Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

  We’re sparing a lot more thought for the “rigged” game than Zahir Leveque did. He’d played it once, won big, and immediately disengaged from anything that didn’t help his money grow. This made him so rich he couldn’t believe how rich he was. He kept calling his bank and listening to the balances for all his accounts with a dreamy look on his face. Now if only he could share the joys of financial apotheosis with someone truly appreciative, someone who’d build on his accomplishments. Policymaking without popular mandate or even public awareness—that gave Z. L. a buzz, as did the certainty that any complaints made against him to the police would be mislaid, and that journalists might yap as much as they pleased but his name would never be mentioned in an unfavorable context in any law court in the country. His other favorite perk was the way the president rushed to return his calls if she missed them. All this would go to waste unless an appropriate heir could be found. He’d visited a lot of psychics back when he was just another lottery player, and most of their predictions clashed, but they’d all told him his lucky number was 1. This subliminally influenced his abandonment of any endeavor that wasn’t immediately embraced as a success. Belief that his fortune was guided by the number 1 was also a source, perhaps the source, of Zahir Leveque’s sneaking suspicion that all he did would die with him.

  Mr. Leveque sent train fare and told Margot to bring her son over to the mansion so he could have a look. Margot assumed that her father would excuse her lie once grandfatherly feelings kicked in. Grandfatherly feelings didn’t kick in. Harriet Lee looked up, Zahir Leveque looked down, and Z. L. saw no heir. Harriet curtsied. An amusingly zealous greeting, a cross between a curtsy and a bow, really—he’d never seen anybody curtsy so that their forehead touched the ground. But that was how the girl curtsied, and then she prattled on topics her mother must have coached her on. She asked him if he had hobbies.

  No. Do you?

  She recoiled. Me? N-no . . .

  Zahir Leveque didn’t like his daughter because she’d told him to his face that she’d give away half his fortune. His daughter’s daughter was another matter: she’d get rid of it all. It wasn’t that Harriet Lee would fritter away the Leveque fortune; he’d almost have preferred that. He didn’t detect an above-average level of generosity in the girl, but she’d squander his wealth all the same. The trouble was she did not calculate. She did not calculate! Her stomach made the most extraordinary noises when she saw the afternoon tea he’d had laid out. Scones and buns, tarts and hot buttered toast. She didn’t eat any of it. Nor did she drink the water; she only pretended to. He let her pantomime feast go on for a bit before asking her what was going on. Not hungry?

  She said apologetically, It’s because I don’t like you.

  He was displeased. Fourteen is too old not to have some inkling of diplomacy. But she really did seem to wish she felt differently.

  Well, my girl—do you think you’re going to like everybody you share a meal with? There are a lot of good things you won’t get to try if you go on this way.

  Zahir handed Harriet a plateful of sweet pastries with a magnanimous flourish. She passed them on to her mother, her gaze lingering mournfully on the flakiest puff. But all she said was: Yes, I suppose you’re right.

  To say that Harriet didn’t calculate wasn’t quite correct—she did. But there was some sort of bonfire in her brain. Her calculations were tossed onto the flames within seconds of being made, and this must be what lit those enormous eyes of hers. The pair were sent back to the wheat fields, where Simon had discovered that Margot hadn’t packed for a short visit to the city. Margot had packed as if leaving forever, and she would have done, without a word of regret or explanation. This marked the beginning of Simon’s own disillusionment with his hardship-averse wife.

  “There’s something you left out just now,” Sago says fearfully. “You can’t go thinking of things and then leaving them out—I don’t like it! This is why I didn’t want to hear a bedtime story, this is why . . .” The rest is muffled, as Prim has inched over to her and covered her mouth.

  “Mind telling us what it was you were thinking of?” Bonnie asks, leaf-fingers swirling over Sago’s back. She’s drawing perfect circles that spin Sago into stillness.

  “I was only thinking,” says Harriet, “of something that Margot doesn’t know that I know. I had to use the WC . . . don’t know why, when I didn’t drink anything there . . . anyway, I heard them talking on the landing below. Granddad must’ve decided that somebody who’d only give away half his fortune was better than nothing. He asked Margot to stay. He told her she could remarry and have another go at bringing someone worthwhile into the world; I gathered from that that if she agreed, I’d be sent back to the farm on my own. Margot didn’t even pause. Granddad made his suggestion, and she said—”

  Harriet’s sentence goes unfinished long enough for Perdita to cover a page of her notepad with question marks.

  “Sorry, I was just wondering whether or not to come up with something that sounds like a Margotism so that you would feel you’ve understood something about her. Something that helps you conclude that relationships are more important to her than money.”

  “But?” asks Prim.

  “But . . . Z. L. wouldn’t have bothered saying what he did if the odds hadn’t been in favor of her taking him up on it. Money actually is a priority for my mother . . . you’ll see later on . . .”

  “So the truth is?” asks Sago.

  The truth is that when Zahir Leveque suggested Margot stay and Harriet go, Margot simply said: Bye then. Unfortunately it was impossible to leave immediately, as Harriet hadn’t yet come back downstairs. So Margot made a little conversation.

  By the way, where’s Mum? I wanted to see her.

  She’s in prison.

  Prison?!

  Yes, for tax evasion, the greedy little minx.

  That’s just the way things turn out for you if you ask the likes of Zahir Leveque for a divorce. The mother hadn’t mentioned her change of address in her letters, and the daughter never looked at postmarks. The divorce was going ahead, though. Mrs. Leveque had told Margot that much. Margot talked about the weather for a while; then a new question occurred to her.

  Who’s in charge of the farm I live on?

  Zahir told his daughter the name of the theoretical person named on the farmstead company letterhead.

  No. You know what I mean. The owner.

  It was funny Margot had brought this up, as the owner was actually a relative of sorts . . . There’s this distant cousin of your mother’s . . . three times removed, or something like that . . .

  And that cousin owns the farm?

  No, his wife does. Clio Kercheval.

  Home was seventeen long credential checks and a short train ride away. It was good that they’d brought such massive trunks along, because all the seats on the train were full. Harriet looked out at factory after fenced factory. The fences were low, so it didn’t seem as if the factory owners were that bothered about people escaping.

  Mother, what do they make in the factories?

  Almost anything you can think of.

  Margot asked Harriet to write down the names of everybody who worked alongside them at the farm—she said she wanted to think about them all, and she was sure Harriet would remember. She’d felt guilty for having put Harriet through the ordeal of learning to read and then not providing adequate reading material. There was Zola, and there were farmers’ almanacs, and that was it. Harriet took to both; they were actually respectable options as far as variety was concerned. This is why, as an adult, she drives Perdita up the wall with her constitutional inability to discuss fiction without making reference to Les Rougon-Macquart. Worse still, poetry, plays, and nonfiction never escape comparison to the farmers’ almanacs. Harriet read more voraciously than Simon and Margot ever had. They discouraged this; she’d be so bored once she ran out of texts that were new
to her. She surprised them with the discovery that once an avid reader runs out of books, she reads people. Harriet read everybody she met, and when she met them again, she reread them.

  Harriet was none too impressed by Margot’s appraisal of her, having seen and heard plenty of parental overstatement on the farmstead. Still, not wanting to disappoint her mother, Harriet listed farmstead names. Some of them were made up, just for fun, and when she’d finished Margot crossed out all the made-up names, then read the list again.

  You haven’t forgotten anybody; they’re all there.

  Harriet was greatly relieved by this, though she couldn’t have said why. But back at the farm, as they passed the cottages where the Cook family lived, the jack-in-the-box sprang out for the first time in ages, his peeling skull pummelling the air: HA HA HA, HA HA HA. And later that night Harriet’s list was in Simon’s hands, accusing him and keeping him from sleep.

  Margot had told him she’d come back because she had nowhere else to go. There was the cottage and there was the mansion and no place in between. He answered: But I thought we . . . I thought we could . . .

  As he spoke, her mouth moved too, only barely suppressing mimicry. I thought we, I thought we could. With each generation the Lees grew poorer and more dutiful. So did their co-farmers, the Parkers, the Coopers, and the Cooks. They didn’t know how to change anything. They only knew how to continue.

  So we’ll come to nothing, Simon said. Not to Harriet, who stood before him, but to the list of names, of which Harriet’s was only one.

  Or—not quite nothing—a few additions to somebody’s wardrobe, or a Catherine wheel window in some mansion a few miles from here. That was the true end their acts pertained to, the result of everything they thought they did for each other’s sake. Each breath they drew condoned this end. On the upside, his part in it wouldn’t go on for very much longer. Like his parents and their parents, there was little likelihood of living past the age of fifty. That’s how he’d found the nerve to marry Margot even though it seemed likely they’d make each other terribly unhappy sooner rather than later.

  Simon said: Come here, Harriet Leveque.

  That wasn’t her name. Also, the look in his eyes suggested it wouldn’t be a good name for her to suddenly answer to. He lunged at her, and she sidestepped. Lunge, sidestep, lunge, sidestep, but she didn’t run; she had to stay—it was this Harriet Leveque who had to leave them. Finally, he seemed to grow drowsy or to awake—he rubbed his eyes: Harriet, I’m sorry, I . . . and he walked toward the closed door of the bedroom he shared with Margot, his steps very slow—it didn’t seem as if he wanted to go in, but he was waiting for a better idea to occur to him. He placed a hand on the doorknob but didn’t turn it. Margot might very well have locked him out, and it looked to Harriet as if he was afraid of that. Simon Lee held the doorknob for another moment, held it gingerly, as if it would break in his hand, and then he left the cottage. Harriet followed him through the fields with a flashlight and blankets; he was clearing space with his hands and feet, squinting up at the crescent moon and thinking about where the sun would be when it rose. He was looking for a good place to lie down, and not necessarily just for the night, a good place to just lie down with no thought of standing up again. When Harriet saw that her father had curled up on the ground with fronds of mercy leaf flattened beneath him, she waited until she heard him snore before creeping over with three blankets, which he accepted wordlessly, without looking at her. And yet he asked her not to go. He kept telling her he couldn’t sleep, and it worried her very much that he choked out those words even as he slept. So she had no choice but to watch him until morning, when the two of them were surrounded by combine harvesters chugging along with only a slight modification to their preordained paths. Then Harriet Lee returned to her mother, who’d just completed a particularly large batch of gingerbread by way of neighborly apology for any nocturnal disturbance.

  * * *

  —

  GINGERBREAD BAKED TO THE Lee recipe takes at least three days to really come into its own. Once that had happened, Harriet went from cottage to cottage doling out gingerbread. Only the very young and the very old were at home, looking after one another. Harriet heard someone say that Simon should’ve married Gwen Cook instead of Margot. This was muttered when Harriet’s back was turned, so she didn’t see who said it, and when she looked over her shoulder, there was no one there. Whoever it was, they were probably right. Gwen Cook was a gentle and capable woman who mainly handled grain storage, and it was hard to imagine her stirring up an atmosphere as foul as the one that festered in the Lee home at that time. Harriet’s parents kept trying to kill each other. You couldn’t tell from listening to what they said, but they were tearing each other limb from limb. They snarled at each other and smiled at Harriet, snarled and then smiled . . . she shuddered to think of it and sought out silver linings. Let’s see: there was the gingerbread, and the ease it brought. But she didn’t even feel she could argue that there wouldn’t be any gingerbread if her mother hadn’t come to the farmstead. The recipe had been right there in Simon’s cottage when Margot arrived. Gwen Cook (or any other alternative bride) could get just as good results from it as Margot did. Gwen and Simon’s daughter or son would’ve delivered gingerbread exactly as Harriet did, obediently refraining from tasting it as Harriet did. They’d be a Lee, after all.

  She had one more cottage to visit: Maggie Parker’s, in the far west. Then she’d join the other kids of working age: Thibault, Titus, and Dottie Cooper (Dottie flew into rages if you called her Turandot); the Cook cousins, Erzurum (Zu for short), Elsa, Atif, and Nathan; and Maggie Parker’s grandsons, Raphael and Jiaolong, the latter of whom really did look like a dragon, especially about the eyebrows.

  Harriet passed an array of plant-vertebrate combinations. There were two new ones, droopy-eared rabbits. She watered them with the watering can she left out for rainfall. She passed a cabbage patch and a carrot patch, cottages, cottages, a miniature crop circle. Sparrows have such an appetite for grain that she was supposed to chase away any sparrows she saw, but she asked them what the crop circle depicted. What’s that you say? I really don’t want to know? So you sparrows are just going to eat all you want and not even spy for anybody . . . ?

  Harriet passed a bucketful of muddy boots and a winnowing fan she picked up as a bargaining chip for when its owner, probably Nathan or Thibault, realized he’d lost it. She passed a willow-cane carriage sans horses (a lesser landmark), Gretel’s Well, more plant-vertebrate combinations, almost there . . .

  The sun set. The wheat field had done it again, stolen the afternoon. Harriet had already missed the threshing-floor sweep. Maggie Parker was the hospitable type, and her family had bred homing pigeons for just under a century, though the pigeons’ homing ability seemed to lessen by the generation. That or the Parkers’ talent for training them. The three Maggie herself had raised were a washout—it had been four years since Maggie had accepted a challenge from a pigeon breeder on the neighboring farmstead and released her birds in the capital city. As yet none of the Parker pigeons had returned to their nests, so the other pigeon breeder won by default, and Maggie was probably the only Parker not to view this incident as the unmentionable end to a grand legacy. By the time Harriet had drunk half a jumbo pot of tea and heard some tales from the annals of Parker’s Pigeon Post, they’d be well into nighttime. But it wasn’t just that. The darker it got, the sharper Harriet’s senses grew, and the sharper Harriet’s senses grew, the better the gingerbread smelled. Rich, sweet embers, nourishment of djinns and other fire-eaters. Harriet in the waning light, with only the wheat and the crickets and the cicadas to see. Maggie always tried to make Harriet take a piece away with her, so there was no substantive distinction between taking one now and taking it at Maggie’s bidding.