Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

  4

  It’s stupid, but Harriet puts Gretel’s ring on before she goes to sleep at night in her room strewn with paper cranes. Stupid because what will all that do? Ward off a return visit from the soot figure? Harriet’s the type who frets all the time, but since she read Perdita’s note, she’s fretting on overdrive. The flat keeps dwindling around her, doors and walls thinning to mere air. She must not be nervous; she must not jump when the heating stutters or when the dripping of the tap changes tempo. The wheat-sheaf ring and the paper cranes bring relief from all dreaming and prognostication. The soot figure is not coming. It has been and gone, and failed.

  In the morning Harriet ties on her favorite apron, the one she’s had printed with a sketch of Perdita’s. The sketch is in the style of a pavement sign: a woman who looks a little like Harriet is wearing a tall, pointy hard hat and clutching the handle of a wooden spoon as if it’s a walking stick. Beneath this image are the words WITCH AT WORK. She puts on music that suits her witchy mood: DJ Luck and MC Neat’s “A Little Bit of Luck.”

  Ta-na-ni ta-na-ni ta-na-ni ta-na-ni ta-na-ni . . .

  She washes and strains red beans, boils them down to near-mush, grinds the beans, refers to Hyorin Nam’s danpatjuk recipe for the next step.

  With a little bit of luck, we can make it through the night . . .

  Harriet pummels rice dough until she has a bowl full of cloud solid enough to rebuild a castle in the air. Instead of crafting ramparts she portions it out into tiny cannonballs. The bean paste bubbles, and Harriet stirs in the dough so that Perdita comes home to a simmering of her favorite things: sugar, starch, and cinnamon. After this and the paper cranes, Harriet almost dares to call herself a friend of Hyorin Nam’s, but she mustn’t be hasty; she’s made this mistake before, and she should wait for a third sign.

  At bedtime, Harriet looks in on Perdita and the dolls. They are gathered close, a rustling bouquet of eyes and leaves, and they haven’t gone to sleep yet. They look at her expectantly, so she takes one step into the room, then one more.

  There’s a question Perdita’s been asking ever since she woke up at the hospital: How did you get here? The question is for both Harriet and Margot, and Margot misunderstands and thinks Perdita is for some reason fixated on the logistics of their getting to the hospital. Harriet understands Perdita’s question perfectly and—shamelessly unsatisfactory mother that she is—has been pretending to share Margot’s misunderstanding. Harriet and Margot have the kind of past that makes the present dubious. Talking or thinking about “there” lends “here” a hallucinatory quality that she could frankly do without. Pull the thread too hard and both skeins unravel simultaneously. Still. Each time Harriet raises her hand, she sees the two rings on her middle finger. The unaltered fact of Gretel is promising.

  So Harriet clears her throat and asks if Perdita is interested in making a deal. Perdita invites her to state her terms, and once stated, they’re rapidly agreed upon. Perdita will tell Harriet how she got to Druhástrana, and Harriet will tell Perdita how she left it. Nggggg, Perdita’s shaking her head, disputing the order of proceedings. First Harriet will tell Perdita how she left Druhástrana. Only then will Perdita tell Harriet how she got there.

  Prim, Sago, Bonnie, and Lollipop move outward to sit with their backs against the bedposts. Their arms fold across their bodies, and their faces are in shadow, four geometric sketches indicating a margin.

  Harriet settles down next to Perdita; she is cross-legged, and so is her daughter; she’s wearing flannel pajamas, and so is her daughter. “Consider this a bedtime story . . .”

  But before Harriet can begin, Sago pipes up. She’d rather go to bed without a story tonight, if that’s all right with the others.

  It’s not all right with the others. Perdita warbles something very stern, and the doll named Lollipop lets it be known that she thinks Sago’s a coward. Prim says, “What’s this, Sago? We’ve heard bedtime stories before.”

  Bonnie says they’d all listen to Sago if they had any sense. What are they going to do if this particular bedtime story has an “it was all a dream” interlude that truthfully refers not just to the tale and its teller but to all those to whom the tale is being told? “Suppose we’re not even character characters but figments of another character’s imagination . . .”

  “I’d be humiliated,” Lollipop bursts out. “Humiliated!”

  “Well, it’s not like we’d just sit back and take it,” Prim adds. “We’ve still got our side of the story. It’s like having a return ticket. We can all go there and back together, can’t we.”

  Perdita nods. Sago sighs, then asks Harriet to go ahead.

  5

  A girl grew up in a field. Well, in a house, with her family, but the house was surrounded by stalks of wheat as tall as saplings. The girl’s earliest memories are framed in breeze-blown green and gold. Ice and moonlight, sunshine and monsoon, the wheat was there, tickling her, tipping ladybirds and other pets into her lap.

  Druhástrana’s small, but everyone who lives there thinks it’s huge. This is due to a couple of types of subjective distance. There’s bureaucratic distance, by which I mean there are all sorts of formalities to be completed at each stage of travel. It takes hours, and by the time your credentials are checked for the tenth time (tenth out of seventeen), most people feel like turning around and going home again. The other type of subjective distance has to do with the way the land itself impedes rapid motion. For example, the wheat field I’ve mentioned was hazardously lush terrain. Whether you crossed it on foot or by tractor, wheat was all you saw ahead of you and all you saw behind.

  But there were landmarks. The first was in the center of the North Sector, where the Cooper family lived. It was a wooden clog the size of a caravel, a relic from the days of giants. The Coopers were convinced the shoe belonged to a giant Cinderella, and they gave the youngest among them the task of keeping it polished in case someone came back for it.

  The second key demarcation was between non-farmland and the beginning of the South Sector, where the Cook family lived. Here you met a jack-in-the-box with a pegged-on smile and eyes that popped out on springs and bounced every which way. His wind-up handle was broken, but that didn’t stop him jumping out and squawking HA HA HA just as you were trying to tiptoe past carrying breakable goods. Maybe he was solar-powered. Someone always pushed his eyes back into his head and closed him into his box once he’d had his fun. The Cooks had lost count of the number of times they’d moved him, only to find that he’d returned to his preferred spot overnight. Mr. Jack-in-the-Box would never become an intuitive meeting point like the Giant’s Clog, but the farmstead people would veer off course without him.

  The third landmark was a broken loom on an iron stand, austere in its rust. Frills of hemlock (or cow parsley?) grew through and around its rolls and beams, trying in vain to mend the shattered frame, or heightening the display of the damage. That one was in the East Sector, where the Lees lived: it was the landmark closest to the girl’s cottage. It was said that three sisters had quarrelled there. She who couldn’t stop laughing at the Coopers’ Giant Cinderella theory was sad to think that harmony could go so long unrestored. She’d wound measuring tape around one of the legs of the loom stand and placed a pair of scissors on its lowest shelf, so that if by some chance the weaver, the measurer, and the cutter reconvened there, they’d see that somebody else had hoped for this too.

  The fourth landmark was a dry well known as Gretel’s Well. It marked the end of the West Sector, where the Parker family lived, and the beginning of non-farmland. The mouth of the well was paved with jade-colored tiles, and past kneeling-reach, the darkness within was utter. If you dropped a stone in there, you had to listen intently for up to ten minutes before you heard it hit the bottom. This could mean that the well was exceedingly deep, or it could mean that some acquisitive creature lived in the well and thoroughly contemplated each stone it caught bef
ore deciding it wouldn’t do and letting it go. There was no tale that anybody knew of concerning this well. The name attached to it both suggested and withheld a story, and thus was invention forbidden. Children asked parents, younger siblings asked older siblings, and all were told: No story.

  There were many smaller landmarks, but the girl I’m talking about still sees the big four sometimes, when she closes her eyes. She was often sent on errands to fetch tools, pass messages, and deliver neatly wrapped parcels of the gingerbread her mother made, so she traveled with a foldup stool that she stood on to see above wheat level. When her feet touched the ground again, the girl felt a gentle pull on the soles of her feet. The wheat drew a curtain around her and promised she’d be a beauty beyond compare by the time she was unveiled. When that didn’t work, it promised her boundless wisdom. All she had to do was place her feet here, and here, where the soil was softest . . .

  The girl never fell for that. She walked faster. She’d seen some plant-vertebrate combinations in the clearings, glassy gazing dormice and owls that earth had risen up around; the ground was growing them, and they looked uncomfortable, as if they’d been stretched and stuffed with straw. There was a leaf that people chewed for relief from pain, and the girl brought this leaf to the plant-vertebrate combinations when she had time; it seemed to make things a bit better for them. The extreme bitterness of the mercy leaf acts as built-in portion control, so she planted bushes of the leaf all around the captives and left them to it. She was busy running the farm alongside her father and mother. They tended the seedbeds and harvested the wheat, threshed it by hand and funneled it into sacks, then started again from the beginning. Once the wheat was threshed and in sacks, it was collected by the truckload. That was when money was handed over, but evidently not enough, as the girl and her parents were hungry almost all the time. So were the families who lived nearby and worked alongside them. Their farmstead was always behind; they’d been shown ominous regional comparison charts that highlighted this fact. The girl’s mother—her name was Margot—did what she could to get more work out of everybody; she made gingerbread for her husband and for anyone else who asked for it; there was a great deal of mercy leaf in the gingerbread, so it helped. They worked on saints’ days even though it was a sin.

  The unrelenting work and the malnutrition hooped their spines; the girl would have walked along stooped over if her mother hadn’t kept whacking her every time she displayed bad posture. Margot was the only person she knew who held life to a higher standard than that available. She’d seen the rest of the country and admitted that it was mostly farms in the rural areas and sprawling factories on the outskirts of small, pristine cities. The speed requirement in the factories made risk of injury equal to that of farming, so when asked how factory work would be better than farm work, all Margot could come up with was, Fewer maggots? It was assumed that Margot had come from factory stock, that she was accustomed to being famished and exhausted, and her assertions that things could be otherwise were mere daydreams. She would’ve set her co-farmers right if they’d asked her, but nobody did, so only her husband and daughter were aware she’d been born into a wealthy family that had got rich off the barely solvent. That’s what was behind her demands to know why they toiled and toiled without profit; she knew a racket when she saw it.

  Getting disowned had been something of an inevitability for Margot Leveque—her cousins took bets on the cause, and the one who bet “proposing marriage to a pauper” raked it in. Margot was ashamed of her father’s squalid opportunism, and even if she hadn’t had romantic notions about growing her own food, she’d still have fallen for her husband’s good looks, rough courtesy, and self-reliance. She felt like an ant that had somehow lassoed a mountain. Simple Simon Lee. She forsook her mansion for the fields he oversaw and soon learned that the farm was his captor and hers, unreliable units of manpower that they were. The wheat was weighed upon collection, and the rate they were paid was sharply cut if the grain weighed any less than the previous time. Week after week of throwing every single grain that could be scraped up onto that scale, and week after week they fell short. By the time Harriet was born, Margot hated Simon’s guts. Margot’s father, Zahir Leveque, had foreseen it: So you asked him to marry you? And he said yes? Hilarious. You’re going to want to go back in time and do whatever else it takes to fix that. Don’t be silly; I’m not going to do anything to either of you! You’ll reach that point all by yourself. Margot had told him he didn’t actually know her that well, but it turned out he did.

  Simon Lee remained keen on Margot, who was equal parts propriety and slightly frightening candor. Simon’s bride was rural-pageant-winner pretty—fresh-faced, with a trim figure—but good luck getting her to sign on as a role model. Simon found her spectacular, and she had time for everybody but him. He picked wild flowers for her. He ran her baths and insisted she take half his food rations, rose earlier to begin Margot’s share of the work so she could sleep longer. Such was his care before, during, and long after Margot Lee’s pregnancy, and still she hated him so much she could only look at him out of the corners of her eyes. This was a state of affairs that their daughter could hardly have guessed at if she hadn’t been right there in the middle of it all. The closest Harriet can get to comprehending it is this: the circumstances of the farmstead families were dictated by a person, a theoretical person, a corporate letterhead, really. Whatever the thing or person was, it had never met them and most likely didn’t know their names or what they looked like. The Lees, Cooks, Coopers, and Parkers farmed in exchange for places where they could live together in between attempts to meet this theoretical person’s ever-varying requirements, requirements that went beyond the fantastic and left the realms of reality altogether. The theoretical person may have noticed that they were human, but if it had, that was of no importance. There’s no way you can treat people like this without earning hatred, so the least this theoretical person could do was accept the hatred that was due. But no, the farms’ owner(s) remained in the subjective distance and the Simple Simons took the blame instead. That, too, was made part of their work. The dodge was magnificent in its totality.

  “Oh,” says the doll named Prim. She’s lying flat on her stomach now; she rests her elbows on Harriet’s crossed knees for a moment. “I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, Mother-of-Perdita. Didn’t you say the mercy leaf could only be taken in small doses when eaten raw? I think it’s safe to assume Simple Simon was being extra nice so Margot would make him more mercy-leaf gingerbread. She probably sensed the change in motive and was hating that more than she was hating him.”

  “Hmmm . . . thank you, Prim,” Harriet says. They’re speaking very slowly, so that Perdita can understand. “A change in motive. I hadn’t considered it in that light. I think it was a mixture. He was definitely addicted. Definitely. At his most desperate he got . . . ah, he just troubled us. He’d emote. Pathos, wrath. It wasn’t acting. Acting isn’t coercive in that way, doesn’t probe or test your response, doesn’t cost you anything if you don’t believe it. This was more like lying, but with affect instead of words. There were these cascades of emotion we had to respond to at once, and it all looked and sounded like the end of his world and ours, until you caught this icy strategy in the way he fine-tuned his tone, working out what pitch to speak at. And it all fell apart once the objective had been reached. He’d stop mid-sob and stuff the gingerbread in. He wasn’t the only one. The things some of the Coopers tried! Margot overlooked most of that, but Dad . . . I was there . . . she’d wipe her hands after touching anything he’d touched. He’d look at me to see if I’d seen, and I’d run over and try to distract him. Arm wrestling, or ‘Guess What’s in My Pocket?’—usually nothing. Or if it was hot, I’d fan him with the straw fan. Otherwise I’d play hairdresser and style him until he looked a fright. He’d always let me, and then he’d style my hair too, and we’d go out and put on a sunset fashion show for the crickets and the cicadas. I swear they went quiet when w
e started parading up and down. I’m saying that whatever else was fake, the kindness and the wanting us to stay together wasn’t. I don’t know why you need to know that, but you do . . .”

  “You were on Margot’s side, though,” says Prim.

  “Was I?!”

  “Unquestionably. All you’re demonstrating is that you know it was wrong to take sides, or that you feel bad for not taking his side.”

  Perdita scrambles across the bed, grabs a notepad and pen, and writes at length. Her hieroglyphs are passed around for analysis, but nobody can read them.

  Harriet says: “I think it was more like what Sago was saying about being a figment of someone else’s imagination. I thought I was part of her story and not part of his, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.”

  Perdita jabs a finger at the notepad as if to say, That’s what I wrote. She has firsthand experience of this, having asked who her father is to no avail.

  But Prim says: “Come off it—you liked Margot best. You can’t fool dolls, you know. Anyway, I probably won’t interrupt anymore.”

  “Probably,” says Lollipop.

  By the age of fourteen, Harriet Lee had become presentable enough to pin a few hopes on. Margot wrote a letter to Zahir Leveque. It was an “I know you’ve disowned me, but you might be interested to hear that I have a son” letter. Margot was an only child, and her father was indeed interested to hear that she’d had a son. He’d long been preoccupied with the question of an heir and was tormented by the notion of some unworthy person getting their hands on his money after his death. Zahir Leveque was the founder of a numbers game with cash prizes beyond most Druhástranians’ wildest dreams and rules nobody understood. You laid a wager not just on winning numbers but on a winning number of numbers. There could be three numbers, or there could be five, or seven. There were a few other numbers games in operation, but Zahir Leveque’s appealed to hard-working, law-abiding, but nonetheless impoverished stoics. Whether they won or not, the outcome of this game confirmed what they’d already suspected: The finer things in life aren’t earned by working around the clock and doing everything you can to uphold the law. We’re given to understand that such activities ought to be enough to do the trick, but they’re not. You’ve got to be lucky too. Really, really lucky. This lesson was all the numbers-game stoics ever got from their ticket purchases; the winner was always a company employee who returned 90 percent of the cash prize the day after being publicly awarded it. The only Druhástranian numbers game that operated with integrity was the one that hardly anyone played because the tickets cost twice as much as the ones for Zahir Leveque’s game. Plus newspapers and the other numbers-game magnates had decided to single out the honest game as the one that was rigged. This “rigged” game was fun to play, though—since the media wouldn’t run the winning numbers, the company had to use alternative methods to announce them; this meant that players had to seek out clues all around them. Any string of nine numbers written on a wall or a pavement could correspond to the ticket you were carrying around that week. From time to time the company hired a jet to write the numbers in the sky, so on Thursday, winning-number day, ticket holders always looked up at frequent intervals so as not to miss anything. The majority of players who won that “rigged” prize never found out that they had. Other players were winners for five minutes, twenty, however long it took to run or take the bus to the nearest claims office, where they’d find out they were two weeks too late or that the number that matched the ticket was somebody’s phone number and nothing to do with the prize at all. Yet the memory of that cartwheeling elation tended to permanently beglitter the players’ outlook. They took other chances. Those who dialed the phone numbers they’d thought were winning sequences found commiseration on the other end, or a work lead for a jobless friend of theirs, or some pressing dilemma the caller could only resolve by drawing on an almost forgotten ability of theirs . . . things like that. The players are so few and far apart that they seldom meet, but when they do, they ask each other who or what is really behind the “rigged” numbers game. Even the official winners don’t believe redistribution of cash is the game’s true purpose.