Gretel

I called a friend and asked to be picked up from Home Depot, where I’d spent all afternoon pushing my cart through the gardening section, picking up whatever looked sturdy and useful. I saw a spade, which looked a lot like what I had, until now, considered a shovel, and wondered how a shovel and a spade differed in form and function. But I didn’t look for a shovel or search for images of shovels on my phone or ask anyone. I already knew what I needed to know: that the cheapest way to pay for a tomato was with money, not time and labor. I was trying to grow something else. Like intuition. Or connection—to my body, or to dirt, or the cycle of time. I found a brand of dirt called Miracle-Gro. I took this as an encouraging sign. I bought three bags of it, though I already had endless volumes of dirt in my backyard.

“Please don’t think I’m having some sort of anarcho-communist phase,” I said as I pulled my bags of Miracle-Gro onto my lap. My friend’s car smelled bitter and had many stains.

“What would that even mean!” she said, laughing like someone who knew all about anarcho-communism and felt a mild disdain for it. My friends knew everything; they were very informed. They wanted to change the world by being aware of the many terrible things that were happening in it. Some mornings, there would be a clear, uncontested, single most terrible thing. This signaled a reprieve that would last about a week, in which we could simply think about this single most terrible thing. But then it would fade, shockingly quickly, and other terrible things would compete, and I was often at a loss as to where to turn my attention. But I had my gardening, and I hoped this was an alternative way to do some good in the world, even while knowing nothing.

The house I lived in was in a neighborhood that was, aside from my house, mostly mansions. My friend whistled. I said, “I know! It’s crazy!” as I always did when my friends, inevitably, whistled at my mansion neighborhood. I told her my place was the small one, and that rent was surprisingly affordable because the AC unit was broken, and the landlord didn’t want to deal with it—and had, in fact, threatened to kill me if I ever called about the AC unit. This was not true. I’d never met my landlord. I kept telling this story to friends who drove me home, though it never really had the effect I desired. Mostly my friends said, “That’s awful!” and “It must be very hot.”

I’m not really sure what effect I desired.

“Oh yes,” my friend said, cutting me off. “The AC. You told me.”

We pulled into the driveway.

“I would invite you in, but unfortunately, because of Gretel, I can’t,” I said.

“God, Gretel!” my friend said. “Gretel do anything crazy lately?”

________

Gretel was a made-up roommate I told my friends about. Gretel was horrible and rude. Gretel was the reason none of them could come inside, which I claimed was badly designed and prone to molding anyway. “My roommate is obscene!” I would say. “She has no sense of boundaries!” Every now and then I made up a new story to tell about her: “Gretel went into my room and ruined my favorite lipstick!” Or “Gretel told me my asymmetric jaw makes me look like an ugly drag queen in photographs!”

Gretel was the name my mother had gone by for a short while, when my parents moved to the US from Korea to get their PhDs, but then she soon realized this was not a typical American name and reverted back to Mi-kyung. It was easy to come up with these stories about Gretel because they were true stories of what my mom had said or done. My friends would say, “Wow, Gretel is fucking crazy” or “Gretel sucks, I’m so sorry,” which I found very satisfying. I knew they’d never say “Mi-kyung is fucking crazy” with such conviction and ease.

In truth I lived in this house alone. The rent was very high, but I was able to afford it because my father had sent me an enormous lump sum shortly before he waded into his apartment swimming pool with a cast-iron skillet tied to his chest using several neckties. When I’d first gotten the money, I thought about how I could live very, very frugally, so I wouldn’t have to have a job for years, or how I could continue working at my stupid office job but treat myself to luxurious things more often. But, within a week, I found the idea of holding down my job or living frugally to be unbearable, unacceptable, and absurd.

By the time I quit my job and moved into the beautiful house, my father had been sent home from the psychiatric unit after being able to name several reasons to live. I sent him a get-well-soon card with paper I made myself, from pulp of abaca and local wildflowers, in the pristine bathtub of my beautiful house.

________

At home, I made myself tea, a fancy loose-leaf apricot black tea that cost four times as much as the normal tea I bought before the lump sum. It was delicious, but not four times as delicious as the normal tea. I felt satisfied knowing all this time what I’d been drinking was the best value and decided to return to it when I ran out of the fancy stuff. I’d drink my normal tea and have a little caprese salad with tomatoes from my garden. Then my mother called.

“How are you doing? We’re at the therapist’s office. Your father is in therapy now. Just like you wanted! Haha! I guess you were right all along!”

“Amazing!” I said.

“Your father would never admit it, but he wants the money back.” In the background, I could hear a receptionist scheduling someone’s appointment. I could hear someone shouting, “It’s my rapist that should be responsible for that copay!”

“Haha!” I said, “No thank you.”

“Your father is healing, physically and psychologically. Just yesterday he held my hand and said, Thank you for pulling me out of the pool. I’m sorry I was angry about it at first. I’ve been through so much, but I see now I’m not alone. I never thought I’d hear your father say thank you and I’m sorry in my life, then I heard him say both in one breath! I think attempting suicide was good for him. Maybe the best thing that has ever happened to him. Suicide! It really transformed him.”

I thought about the other times my mom had said my father had been transformed. Once she said he’d been struck by lightning.

“Oh, no,” my father said shyly when she said this. “I was just looking out the window during a storm, and I felt a little shock, that’s all.”

“But now your personality is so much softer at the edges,” she said.

I felt my father was transformed frequently in my formative years, mostly by rage, often in response to something I said, which would then cause him to take the door of my room off its hinges and come in and scream and beat me. Then my mother would say, “Oh now,” and pull him away, and then a few hours later they would take me to an ice cream parlor called Custard Cream, which they otherwise thought was not worth it: “so they dice up a little strawberry and put it on top—that little mound of sugared fruit is two dollars?”

“Good for him,” I said into the phone. “But tell him for me that sometimes we must live with the consequences of our actions.”

“Excuse me,” I heard my mother say to someone in her immediate environment. “My daughter has just said we must live with the consequences of our actions in response to her own father narrowly surviving suicide. Do you have anything you want to say to that?”

My mother put her mouth to the phone again. “This is the head psychiatric doctor in the hospital. He has something to tell you.”

I heard a man’s throat clear several times. “I don’t think this is a conversation I’m supposed to be a part of,” he said.

“Did you hear that?” my mom said. “He said your father is working through serious trauma, and he needs support, not judgment. He said your callousness is frankly alarming, and perhaps it is you who needs therapy more than your father.”

“Oh no!” I said. “I’m afraid we have come up against a time boundary for this call. I must go tend to my garden now. Great talking to you. Goodbye!”

________

I went out to the garden with my new spade. I knelt and began furiously hacking away at what I thought were weeds as I cried. I was afraid. I knew, with a sudden certainty, that this was the peak of my life: it would all go downhill from here, and not in a gentle slope kind of way either. It was like a vision, except I couldn’t see anything. I had this feeling often, multiple times a year, but this time it was stronger than it had ever been, as it always was.

I thought about how the salt from my tears would ruin the earth, how the beets or whatever it was down there would become poisoned by the salt. The beets were innocent, but they would not escape the inheritance of trauma! I cried even harder. I brought out my bag of Miracle-Gro and poured it on top of the sprouts so the good dirt would mix with the salty dirt and mitigate the damage.

________

The next day, a friend—a friend of the friend who’d given me a ride home—called to let me know Miracle-Gro oversupplies plants with nitrogen so they grow fast and bushy, but produces off-chemicals that harm the soil microbes and the worms.

“All forms of life in the soil, really,” he said.

My friends were good and virtuous. I’d met them at a weekly volunteering event making pb&j sandwiches for homeless people, which

I’d started going to because of all the free time I had after quitting my job, and the guilt I felt about my new money. My friends believed in healthy interpersonal boundaries and universal health care and socialism. I did too, but, whereas my belief was similar to a belief in Jesus Christ, or in heaven and hell, their belief was based on knowledge about economics, human behavior, and history. My friends did not make pb&j sandwiches with the end pieces of the bread, because they did not want to offer anyone anything they themselves wouldn’t want.

“How did you learn how to garden?” I asked him.

“From the internet!” he said. “You can learn anything from the internet.”

________

From the internet, I learned the tall plant that had been doing very well all summer was almost certainly not a tomato plant. I considered waiting another few weeks, just to see, but then I imagined its roots in the ground, choking and killing everything I’d planted. I went out and gave the plant a gentle yank. It was deeply and sturdily rooted, which made me certain it was a weed, perhaps even a virulent invasive species. I yanked harder and felt a muscle under my right shoulder blade seize up. I twisted, trying to find and massage the muscle with my other hand, but it was buried under larger muscles and hard to get at.

“Are you hurt?”

I looked up. A blonde woman in a white dress was looking at me from the neighbor’s backyard, where I saw a barbeque party petering out.

“Not really,” I said.

She waved me over. This was years before I’d figured out how to simply ignore that kind of gesture. I ran to her like a little dog, like her little dog. She was somehow smaller up close, half a head shorter than me.

“My name is Gretel,” she said. “Turn around.”

I turned around.

“Gretel is an unusual name,” I said.

“Not really,” she said. “Sit down.”

I sat. I felt sure this Gretel had come to expose me. I knew soon she would post on the internet that she’d seen me gardening, gardening as the world went up in flames, and that I lived alone in a beautiful house. She would tell everyone I’d threatened to call the cops on my dad and report him for child abuse if he didn’t buy me a Siberian husky from a responsible breeder for my 11th birthday. She would tell my friends I hated horizontalism and loved hierarchy and order. She would reveal my interest in socialism came out of a personal desire to be taken care of, and nothing else.

“I am a physical therapist,” Gretel said. She prodded down my back saying, “Ouch? Hm? Ouch?”

I said, “No, no, no, yes.”

Gretel had her hands firmly on my shoulders, pushing me into the ground, which seemed to give under me, in very small increments. The word “loam” came to mind, though I had no certainty about what it meant. I wished I hadn’t turned around and sat down. If only I’d known what I wanted! I could have said I had a kettle going inside. I could have said I have chicken pox. I could have said I was uncomfortable being touched by strangers, though I was sure she was a nice person who wanted to help me.

No. I couldn’t have said that.

“This muscle here?” she asked, running her finger along precisely the right muscle.

“Don’t you want to get back to your friends?” I asked.

She ignored this. She manipulated my left shoulder and my neck while pushing—presumably with her knee—at a place in my back. This happened quickly and decisively, with little warning. I felt my breath go out of me in one solid lump. I pulled my shoulder blades together and felt far more pain than I had before. I held my breath so I wouldn’t cry.

“How’s that?” she asked.

“Better,” I said. “Wow. Wow, wow, wow.”

________

“Have you considered that I was scared of your father too?” my mother once asked.

“No, never,” I said. “Not once has it occurred to me.”

“Well,” said my mother, who said and heard everything with total sincerity, “let it occur to you now.”

________

I stopped tending to the garden after the day I met Gretel, though I continued to observe it daily. The garden grew lush in my inaction. There was a surprising variety in the plants that came up. A few had flowers or clusters of flowers. Many of them grew tall, and the ones that didn’t died and rotted under them. A large gathering of slugs liked to lurk in the moist, shaded environment.

Eventually the landlord sent her son over. He was tall and handsome and wanted to be reasonable.

“You’re not supposed to dig up the backyard,” he said. “It’s right there in your lease.”

“But it didn’t seem like you minded, before,” I said.

“We were open to new ideas,” he said. “We thought you were going to grow some cute vegetables. It seemed like you had a plan. Now it seems like you don’t have a plan. Which I get, believe me. I’m trying to find a plan myself.”

“What kind of plan?” I asked. And then I felt maybe I’d asked the question too coyly. I stopped leaning against the doorframe and stepped back. He stepped forward, and I closed the door very quickly—one might even say I slammed it in his face. I watched from the gap in the curtains as he paced by the door, coming up as if to knock and then, thinking better of it, backing off again.

I texted a group chat of seven of my friends. i’m scared. Then I took a long bath and forgot about the text. When I got my phone again, there were many concerned replies on the group chat, as well as individual texts reiterating the same question: what’s wrong? I texted back and told them it was Gretel. Gretel was frightening me. I couldn’t live here anymore. Gretel made me feel unsafe.

Later that night, I received a call from a friend of a friend, who said there was a room in a cooperative housing unit I could move into. She also offered me money to cover moving expenses and the deposit. She said it came from their mutual aid fund. I didn’t understand what was mutual about it, but I thought it was a chance to stop living in the precarious peak of my life. I’d give up my pristine bathtub and start again, based on friendship and goodwill, rather than accidental inheritance. I accepted her offers shyly, gratefully.

________

Once I was situated in my new apartment—poorly designed and prone to mold—and started working at another dumb job, I transferred my inheritance back to my dad and called to let him know.

“Fine,” he said. “That’s fine.”

“It looks like I used a lot of the money but it’s just because I had to move suddenly and pay for some stuff. Because I broke my lease. Because I tried to garden.”

“A lot of people with no farming experience have fantasies about farming that have nothing to do with the reality of farming,” he said. “Anybody who knows the reality of farming cannot have fantasies about farming.”

“It was just going to be a small garden. Not a farm.”

“Exactly what I mean,” he said.

________

Several years later, I saw Gretel giving a talk.

I’d heard from my friends someone was giving a talk about how trauma can show up in the body in the form of inflammation or chronic illness, as a part of a series on mental health in relation to social justice. It was suggested to me by three friends, separately, who said it seemed up your alley or your sort of thing or your exact cup of tea.

Because I got off work late that day, and because I always misjudged how long it would take me to bike somewhere, I arrived after the talk had begun. I went into the auditorium quietly, found my friends, and made my way to the seat they’d saved for me. As I weaved through the knees of strangers, I recognized the speaker. At first, I couldn’t place who she was—I only knew I’d met her before. But when I placed who she was, I was absolutely certain.

“Do you already have a question?” the speaker said, turning to me.

I realized I was still standing.

“No,” I said. “Yes. I think we’ve met. I hurt myself gardening, and you were at my neighbor’s barbeque? You tried to fix my shoulder? But you made it a lot worse. I didn’t say anything at the time. Actually, I said you made it better, but you made the problem far worse, and now, even to this day, I have limited mobility on this side.”

I raised my arm over my head and then back down slowly, first on the right side then on the left, to demonstrate. Everyone was watching me.

“It doesn’t look like a big difference,” I said, suddenly aware it did not look like a big difference. “But I have less control at the end ranges of motion on this side. It’s hard to see, from where you are, but I feel it, very much.”

The speaker smiled gently.

“I am sure,” she said, “that you must be mistaken. It would, after all, be entirely unethical to just go around performing medical procedures on the street.”

The crowd laughed. I did not look down to see if my friends were laughing too.

“No,” I said firmly, “you are Gretel, the physical therapist in a white dress.” The laughter hiccupped uncomfortably and trickled off.

“As you can see, that isn’t my name.” The speaker pointed to her name tag, which was obviously too far away and too small for me to read from where I stood. “And as for a white dress, I don’t think I own any!”

This was, once again, well-received by the audience, which caused me to lose control momentarily and scream several things at her, some of which my friends believed you should not call a woman, no matter what.

“Why don’t we go outside,” my friends suggested. They grasped my hand tightly. I allowed them to lead me toward the door, though I did not stop speaking.

“Your calmness makes you more credible to everyone else here, but I know that you are calm because you are Gretel,” I said loudly, though my voice shook. “If you were not Gretel, if you were wrongly accused, you would be flustered. But you are Gretel, and you have been preparing, because you knew that one day, I would speak up against you. You are prepared!” I sobbed. The doors were shutting, and I could only see a sliver of the room I was being taken from, a sliver of Gretel, rapidly narrowing. “It isn’t fair! You are prepared, but I am not!”

Once outside the auditorium, my friends took me to an empty classroom. They sat with me as I cried. The one friend who always carried a wide array of illegally obtained psychiatric medication offered me some Xanax and sleeping pills.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Just hold onto them then,” she said, putting four pills in my hands.

“Are you saying that’s Gretel, your roommate?” my friends asked.

“No,” I said. “Yes. No.”

I wanted to tell my friends about the time my mother had made fun of my small, developing breasts while cutting my hair in the bathroom. My mother had always cut my hair, because haircuts were “stupidly expensive” and “for Americans with no fine motor skills.” She made me fully undress in the bathroom so the cleanup would be easy afterwards. “One is bigger than the other,” she said, pointing at my breasts with her scissors, “and this is very obvious in your case because they’re both very small. The difference between 100 and 101 is not a lot, but the difference between two and three feels like a lot, even though, mathematically speaking, they are the same. Make sense?” I wanted to tell this story, and tell it to its end, to include the part when she accidentally cut the lip of my ear with the scissors and shouted, “You’re fine! You’re okay! It doesn’t hurt!” and wept while bandaging it. It was the one time I’d seen my mother cry.

“One time,” I began, “when Gretel, my roommate, was cutting my hair—”

“Why was Gretel cutting your hair?” my friends asked. “Why did you let Gretel, your batshit insane roommate, cut your hair?”

“What?” I said. “I didn’t. What? Can I have the water please? I’d like to take these pills.”

My friends brought me water, and I took the pills. I opened my mouth afterwards and moved my tongue up and down to show them the pills were gone, but my friends didn’t look into my mouth. I closed my mouth.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now I’d like to rest alone.”

I woke up later. It was dark. The building was empty and locked. My phone was dead. I went to the window, and, from my third-floor vantage point, I could see Gretel just outside the building, surrounded by a small group of people who were probably asking her questions. I couldn’t see their faces, only the tops of their heads. I considered banging on the window so they’d look up and see I was still in the building, but I worried this would make me appear deranged and dangerous, so instead I sat down by the window and just watched. There were streaks of gray hair on the top of Gretel’s head. Gretel waved goodbye as groups of people left her. Alone, Gretel smoked a cigarette, moving the tiny, warm dot of light to her face and then away from her face. Gretel left. The dark brought out the stars. Hours later, the stars faded as the watery morning light seeped out over the sky. The building would be reopened soon, and I would go home. At some point, I had a familiar feeling, the feeling that this was the best it was going to get, that soon it would all be taken away from me, but then I thought, maybe not, and the feeling became diffuse, warbled at the edges, and went away.