Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

  What Perdita wanted and still wants: to do something nice for her mum for a change. And she told them so, Tamar and Ambrose—she told them so repeatedly!

  What went on that afternoon and evening: Tamar poured Perdita purple tea, which Perdita didn’t drink. Ambrose blundered into the room (to “Gretel”’s intense displeasure) and there was some talk of Druhástrana, things both Tamar and Ambrose remembered the Lees mentioning, much of it new to Perdita, so possibly misremembered. Still, Perdita kept trying to steer the conversation back around to the real Gretel Kercheval and how she might be found or contacted, how to bring about the reunion Perdita was seeking . . . and how she stressed that help reuniting Harriet and Gretel was all she was seeking from them! All that was of no use, the conversation got on to Druhástranian lore gathered from other sources, and Tamar, as if struck by sudden recollection, opened a little drawer on the table beside her and took out a sachet filled with powder. Perdita watched Ambrose, who didn’t seem to have seen this powder before but didn’t seem happy about it, and Perdita listened to the story of the sachet: it had come to Tamar from a reliable source, someone who had once given her husband three carrier pigeons that had turned out to be truly Druhástranian.

  The contents of this sachet—Tamar leaned forward, placed the sachet in Perdita’s palm, and closed her fingers around it. This is how your mother and grandmother left Druhástrana . . . Margot made gingerbread with it.

  That’s only half the truth, Ambrose said. Perdita turned to him: So—half a lie?

  No—it’s just that the truth goes on beyond what she said, and no transit records were kept, so if you’re inclined to believe her, I can’t show you anything that’d change your mind—

  Tamar shook the sachet and continued as if Ambrose hadn’t even spoken.

  This is how they left, and this is how you can go there and look for Gretel Kercheval.

  Tamar told Perdita that this was the last of eight sachets, and that thanks to these sachets, she, Tamar, had been to Druhá City and back several times now.

  Half-truths again . . . that was what Ambrose muttered.

  What’s Druhá City like? Perdita asked.

  Tamar frowned. Pricier than you’d think.

  Ambrose looked scared witless, so it was more for him than for herself that Perdita said: Hey, fake Gretel, you’re not trying to kill me, are you?

  Tamar blinked. I’m not trying to kill you. Your desire to go abroad coincides with my very dear wish for you not to be here, that’s all.

  So you gave me one sachet. That way it’ll be hard for me to come back.

  Not really, Ambrose said, studying Tamar’s face. Not if you’re going to the same place the stuff in the sachet came from. Shouldn’t be long before you’re back—and then there are a few people to introduce you to.

  Tamar said they’d see about that. But in the meantime, she swore on her son’s head that the sachet would get Perdita to Druhástrana in one piece. After this, Perdita drank some of the purple tea and enjoyed it.

  Perdita Lee may have refused to be dragged into an inheritance drama, but Ambrose Kercheval must have been more mindful of how difficult it is to stay out of such a story, especially when somebody else is hell-bent on that being the way things play out. By the time things passed a point of no return (that is to say by the time Tamar had chased Perdita all the way out of the house, shouting, Just take that powder and go back . . . I’m sending you back), Ambrose had switched the sachet several times. Several times because Perdita had cottoned on and kept switching it back. They tried to do this as if it was all just another part of the evening’s circus act, but Perdita wasn’t going home with a sachet of mere powdered sugar. She was taking the sachet Tamar had given her. It was that or nothing.

  Ah, but Ambrose Kercheval. Ambrose, who would live such a peaceful life if it weren’t for his brother and his sister-in-law . . . looking back on the rest of that evening reinforces Perdita’s intention to give the man a monster hug next time she sees him. The evening was one long interview—funny overall, Perdita thinks, but speckled with woe—Perdita being interviewed for the position of granddaughter and Ambrose being interviewed for the position of grandfather. Perdita was ready to go ahead, and Ambrose seemed keen too, but they had to think of all the people they’d have to check with before the bond could be made official.

  Harriet is embarrassed that she’s left her daughter so starved of fatherly and grandfatherly affection that the girl’s just going around pledging herself to any male Kercheval who crosses her path.

  “Well, good,” says the doll named Lollipop. “You should be embarrassed about that.”

  After dinner, Ambrose put Perdita up at a hotel for the night. He took the room next to hers, just in case Tamar had further plans of some sort. Harriet’s guessing Ambrose didn’t sleep a wink and trembled all night.

  The next day, Ambrose saw Perdita home and left once he’d made sure that she used the sachet he gave her in the gingerbread she made. She really did use the powdered sugar—in the first of the two batches. And yes, the dolls saw this themselves, Ambrose did lie down with the girl he wanted for a granddaughter and sang to her—she asked him to.

  What is it with you Lees and the way you appear before us Kerchevals like . . .

  “Fairies,” Harriet says, but the doll named Bonnie corrects her: “Like a fairy, he said. Singular, not plural.”

  Ambrose sang every Druhástranian lullaby he knew. He cried over her—she didn’t know why, and she didn’t ask. Her stomach was hurting; she feigned sleep, and Ambrose went home. When Harriet presses Perdita to talk about meeting Gretel, the real Gretel, Perdita’s mind wanders, as does her gaze. She says a strange thing about the wheat-sheaf ring being “in” her hand . . . I put my hand in my hand and there it was, something like that.

  The trust with which Perdita took the powder that had been given her—Harriet can’t think of any form of trust more insanely severe, more probing of the other party’s intentions.

  Perdita’s trust was so severe that at the very last minute, possibly unsettled by the girl’s refusal to blink first, reality took her side. And now Harriet’s daughter shrugs and yawns hugely before asking her what she wants to do for her birthday.

  14

  Hmmm . . . still here?

  Huh, then it seems you wouldn’t mind hearing about the three houses. I mean the three places where Gretel and Harriet agreed to meet again. And you can’t hear about those without hearing about how all three Lees returned to Kercheval House one rainy day about six months after Harriet’s long night with Perdita and the dolls. Perdita and her therapist had been working hard, and six months, more or less, was the time it took to confirm that her speech was fully intelligible again. The therapist admitted a niggling feeling that Perdita had recovered even sooner than this and that the date would’ve been easier to pinpoint if she hadn’t been working with somebody whose mind seemed so comfortable operating on that border between inability to form speech and preference for withholding it. Basically by the final month or so Perdita Lee’s therapist was almost sure her patient was malingering but couldn’t definitively prove it.

  As soon as she saw that her daughter was all better, Harriet Lee began thinking of revenge. That’s what the return to Kercheval House was about, and that’s how Harriet encountered Tamar standing outside the gates. Tamar, dressed entirely in red and holding a purple umbrella, was talking on her phone—interesting that there was no room inside that sprawling property that she deemed appropriate for whatever conversation she was having—she was talking on her phone and dragging a high-heeled foot back and forth over the patch of earth she stood in, as if triple- and quadruple-sealing a minuscule gravesite. Harriet saw Tamar from a long way away and knew who it was even before the face came into focus. Tamar saw Harriet too. She ended her phone call and stood there waiting as Harriet, dressed entirely in black and also carrying a purple umbrella,
walked faster and faster and then, no longer able to put up with the delay imposed by this long stretch of grass and lampposts and shaggy-leaved shrubbery, broke into a run. Margot grabbed the hood of Harriet’s jacket to try to hold her back, but the hood just ripped off as Harriet put on more speed and outran her, outran Perdita too; Harriet hurtled toward Tamar with her teeth bared, her umbrella raised high, and the soles of her trainers catapulting mud. And as she ran she was thinking, This is mental! Tamar’s Mum’s age; how can I hit her, even though she has put us through all this . . . please let her be scared that I’m running at her like this, please let her be gone by the time I get there. But Tamar stayed where she was, only lifting her arm to deflect Harriet’s blow with her own umbrella before bashing her attacker right back. There followed a tumultuous clashing of spokes and springs and ferrules and purple nylon . . . the rain fell so hard that both women were blinded by it; they heard Margot and Perdita shouting, but nobody tried to pull them apart, and to Harriet the fight was like being in a self-inflating, self-deflating canopy. When she felt the rain coming in through her shredded clothes, coming in to wash all the new cuts, Harriet knew Tamar had won. Did the weather bow before money too? It maddened her that there didn’t seem to be a day on which she could win a fight with Tamar Kercheval, even when she deserved to.

  The funny thing (funny-ish) is that Tamar thought Harriet had won. She thought this not because of any wound she felt but because Harriet was still standing. Once she’d ascertained that that wasn’t going to change, she dropped into a crouch and croaked, Go inside, then, in the tones of a guardian spirit that had been bested in battle. Margot and Perdita stepped over this fallen lady in red and pressed the buzzer beside the gate and told Rémy: Yes, it’s us. We’re here. The gate opened, and Margot and Perdita went through; Harriet stayed with Tamar, who held her crouch and mumbled that she could lose to Harriet this once, that it wasn’t really a loss, anyway, really she was letting Harriet off, because—

  “Because?”

  Harriet tried to make eye contact with Tamar, but it wasn’t easy; Tamar seemed to see a chessboard where her face was, a series of threatening moves. “By rights you could have gone after Gabriel,” Tamar said.

  “Eh?”

  “You know, my child for yours—but you didn’t, you were better than that, so I should lose to you this time.”

  It was hard to keep a straight face, but Harriet didn’t laugh. Everybody around her was living out a different story in which events had different causes and motivations according to how they were perceived. Laughing at this didn’t create too much of a problem when the differences seemed slighter, but Tamar’s take was so markedly different . . . well. Harriet didn’t wish to see someone this passionate become a walking Druhástrana, cut off from the rest of the world. Harriet told Tamar to get up. She said, “I’d hold out my hand to you but I don’t think you’d take it. I don’t know how much attention you’re going to pay to this but I’m not plotting against you or your son. Me, Margot, Perdita—we did march up to your gates like an unholy triumvirate, but we’re not plotting; we just can’t let you keep on being like this to us. You just fucking can’t, Tamar. You said you lost this once, but, Tamar, even in the middle of all this hating us, don’t you ever get a feeling that if you don’t stop this, you’re going to end up losing every fight?”

  Harriet also said she wished Tamar would go back to liking the Lees again because she was so much better at that than she was at hating them. Harriet wasn’t sure she actually believed that, but some flattery seemed called for.

  Tamar still didn’t move. “Hold out your hand to me, then,” she said.

  Harriet did, and Tamar took it, and stood up. “But if you ever cross me . . . ,” Tamar said, a statement Harriet tested by laughing whilst looking to see if Tamar was laughing too. She was, but what if it was fake laughter . . . no, Harriet, no. Thinking like that is part of the problem.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW OTHER THINGS happened that visit:

  The first was that Harriet spoke to Gabriel Kercheval again. The reunion was entirely impromptu and probably would have gone badly if it hadn’t been. Upon entering the house and catching a glimpse of her scratched and rain-soaked self in a mirror, Harriet’s first instinct was to hide so that Rémy (ugh, it had always been Rémy for her, hadn’t it) wouldn’t see her like this. Tamar pointed out a bathroom she could use, but either there was still malevolence drifting around or the doorway was misidentified or Harriet simply misunderstood which one . . . the door Harriet opened led into the kitchen where both iterations of the 3:00 A.M. crew had whiled away the small hours years before. Mr. Bianchi and Ms. Danilenko had moved on to other posts years ago—Ari had told Margot: It’s just me and Tamar now. The boys visit when they have time, and they hardly ever have time. Harriet went into the kitchen to see any trace of it remained, the huddle she and Margot and Rémy and Gabriel drew one another into whenever they thought the angry cook or the angrier housekeeper might be about to burst into the room. She traversed the tiled countertop widdershins, took a wooden spoon in hand, and struck a couple of the brass pans that hung above the kitchen range; they still caroled like bells. She thought of the time there was a power cut and for five, ten, fifteen minutes, the 3:00 A.M. crew were convinced that Mr. Bianchi had gone down to the fuse box and turned off the electricity so as to ruin the gingerbread that was baking in the oven. Bianchi can never stop us, Rémy had whispered into the huddle. We’re as indivisible as gingerbread dough. Shhh, don’t ask me what that means! And of course just a few months later, Mr. Bianchi had taken Rémy’s place in the huddle and Ms. Danilenko had taken Gabriel’s, as they all kept an ear out for Tamar. Yes, it was the same kitchen, the same 3:00 A.M. crew clubhouse. And now? Tamar could be in the huddle too, if she liked; but what would the gingerbread conspiracy be in aid of now?

  There was a laptop open on the kitchen counter, and beside that an open spectacle case and a glass of juice. Harriet walked past the laptop, making one last round of the counter before leaving the room, and she caught a blur of movement across the laptop screen. A voice, also from the screen, said: “Hello?! Stop. Come back!”

  It was Gabriel, half-frowning at her out of a Skype window, broad-chested and bearded now—the shepherd boy had ascended Mount Olympus. After greeting Harriet politely, he asked her to charge the laptop: “I have a feeling it’s going to conk out any minute.” He was right—the battery was down to 5 percent—she did as he asked.

  “Where are you?” Somewhere relentlessly vertical—behind him, through gauzy curtains, she saw rooftops, golden, pink, and white, rising up out of an avenue of trees. Off-screen somebody spoke to him in Cantonese, and it was good to see the way his face changed as he switched languages to answer, slightly tongue-tied, as is inevitable with new words and new lovers. It seemed possible that he didn’t need things to be easy anymore. In English, he said to her: “Hong Kong. And you’re . . . there.”

  “Were you talking to Ari?”

  “Yup. He said he’d be back in a minute.”

  “Ah. And how long ago was that?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’ll get him.”

  Before she went, Gabriel said he had to tell her something. He said he would honestly never have hurt her. The inclusion of the “honestly” jarred for some reason, but she said OK.

  “I don’t know what it was, but I immediately felt like you were better than me, in some way you were truer, or something like that . . . you just kept trying to be truer. It was just really strange having to act like some kind of sponsor when really I was the one who’d have to work at being your equal. And I did want to do, I did, but there was other stuff that meant I didn’t have time, and trying to do it all was . . . scratch that, this is coming out wrong . . . Harriet. Harriet! Are you seriously just walking off? Wait. Please. You might not remember this, but I didn’t used to like gingerbread. At all. Then you came a
nd you wanted to give me gingerbread, and I took it because you were the one offering it to me. I could eat it, but I still didn’t like it.”

  “Ha ha—I actually don’t remember this at all.”

  “Hated the stuff, actually. Hated it. One day when you gave me another box of the stuff I think I actually said ‘Urgh’ aloud—or I made a face, or something, and you looked at me and said I should just keep it for later. You might like it later, you said.”

  “I said that?”

  “Yes. You just don’t remember. Anyway, you said that, and you looked so hopeful that I think you must have done something to me, because . . .”

  “Later you started to like it?” Harriet wasn’t sure what Gabriel is saying; obviously he was saying what he was saying and she didn’t think he meant anything bad by it, but this recollection of his reinforced a feeling she had (a feeling that she’d always had?) that this is the impression she made, that of being a person who can be saved up for later.

  “Yes, I started to like the gingerbread, Harriet. Really, really, and a lot.”

  “OK.”

  Gabriel unhelpfully told her she looks the way he felt the day Ari told him, Stop following me around with those clipboard eyes; it’s as if you’re taking notes on everything I say and do so as to quote it all back to me . . . and worst of all, sometimes you do bring out the quotations! Gabriel said this in a low voice, in case Ari suddenly interrupted them, shouting, QUOTING AGAIN! This wasn’t a review of Harriet’s facial expression but the state she and her clothes were in after the umbrella fight she’d just been in with his mum. To all this Harriet could only say OK again, and ah, frail ego, why should Ari say things that made Gabriel feel the way Harriet looked just then—and why should some attempt at kindness on Gabriel’s part also make her feel the way she looked just then . . . Harriet was about to cry, and then she was crying, but she also kept saying OK, OK, and strangely Gabriel cried too; they sniffled until the friend he was with came up to Gabriel’s laptop camera, raised a fist at Harriet, and said something along the lines of, What do you mean, OK, OK? What’s OK about this?