Margaret Atwood - Hag-Seed

Having brushed and affixed his teeth, Felix arranges his hair, which is fortunately still thick. Then he snips a few stray wisps off his beard. He’s been growing it out for twelve years, and it’s the right shape now: full but not bushy, eloquent but not pointed at the end. Pointed would be demonic. He’s aiming for magisterial.

He dresses in his work clothes: jeans, hiking boots, the dark-green Mark’s Work Wearhouse shirt, a worn tweed jacket. No tie. It’s necessary to look like the version of himself that’s become familiar up at Fletcher: the genial but authoritative retired teacher and theatre wonk, a little eccentric and naive but an okay guy who’s generously donating his time because he believes in the possibility of betterment.

Well, not donating it exactly; he does get paid. But peanuts, so he’s not doing it just for the money. His students are suspicious of ulterior motives, having so many ulterior motives themselves. They disapprove of greed in others. As for themselves, they only want what’s due to them. Fair is fair, and that way many a fracas can lie, as Felix already knows.

He tries to keep out of their private arguments. Just don’t bring this crap into class, he tells them. I’m not in charge of who stole your cigarettes. I’m the theatre guy. When you walk in here, you shed your daily self. You become a clean slate. Then you draw on a new face. If you’re nobody, you can’t be somebody unless you’re somebody else, he tells them, quoting Marilyn Monroe, a name they’ve heard of. And in here, we all begin by being nobody. Yes, me too.

They zip it up then: they don’t want to be kicked out of the class. In a world that doesn’t contain much for them that they can actually choose, they’re in the Shakespeare class because they chose it. It’s a privilege, as they are told perhaps too often. Some folks on the outside would kill for what Felix is giving them. Felix himself never says that, but it’s implied in everything he does say.

“I’m not doing it for the money,” Felix says out loud. He turns: Miranda’s sitting at the table, a little pensively because she won’t be seeing much of him now that it’s January and the spring semester is about to begin. “I never did,” he adds. Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don’t do things for the money, they simply have money, and that’s what allows them to be noble. They don’t really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves. And Felix, in the eyes of Miranda, is noble. It helps him to know that.

Miranda’s fifteen now, a lovely girl. All grown up from the cherub on the swing who’s still enclosed in her silver frame beside his bedside. This fifteen-year-old version is slender and kind, though a little pale. She needs to get out more, run around in the fields and woods the way she used to. Bring some roses to her cheeks. Of course it’s winter, there’s snow, but that never used to bother her; she could skim above the drifts, light as a bird.

Miranda doesn’t like it when he’s away so much, during the months when he’s giving the course. Also, she frets: she doesn’t want him to wear himself out. When he gets back after a heavy day they share a cup of tea together and play a game of chess, then eat some macaroni and cheese and maybe a salad. Miranda has become more health-conscious, she’s insisting on greenery, she’s making him eat kale. When he was growing up, no one had ever heard of kale.

If she’d lived, she would have been at the awkward teenager stage: making dismissive comments, rolling her eyes at him, dying her hair, tattooing her arms. Hanging out in bars, or worse. He’s heard the stories.

But none of that has happened. She remains simple, she remains innocent. She’s such a comfort.

But lately she’s been brooding about something. Has she fallen in love? He certainly hopes not! Anyway, who would she fall in love with? That log-toting lout of a Walter is long gone, and there’s nobody else around.

“Be good till I come back,” he tells her. She smiles wanly: what else can she be but good? “You can do some embroidery.” She frowns at that: he’s stereotyping. “Sorry,” he says. “Okay. Some higher math.” That gets a laugh out of her, at any rate.

She won’t stray far from the house, he knows that. She can’t stray far. Something constrains her.

Now he’ll have to brave the snow outside, plunge into the cold, face the daily test: will his car start? In winter he parks it at the top of the laneway. It’s not the Mustang any more, that car rusted out some years back. It’s a blue second-hand Peugeot he bought through Craigslist once Mr. Duke was getting his paychecks from Fletcher. Even when the lane is plowed, it can be treacherous, and it’s muddy in spring; so he uses it only in the dry seasons, which are summer and fall. If the snowplow has gone by on the sideroad, he’ll have to dig through the windrow of ice and chunks of frozen brown guck from the undersides of passing vehicles. This road has been paved since he moved into the shack, so it’s become more of a route. The propane truck uses it, for one. The FedEx van. The school bus.

The school bus, full of laughing little children. When it passes, he averts his eyes. Miranda might have been on a school bus once, if she’d ever reached that age.

From the hook on the back of the door Felix takes down his winter coat, with the mitts and tuque stuffed into the sleeves. He needs a scarf, and he has one; it’s plaid. He’s put it somewhere, but where? In the big old armoire in the bedroom, Miranda reminds him gently. Odd: he doesn’t usually keep it there.

He opens the door. There’s his one-time wizard’s staff, the fox-head cane. His magic garment is hanging in there too, shoved to the back. The cloak of his defeat, the dead husk of his drowned self.

No, not dead, but changed. In the gloom, in the gloaming, it’s been transforming itself, slowly coming alive. He pauses to consider it. There are the pelts of the plush animals, a little dusty now, striped and tawny, grizzled and black, blue and pink and green. Rich and strange. The many pearly eyes twinkle at him from the underwater darkness.

He hasn’t worn his mantle since that time of treachery and rupture a dozen years ago. But he hasn’t thrown it out, either. He’s kept it in waiting.

He won’t put it on yet: it’s not the right moment. But he’s almost certain it will be the right moment soon.

Monday, January 7, 2013.

Felix shovels his car out from the windrow thrown by the snowplow across the top of his laneway. Keep this up and you’ll rupture, he tells himself. You’re not twenty-five any more. You’re not even forty-five. Maybe you should stop playing at hermits, and sublet a rundown condo, and shuffle around town with a dog on a string like other old farts your age.

After a few ulcer-making moments when the car fails to start — he should get a block heater — Felix heads off to Fletcher Correctional. Sprites and goblins, here I come, he broadcasts silently to the inside of the car. Ready or not!

And he’s ready.

A month ago, in mid-December, Felix got an email from Estelle. She had some wonderful news for him, she said; she would like to convey it to him in person. How about lunch, or maybe even dinner?