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. Three 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.