Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

  With no benefactor standing between her and the jobs she’d daydreamed about, Margot tried a few of them, cheating a bit, since Tamar was her character reference. She lasted two weeks as a personal shopper and one week each on jobs as an assistant stylist for magazine photo shoots and an assistant curator of a museum (I can definitely handle this, Harriet . . . it’s a teeny tiny museum . . . all in one room!). She voluntarily left each post. At least, she said it was voluntary. Having conceded that she couldn’t opt out of building actual experience, Margot’s new plan was to live off a Minimum FrankenWage, the cobbling together of wages from the three jobs she eventually found. Two of her jobs were paid in cash, so in official terms, she stayed below the tax threshold. The Minimum FrankenWage put them a few pence above it, and parting with 20 percent of that . . . the mind boggled. She knew people did it, it seemed like some of the people she ran into at the Job Center did it, but how? The Lees were on one meal a day as it was. Admittedly a big meal. Could it be cut down to medium size? Margot and Harriet got lean again. Not anywhere as lean as they’d been on the farmstead, but lean enough to prevent regular menstruation. Ambrose Kercheval came to see Harriet after school one day, and when he clocked her, she got some idea of the shocked expression he must have exhibited the first time he went to McDonald’s with Kenzilea.

  My dear girl. Wouldn’t you like to have some—Ambrose checked his watch—late lunch? On me. Please! Harriet didn’t want to eat a meal Margot had had to skip, but she didn’t want to be unsociable either, so she and Ambrose sat on a park bench and shared her emergency gingerbread slab. According to Ambrose, he’d been about to put a job on offer through his “usual channels,” but then he’d thought Harriet might be interested. She shook her head. He told her how much he’d pay, and she shook her head with a little less conviction.

  I can’t work for you . . .

  It’s just a delivery job.

  There’s no use asking; we’re not taking any money from you . . . because of what you do . . .

  What I do?

  The company. You and Ari.

  Come, come, we’re not that bad.

  They weren’t hit men, though Ari’s “whatever it takes” mentality often left Ambrose ruminating that they might as well be. Their company managed dynastic wealth, swept a searchlight across all the tributaries of an inheritance, and guaranteed that no matter how much of the original capital had been spent, there would always be more. Much more. If you were wealthy now and you put the Kerchevals in charge of your assets, your grandchildren would be four to five times as rich. This was the profession of both Ari and Ambrose’s parents and that of their father’s father and great-uncle. There were many close associates at work behind the scenes, but client liaison was straightforward. The business had two faces to it. One encouraged the client to spend when it was deemed necessary to spend, while the other encouraged saving when it was deemed necessary to save.

  Father was Save and Mother was Spend. Now I’m Save and Aristide is Spend. Come back in twenty years or so and it’ll be the same company, only with Rémy saying Spend and Gabriel saying Save. Spend’s always the more creative one . . . there’s a lot of troubleshooting on that side of things . . .

  So if you’re Save, all you have to do is sit on top of a pot of gold rubbing your chin?

  Ambrose coughed a couple of times. That was how he chuckled.

  Didn’t think so. About the job . . .

  Ambrose wanted Harriet to collect one package a day—a package she’d find waiting in the front hall of Kercheval House each morning.

  How many mornings?

  One thousand and eighty, with bank holidays off. Maybe more. We’ll have to see how it goes.

  Harriet was to deliver the packages to Kenzilea Kercheval, see that she unwrapped them, and tell him in detail what her initial reactions had been.

  You can’t outsource this one, Mr. Kercheval. It’s OK . . . this isn’t your decision. You have to deliver one package to Kenzilea Kercheval every day, and if she isn’t in that day, then you deliver two the next day and so on until all the presents—

  All the presents? Ambrose asked.

  Oh, nothing. I don’t know why I said that. Anyway, you have to. And that—that’s an order . . .

  He smiled at her and said: I see.

  Kenzilea was irritated; it was too late for gifts, she had no room for them, she’d return them. Only she couldn’t. She looked at the receipts, and the dates fell so far beyond the standard twenty-eight-day returns policy . . . she dug up her daybook for the year in which the gift had been purchased and phoned Ambrose to read him that day’s doings: hospital, home clinic, dinner with Rémykins (or see what excuse he makes for not coming to dinner), a good gossip with Ms. X, Dr. Y, or Mr. Z before bed. This was supposed to impress upon him how irrelevant the purchase was to her current life, but it was awkward because when she thought about the day that was almost at an end, hadn’t the substance of it been more or less the same as the one she was depicting as ancient history? Right down to setting aside of blocks of time for uninterrupted gossip . . .

  Hmph. Since I’m stuck in my ways, shall we go for a milk shake, ex-husband?

  Ambrose thought a milk shake would be just the thing. Malted, he added, since McDonald’s doesn’t sell those.

  Margot and Harriet searched the Kercheval company name again and reread the results in a new light, though, as Ambrose had said, terms like “cutthroat tenacity” were only slightly less sinister in the context of hoarding wealth.

  They’re not hit men, though . . . damn and blast it. I did ask Tamar, and she was so cagey. What did Ari tell you? Well, daughter, what do you think I’m going to say now?

  Let’s go crawling back? Only joking. Onward, onward . . .

  The Lees grew out their hair dye and went about gray-headed, sold the clothes the Kerchevals had bought them, swapped the bright silks and swishy skirts for secondhand jeans of the type that are usually sold to men and white T-shirts or the cream-colored jumpers that were consistently the cheapest available in charity shops. When Margot goes through a romantic drought nowadays she asks Harriet if she should go back to dressing like that. They both remember how often Margot got asked out during that period. By people she enjoyed too—it was something to do with charges they didn’t emit and others that they did. Twice Margot brought a lover home and Harriet thought they might be considering something long term. Twice Harriet had the simultaneously intriguing and excruciating experience of watching two people having sex without touching, or even moving, apart from a few uncontrollable and quickly suppressed gasps. Intriguing would’ve outweighed excruciating if one of the people involved hadn’t been her own mother . . . and wasn’t this a sort of inversion of the non-physical cage fights Margot and Simon had dragged each other into right in front of their daughter? Both potentially long-term involvements stalled; Harriet never found out from which end, but she cherished the boozy picnic each visitor brought along with them. Flaky bread, the creamiest of cheeses, roasted pheasant breast, and tall bottles of wine that waxed flamingo-necked the drunker Harriet got.

  But those were the two brief holidays her mother was able to find the time and inclination for. The rest of the time Margot was on her way to work, at work, on her way back from work or asleep. It wasn’t her clothes that drew in the amorous response to her person—Margot Lee had an eidolic beauty in those days, her gaze downcast as she tended to what flickered within, the drowsy, drowsy beating of a heart that knows how few its needs are. One of Margot’s jobs required her to think on her feet—a coalition of independent café owners paid her a monthly wage to stand outside selected Starbucks locations and “discreetly discourage potential customers from going in” (methods not specified). Of Margot’s other four jobs, the most notable was probably the agency-facilitated one. Applicants were put through a few shrewdly anonymous checks for trustworthiness before they were approved for employmen
t. (Margot submitted her CV and was told, three weeks later, that she’d passed both interview stages. Who interviewed me, and when?! Answer came there none.)

  The job itself was waiting for deliveries at people’s houses. You arrived as the customer was leaving, and there was no popping in and out of the house before the parcel(s) had been signed for, as you weren’t left with any house keys. And Margot Lee didn’t just sit around watching TV while she was waiting; she did any washing up that was lying around and rearranged furniture so that the rooms looked better. To say that is to simplify what Margot does; her talents lie in the psychotherapeutic realm. Nowadays she gets magazine write-ups describing her as an “architect of the emotion of living spaces,” and though she wishes there was a less off-putting way to say it, she does own up to a structural approach to what she does. Once, as she paced around waiting for a package in a living room that made her dizzy whenever she approached the center of its floor, she fell to thinking of a way to either close off that whirlwind center or reset its level. Window-shopping had been good that week. She’d seen a folding screen . . . filigreed clouds hurried along across its cutwork sky, and it stood on little legs . . . Margot picked up her credit card. The shop she had in mind didn’t have a website, so she phoned them and placed an order for delivery. Since the shop was just down the street, the screen arrived before the package she was waiting for. She positioned the screen, left the package in front of it (or behind it, depending on your vantage point), and moved on to her next waiting session. That evening the Waiting Agency called her to say that the customer was VERY EXCITED, wanted to know exactly what Margot had done to make the room so comfortable she felt as if she’d been born in it, and so on. She wanted to know how much she owed Margot. Margot quoted the price she’d paid for the screen and the customer phoned her back directly to ask her to take away the screen.

  That’s silly money. But maybe . . . if you have time . . . do you think you find some less expensive things that have . . . how to say it . . . similar force?

  And with that Margot was on her way toward what she most wanted to do. Being able to work for herself was part for it, but she would have worked for anyone who allowed her free rein over the construction of images that dwelled in your own image, entering through the eye and enveloping all your other senses. A jazz lover Margot was seeing for a while lent her Dorothy Ashby’s entire discography and said she wanted to live inside Dorothy Ashby’s harp; in between her other jobs she clothed the jazz lover’s home in shades of blue, each shade exalted in its temperature and texture.

  The Margot Lee effect is one of visceral familiarity. Harriet thinks of the time a farmstead girl put on every piece of clothing and every accessory she’d been told to and walked along the corridors of a ritzy hotel as if she knew everybody in it and they knew her. Translated to physical space this means that any element in a room that seems to turn to you and say: Oh, it’s you . . . welcome home is probably an element that Margot’s dug up. You might not be immediately bowled over by the effect—even now there are suspicions that she’s overrated—but if Harriet’s mother has really worked a place over, then you know it when you try to make a definitive exit but keep going back for things you’ve left in there. Upon collecting a glove from a window seat and realizing that that was her final excuse to go back to that particular room, Harriet found herself gripping the door lintel before she went out. There were tears in her eyes—she was leaving a place of joy, a place that was confiding and confidential, and for what? Some cold, dark forest full of dead ends. She asked her mother if she’d always been able to do this.

  Margot said: Oh no—I learned while you were gone and it seemed more and more likely that instead of you coming back we were both going to go even farther away.

  She’d wanted to be able to fix things up nicely for the two of them wherever they went, so the tinkering began . . . sending away for catalogs and pairing this with that in her head as if money were no object . . . then going down a level to the next best pairings, and the next . . . and she practiced.

  Unexpected complications arose once Margot was finally able to work for herself. The power to make things cozy attracted dubious admirers and repelled those she most wished to support. She worked on her tact; she had to when turning away fiery types who could sink her business if they threw enough of a tantrum, but some conversations were unavoidable. One fellow’s refusal to take no for an answer was adversely affecting the rest of her work—calls were missed and delayed while she tried to get this non-client off the phone, and eventually he got the explanation he’d asked for. Margot told him it wasn’t the budget (he’d said he could increase it) or the fee she’d be paid (he’d said he could increase that too) or the timing (he’d said he could wait until her schedule cleared up). Harriet listened in on the final phone call, recording it just in case the man made a threat, but Margot’s voice was more audible than her caller’s was. Pushed beyond tact, Margot told her caller what the real problem was. She told him she couldn’t think of anything more sad or less interesting than putting her heart and mind into making him feel secure. How on earth could she make someone who believed there are too many foreigners in his country feel secure? She told her caller that replicating the inside of a dustbin would be much more interesting and fulfilling for her than replicating the inside of an airtight safe. Her caller mostly spluttered, and then all of a sudden—Hello? Hello? Oh, he’s gone—

  Even as she burned bridges with some VIPs, Margot Lee struggled to get beyond preliminary phone calls with others—the directors of women’s shelters, halfway houses, and other outreach organizations, people who could give her work that would improve her work. Namedropping the Kerchevals didn’t wash with them at all, and even if she was offering to work for free, all materials included, and there was no time to consider such services as Margot seemed to be offering: You’d like to come in and rearrange some cushions? We can do that ourselves.

  All that was up ahead. Before that there was the Minimum Franken Wage, and if Mr. Airtight Safe had come to her during that time Margot would’ve just done his bidding. You’ve heard about Margot’s two cash-in-hand jobs, but her third job, and the only one she received a pay slip for at that time, was as sales assistant in an antiques shop. More minding antiques than selling them, as plenty of people came in to have a look around, but only a few made a purchase. Harriet took the day off school and stood in for her mother when Margot’s other working hours overlapped with her antiques-shop hours. A Lee standing in for a Lee who was busy standing in for somebody else.

  Gabriel Kercheval came into the shop one afternoon. Harriet was leaning on the counter at the back of the shop reading La Bête humaine and thinking what a different beast this book was in English. Whilst reading she hoped that the group who’d just entered the shop and were going around picking things up and putting them down again weren’t going to break anything and that their slightly sneering expressions were a haggler’s method of disguising ardent attachment. Harriet had trotted around after them for a few minutes trying to tell them the stories of the objects they were handling, but a member of the group had warned her that they’d all leave if she didn’t “calm down,” so Harriet had returned to the counter, where she read and thought of her Professor Procházka. She also thought of making a sale, a good sale. She mustn’t make a bad sale . . . if she lost this job she’d lose the perk her mother most prized: getting to arrange the shop window display.

  (In fact Margot was already on the verge of letting the job and the window-dressing perk go. She didn’t want Harriet missing any more school—you, my one and only, first and last daughter, you who loves school the way others your age love clubbing or finding out each other’s a/s/l in chat rooms . . . This wasn’t inaccurate, with the caveat that Margot made it sound as if Harriet was popular at school. She wasn’t, but she enjoyed syllabi as ways of knowing what she had to learn. It was good to follow one alongside others who also needed to learn the same thing
. This was far less daunting than that task Gretel had identified . . . the one that involved working out an asking price for her gingerbread. Even if she got her sums right and it turned out life owed her something, there was no way such a bill would ever be settled. Life isn’t ill-natured; it’s just dirt poor, like any other public resource.

  Tamar and Ari had given her to understand that a state-school classroom is one in which it’s impossible to see the blackboard through the thicket of fists flying in every direction. But either Harriet’s new new school wasn’t that rowdy or even the rowdiest inmates of after-school detention were disarmed by the slightly nervous approach of a gray-haired girl who was all of five feet and one inch tall and carried a large tin of homemade gingerbread with her. As a social experience Harriet didn’t find school bad, but it could have been better. Harriet would join groups, groups of boys and groups of girls, groups of student librarians and groups of teen iconoclasts, and so on, and she’d exchange smiles with the people she found gathered there . . . all genuine smiles. Nobody had anything against Harriet, and she didn’t have anything against anybody, but, bit by bit, in twos and threes, the group she’d just joined migrated and recongregated elsewhere, and she didn’t have the heart to chase it. Once Harriet turned to the last girl left standing with her beside the snack vending machine and said, Why don’t we talk a bit . . . just talk? To her credit, the girl Harriet questioned did take time to try to think of a proper reply. You seem really nice, she said, after a few seconds. This seemed to serve both as answer and consolation prize; very soon after saying that, the girl rejoined her group across the hall, and Harriet thought about how a lot of people are just looking for acquaintances. Which is understandable; a lot of the people one meets have already formed close attachments, and there’s quite enough going on in those friendships already. In an environment like this, Harriet Lee must have seemed like a bit of a social chore, one of those girls who weren’t satisfied with mere conversation . . . having a little chat about nothing with her today bound you to more little chats the next day and the day after . . .