Mia snapped her fingers. “I remember how this one goes!”
“Great.” I was only too happy to push the paper over to her. I’ve always had a hard time figuring out what the moral of a story is supposed to be, and she was bound to know: She’d been to college.
Mia wrote.
One day a farmer came to the magician. “I’ve hesitated over this decision for many days, because my wife is very beautiful,” the farmer said. “Possibly the most beautiful woman in all the world. Still, I think you’d better make her ugly all the same. She frightens me; she frightens everyone who goes near her.”
“Frightens you?” the magician asked. “Frightens you how? And where is she?”
“She’s back at the farm.” The farmer shuffled his feet apologetically. “I tried to bring her with me, but she wouldn’t come.”
“Wouldn’t come?” The farmer was big and tall, at least twice the size of the magician. He must not have tried very hard to persuade his wife to travel with him.
“Somehow I couldn’t lay a hand on her,” the farmer said, unable to hide his anguish. “I moved to seize her arm, and found I’d seized my own arm. I snatched at her hair and ended up pulling my ear. And if you want to know how I got this black eye…”
The magician was interested. He’d met several stunning witches, but none of them had married farmers, and none of them practiced this particular kind of passive resistance. He agreed to accompany the farmer home.
Mia dropped the pen and nodded at me to continue. “You do remember how it goes, right? I mean… we’re not just…?”
“Sure,” I said. “I mean — no. Sure I remember.”
I made my handwriting much smaller than usual, in case I was wrong.
The magician found the farmer’s wife kneeling, planting cassava, setting the cuttings up inside little hills of soil. There’s no use trying to describe her in detail; all that can really be said is that she had the kind of beauty that people write songs about and occasionally commit suicide over. The type who seems a very long way away even when she’s right there in your arms. She wiped her hands on her apron, looked up at him, and said: “Hello.”
As a test, he said to her: “Come, woman, be more beautiful.” (Her husband groaned at that.) But nothing happened. The farmer’s wife went on planting. The magician felt uneasy — was it really impossible for her beauty to be any greater? Could she really be first among women, hidden away here on this farm? — and so he told her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” in the strongest tones possible. The woman didn’t raise her eyes from the ground. Her hands continued to plant cassava, and she remained exactly the same. “Don’t disturb my life, magician,” she said. “Just leave me be.”
The magician took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to his, though her gaze and the feel of her skin made his flesh crawl. “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” the magician said again. The field itself heard him this time, and three scarecrows appeared at the perimeter. But the farmer’s wife didn’t change. She said: “All I’ve ever wanted is to make things grow, and to feed people. I’ve been doing that for some years now, and I’ve been happy. I don’t want anything more or less than what I already have. I beg you: Don’t disturb my life.”
“But your husband is frightened of you,” the magician told her.
“I’ve given him no cause to be,” she replied.
“And yet he can hardly bear to look at you…”
“It isn’t necessary for him to look at me.”
Mia read that part over three times, and for a moment I thought I was busted. But she continued writing in silence, cupping her hand over the page as though she were the imposter and not me.
“Grow wings,” he told her. “Bear fruit.” She did neither. He pursued her for miles of farmland, got in the way of all her daily tasks, issued command after command, whatever came into his head. “Become a walking stick!” She didn’t. His voice grew hoarse. At last he admitted that she was a formidable witch, and that he was willing to learn whatever she could teach him.
“It isn’t magic,” she said. “It’s just that I’m well dressed. You men who try to tell me I’m a scarecrow or try to grab my arm but can’t manage it, don’t you understand that you’re not really addressing me? It’s more as if you’re talking to a coat I’m wearing.”
She was sat on a low chair, shelling beans, and he sat down at her feet and began to help her. “I don’t see what you mean,” he said. “Teach me. Show me.”
“What can I teach you?” she said. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide. She stayed like that for one minute, two minutes. He thought she was sleeping and forced himself to place a hand on her shoulder. A snake’s head glided out from between her lips, bright as new chainmail; he saw that its golden coils wound down her throat.
“You’re wrapped around her heart,” the magician said.
“I am the heart,” the snake replied.
He left the farm without looking back. There are few things in life more unpleasant than the laughter of a snake.
“Maybe that isn’t the version you read,” Mia said, watching me. She bit the end of the pen a few times. “I think I read it in Italian, so…”
“No, this is pretty much the version I read,” I said, because it felt too damn late to back down. I imagine that from time to time some similar situation has led governments to declare war.
I had to be up early for a trial shift at a bookstore, so I sent Mia home right after dinner.
“Hey,” she said, on her way out of the door. “Maybe this bookstore job is the one.”
I said: “Maybe!” But I thought: Probably not.
The best line of work for me would be roadside sprite. I’d live quietly by a dust-covered track that people never came across unless they took a wrong turn, and I’d offer the baffled travelers lemonade and sandwiches, maybe even fix their engines if they asked nicely (I’d have used my solitude to read extensively on matters of car maintenance). Then the travelers would go on their way, relaxed and refreshed, and they’d forget they’d ever met me. That’s the ideal meeting… once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.
5
the next morning Ted took Webster on a trip to Wachusett Mountain. He said it was “just because,” but we decided between us that he was either going to propose or he was going to call the whole thing off. I hoped he would propose. She’d been so sad that he hadn’t proposed on Valentine’s Day. She’d asked me if I thought some women just weren’t meant to be married. I said: “Yes. But not you.” I meant it too.