by John Updike
But she must, Sukie thought, have heard about our sabbats. The girl was difficult to see through; patches of an unnatural innocence, as though she had been skipped by life, blocked telepathy as lead blocks X-rays. "Oh, a sort of eccentric youngish middle-aged man who's bought the old Lenox place. You know, the big brick mansion toward the beach."
"The haunted plantation, we used to call that. I was fifteen when my parents moved here and really never got to know the area terribly well. There's an enormous amount to it, though it looks like nothing on the map."
Insolent tropical Rebecca brought their coffee in Nemo's heavy white mugs, and the golden johnny-cakes; along with the pronounced warm fragrances of these there carried across the glazed table a spicy sour smell that Sukie linked to the waitress herself, her broad pelvis and heavy coffee-colored breasts, as she leaned over to set the mugs and plates in place. "Is there anything wanting now of you ladies' happiness?" the waitress asked, looking down upon them from the great slopes of herself. Her head looked rather small and sinewy—her black hair done in corn rows of tight braids—upon the mass of her flesh.
"Is there any cream, Becca?" Sukie asked.
"I get you de one." Putting down the little aluminum pitcher, she told them, "You can say 'cream' if you likes, milk is what dc boss puts in every mornin'."
"Thank you, darling, I meant milk." But for a little joke Sukie quickly said to herself the white spell Sator arepo tenet opera rotas, and the milk poured thick and yellow, cream. Curdled flecks rotated on the circular surface of her coffee. Johnnycake turned to buttery fragments in her mouth. Indian ghosts of cornmeal slipped through the forest of her tastebuds. She swallowed and said, of Van Home, "He's nice. You'd like him, once you got over his manner."
"What's wrong with his manner?"
Sukie wiped crumbs from her smiling lips. "He comes on rough, but it's a put-on really. He's really no threat, anybody can manage Darryl. A couple of my girlfriends and I play tennis with him in this fantastic big canvas bubble he's put up. Do you play?"
Jennifer's round shoulders shrugged. "A little. Mosdy at summer camp. And a bunch of us used to go use the U. of C. courts occasionally."
"How long are you going to be around, before you go back to Chicago?"
Jennifer was watching the curds swirl in her own coffee. "A while. It may take until summer to sell the house, and Chris has nothing much to do as it turns out and we get along easily; we always have. Maybe I won't go back. As I said, it wasn't working out that great at Michael Reese."
"Were you having man trouble?"
"Oh no." Her eyes lifted, displaying below her pale irises arcs of pure youthful white. "Men don't seem all that interested in me."
"But why not? If I may say so, you're lovely."
The girl lowered her eyes. "Isn't this funny milk? So thick and sweet. I wonder if it's gone bad."
"No, I think you'll find it very fresh. You haven't eaten your johnnycake."
"I nibbled at it. I never was that crazy about them, they're just fried dough."
"That's why we Rhode Islanders like them. They come as they are. I'll finish yours if you don't want it."
"I must do something wrong that men sense. I used to talk about it with my friends sometimes. My girlfriends."
"A woman needs woman friends," Sukie said complacently.
"I didn't have that many of those either. Chicago is a tough town. These birdlike little ethnic women studying all night and full of all the answers. If you ask them anything personal, though, like what you're doing wrong with these men you have to meet, they clam right up."
"It's hard to be right with men, actually," Sukie told her. "They're very angry with us because we can have babies and they can't. They're terribly jealous, poor dears: Darryl tells us that. I don't really know whether or not to believe him; as I say, a lot of him is pure put-on. At lunch the other day he was trying to describe his theories to me, they all have to do with some chemical whose name begins with 'silly.'"
"Selenium. It's a magical element. It's the secret of those doors in airports that open automatically in front of you. Also it takes the green color out of glass that iron gives it. Selenic acid can dissolve gold."
"Well, my goodness, you do know a thing or two. If you're that into chemistry, maybe you could be Darryl's assistant."
"Chris keeps saying I should just hang out in our house with him a while, at least until we sell it. He's fed up with New York, it's too tough. He says the gays control all the fields he's interested in—window dressing, stage design."
"I think you should."
"Should what?"
"Hang around. Eastwick's amusing." Rather impatiently—the morning was wasting—Sukie brushed all thejohnnycake crumbs from the front of her sweater. "This is not a tough town. This is a sweetie-pie town." She washed down the crumbs in her mouth with a last sip of coffee and stood.
"I feel that," the other woman said, getting the signal and beginning to gather up her scarf, her pathetic patched parka. Dressed and on her feet, Jenny performed a surprising, thrilling mannish action: she took Sukie's hand in a firm grip. "Thank you," she said, "for talking to me. The only other person who has taken any interest in us, except for the lawyers of course, is that nice lady minister, Brenda Parsley."
"She's a minister's wife, not a minister, and I'm not sure she's so nice either."
"Her husband behaved horribly to her, everybody tells me."
"Or she to him."
"I knew you'd say something like that," Jennifer said, and smiled, not unpleasantly; but it made Sukie feel naked, she could be seen right through, with no lead vest of innocence to protect her. Her life was lived in full view of the town; even this little stranger knew a thing or two.
Before Jennifer flicked the scarf into place Sukie noticed that around her neck hung a thin gold chain of the type that for some people supports a cross. But at the base of the girl's slender soft white throat hung the Egyptian tau cross, its loop at the top like the head of a tiny man—an ankh, symbol of life and death both, an ancient sign of mysteries come newly into vogue.
Seeing Sukie's eyes linger there, Jennifer looked oppositely at the other's necklace of copper moons and said, "My mother was wearing copper. A broad plain bracelet I'd never seen before. As if—"
"As if what, dear?"
"As if she were trying to ward something off." "Aren't we all?" said Sukie cheerily. "I'll be in touch about tennis."
The space inside Van Home's great bubble was acoustically and atmospherically weird: the sounds of shouts and of balls being hit seemed smothered even as they rang out, and a faint prickly sensation of pressure weighed on Sukie's freckled brow and forearms. The amber hair of these forearms stood up as if electrified. Beneath the overarching firmament of dun canvas everything seemed in slightly slow motion; the players moved through an aura of compression, though in fact the limp dome stayed inflated because the air within it, pumped by a tireless fan through a boxy plastic mouth sealed by duct tape low in one corner, was warmer than the winter air outside. Today was the shortest day of the year. An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke. Thin powdery lines appeared next to brick edges and exposed tree roots but melted in the wan noon sun; there was no accumulation, though every shop and bank with its seasonal pealing and cotton mimicry was inviting Christmas to be white. Dock Street, as early darkness overtook the muffled shoppers, looked harried, its gala lights a forestallment of sleep, a desperate hollow-eyed attempt to live up to some promise in the bitter black air. Playing tennis in their tights and leg warmers and ski sweaters and double pairs of socks stuffed into their sneakers, the young divorced mothers of Eastwick were taking a holiday from the holiday.
Sukie feared guiltily that she might have spoiled it for the others by bringing Jennifer Gabriel along. Not that Darryl Van Home had objected to her suggestion over the phone; it was his nature to welcome new recruits and pe
rhaps their little circle of four was becoming narrow for him. Like most men, especially wealthy men, especially wealthy men from New York City, he was easily bored. But Jennifer had taken the liberty of bringing her brother along, and Darryl would surely be appalled by the entry into his home of this boy, who was in the newest fashion of youth inarticulate and sullen, with glazed eyes, a slack fuzzy jaw, and tangled curly hair so dirty as to be scarcely blond. Instead of tennis sneakers he had worn beat-up rubber-cleated running shoes that even in the chill vastness of the bubble gave off a stale foul smell of male sweat. Sukie wondered how pristine Jennifer could stand a housemate so slovenly. Monty for all his faults had been fastidious, always taking showers and rinsing out coffee cups she had abandoned on an end table after a phone conversation. The boy had borrowed a racket and shown no ability to hit the ball over the net, and no embarrassment at his inability, only a sluggish petulance. Ever the courteous host and seeming gentleman, Darryl, though all suited up to play, in an outfit of maroon jogging pants and purple down vest that made him look like a macaw, had suggested that the four females enjoy a set of ladies' doubles while he took Christopher away for a tour of the library, the lab, the little conservatory of poisonous tropical plants. The boy followed with languid ingratitude as Darryl gestured and spouted words; through the walls of the bubble they could hear him exclaiming all the way up the path to the house. Sukie did feel guilty.
She took Jenny as her partner in case the girl proved inept, though in warming up she had shown a firm stroke from both sides; in play she showed herself to be a spunky sound-enough player, though without much range—which may have been partly deference to Sukie's leggy, reaching style. At about the age of eleven, Sukie, learning the game on an old, rhododendron-screened macadam court a friend of her family's had on his lakeside estate, had been complimented by her father for a spectacular, lunging "get"; and ever after she had been a "fetching" style of player, even lagging in one corner and then the other to make her returns seem spectacular. It was the ball right in on her fists Sukie sometimes couldn't handle. She and Jenny quickly went up four games to one on Alexandra and Jane, and then the tricks began. Though the object coming into Sukie's forehand was an optic-yellow Wilson, what she got her racket on—knees bent, head down, power flowing forward and up for a topspin return—was a gob of putty; the weight of it took a chip out of her elbow, it felt like. What dribbled up to the net between Jennifer's feet was inarguably, again, a tennis ball. On the next point the serve came to her backhand and, braced against another lump of putty, she felt something lighter than a sparrow fly from her strings; it disappeared into the shadowy vault of the dome, beyond the ring of clear plastic portholes that admitted light, and fell far out of bounds in the form of an optic-yellow Wilson.
"Play fair, you two fiends," Sukie shouted across the net.
Jane Smart called back flutingly, "Keep your eye on the ball, sugar, and bad things won't happen."
"The hell you say, Jane Pain. I put perfect swings into both those shots." Sukie was angry because it wasn't fair, when her partner was an innocent. Jennifer, who had been poised on the half-court line, had seen only the outcome of these shots and turned now to show Sukie a forgiving, encouraging face, heart-shaped and flushed a bright pink. On the next exchange, the girl darted to the net after a weak return from Jane, and Sukie willed Alexandra to freeze; Jenny's sharp volley thudded against the big woman's immobilized flesh. Released from the spell in a twinkling, Alexandra rubbed the stung spot on her thigh.
Reproachfully she told Sukie, "That would have really hurt if I weren't wearing woolies under my tights."
A welt would arise there, though, and Sukie apologetically pleaded, "Come on, let's just play real tennis." But both opponents were sore now. A grinding pain seized Sukie's joints as she stretched to volley an easy shot coming over the center of the net; pulled up short, she helplessly watched the blurred ball bounce on the center stripe. But she heard Jenny's feet drum behind her and saw the ball, miraculously returned, drop between Jane and Alexandra, who had thought they had the point won. This brought the game back to deuce, and Sukie, still staggered by that sudden ache injected into her joints but determined to protect her partner from all this malefica, said the blasphemous backwards words Retson Retap three times rapidly to herself and created an air pocket, a fault in the crystal of space, above their opponents' forecourt, so that Jane double-faulted twice, the ball diving in mid-trajectory as from a table edge.
That made the game score five to one and brought the serve to Jenny. When she tossed the ball up, it became an egg and spattered all over her upturned face, through the gut strings. Sukie threw down her racket in disgust and it became a snake, that then had nowhere to slither to, the great bubble being sealed all along the edge; frantically the creature, damned at the dawn of creation, whipped its S's and zetas of motion back and forth across the blood-colored AsPhlex that framed the green court, its diagrammed baselines and boundaries. "All right," Sukie announced. "That does it. The game's over." little Jenny with an inadequate feminine handkerchief was trying to wipe away from around her eyes the webby watery albumen and the yolk with its fleck of blood. The egg had been fertilized. Sukie took the hanky from her and dabbed. "I'm sorry, so sorry," she said. "They just can't stand to lose, they are terrible women."
"At least," Alexandra called across the net apologetically, "it wasn't a rotten egg."
"It's all right," Jennifer said, a little breathless but her voice still level. "I knew you all have these powers. Brenda Parsley told me."
"That idiotic blabbermouth," Jane Smart said. The other two witches had come around the net to help wipe Jennifer's face. "We don't have any powers she doesn't, now that she's been left."
"Is that what does it, being left?" Jenny asked.
"Or doing the leaving," Alexandra said. "The strange thing is it doesn't make any difference. You'd think it would. Anyway, I'm sorry about the egg. But my thigh's going to be black and blue tomorrow because Sukie wouldn't let me move; it wasn't really playing the game."
Sukie said, "It was as much playing the game as what you were doing to me."
"You mishit those shots plain and simple," Jane Smart called over; she had gone to the edge of the court to look for something.
"I thought too," said Jennifer softly, courting the others, "your head came up, at least on the backhand."
"You weren't watching."
"I was. And you have a tendency to straighten your knees at impact."
"I don't. You're supposed to be my partner. You're supposed to encourage me."
"You were wonderful," the girl said obediently.
Jane returned holding in her cupped palm a little heap of black sand she had scraped up with her fingernails at the side of the court. "Close your eyes," she ordered Jennifer, and threw the sand directly into her face. Magically, the glutinous remains of egg evaporated, leaving, however, the grit, which gave the smooth upturned features a startled barbaric look, as if wearing a speckled mask.
"Maybe it's time for our bath," Alexandra remarked, gazing maternally at Jennifer's gritty face.
Sukie wondered how they could have their usual bath with these strangers among them and blamed herself, for having been too forthcoming in inviting them. It was her mother's fault; back home in New York State there had always been extra people at the dinner table, people in off the street, possible angels in disguise to her mother's way of thinking. Aloud Sukie protested, "But Darryl hasn't played yet! Or Christopher," she added, though the boy had been lackadaisical and arrogantly inept.
"They don't seem to be coming back," Jane Smart observed.
"Well we better go do something or we'll all catch cold," Alexandra said. She had borrowed Jenny's damp handkerchief (monogrammed J) and with an intricately folded corner of it was removing, grain by grain, the sand from the girl's docile round face, tilted up toward this attention like a pink flower to the sun.
Sukie felt a pang of jealousy.
She swung her arms and said, "Let's go up to the house," though her muscles still had lots of tennis in them. "Unless somebody wants to play singles."
Jane said, "Maybe Darryl."
"Oh he's too marvellous, he'd slaughter me."
"I don't think so," Jenny said softly, having observed their host warm up and as yet unable to see, fully, the wonder of him. "You have much better form. He's quite wild, isn't he?"
Jane Smart said coldly, "Darryl Van Home is quite the most civilized person I know. And the most tolerant." Irritably she went on, "Lexa dear, do stop fussing with that. It'll all come off in the bath."
"I didn't bring a bathing suit," said Jennifer, her eyes wide and questing from face to face.
"It's quite dark in there, nobody can see anything," Sukie told her. "Or if you'd rather you can go home."
"Oh, no. It's too depressing. I keep imagining Daddy's body hanging in midair and that makes me too scared to go up and start sorting the things in the attic."
And it occurred to Sukie that whereas the three of them all had children they should be tending to, Jennifer and Christopher were children, tending to themselves. She suffered a sad vision of Clyde's prick, a father's, which could have been her own father's and in truth had seemed a relic of sorts, with a jaundiced tinge on its underside when erect and enormously long gray hairs, like hairs from an old woman's head, snaking down from the testicles. No wonder he had overreacted when she spread her legs. Sukie led the other women out of the tennis bubble, whose oval door unzipped from either side and had to be used quickly, to keep warm air from escaping.
The dying December day nipped at their faces, their sneakered feet. Coal, that loathsome Labrador of Alexandra's, and Darryl's blotchy nervous collie, Needlenose, who had together trapped and torn apart some furry creature in the island's little woods, came and romped around them, their black muzzles bloody. The earth of the once gently bellied lawn leading up to the house had been torn by bulldozers to build the court this fall and the clumps of sod and clay, frozen hard, made a moonscape treacherous to tread. Tears of cold in Sukie's eyes gave her companions a rainbow aura and it hurt her cheeks to talk. On the firmness of the driveway she broke into a sprint; at her back the others followed like a single clumsy beast on the gravel. The great oak door yielded to her push as if sensate, and in the marble-floored foyer, with its hollow elephant's foot, a sulphurous pillow of heat hit her in the face. Fidel was nowhere in sight. Following a mutter of voices, the women found Darryl and Christopher silting on opposite sides of the round leather-topped table in the library. Old comic books and a tea tray were arranged on the table between them. Above them hung the melancholy stuffed moose and deer heads that had been left by the sporting Lenoxes: mournful glass eyes that did not blink though burdened with dust. "Who won?" Van Home asked. "The good or the wicked?"
