Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Another option for Breadcrumb Ball attendees was taking turns dressing in gray shock-haired wigs and ankle-length black gowns and chasing the girls around growling, “Give-me-Hansel-give-me-Hansel.” Stop it, Zu said, the first time that happened. Just . . . stop, OK? You can have him. Here.

  At the end the grown-ups would ask if that had been fun. They wanted to show that they were high-spirited and spontaneous, perhaps even a teensy bit unsafe to be with. They’d had what they remembered as carefree childhoods and wanted a reprise, or they’d had unhappy childhoods and wanted another chance. Yes, we had fun, we are bona fide children and we think you’re great, please come again soon. That was the only permissible response. If you gave any other, you were sent home to be a drain on resources again: that was the biggest threat Clio had up her sleeve.

  The girls’ commitment to endorsing adults aged them a bit, but they were fine with it as long as they got to stay where they were. Failing to hack a cushy job as a professional child impersonator . . . that was a defeat too terrible for the girls to contemplate.

  Besides, the cash cauldron was boiling over. City dwellers paid less tax than farmstead people, but they were subject to a Compulsory Purchase Law, which made sure all the overpriced farm and factory goods were sold. You could get a waiver if you bought Druhástranian Experiences like visiting the Gingerbread Girls instead. Some of the visitors asked, “Can’t we have a sleepover with the girls? Can’t you offer a package that involves staying here awhile?” and every other night a gang of bankers got drunk and tried to break in, smearing their faces against the windows and reciting the names of their first loves. Harriet held out her hands to them, and a matron cuffed her around the head: Exactly what are you seeking to encourage right now?

  At their morning assemblies Clio told them they should feel flattered that people wanted to be with them. If you were a Gingerbread Girl, people found shelter in your company. At least, they did until you were sixteen and became an ex-child. Then you were to take on the role of a blue-and-white-uniformed matron and stay in the background.

  Harriet wasn’t homesick like Zu was, and she wasn’t happy to be there like Dottie was.

  Mrs. Kercheval.

  Yes?

  How’s Gretel?

  Gretel? Bless you. She’s fine. Keeps bringing home new friends, all sorts, honestly . . . her friends are my friends, but I do spend a lot of time combing her for lice. Take for instance this picturesque old man she brought home on Saturday. Silk tie, bowler hat, and holes in the soles of his shoes so big he kept stepping through them and having to yank the shoe up after him step by step. Of course as soon as she saw this man Gretel couldn’t think of anything she’d rather do than spend the whole day helping him search along the roadside for a bean. Yes, somebody had given Gretel’s new friend a bean, and that somebody had said: This bean will serve you well. But Gretel’s friend didn’t want the bean . . . I suppose it does put you in a mood when you want someone to stay with you and get fobbed off with a bean and a mysterious recommendation instead. He didn’t want the bean, so he went up the tallest building he could find and he threw away the bean. Apparently he had second thoughts and tried to catch it even as it was falling, but it was gone. Almost immediately after that he started to have suspicions that his bean wasn’t like any other bean after all. He went to all the supermarkets looking at the dried beans they had. He looked at pictures of beans in encyclopedias. MY bean’s an altogether different shape and color . . . I thought it was just a nothing bean, but it isn’t, it’s a bean of influence and I want it back! I should never have let it go. Whatever possessed me, he said. It was just such a sullen, shriveled little lump . . . I should have given it loving care . . . all that is living thrives on loving care . . . On and on about that bean. Gretel brought him home for dinner and he sat there going, bean bean bean, and I said I thought he should track down the person who gave him the bean and ask for another one—a good excuse to reopen a conversation, at least—and he said, Oh do you think that would work, and was just becoming a tad more sensible when Gretel stepped up to the dinner table with a little button box. She had some buttons in there and he was all yes yes, very nice, thank you for showing me these buttons, but she also had his bean! He was beside himself. He’d been searching for years. She found it as she was just going about here and there, as she does, and she’d recognized his description so she brought him home while she checked. I must admit it did look like the sort of bean you should keep close by.

  Has he planted it, the bean? Will he?

  Not he. It’s a scoundrel’s bean, for people who know they’ll be leaving an unbearable gap behind them and have the cheek to try to fill it in in advance. “Here’s a bean that’ll serve you well,” my foot. He’ll keep it until he needs to use it the way it was used on him . . .

  Oh no, that’s not it at all. The person who gave him the bean has been waiting for him to plant it . . .

  Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, darling, with your background? Planting as a solution for everything. I’d try to find out for you, but with Gretel it’s another weekend, another searcher . . .

  Dottie had made two new friends, Rosolio and Cinnabar: when they got bored during afternoon tea they’d pick a guest they felt they could nudge out of his or her right mind—a man or woman of straitlaced appearance, a black-coffee drinker with too much discipline to reach for anything sweet. Dottie, Rosolio, and Cinnabar selected that person and locked eyes on them as they nibbled away at their gingerbread men. Systematic dismemberment was necessary, as Dottie preferred the head, Rosolio the legs, and Cinnabar the torso. They fed one another accordingly, pecking crumbs out of one another’s hands like fiendish hatchlings, never for a moment taking their eyes off their target. We don’t know what we’re doing . . . or perhaps we do, a little . . . anyway, it’s to please you. This was how they made a tea party guest theirs. Back again? the other girls asked joyfully, as the captive fumbled toward the chair with the best view. Elsa Cook would’ve been amazed by this: she operated on the principle that spectators only grew attached to you if they saw you put in direct danger. But also, who would’ve thought Dottie of the Vesuvian nosebleeds had coquetry in her too?

  Zu pushed the product itself and nothing else. Her no-frills desperation had its own efficacy—like the Little Matchstick Girl, but with gingerbread. She kept getting her pay docked for being below the ideal weight for her height. She couldn’t keep the gruel down, so every meal was a catch-up meal for her. Two bowls at a time. Spooning up the gruel took too long; Zu just tipped back her head and slopped the gruel straight in.

  Harriet could stomach any mess, but she was Margot-sick. The symptoms were various and sometimes debilitating; tearfulness, being intensely critical of people for not laughing the way Margot did or hugging her the way Margot did or interrupting people mid-story in order to predict what they were going to say next with a fifty-fifty success rate the way Margot did. There was also a lot of desultory raising and dropping of the arms, as if seeking a hold, as if the whole lopsided world was just a badly hung picture frame she could tilt back into balance. She missed Simon and Elsa and her favorites among the farmstead boys too, but they could all manage without her. Still, Harriet had been counting the contents of the pay packets she’d held on to ever since she’d realized Margot’s letters weren’t from Margot. Six months in, Harriet and Zu were already a quarter of the way toward the amount they wanted to make before retiring. Nobody at the farmstead would recognize them at first. They could pretend to be tourists, city mademoiselles who suddenly made it rain with gifts and letters from Dottie. They would make a down payment on the farmstead: land owned by kids was an idea that would probably appeal to Clio.

  The heat of the dormitory was a desert heat, so mirages kept Harriet awake. She shook off her blanket, and it clung to her leg for a moment, an itchy briar coiled around the skin there. She prodded the blanket with a sweaty toe and it fell to the floor. T
hree other girls already lay naked with their arms and legs splayed, not sleeping but staring up into the surveillance cameras above, challenging the matrons, security guards, and anybody else to get off on this. Zu had a theory that what they felt was some emanation of their combined body temperature and nestling in might be the only way to endure it. Harriet got out of bed. She walked out of the dormitory and up the boiled-sweets bedecked staircase, briefly returning for a cardigan when the chill hit her outside the dormitory door. This was their house, and they were free to roam it, watched all the time but not interacted with by ex-children unless they strayed into the no-no territory of being about to come to harm. Trying to leave the premises brought guards out so fast they seemed like holographic projections. Harriet checked the tearooms one by one on the off-chance that some gingerbread had been left out, but she knew how thoroughly the premises were purged of the stuff as soon as the guests left. Clio had told them over and over again about how when she was a girl a school friend of hers had given her a gingerbread mansion as a keepsake and how beautiful the little mansion had been until some cockroaches moved in and ate it from the inside out.

  The Topkapi tearoom was Harriet’s favorite; she lifted the lids of the boxes stacked up between the table legs and stroked the pistachio-colored porcelain. All the cups and saucers were square, like pieces of Turkish delight. The teapots were too; there was one on the tabletop with tea still in it, since cockroaches didn’t go for tea. Harriet drew open the gold-tasseled curtains, sipped her cold tea, and looked out over a city the girls only went out into whilst being ferried to and from the factory. Druhá City was as shiny and as loud as a rhinestone-studded rattle. And it was a Thursday, so Gretel would be out playing the numbers game under the night sky.

  9

  Margot had given Harriet five city commandments.

  Make sure you eat enough.

  Avoid getting sick; let people with colds fend for themselves.

  Turn in no more and no less than a proper day’s work.

  Don’t like Clio more than you like me.

  See some sights if humanly possible.

  The fifth command proved the trickiest to implement. One afternoon Harriet went into Clio Kercheval’s office without knocking. Clio clicked her computer screensaver on in case Harriet came around the desk, and then she folded her hands together.

  What can I do for you, er—Dottie.

  Harriet shook her head.

  Sorry, what can I do for you, Rosolio? Lyud . . . no? Camille? Child. What can I do for you, child?

  Harriet petitioned Clio for a group trip to the city.

  To the city? Clio patted her knee until Harriet inferred that she was supposed to come and sit on it. Harriet shook her head again. I’m fourteen, she said.

  Well. What do you want to see in the city, fourteen-year-old?

  Historical monuments? Or we could go to the zoo?

  Listen, child—there’s no need for you to see the city. The city would corrupt you.

  Harriet had another go. School, then. School would improve us.

  School is a greater corrupter than any city. I’m really doing the best I can for you—in loco parentis, you know.

  Oh, said Harriet. I think I’ll go home, then.

  You want to go home? Clio was thunderstruck. The most recent opinion poll had returned the results that going home was the last thing the girls wanted. What was going on here? Was Margot Leveque’s kid negotiating? Clio may not have been able to remember the child’s name, but she was one of the more convincing Gingerbread Girls, and her absence would induce no small loss of revenue. Harriet opened the office door. Clio jumped up and closed it again.

  Don’t be like that. I’ll order textbooks, she said. Books from Gretel’s curriculum. You can study from them, be your own teacher. And you can teach the others, if you’d like. You can all be home educated. What do you think? Is it a good compromise?

  Harriet accepted. In the dormitory she gathered the girls around and told them she’d got Clio’s permission to turn the Buckingham tearoom into a classroom for a couple of hours before they were due to head to the factory. They could gather around the tabletop held up by nutcracker soldiers and follow the National Curriculum with seed-pearl crowns set upon their studious heads. Nothing is impossible for royalty. The plan was unanimously agreed upon, but rousing the Gingerbread Girls the morning after the textbooks arrived was a different story. Harriet got called names and was told she’d better watch her back . . . so she let the sleepers sleep and relied on textbooks to help her transport other textbooks. They made good doorstops. She put down her notepad last. At four in the morning in the Buckingham tearoom, Harriet put on the crown that hung off the back of her wooden throne, stuck her hand into the pocket of her dressing gown in search of a pen, and found thirty-two folded notes. All were variations on Go Harriet! Get that knowledge! and Sorry I’m so lazy ♥ ♥ ♥ and Please forget what we said this morning . . . when it comes to solid-gold boffins we have no one but you. Her friends knew themselves and had written these the night before.

  The history textbooks were the ones Harriet had been most interested in, but the only ones available were all about the histories of other countries that had greater global relevance and the suspiciously bravura role Druhástrana had played in their fortunes. Humble Druhástrana, friend to all nations, forgotten by all in its own time of need (but when had that been?). All aggression against Druhástrana was unjust and ultimately unsuccessful; there beneath the national emblem (three black griffins with their backs turned atop a gray mountain) on the flag was the motto: Never wounded, never wrong. The referendum had been the only way to definitively withdraw from the so-called brotherhood of nations; let them see, yes, they’d all see how well they’d get on without all the contributions Druhástrana had made toward world peace . . . Harriet bent the textbook in half at the page she was reading and banged it against the tabletop, trying to shake some of the opinionation out of it. She was oppressed by this opinionation; each sentence threatened to turn her into a cynic by the time she reached the end of it. She turned to another textbook, on the history of England, and got on with that one a bit better, especially the bit of Druhástranian history the author had managed to slip in as an aside on referendums. The author asserted that the need for Druhástrana’s Great Referendum (the one that had divorced it from all formal international relations and most informal ones too) had been brought about by a general taking of umbrage against all the foreigners who kept coming in and trying to propagate distracting inequalities, stuff about physical appearance and who people should and should not fancy and places of prayer that were better than others, or notions that the best people don’t pray at all . . . Druhástranians didn’t need any of that. What Druhástranians wanted was to keep things simple and concentrate on upholding financial inequality. Even that inequality could have been ironed out if the populace really wanted it, but singularity, the possibility of singularity, was something that the voting majority found impossible to sacrifice. Ask any Druhástranian man or woman and he or she will admit this truth—(Harriet did not admit this truth, but then she was neither man nor woman; she’d have to ask Margot sometime)—the truth that he or she can find the strength to live out a lifetime under the most dire privations as long as there’s a chance, however irrational, that he or she could someday stumble upon some abundance that’s accompanied by the right to keep it all for himself. Or herself. Thus did Druhástrana turn away from the world, like those three black griffins we see on our flag, and if only we could see what lies before those griffins! What is it they’ve been watching over all these years? What could have kept them from turning to face us?

  After this the textbook author returned to a discussion of the Magna Carta and stuck to that, so Harriet dropped history and turned to maths and science and a handful of languages, English foremost. Clio tested her, neglecting to mention t
hat the test papers were past exam papers for each subject. The difficulty was meant to be demoralizing, but Margot Leveque’s kid got motivated by it instead. She stopped talking about going home and followed the applicable rules and guidelines with gusto. Harriet’s logic was malleable regarding anything that wasn’t a matter of the heart, and even when she was conscious of having been led into fallacy, it pleased her to reassemble her thoughts to order. It was the only way she could be sure they wouldn’t go to waste.

  Two things happened—one pleasant and one unpleasant.

  The unpleasant thing: a busload of rail-thin farmstead girls came to the Gingerbread House for a visit. Clio wanted them to see how happy and nurtured and well clothed they’d be. The parents were wowed, but the farmstead girls were stone-faced. They gazed upon the Gingerbread Girls as you would some badly made counterfeit you’d bought at the same price as the original. The Gingerbread Girls trotted through all their farmstead reminiscences and led the visitors to the photo wall replete with images of them as they’d been when they’d first arrived. Yes, that’s really us! Ha ha, no—no replacements! The farmstead girls paid no attention to the photos. They only had eyes, such cold and confrontational eyes, for the three-dimensional Gingerbread Girls standing right in front of them. And as soon as the grown-ups had wandered away to watch a slideshow presentation, the farmstead girls closed in. What are your names? said Dottie Cooper’s crew. They were still trying to get a convivial atmosphere going. Ours are—