressure of being Archie Farnsworth’s perfect fiancée.
The breakup was civilized, of course. Everything in this world was civilized. We are both too well-bred for scenes. He got his ring back, and we moved on, or so I thought. We agreed to “remain friends,” in a way that means we will awkwardly avoid each other at social functions for the next ten years or so.
I do not respond to his text. I do not even have the energy for whatever game he is playing.
Instead, I stand up and walk through my studio, running my fingers along the smooth surface of the practice table where students learn proper place settings. Twelve forks, twelve knives, twelve spoons, all arranged in perfect formation. My mother could identify every piece with her eyes closed. She could explain the history and purpose of each one with the passion of a museum curator.
I stop at the wall of photographs.
My mother at twenty-five, opening the studio with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by the mayor’s wife. My mother at forty, receiving an award from the Junior League. My mother at sixty, teaching a class of bright-eyed girls who actually wanted to be there.
And then me, at all my various ages. Five years old in a tiny dress, practicing my curtsy. Sixteen, showing how to do a proper tea service. Twenty-two, officially joining the business as my mother’s partner.
I look at that last photo of my mother and me standing in front of this very desk, both of us smiling. She is wearing her signature pearls, the ones that I keep in a velvet box because I just cannot bear to wear them. Her posture is perfect, her expression serene and confident. She never doubted herself, not a day in her life. If she did, she never let it show.
“I’m trying, Mother,” I whisper to the empty room. “I’m trying so, so hard.”
The studio does not answer. It just sits there, beautiful and useless, a monument to a world that no longer exists.
I am in the small kitchen at the back of the studio, stress eating the shortbread cookies I baked at three a.m. last Tuesday, when my phone rings and scares me.
I glance at the screen, thinking it will be Archie again or maybe one of my few remaining clients, but the number is unfamiliar. A Georgia area code, but definitely not Atlanta.
I swallow the last of the cookie and answer with my professional voice.
“Whitfield Etiquette, this is Eleanor speaking.”
“Ms. Whitfield? Ms. Eleanor Whitfield?”
