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—
Shut up. The Gingerbread Girls were held down, their pigtails knelt on until they stopped struggling. Then the farmstead girls pinched them, pulled flesh and fat away from their arms and thighs and stomachs, and flicked it back into place. For a long while they didn’t speak, just stuck their hands right inside the Gingerbread Girls’ clothes and pinched them hard. Harriet looked up through the web of skeletal hands and into the eyes of one of the girls who was pinching her, trying to see if the girl was giving vent to anger or fulfilling curiosity or enjoying this in any other way, but those eyes told her nothing. The only thing Harriet would later be able to liken the pinching to was a beauty treatment given by a masseuse who was at the end of her shift and had already checked out mentally. Another girl placed her foot on Harriet’s cheek and rolled her head back and forth in the mud. She seemed to be doing this so Harriet couldn’t maintain eye contact. Laugh, the girl said. Let the grown-ups know we’re getting on.
But they can see we’re not getting on. There are security cameras, Harriet said, pointing. There, there, there, there, there, and there.
The farmstead girls waved at the cameras one by one, waved cheerfully, with both hands. Laugh, I said. Flaky-nailed fingers slid up the legholes of Harriet’s knickers, into the armholes of her vest. Pinch, pinch, pinch. And Harriet laughed until she hit the happy note that released her head from football duty. One by one, the Gingerbread Girls giggled for dear life. The farmstead girls would probably have gone on administering pain by the thimbleful until the grown-ups were ready to see what they’d wrought, but Dottie’s nose erupted, and it was their turn to be harrowed and perplexed, most of all by the fact that she kept up her squeaky laugh throughout. They fled.
After the farmstead group left, some cameramen arrived to film a documentary on Clio and the Gingerbread Girl Power phenomenon. Dottie missed out on TV stardom, laid up in the infirmary as she was, and her friend’s “Violation of the Gingerbread Man” game just wasn’t the same without her. The director of the documentary seemed to be under the impression that the Gingerbread Girls were a charity organization, that they had been rescued from neglect. How to explain that Clio had rescued them from her own neglect of their parents? And anyway they weren’t confident that their current situation was a truly protected one. Their countryside counterparts came to chasten them for accepting treats, probed their bodies, and it all just ran along as part of the security-camera feed. Clio had seen what happened and said, “Agricultural peoples, you know,” and “Child’s play mirrors such powerful traditions . . .” The pinching reminded her of a fertility rite she’d seen abroad. The matrons and the older Gingerbread Girls no longer feigned comprehension as Clio ruminated aloud; they’d found that she liked a look of puzzlement better.
Abroad. Clio would always say “abroad” without naming a specific country; she’d never been anywhere. Interestingly (to Harriet), Clio Kercheval wasn’t trying to fool anybody when she said things like this. She made no secret of being overbearing and having her eye on the money. In spite of everything—and there was a lot—Harriet did not dislike this woman, who was open about her requirements that the girls be healthy, good to one another, kind to those who sought their approval, and fond of her at all times. Clio was no liar, at least not in the sense in which Montaigne presents the act of lying as that of gainsaying the testimony of one’s own knowledge. On the contrary, Clio never held back from full avowal of what she knew. But there was a problem with the information she was acting on—very little of it was true. Being neither mad nor sane, Clio Kercheval was just going to keep juggling her priorities at the same time as saying things like, “Oh, you girls were like celebrants in a fertility rite I saw abroad,” and she was going to drive all her charges around the bend without the slightest blip in her own peace of mind. The director of the documentary had had cameras on Clio and Harriet as they talked without microphones, and being a connoisseur of the violent facial twitch, he got his sound team to mic them up and asked Harriet if she had anything to say to fans of the Gingerbread Girls. Harriet put her hands on her hips and fitted a smile over her teeth like a gum shield. And what did she say? She wouldn’t watch the footage back even if you paid her, but it was something along these lines:
Come and see us! Look, but don’t touch. We’ll always be here. We’ll never grow up, and we’re forever grateful that you picked us.
Please don’t use that, Clio asked the cameramen, director, and everybody else on set. I mean . . . an unschooled country child coming out with these phrases in English . . . our patrons won’t know what to think, they’ll have fears we haven’t been honest with them . . .
Harriet had spoken so fast that few non-native English speakers would’ve been able to understand what she’d said, but nobody on set asked her for a translation. A cameraman played Harriet’s outburst back for Clio: But doesn’t it look wonderful? She’s like a little fallen angel speaking in tongues! Harriet did a long-distance money count, adding up the banknotes stuffed between the mattress she slept on and the bedframe. Wouldn’t she regret it if she left without adding to them? She thought she’d regret reining herself in more. She clapped her hands and slapped her knees, turned toward Clio and then away, a derelict soul in a pink-and-white petticoat. The cameras kept rolling.
Look but don’t touch. Look but DON’T TOUCH. Don’t touch, don’t touch.
The words were scuttling out of her mouth quicker than she could crunch down on them. One handclap per syllable. Remember, Clio, remember decay, remember that cockroaches ate your lovely gingerbread mansion, clicking their mandibles as they gnawed away the floor beneath them. She ran at Clio with her head down, but Clio made no retreat, and when Harriet thought to discomfit the woman by other means and wrapped her arms around her waist, Clio didn’t recoil. She rested her chin on the top of Harriet’s head.
If only Gretel was this affectionate, and this fond of studying the English language! Yes, let’s cuddle, overtired little girl. You’ve had a long day. All your days are long. Don’t film this, please. Yes, sorry, I do understand we’re going to run into difficulties if I keep . . . can they have their dinner first and start again in an hour?
Up in the dormitory Zu and Rosolio made garters the girls could wear beneath their petticoats. Let them come, let them come from the farms and try to pinch us again, Rosolio raged as she sewed. Who the fuck did they think they were dealing with? From now on we’re all carrying gingerbread shivs, OK?
You said it, Ros.
That’s how it’s got to be.
Zu’s was the only voice of semi-dissent, and she spoke without dropping a stitch: Violence isn’t the answer, but I’ll make the shivs pretty at least.
* * *