by John Updike
Her figurines were in a sense primitive. Sukie or was it Jane had dubbed them her "bubbies"—chunky female bodies four or five inches long, often faceless and without feet, coiled or bent in recumbent positions and heavier than expected when held in the hand. People seemed to find them comforting and took them away from the shops, in a steady, sneaking trickle that intensified in the summer but was there even in January. Alexandra sculpted their naked forms, stabbing with the toothpick for a navel and never failing to provide a nicked hint of the vulval cleft, in protest against the false smoothness there of the dolls she had played with as a girl; then she painted clothes on them, sometimes pastel bathing suits, sometimes impossibly clinging gowns patterned in polka dots or asterisks or wavy cartoon-ocean stripes. No two were quite alike, though all were sisters. Her procedure was dictated by the feeling that as clothes were put on each morning over our nakedness, so they should be painted upon rather than carved onto these primal bodies of rounded soft clay. She baked them two dozen at a time in a little electric Swedish kiln kept in a workroom off her kitchen, an unfinished room but with a wood floor, unlike the next room, a dirt-floored storage space where old flowerpots and lawn rakes, hoes and Wellington boots and pruning shears were kept. Self-taught, Alexandra had been at sculpture for five years—since before the divorce, to which it, like most manifestations of her blossoming selfhood, had contributed. Her children, especially Marcy, but Ben and little Eric too, hated the bubbies, thought them indecent, and once in their agony of embarrassment had shattered a batch that was cooling; but now they were reconciled, as if to defective siblings. Children are of a clay that to an extent remains soft, though irremediable twists show up in their mouths and a glaze of avoidance hardens in their eyes.
Jane Smart, too, was artistically inclined—a musician. She gave piano lessons to make ends meet, and substituted as choir director in local churches sometimes, but her love was the cello; its vibratory melancholy tones, pregnant with the sadness of wood grain and the shadowy largeness of trees, would at odd moonlit hours on warm nights come sweeping out of the screened windows of her low little ranch house where it huddled amid many like it on the curved roads of the Fifties development called Cove Homes. Her neighbors on their quarter-acre lots, husband and wife, child and dog, would move about, awakened, and discuss whether or not to call the police. They rarely did, abashed and, it may be, intimidated by the something naked, a splendor and grief, in Jane's playing. It seemed easier to fall back to sleep, lulled by the double-stopped scales, first in thirds, then in sixths, of Popper's etudes, or, over and over, the four measures of tied sixteenth-notes (where the cello speaks almost alone) of the second andante of Beethoven's Quartet No. 15, in A Minor. Jane was no gardener, and the neglected tangle of rhododendron, hydrangea, arborvitae, barberry, and all around her foundations helped muffle the outpour from her windows. This was an era of many proclaimed rights, and of blatant public music, when every supermarket played its Muzak version of "Satisfaction" and "I Got You, Babe" and wherever two or three teenagers gathered together the spirit of Woodstock was proclaimed. Not the volume but the timbre of Jane's passion, the notes often fumbled at but resumed at the same somber and undivertible pitch, caught at the attention bothersomely. Alexandra associated the dark notes with Jane's dark eyebrows, and with that burning insistence in her voice that an answer be provided forthwith, that a formula be produced with which to wedge life into place, to nail its secret down, rather than drifting as Alexandra did in the faith that the secret was ubiquitous, an aromaless element in the air that the birds and blowing weeds fed upon.
Sukie had nothing of what she would call an artistic talent but she loved social existence and had been driven by the reduced circumstances that attend divorce to write for the local weekly, the Eastwick Word. As she marched with her bright lithe stride up and down Dock Street listening for gossip and speculating upon the fortunes of the shops, Alexandra's gaudy figurines in the window of the Yapping Fox, or a poster in the window of the Armenians' hardware store advertising a chamber-music concert to be held in the Unitarian Church and including Jane Smart, cello thrilled her like a glint of beach glass in the sand or a quarter found shining on the dirty sidewalk—a bit of code buried in the garble of daily experience, a stab of communication between the inner and outer world. She loved her two friends, and they her. Today, after typing up her account of last night's meetings at Town Hall of the Board of Assessors (dull: the same old land-poor widows begging for an abatement) and the Planning Board (no quorum: Herbie Prinz was in Bermuda), Sukie looked forward hungrily to Alexandra's and Jane's coming over to her house for a drink. They usually convened Thursdays, in one of their three houses. Sukie lived in the middle of town, which was convenient for her work, though the house, a virtually miniature 1760 saltbox on a kind of curved little alley off Oak called Hemlock Lane, was a great step down from the sprawling farmhouse—six bedrooms, thirty acres, a station wagon, a sports car, a Jeep, four dogs—that she and Monty had shared. But her girlfriends made it seem fun, a kind of pretense or interlude of enchantment; they usually affected some odd and colorful bit of costume for their gatherings. In a gold-threaded Parsi shawl Alexandra entered, stooping, at the side door to the kitchen; in her hands, like dumbbells or bloody evidence, were two jars of her peppery, basil-flavored tomato sauce.
The witches kissed, cheek to cheek. "Here sweetie, I know you like nutty dry things best but," Alexandra said, in that thrilling contralto that dipped deep into her throat like a Russian woman saying "byelo." Sukie took the twin gifts into her own, more slender hands, their papery backs stippled with fading freckles. "The tomatoes came on like a plague this year for some reason," Alexandra continued. "I put about a hundred jars of this up and then the other night I went out in the garden in the dark and shouted, 'Fuck you, the rest of you can all rot!'"
"1 remember one year with the zucchini," Sukie responded, setting the jars dutifully on a cupboard shelf from which she would never take them down. As Alexandra said, Sukie loved dry nutty things— celery, cashews, pilaf, pretzel sticks, tiny little nibbles such as kept her monkey ancestors going in the trees. When alone, she never sat down to eat, just dipped into some yoghurt with a Wheat Thin while standing at the kitchen sink or carrying a 19
Though this reminiscence had referred, implicitly and pleasurably, to her married days and their plenty, mention of an old husband was a slight breach of decorum and snatched away Alexandra's intention to laugh. Sukie was the most recently divorced and the youngest of the three. She was a slender redhead, her hair down her back in a sheaf trimmed straight across and her long arms laden with these freckles the cedar color of pencil shavings. She wore copper bracelets and a pentagram on a cheap thin chain around her throat. What Alexandra, with her heavily Hellenic, twice-cleft features, loved about Sukie's looks was the cheerful simian thrust: Sukie's big teeth pushed her profile below the brief nose out in a curve, a protrusion especially of her upper lip, which was longer and more complex in shape than her lower, with a plumpness on either side of the center that made even her silences seem puckish, as if she were tasting amusement all the time. Her eyes were hazel and round and rather close together. Sukie moved nimbly in her little comedown of a kitchen, everything crowded together and the sink stained and miniature, and beneath it a smell of poverty lingering from all the Eastwick generations who had lived here and had imposed their patchy renovations in the centuries when old hand-hewn houses like this were not considered charm
ing. Sukie pulled a can of Planter's Beer Nuts, wickedly sugary, from a cupboard shelf with one hand and with the other took from the rubber-coated wire drainer on the sink a little paisley-patterned brass-rimmed dish to hold them. Boxes crackling, she strewed an array of crackers on a platter around a wedge of red-coated Gouda cheese and some supermarket paté still in the flat tin showing a laughing goose. The platter was coarse tan earthenware gouged and glazed with the semblance of a crab. Cancer. Alexandra feared it, and saw its emblem everywhere in nature—in clusters of blueberries in the neglected places by rocks and bogs, in the grapes ripening on the sagging rotten arbor outside her kitchen windows, in the ants bringing up conical granular hills in the cracks in her asphalt driveway, in all blind and irresistible multiplications. "Your usual?" Sukie asked, a shade tenderly, for Alexandra, as if older than she was, had with a sigh dropped her body, without removing her shawl, into the kitchen's one welcoming concavity, an old blue easy chair too disgraceful to have elsewhere; it was losing stuffing at its seams and at the corners of its arms a polished gray stain had been left where many wrists had rubbed.
"I guess it's still tonic time," Alexandra decided, for the coolness that had come in with the thunderstorm some days ago had stayed. "How's your vodka supply?" Someone had once told her that not only was vodka less fattening but it irritated the lining of your stomach less than gin. Irritation, psychic as well as physical, was the source of cancer. Those get it who leave themselves open to the idea of it; all it takes is one single cell gone crazy. Nature is always waiting, watching for you to lose faith so she can insert her fatal stitch.
Sukie smiled, broader. "I knew you were coming." She displayed a brand-new Gordon's bottle, with its severed boar's head staring with a round orange eye and its red tongue caught between teeth and a curling tusk.
Alexandra smiled to see this friendly monster. "Plenty of tonic. Puh-leese. The calories!"
The tonic bottle fizzed in Sukie's fingers as if scolding. Perhaps cancer cells were more like bubbles of carbonation, percolating through the bloodstream, Alexandra thought. She must stop thinking about it. "Where's Jane?" she asked.
"She said she'd be a little late. She's rehearsing for that concert at the Unitarians'."
"With that awful Neff," Alexandra said.
"With that awful Neff," Sukie echoed, licking quinine water from her fingers and looking in her bare refrigerator for a lime. Raymond Neff taught music at the high school, a pudgy effeminate man who yet had fathered five children upon his slovenly, sallow, steel-bespectacled, German-born wife. Like most good schoolteachers he was a tyrant, unctuous and insistent; in his dank way he wanted to sleep with everybody. Jane was sleeping with him these days. Alexandra had succumbed a few times in the past but the episode had moved her so little Sukie was perhaps unaware of its vibrations, its afterimage. Sukie herself appeared to be chaste vis-a-vis Neff, but then she had been available least long. Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties. The two friends wanted to rescue Jane, who in a kind of indignant hurry was always selling herself short. It was the hideous wife, with her strawy dull hair cut short as if with grass clippers and her carefully pronounced malapropisms and her goggle-eyed intent way of listening to every word, whom they disapproved of. When you sleep with a married man you in a sense sleep with the wife as well, so she should not be an utter embarrassment.
"Jane has such beautiful possibilities," Sukie said a bit automatically, as she scrabbled with a furious monkey-motion in the refrigerator's icemaker to loosen some more cubes. A witch can freeze water at a glance but sometimes unfreezing it is the problem. Of the four dogs she and Monty had supported in their heyday, two had been loping silvery-brown Weimaraners, and she had kept one, called Hank; he was now leaning on her legs in the hope that she was struggling in the refrigerator on his behalf.
"But she wastes herself," Alexandra said, completing the sentence. "Wastes in the old-fashioned sense," she added, since this was during the Vietnam War and the war had given the word an awkward new meaning. "If she's serious about her music she should go somewhere serious with it, a city. It's a terrible waste, a conservatory graduate playing fiddle for a bunch of deaf old biddies in a dilapidated church."
"She feels safe here," Sukie said, as if they didn't.
"She doesn't even wash herself, have you ever noticed her smell?" Alexandra asked, not about Jane but about Greta Neff, by a train of association Sukie had no trouble following, their hearts were so aligned on one wavelength.
"And those granny glasses!" Sukie agreed. "She looks like John Lennon." She made a kind of solemn sad-eyed thin-lipped John Lennon face. "I sink sen we can drink ouur—sprechen Sie mass?—bev-er-aitches neeoauu." There was an awful un-American diphthong that came out of Greta Neff's mouth, a kind of twisting of the vowel up against her palate.
Cackling, they took their drinks into the "den," a little room with peeling wallpaper in a splashy faded pattern of vines and fruit baskets and a bellied plaster ceiling at a strange sharp slant because the room was half lucked under the stairs that went up to the atticlike second floor. The room's one window, too high for a woman not standing on a stool to peer out of, had lozenge panes of leaded glass, thick glass bubbled and warped like bottle bottoms.
"A cabbagy smell," Alexandra amplified, lowering herself and her tall silvery drink onto a love seat covered in a crewelwork of flamboyant tattered swirls, stylized vines unravelling. "He carries it on his clothes," she said, thinking simultaneously that this was a little like Monty and the zucchini and that she was evidently inviting Sukie with this intimate detail to guess that she had slept with Neff. Why? It was nothing to brag about. And yet, it was. How he had sweated! For that matter she had slept with Monty, too; and had never smelled zucchini. One fascinating aspect of sleeping with husbands was the angle they gave you on their wives: they saw them as nobody else did. Neff saw poor dreadful Greta as a kind of quaint beribboned Heidi, a sweet bit of edelweiss he had fetched from a perilous romantic height (they had met in a Frankfurt beer hall while he was stationed in West Germany instead of fighting in Korea), and Monty... Alexandra squinted at Sukie, trying to remember what Monty had said of her. He had said little, being such a would-be gentleman. But once he had let slip, having come to Alexandra's bed from some awkward consultation at the bank, and being still preoccupied, the words "She's a lovely girl, but bad luck, somehow. Bad luck for others, I mean. I think she's fairly good luck for herself." And it was true, Monty had lost a great deal of his family's money while married to Sukie, which everyone had blamed simply on his own calm stupidity. He had never sweated. He had suffered from that hormonal deficiency of the wellborn, an inability to relate himself to the possibility of hard labor. His body had been almost hairless, with that feminine soft bottom.
"Greta must be great in the sack," Sukie was saying. "All those Kinder. Fünf, yet."
Neff had allowed to Alexandra that Greta was ardent but strenuous, very slow to come but determined to do so. She would make a grim witch: those murderous Germans. "We must be nice to her," Alexandra said, back to the subject of Jane. "Speaking to her on the phone yesterday, I was struck by how angry she sounded. That lady is burning up."
Sukie glanced over at her friend, since this seemed a slightly false note. Some intrigue had begun for Alexandra, some new man. In the split-second of Sukie's glance, Hank with his lolling gray Weimaraner tongue swept two Wheat Thins off the crab platter, which she had set down on a much-marred pine sea chest refinished by an antique dealer to be used as a coffee table. Sukie loved her shabby old things; there was a kind of blazonry in them, a costume of rags affected by the soprano in the second act of the opera. Hank's tongue was coming back for the cheese when Sukie caught the motion in the corner of her eye and slapped his muzzle; it was rubbery, in the hard way of automobile tires, so the slap hurt her own fingers. "Ow, you bastard," she said to the dog, and to her friend, "Angri
er than anybody else?," meaning themselves. She took a rasping sip of neat Bourbon. She drank whiskey summer and winter and the reason, which she had forgotten, was that a boyfriend at Cornell had once told her that it brought out the gold flecks in her green eyes. For the same vain reason she tended to dress in shades of brown and in suede with its animal shimmer.
"Oh yes. We're in lovely shape," the bigger, older woman answered, her mind drifting from this irony toward the subject of that conversation with Jane— the new man in town, in the Lenox mansion. But even as it drifted, her mind, like a passenger in an airplane who amidst the life-imperilling sensations of lifting off looks down to marvel at the enamelled precision and glory of the Earth (the houses with their roofs and chimneys so sharp, so Finely made, and the lakes truly mirrors as in the Christmas yards our parents had arranged while we were sleeping; it was all true, and even maps are true!), took note of how lovely Sukie was, bad luck or not, with her vivid hair dishevelled and even her eyelashes looking a little mussed after her hard day of typing and looking for the right word under the harsh lights, her figure in its milky-green sweater and dark suede skirt so erect and trim, her stomach flat and her breasts perky and high and her bottom firm, and that big broad-lipped mouth on her monkeyish face so mischievous and giving and brave.
"Oh I know about him!" she exclaimed, having read Alexandra's mind. "I have such tons to tell, but I wanted to wait until Jane got here."
