Gretchen

by Shannon Kirk

  The door flies open outward, and I have to jump back so it doesn’t slam into my face. I stumble in the gravel of the circular driveway. Here’s Gretchen, her smile beaming wide, her skin bright white. She’s in her apple-print dress. A blotch of red pulses on her neck. Her hair is shiny bright, straightened to the point of being sharp. Rail thin, fragile, and shorter than I am—I’m a giant, or a shadow in her presence, especially since I’m in black jeans and a black T-shirt with an octopus screen print and my black hair hangs long and loose. Blue contacts are my only pops of color. My silver jelly pendant sparkles in all this blinding light.

  “Lucy,” she yells and grabs my arm to pull me in. “I missed you SO MUCH at camp!”

  I’m inside the foyer.

  “Sorry about the alarm lights. Remember Daddy told you?”

  “Uh-uh,” I say, but I’m no longer thinking about floodlights. Inside, surrounding—I, I, I can’t believe what I’m standing in. This is the strangest space I’ve ever seen.

  First off, I was right that the ceiling height on the first floor is high, about fifteen feet high. Within the foyer, a staircase to the second floor is offset to the left. Three hallways lead out of the foyer: one running beside the offset stairwell and toward the back, one to the right wing of the house, one to the left. Within the column of the foyer, around the three doorways and staircase, and up the fifteen-foot-high walls, are framed, shellacked puzzles. Every square inch holds a puzzle. From the baseboards to the crown molding. The number of patterns in here is confusing, unexpected, nothing I’ve ever encountered anywhere, ever. I’m turning a circle to take them all in, roving my eyes, tilting my head up, tilting down. I feel like I’m riding a carousel horse, around, around, up and down, dizzying myself from the motion and the light blinding off center mirrors that turn counterclockwise to my clockwise. I think a piano plays disorienting scales of waves in the belly of the house. I’d call the song “Seasickness.”

  Gretchen stands to the side and watches me. She’s silent as I inventory what I’m seeing: hundreds of puzzles of colorful dinosaurs, dinosaur bones in archaeology digs, the T. rex Sue in Chicago’s Field Museum, which Mom brought me to once.

  “A lot of the fossil puzzles I made. Some of the dinosaur ones are commercial puzzles, a Ravensburger. A rare Schmid. And one—” She’s pointing to a painted-on-wood, bones-in-a-cave puzzle that I think might be a one-of-a-kind antique. “That one should be in a museum. But,” she leans in to whisper, “the museums can fuck themselves, right, swearer girl?”

  “You made some?” I squeak out, but I’m not focusing on her. I’m trying to estimate how many puzzles of dinosaurs and fossils are in this room. Two hundred?

  “Sure, I made some,” she says, still watching me as I twirl around and look up and down. “Did you know that the dinosaurs they find, those aren’t bones, actually. You’d think they’re bones, but really through a process called petrification, minerals fill in the pores, and the bone becomes stone. So they’re fossils. Depends on the environment, whether water or wind speeds up decomposition, and also the acidity level of the soil. Unfortunately, bones need at least ten thousand years to be hard as a stone. Bummer.”

  “Oh,” I say. Was she talking about decomposition? Is she bummed by how long bones take to fossilize? What?

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s eat so we can work on a new puzzle.”

  Gretchen leads me down the hallway to the left. We have to circumnavigate a tower of, one, two, three, I think eight boxes of brand-new Crock-Pots.

  “Sorry, don’t mind Daddy’s Crock-Pots. He’s working on some project. I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  This hallway seems unnaturally narrow. It’s as if the wall opposite the exterior front wall is makeshift and built after the fact to the home’s original design. I think in a normal house of this size and make, we should be walking down a wide hall with openings to fancy living and sitting rooms. But that’s not what we’re in. This is more like a claustrophobic hallway in one of those laser-tag mazes (which I did once with Mom so as to break up one of our long road trips through the Midwest).

  Although narrow, this hallway is not dark. Lights shine up from the baseboards and down from the crown molding the whole long length. Also, vertical rods of lights are interspersed along the way—as if Ahsoka Tano came and tacked her white lightsabers to the wall. Again, framed and shellacked puzzles cover the wall surfaces, floor to ceiling, the entire length of the hall. I pass puzzles of groups of people, massive crowds of people in each one. Some are blocks of people of one race, some are multicultural. I feel like I’m in a research wing belonging to some mad anthropology professor, one obsessed to the point of derangement. There’s a puzzle of tribesmen in what I presume is an African village. One of colonial-era villagers in what must be new America. One of a bunch of faces—black, white, olive. So many others. As we progress, I note two of the slit exterior windows.

  Gretchen narrates as we walk, her ahead of me as if a museum guide. “Wish we didn’t have to have any windows at all, could have had a couple more puzzles hung in here. But Daddy says it would be weird to have no windows. Whatever,” she says, and snorts.

  I have no idea how to respond to this. Fortunately, Gretchen keeps walking and talking.

  “The puzzles in this hall are from my peoples collection,” she says. And I think, This hall? Are there more narrow halls? “These here I found at Brimfield,” she says, pointing to two puzzles high up on one wall. “Bought that one, the five-thousand-piece Cockburn Village Auction, at, ha, ironic, a competitive auction in which one of my chief competitors tried to wrench it away from me.” She stops short and, in a slow turn, looks up at me. I tower over her, so she literally looks up. Her face is serious. “He didn’t win the auction,” she says, almost in anger at whoever this competitor trying to outbid her was. “Nobody wins when I want something.”

  I nod. Noted.

  She leans in. “I always get what I want,” she says, staring at me.

  I nod again. Mm-kay.

  She turns back around and continues on. I consider walking backward to the front door so I can go home. So I can escape, I start to think. But I move forward, feeling somewhat possessed, and also not wanting to go back to the stifling, steel air of the rental with Mom. This is feeling like the part in the horror movie where I’m yelling at the main doofus to turn the fuck around and run. So I guess I’m the doofus. I hope I’m not the doofus.

  “Several of these are not for sale anywhere, because I made them from scratch.”

  Again, I ignore this comment about making puzzles, because I’m distracted by one in which people are stacked tight in a serpentine line, one that loops on itself to take the entire space of the puzzle—much like intestines loop in a layer in your gut. The people seem to be marching to something, and all their faces are resigned and haunted. Nobody’s smiling. None of the men, women, children, or babies in arms smile. They stare into the back of the head in front of them. One of the people is grotesque; he has the twisted-in-pain face of an elderly man in agony, but on a boy’s body. Gretchen stops.

  “Ah, interesting you’d stop for that one, Lucy.”

  “What is this?”

  “A cult. That’s the Death March. Really, a painting. A painting turned into a print turned into a puzzle. It’s a rendition of a cult, all members walking to their death. You ever hear of mass vanishings? There’s been a lot throughout history. Total mysteries, except some are totally not a mystery at all. Ever hear of Jamestown? The mass suicide?”

  I’m shaking my head at her, not sure what to say. Mass vanishings.

  “Anyway,” she says and continues walking. Over her shoulder she says, “Do you have a grandfather, Lucy?”

  What?

  I need to leave.

  “Gretchen,” Jerry shouts from the belly of the house. The piano music has stopped.

  “Come on,” Gretchen says, skipping ahead.

  Death March. Wait. Wait. Death March? Mass v
anishings? Cults? Do I have a grandfather? What? I note I’ve walked nearly the length of the left side of the house away from the foyer. I consider turning and walking out, but Gretchen calls again, “Luce, come on,” in a voice that is odd for its normalcy. Her voice is as if she’s just another girl calling me to skip a rope or swing a swing. I follow on, telling myself I have no friends. Dali’s just a work guy. Sandra’s just my cranky boss. I’ve got no one else in the world to talk to except Allen, the greatest cat in the world, and all I’m doing right now is churning myself into paranoid worry, like Mom does. Gretchen’s just a weirdo. Harmless. A nerd. You need a friend. Move on.

  At the mouth of the hall, we enter a seriously dated kitchen of piss yellow and brown. The pine cabinets are a dark stain, the kind you might find in a cabin in the woods. The floor is practically antique linoleum with a yellow-and-white tulip pattern. And the yellow countertops are midcentury Formica—I read a lot of design magazines. I do not know how to understand Gretchen’s kitchen. I do not know how this dated, cabinlike kitchen could be in the brick fortress-mansion of the girl who decorated the insanely fashionable and colorful rental I’m living in. Would I be rude to point this out? My confused scrutiny must be obvious.

  “Lucy,” Jerry says in greeting. He’s walked into the kitchen from some other entrance point and deposits himself beside the yellow stove. I’m beginning to feel like the interior of this house is a maze. “Gretchen’s made us a load of bacon, and the rolls are warm. Got ’em from Scheppard’s, of course. Come on into the dining room.” Jerry is once again wearing his white cotton gloves. The sound of a piano playing is gone, and I wonder if I heard a piano at all, since background noise seems impossible in this sealed vacuum of Twilight Zone outer space. The lack of noise bothers me; all I hear is Gretchen’s and Jerry’s breathing, and also the sound of my own heart thudding. And the lights—the lights are so bright, I’m sure I’ll get a migraine.

  The kitchen smells of bacon, which is a conflict, for the scent is a comfort compared to the warning sirens my other senses are blaring. My stomach growls, and yet my heart thuds in my throat. Don’t they have any ceiling fans? No air moves in here. It’s hot.

  As I consider closer, the kitchen appears much smaller than I think it’s supposed to be. The interior walls also appear retrofit, just like the narrow hall.

  I follow Jerry, who limps ahead in the lead, and Gretchen down another narrow hall, which runs adjacent to the same hall we came down. Again, uplighting and downlighting and lightsaber lights accent floor-to-ceiling puzzles along the way. We’re walking back toward the foyer. The puzzles in this narrow hall are of underground scenes. Several are ant colonies. Some are the frayed, veiny growth of tree roots in the soil; some are of plant and flower roots. Some are of burrowing underground bugs.

  “This hall holds puzzles from my earth collection. Aren’t they the best?”

  “Yes?” I say, as a question at first. A mistake. Gretchen stops and twists to me. “Yes,” I add in a more definite tone. “Really great.”

  We pass a puzzle of a rock cliff, a puzzle of a cave with stalagmites, or stalactites, or whatever they’re called, and more of other caved or underground items. Buried things.

  At the tip of this second hall is a small square of a room that blunts the end and blocks what should be an opening back into the foyer, if I’m oriented correctly and haven’t fallen down some mind-warping, Alice in Wonderland, crazy dimension. A round dining table takes up nearly all the space. I’m sure all these weird walls and halls and this windowless dining nub were built after the home’s original construction; this is obviously not a natural design. Jerry scootches sideways around the table and sits. I remain standing and pivoting my head up and down the fifteen-foot-high walls, like I’ve been doing all along. Here in the dining room, once again, are floor-to-ceiling framed and shellacked puzzles.

  “The dining room!” Gretchen says. “Obviously all of these puzzles showcase foods. Had to have fun in this room. Right, Daddy? No bones or bugs or people or dirt earth in here.”

  “Correcto. Not in this room,” Jerry says while winking at his daughter. “This is a room for eating.”

  True enough, a puzzle of slices of bread hangs above Jerry’s head, next to one of several bunches of bananas and one of all the candy bars on the market. And so many others.

  Gretchen sits, and I sit where I’m directed. In the center of the round table is a lazy Susan with a yellow platter full of bacon. A literal heaping pile of bacon on a yellow platter. There’s enough bacon here to construct one hundred Dyson’s turkey-club subs. Another yellow plate on the lazy Susan holds white Scheppard’s rolls, which indeed must be warm, like Jerry said, because the room smells of fresh-baked bread and bacon. Another yellow plate holds iceberg lettuce, slices of American cheese—the legit deli kind—and sliced bloodred heirloom tomatoes. A plate covers each of our rattan place mats, in front of which are tepee’d napkins. No utensils or cups for any drinks.

  Using his white-gloved hands, Jerry reaches behind to a skinny side table and drags over three kid juice boxes, one for each of us. The size is the toddler size that you’d find in the baby-food aisle. I get berry-berry, Jerry takes apple, and Gretchen gets grape.

  “Dig in,” Jerry says.

  Gretchen first makes Jerry a sandwich from the ingredients on the lazy Susan, and then makes herself the fattest BLT I’ve ever seen. I’m sitting here stunned by how weird this is, wondering not only about the crazy puzzle halls and walls, the Death March puzzle, which for some reason is lingering on me like a stink, but also why Gretchen made so much bacon and why Jerry is wearing gloves to eat—and, not to mention, the creepiness of us drinking these tiny juice boxes. What? I can’t get over the obscene amount of bacon. Above Jerry’s head, between a puzzle of a pyramid of cheeseburgers and one of a watery ham, is a puzzle of a vintage ad for a candy bar called Chicken Dinner. My eyes are blinded by the light refracting off the glass that covers billions of puzzle pieces.

  Gretchen follows my eyes, keen on my every twitch, every breath, every thought.

  “They used to use old advertising to make puzzles, Luce. Make your sandwich, dig in!” She spins the lazy Susan so the warm Scheppard’s rolls are closest to me. Why is Jerry drinking from a kid’s juice box? Why am I? Why does he eat with gloves on? Why am I in a maze house of puzzles? Why did they close off rooms with these walls? For the puzzles? Just for the puzzles?

  I take a roll, a slice of cheese, and eight slices of bacon like a normal person, not twenty like glutton Gretchen. Could make about ninety-five more sandwiches with the bacon remaining. I suck up all the juice in my tiny juice box, and I must be lost in bewilderment, because I suck so hard the center collapses and makes a loud cracking implosion sound. Gretchen laughs.

  “Thirsty much, Luce?” She continues giggling. Jerry hands me another berry-berry. I note he’s on his fourth apple. There is no ambience of soothing music, just hot silence when people don’t talk. And the lights are surgical-level bright. I know Mom says all families live differently from every other family, and all families have quirks. We certainly do. And it’s true, I’ve never in my life had dinner with any other family, so I’m not the best judge on what’s normal versus quirky versus downright total horror-level nuts. Lunch in school cafeterias doesn’t count, because that’s more like war-zone battle, fighting for survival—that’s not dining. And I’ve watched movies and read books about friends eating with friends, scenes on the screen where people improbably all sit on the same side of a table. So that’s one thing that’s different, because here we’re seated in a circle, which might be the only normal thing we’re doing—I guess. In fifteen years of life, I’ve only ever eaten meals with Mom, just the two of us with separate plates and no need for a serving dish in center. In all my countless hours of fantasizing about what it would be like to dine with a friend, visions of giggling through a course of perfect cheesesteaks and icy Cokes with a Jenny, I never imagined walls of puzzles and blinding lights and
a mountain of bacon and baby juice boxes. So although I have zero real-life context to rank tonight on the crazy scale, I have to believe this whole situation is a runaway crazy train to coo-coo town.

  Gretchen stops giggling when she looks at her father. “You’re doing very well, Daddy. Do you feel weird? Want another sandwich?”

  I scratch my neck, feeling a prickly heat, like I might break out in mind hives, or a centipede with stinger legs is crawling and hatching poisonous eggs in my skin.

  Jerry reaches for Gretchen’s arm and squeezes. “Doing just perfect, doll. Yes, please make me another.”

  Jerry looks at me. “Gretchen has been so good to me ever since I broke my finger. I’ve been too afraid to use my hands for anything. Didn’t want to hold anything. No silverware, not even sandwiches. For a few weeks, Gretchen spoon-fed me everything. She’s such a good girl. Tonight’s my first night back to holding sandwiches.”

  “Yeah, Daddy!” Gretchen yells.

  I concentrate on chewing whatever is in my mouth and nod to both of them. I could have swallowed a millennium ago, but I keep chewing and nodding and saying nothing. Because I don’t know what the hell to say. And while I do wish Mom was here to extricate us with her sharpness and evil eye, I know I need to snap out of it on my own, finish this dinner stat, and get home—at this point, I’ll take Mom’s steel oxygen to this whole scene a million times over.

  “I mean, I have used my hands, of course. I’ve had to drive to Boston and back. Been practicing with the symphony as soon as the doc cleared me. But anything beyond driving or playing the piano, not much at all. Have to be careful,” Jerry says. He cradles one hand with a hand hammock the way he does, and Gretchen slides him a second BLT. “Anyway,” he says, “Gretchen has been very understanding.”