Still . . . does Harriet want in? Fuck yes. Imagine the sense of invulnerability! What must it be like to clock that someone’s staring at you and feel no concern? She wants to know how it feels to be absolutely sure that you haven’t done anything wrong. She’s not intimidated either—she doesn’t believe for a second that these people aren’t tryhards just like her. They’re tryhards who succeed, that’s all. Their striving is never past tense; it’s merely concealed. Harriet’s close reading of body language at the PPA meetings tells her that Abigail and Mariama are exes, the kind who can’t work out why they aren’t still together and send their current partners into spirals of paranoia whenever they meet up. Emil and Hyorin are not amused by the way that Noah pervs on Gemma, but they let it go because, against all odds, Gemma likes it. Alesha backs up everything Felix says out of fear, while Felix backs up everything Alesha says out of fondness. This could be down to a couple of specific incidents, or they could’ve been misreading each other for years. Harriet sees all this and more, and she supposes these factors could be used by a newcomer to destabilize the group. But Harriet would never do that! Well, she might, actually, for their own good. Much can be improved through reorganization.
Harriet and Perdita live in five affordable rooms of a house that has monumental staircases and no lift, which is where the affordability comes in. Each step is so large that climbing the staircases takes more than just walking up; it’s also necessary to spring, scramble, and wriggle. This upsets delivery people and is more exercise than Margot Lee likes, but she has a soft spot for houses that look sensible until you get inside. There’s lion-print wallpaper to look at on every floor. When visiting her kid and grandkid, Margot brings a book and sits down to read a little at each of her rest stops on the second, third, and sixth floors. Then, one more flight up and she arrives at Harriet and Perdita’s front door, swaps her outdoor shoes for a pair of slippers, and is admitted to their cheerfully warped matchstick box of a home, where a velvet forest stands between the rooms and their casement windows. Margot made these curtains herself, embroidering them with vine-like patterns that seem to lengthen in the mornings and retract at night. Above those, silver satin parasols have been turned inside out to take the place of chandeliers—light bulbs dangle from their spokes. On the kitchen wall there’s a black-and-white photo of a gingerbread man in an antique frame, a jumble-sale find from a decade earlier. The photo has an outdoor setting; the gingerbread man is posed so it looks like he’s ambling through foliage with his gingerbread knapsack, off to see the world. Once, when Perdita was little, she took the photo into school and told everyone the man pictured was her father. She sounded so much in earnest that nobody knew what to say. Perdita’s teacher got tears in her eyes telling Harriet about it and flinched when Harriet laughed.
On an evening when Perdita’s away on a school trip, Harriet sits in front of her computer eating sample squares of lavender shortbread and practicing her favorite form of procrastination: writing highly positive reviews of her eBay, Etsy, and Amazon purchases. Five stars for everybody. She didn’t finish one of the books she just gave five stars to. She just liked the author photo. Five stars for the portrait photographer, then. She’s been doing this ever since some of her students told her they do this with one-star reviews. Opposing random negativity with random positivity—that’s the main thing. She sips some bitter melon tea; the shortbread is just a little too sweet. When she’s run out of synonyms for the word “fabulous,” she visualizes a message from Gioia. Hi, it’s Gioia. Just broke my Lenten fast with your gingerbread, and all I can say is wizzy wow. We need this to be part of the fundraising bazaar. Not want, need. I won’t take no for an answer. How much can you make? Also, do you want to go bowling with us?
OK, maybe not bowling, but an invitation to something.
In the absence of that message, Harriet drafts an email to the entire PPA, to Gioia, Felix, Emil, Abigail, Hyorin, Gemma, Mariama, Alesha, Noah. It is both rant and unanswerable questionnaire. WHAT ARE YOU ALL SO AFRAID OF? Harriet types. Why won’t you try the gingerbread? Are you looking down on me because you think all I have is a handful of flour?
But Harriet has this friend . . . well, she doesn’t know if Gretel’s still her friend; she isn’t sure where Gretel is and doesn’t know what Gretel is doing right now, but sometimes she receives an opinion from Gretel, an opinion just as clear as if Gretel’s phoned her up and said the words herself. Harriet likes the thought of occasionally bursting in on Gretel’s thoughts too, advising on all sorts of situations she couldn’t possibly be aware of. This time her psychic projection of Gretel calmly and coolly looks over the email Harriet’s about to send. Send it if you want, the projection says. They won’t reply. It is all pork in different sauces.
Psychic-projection Gretel has been doing this a lot lately. Giving apathetic counsel. It’s as if she knows Harriet doesn’t pay her as much heed as she used to.
A word of advice, Gretel: You’re losing authority. Shouldn’t you put in an actual appearance instead of just talking?
Chop chop—now’s the time. What do you mean, why now . . .
. . . there’s never been a better time than the present. As you know, as you know.
Harriet’s lights flicker, and she hears feet on the long flight of stairs between the sixth and the seventh floors. Skip, step, hop, skip, step, hop, and quick exhalations, hfff hfff hfff. But otherwise a dauntless ascent. Long, long strides.
Harriet listens with nothing in her mind but ?!?!
Skip, step, hop, Gretel. Skip, step, hop, Gretel. Skip, step, hope and hope and hope—
This is part and parcel of living at the top of seven steep staircases. Princess-in-a-tower syndrome sets in. You expect momentous visitors, since those are the only kind who would take the time and trouble to seek you out. Visitations from fate or from one you long to behold. But Harriet might do well to bar the door. If the climb from first to seventh floors isn’t a big deal for Gretel Kercheval, that could be because the longest climb was the one that brought her to the first floor. The silver lights flicker again, and the stitched vines grow across the windows, grow toward one another. The vines do that sometimes, become a bridge with one tread of its deck missing. Twenty years. Gretel might be dour at first, mostly because of the bother of having to inform her grievances they must part ways. She never was able to surrender a feeling without a review of its peaks and low points.
Harriet stands by the front door with a corner of a shortbread square poking out of her mouth like a stylized tongue. She doesn’t remember standing up and walking across the flat: she was in her chair, and now she’s at the door, that’s all. She listens as two feet settle on the top step. The puffing stops.
She covers both eyes with her hands for an instant before looking through the peephole. No Gretel. But she’d come close. There must have been something Harriet could’ve done on her end. She should have gone to meet her guest halfway, and she would have, if she wasn’t wearing slippers and a baggy T-shirt that reads FRIED IN BUTTER. Nothing remarkable has ever happened to anybody while they were wearing a T-shirt that reads FRIED IN BUTTER. Harriet opens the door, and it is just her, the smell of her downstairs neighbor’s potato pancakes, and tawny lions embossed onto navy blue wallpaper. Each one hails her solemnly, with upheld paws. The lions seem sorry that Gretel isn’t here. The square of shortbread falls into her palm. Gretel would have leaned forward and drawn it into her own mouth with her greeting kiss—soft lips, sharp teeth. And then she would have said: “More.”
Harriet deletes her draft message to the PPA and texts Perdita instead: How’s Canterbury? Everything OK? Perdita sends her a thumbs-up emoji.
Harriet:
makes dinner for one and plans the lesson for the class she’s teaching the following day: Spotlight on Lady Macbeth, she’s calling it. “Out, out, damned spotlight,” the class will not say.
responds to her mother’s flustered inquiry about what to do if you’ve accidentally “superliked” someone on Tinder and then discovered that the accidental superlike has superliked you too (also accidentally?).
checks that her bag is filled with the essentials she’ll need for the next morning, including the gingerbread with which she bribes a librarian in the Wellcome Library reading room to keep watch over her window seat of choice.
googles Druhástrana, but there’s nothing new. The top result is the Wikipedia page, like it always is.