by John Updike
"Which witch is which?" Jane Smart asked, flinging herself down on a crimson beanbag chair under a cliff of bound arcana, pale-spined giant volumes identified in spidery Latin. "The fresh blood won," she said, "as it usually does." Fluffy, malformed Thumbkin had been standing still as a statuette on the hearth tiles, so close to the fire the tips of her whiskers seemed to spark; now with great dignity she stalked over to Jane's ankles and, as if Jane's white athletic socks were scratching posts, sunk the arcs of her claws deeply in, her tail at the same time shivering bolt upright as though she were blissfully urinating. Jane yowled and with the toe of one sneakered foot hoisted the animal high into space. Thumbkin spun like a great snow-flake before noiselessly landing on her double paws over near where the brass-handled poker, tongs, and ash shovel glittered in their stand. The offended cat's eyes blinked and then joined their brass glitter; the vertical pupils narrowed in their yellow irises, contemplating the gathering.
"They began to use dirty tricks," Sukie tattled. "I feel gypped."
"That's how you tell a real woman," joked Darryl Van Home in his throaty, faraway voice. "She always feels gypped."
"Darryl, don't be dreary and epigrammatical," Alexandra said. "Chris, does that tea taste as good as it looks?"
" IT’s O.K.," the boy managed to get out, sneering and not meeting anyone's eye.
Fidel had materialized. His khaki jacket looked more mussed than usual. Had he been with Rebecca in the kitchen?
"Ti para las sefioras y la senorita, por favor," Darryl told him. Fidel's English was excellent and increasingly idiomatic, but it was part of their master-servant relationship that they spoke Spanish as long as Van Home knew the words. "Si, senor."
"Ra pidamente," Van Home pronounced. "Si, si." Away he went.
"Oh isn't this cozy!" Jane Smart exclaimed, but in truth something about it dissatisfied Sukie and made her sad: the whole house was like a stage set, stunning from one angle but from others full of gaps and unresolved shabbiness. It was an imitation of a real house somewhere else.
Sukie pouted, "I didn't get the tennis out of my system. Darryl: come down and play singles with me. Just until the light goes. You're all suited up for it and everything."
He said gravely, "What about young Chris here? He hasn't played either."
"He doesn't want to I'm sure," Jennifer interjected in a sisterly voice.
"I stink," the boy agreed. He really was blah, Sukie thought. A girl his age would be so amusing, so alert and socially sensitive, gathering in impressions, turning them into flirtation and sympathy, making the room her web, her nest, her theatre. Sukie felt herself quite frantic, standing and tossing her hair, verging on rudeness and exhibitionism, and she didn't quite know what to blame, except that she was embarrassed at having brought the Gabriels here—never again!— and hadn't had sex with a man since Clyde committed suicide two weeks ago. She had found herself lately at night thinking of Ed, wondering what he was doing off in the underground with that little low-class smudge Dawn Polanski.
Darryl, intuitive and kind for all his coarse manner, rose in his red jogging pants and put his purple down vest back on, plus a Day-Glo orange hunting cap with a bill and earflaps that he sometimes wore for a joke, and took up his racket, an aluminum Head. "One quick set," he warned, "with a seven-point tie breaker, if it goes to six-six. First ball turns into a toad, you forfeit. Anybody want to come watch?" Nobody did, they were waiting for their té. Lonely as a married couple then, the two of them went out into the dimming gray afternoon—the silent woods and bushes lavender and the sky an enamelled green in the east—down to the dome with its graveyard closeness and quiet.
The tennis was grand; not only did Darryl play like a robot, clumsy-looking but infallible, but he drew forth from Sukie amazing shots, impossible gets turned into singing winners, the segmented breadths and widths of the court miniaturized by her unnatural speed and adroitness. The ball hung like a moon as she raced for it; her body became an instrument of thought, present wherever she willed it. She even brought off a few backhand overheads. She felt herself stretch at the top of her serves like a bow releasing an arrow. She was Diana, Isis, Astarte. She was female grace and strength shed, for this silver moment, of its rough garb of servitude. Gloom gathered in the corners of the dun bubble; the portholes of sky hovered overhead like a mammoth crown of aquamarines; her eyes could no longer see the dark opponent scrambling and thumping and heaving on the far side of the net. The ball kept coming back, and with pace, springing up at her face like a predator repeatedly reborn from the painted asphalt. Hit, hit, she kept hitting, and the ball got smaller and smaller—the size of a golf ball, the size of a golden pea, and at last there was no bounce on the inky far side of the net, just a leathery swallowing sound, and the game was over. "That was bliss," Sukie announced, to whoever was there.
Van Home's voice scraped and rumbled forward, saying, "I was a pal to you, how's about being a pal to me?"
"O.K.," Sukie said. "What do I do?"
"Kiss my ass," he said huskily. He offered it to her over the net. It was hairy, or downy, depending on how you felt about men. Left, right...
"And in the middle," he demanded.
The smell seemed to be a message he must deliver, a word brought from afar, not entirely unsweet, a whiff of camel essence coming through the flaps of the silken tents of the Dragon Throne's encampment in the Gobi Desert.
"Thanks," Van Home said, pulling up his pants. In the dark he sounded like a New York taxi driver, raspy. "Seems silly to you, I know, but it gives me a helluva boost."
They walked together up the hill, Sukie's sweat caking on her skin. She wondered how they would manage the hot tub with Jennifer Gabriel there and showing no disposition to leave. Back in the house, the loutish brother was alone in the library, reading a big blue volume that Sukie in a glance over his shoulder saw to be bound comic books. A caped man in a blue hood with pointed ears: Batman. "The complete fucking set," Van Home boasted. "It cost me a bundle, some of those old ones, going back to the war, that if I'd had the sense to save as a kid 1 could have made a fortune on. Christ I wasted my childhood waiting for next month's issue. Loved The Joker. Loved The Penguin. Loved the Batmobile in its underground garage. You're both too young to have gotten the bug."
The boy uttered a complete sentence. "They used to be on TV."
"Yeah, but they camped it up. They didn't have to do that. They made it all a joke, that was damn poor taste. The old comic books, there's real evil there. That white face used to haunt my dreams, I'm not kidding. How do you feel about Captain Marvel?" Van Home pulled from the shelves a volume from another set, bound in red rather than blue, and with a comic fervor boomed, "Sha-ZAM!" To Sukie's surprise he settled himself in a wing chair and began to leaf through, his big face skidding with pleasure.
Sukie followed the faint sound of female voices through the long room of moldering Pop Art, the small room of unpacked boxes, and the double doors leading to the slate-lined bath. The lights in their round ribbed wells had been rheostatted to low. The stereo's red eye was watching over the gentle successions of a Schubert sonata. Three heads of pinned-up hair were disposed upon the surface of steaming water. The voices murmured on, and no head turned to watch Sukie undress. She slid from her many stiff layers of tennis clothes and walked through the humid air naked, sat on the stone edge, and arched her back to give herself to the water, at first too fiery to bear but then not, not. Oh. Slowly she became a new self. Water like sleep sucks our natural heaviness away. Alexandra's and Jane's familiar bodies bobbed about her; their waves and hers merged in one healing agitation. Jennifer Gabriel's round head and round shoulders rested in the center of her vision; the girl's round breasts floated just beneath the surface of the transparent black water and in it her hips and feet were foreshortened like a misbegotten fetus's. "Isn't this lovely?" Sukie asked her.
"It is."
"He has all these controls," Sukie explained. "Is he going to come in
with us?" Jennifer asked, afraid.
"I think not," Jane Smart said, "this time." "Out of deference to you, dear," Alexandra added. "I feel so safe. Should I?" "Why not?" one of the witches asked. "Feel safe while you can," another advised. "The lights are like stars, aren't they? Random, I mean."
"Watch this." They all knew the controls now. At the push of a Finger the roof rumbled back. The first pale piercings—planets, red giants—showed early evening's mothering turquoise dome to be an illusion, a nothing. There were spheres beyond spheres, each transparent or opaque as the day and year turned.
"My goodness. The outdoors."
"Yess."
"Yet I don't feel cold." "Heat rises."
"How much money do you think he put into all this?"
"Thousands."
"But why? For what purpose?" "For us." "He loves us." "Only us?"
"We don't really know." "It's not a useful question." "Aren't you content?"
"Yes." "Yess."
"But I'm thinking Chris and I should be getting back. The pets should be fed." "What pets?"
"Felicia Gabriel used to say we shouldn't waste protein on pets when everybody in Asia was starving."
"I didn't know Clyde and Felicia had pets."
"They didn't. But shortly after we got here somebody put a puppy in the Volvo one night. And a cat came to the door a little later."
"Think of us. We have children."
"Poor neglected little scruffy things," Jane Smart said in a mocking tone that indicated she was imitating another voice, a voice "out there" raised in hostile gossip against them.
"Well I was raised very protectively," Sukie offered, "and it got to be oppressive. Looking back on it I don't think my parents were doing me any favors, they were working out some problems of their own."
"You can't live others' lives for them," said Alexandra driftingly.
"Women must stop serving everybody and then getting even psychologically. That's been our politics up to now."
"Oh. That does feel good," Jenny said.
"It's therapy."
"Close the roof again. I want to feel cozy."
"And shut off the fucking Schubert."
"Suppose Darryl comes in."
"With that hideous kid."
"Christopher."
"Let them."
"Mm. You're strong."
"My art, it giffs me muskles efen (inter me fingernails, like."
"Lexa. How much tequila was in your tea?" "How late does the supermarket toward Old Wick stay open?"
"I have no idea, I absolutely have stopped going there. If the Superette downtown doesn't have it, we don't eat it."
"But they have hardly any fresh vegetables and no fresh meat."
"Nobody notices. All they want are those frozen dinners so they don't have to come to the table and interrupt TV, and hero sandwiches. The onions they slop in! I think it's what made me stop kissing the brats good night."
"My oldest, it's incredible, nothing but crinkle chips and Pecan Santhes since he was twelve and still he's six foot two, and not a cavity. The dentist says he's never seen such a beautiful mouth."
"It's the fluoride."
"I like Schubert. He isn't always after you like Beethoven is." "Or Mahler." "Oh my God, Mahler." "He really is monstrously too much." "My turn." "My turn."
"Ooh, lovely. You've found the spot." "What does it mean when your neck always hurts, and up near your armpits?" "That's lymph. Cancer." "Please, don't even joke." "Try menopause." "I wouldn't care about that." "I look forward to it."
"You do wonder, sometimes, if being fertile isn't overrated."
"You hear terrible things about IUDs now."
"The best subs, funnily enough, are from that supertacky-looking pizza shack at East Beach. But they close October to August. I hear the man and his wife
go to Florida and live with the millionaires in Fort Lauderdale, that's how well they do."
"That one-eyed man who cooks in a tie-dyed undershirt?"
"I've never been sure if it's really one eye or is he always winking?"
"It's his wife does the pizzas. I wish I knew how she keeps the crusts from getting soggy."
"I have all this tomato sauce and my children have gone on strike against spaghetti."
"Give it to Joe to take home."
"He takes enough home."
"Well, he leaves you something, too."
"Don't be coarse."
"What does he take home?"
"Smells."
"Memories."
"Oh. My goodness."
"Just let yourself float."
"We're all here."
"We're right with you."
"I feel that, "Jenny said in a voice even smaller and softer than her usual one.
"How very lovely you are."
"Wouldn't it be funny to be that young again?"
"I can't believe I ever was. It must have been somebody else."
"Close your eyes. One last nasty piece of grit right here in the corner. There."
"Wet hair is really the problem, this time of year."
"The other day my breath froze my scarf right to my face."
"I'm thinking of getting mine layered. They say the new barber on the other side of Landing Square, in that little long building where they used to sharpen saws, does a wonderful job."
"On women?"
"They have to, men have stopped getting them. They've upped the price, though. Seven fifty, that's without any wave or wash or anything."
"The last thing I did for my father was wheel him into the barber for a haircut. He knew it was his last, too. He announced it to everybody, all these men sitting around. 'This is my daughter, who's bringing me in for the last haircut I'll have in my life.'"
"Kazmierczak Square. Have you seen the new sign?"
"Horrible. 1 can't believe it'll last."
"People forget. The schoolchildren now, World War Two to them is just a myth."
"Don't you wish you still had skin like this? Not a scar, not a mole."
"Actually, there is a little pink thing I noticed the other day, up high. Higher."
"Oh yess. That hurt?"
"No."
"Good."
"Did you ever notice, once you start investigating yourself for lumps like they say you should, they seem to be everywhere? The body is just terribly complicated."
"Please don't even make me think about it."
"In the new dictionary they got at the paper there are these transparencies bound in with regular pages at the entry 'Man,' only a woman's body is there too. Veins, muscles, bones, each on a sheet of their own, it's incredible. How it all fits."
"I don't think it's really complicated, it's just our thinking about it makes it complicated. Like a lot of things."
"How wonderfully round they are. Perfect semicircles."
"Hemispheres."
"That sounds so political."
"Hemispheres of influence."
"That is one of the unjoys. Erogenous-zone sag. I looked at my bottom in the mirror the other day and here were these definite undeniable puckers. Maybe that's why I have a stiff neck."
"Nemo's makes a pretty good sausage sub."
"Too many hot red peppers. Fidel is getting to Rebecca. He's flavoring her."
"What color do you think their babies would be?"
"Beige."
"Mocha."
"Does that feel too intrusive?"
"Not exactly."
"How well she speaks!"
"Oh God: the trouble with being young and beautiful is nobody helps you really appreciate it. When 1 was twenty-two and at my peak I guess all I did was worry about pleasing my mother-in-law and if I was as good in bed as these whores Monty knew in college."
"It's like being rich. You know you have something and you get uptight about being taken advantage of."
"Darryl doesn't seem to let it worry him."
"How rich is he, really?"
"He still has
n't paid Joe's bill, I know."
"That's how the rich are. They hold their money and collect the interest."
"Pay attention, love."
"How can I not?"
"My fingertips are all shrivelled."
"Maybe it's time we see if amphibians can lay their eggs on land."
"Okey-dokey."
"Here we go."
Splashing, they emerged cumbersomely: silver born
in a chemical tumult from lead. They groped for towels.
"Where is he?"
"Asleep? I gave him a pretty strenuous game, if I do say so."
"They say, unless you use oil afterwards, water isn't good for your skin past a certain age." "We have ointments." "We have buckets of ointments." "Just stretch out. Are you still relaxed?" "Oh yes. I really am."
"Here's another, just under your pretty little boob. Like a tiny pink snout." Dark as the room was, it did not seem strange that this could be seen, for the pupils of the four of them had expanded as if to overflow their gray, hazel, brown, and blue irises. One witch pinched Jennifer's false teat and asked, "Feel anything?"
"No."
"Good."
"Feel any shame?" another asked. "No."
"Good," pronounced the third. "Isn't she good?" "She is."
"Just think, 'Float.'" "I feel I'm flying." "So do we." "All the time." "We're right with you." "It's killing."
"I love being a woman, really," Sukie said. "You might as well," Jane Smart said dryly. "I mean, it's not just propaganda," Sukie insisted. "My baby," Alexandra was saying. "Oh" escaped Jenny's lips.
