Gretel

Abstract

Gretel Hedgie Choi (bio) 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.” [End Page 25] 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...