The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

  "We must seal the malignancy in," Alexandra said. "Jane, do you have Reynolds Wrap?"

  The other two giggled again. They were scared, Alexandra realized. Why? Nature kills constandy, and we call her beautiful. Alexandra felt drugged, immo­bilized, huge like a queen ant or bee; the things of the world were pouring through her and reemerging tinged with her spirit, her will.

  Jane fetched too large a sheet of aluminum foil, torn off raggedly in panic. It crackled and shivered in the speed of her walk. Children's footsteps were pounding down the hall. "Each spit," Alexandra quickly commanded, having bedded Jenny upon the trembling sheet. "Spit so the seed of death will grow," she insisted, and led the way.

  Jane spitting was like a cat sneezing; Sukie hawked a bit like a man. Alexandra folded the foil, bright side in, around and around the charm, softly so as not to dislodge the pins or stab herself. The result looked like a potato wrapped to be baked.

  Two of Jane's children, an obese boy and a gaunt little girl with a dirty face, crowded around curiously. "What's that?" the girl demanded to know. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of evil. Both her upper and lower teeth were trussed in a glittering fretwork of braces. She had been eating something sweet and greenish.

  Jane told her, "A project of Mrs. Spofford's that she's been showing us. It's very delicate and I know she doesn't want to undo it again so please don't ask her."

  "I'm starving," the boy said. "And we don't want hamburgers from Nemo's again, we want a home-cooked meal like other kids get."

  The girl was studying Jane closely. In embryo she had Jane's hatchet profile. "Mother, are you drunk?"

  Jane slapped the child with a magical quickness, as if the two of them, mother and daughter, were parts of a single wooden toy that performed this action over and over. Sukie and Alexandra, whose own starved children were howling out there in the dark, took this signal to leave. They paused on the brick walk outside the house, from whose wide lit windows spilled the spiralling tumult of a family quarrel. Alexandra asked Sukie, "Want custody of this?"

  The foil-wrapped weight in her hand felt warm.

  Sukie's lean lovely nimble hand already rested on the door handle of her Corvair. "I would, sweetie, but I have these rats or mice or whatever they are that nibbled at the other. Don't they adore candle wax?"

  Back at her own house, which was more sheltered from the noise of traffic on Orchard Road now that her hedge of lilacs was leafing in, Alexandra put the thing, wanting to forget it, on a high shelf in the kitchen, along with some flawed bubbles she hadn't had the heart to throw away and the sealed jar holding the polychrome dust that had once been dear old well-intentioned Ozzie.

  "He goes everywhere with her," Sukie said to Jane over the phone. "The Historical Society, the conser­vation hearings. They make themselves ridiculous, trying to be so respectable. He's even joined the Uni­tarian choir."

  "Darryl? But he has utterly no voice," Jane said sharply.

  "Well, he has a little something, a kind of a baritone. He sounds just like an organ pipe." "Who told you all this?"

  "Rose Hallybread. They've joined at Brenda's too. Darryl apparently had the Hallybreads over to dinner and Arthur wound up telling him he wasn't as crazy as he had first thought. This was around two in the morning, they had all spent hours in the lab, boring

  Rose silly. As far as I could understand, Darryl's new idea is to breed a certain kind of microbe in some huge body of water like Great Salt Lake—the saltier the better, evidently—and this little bug just by breed­ing will turn the entire lake into a huge battery some­how. They'd put a fence around it, of course."

  "Of course, my dear. Safety first."

  A pause, while Sukie tried to puzzle through if this was meant sarcastically and, if so, why. She was just giving the news. Now that they no longer met at Darryl's they saw each other less frequently. They had not officially abandoned their Thursdays, but in the month since they had put the spell on Jenny one of the three had always had an excuse not to come. "So how are you?" Sukie asked.

  "Keeping busy," Jane said.

  "I keep running into Bob Osgood downtown."

  Jane didn't bite. "Actually," she said, "I'm unhappy. I was standing in the back yard and this black wave came over me and I realized it had something to do with summer, everything green and all the flowers breaking out, and it hit me what I hate about summer: the children will be home all day."

  "Aren't you wicked?" Sukie asked. "I rather enjoy mine, now that they're old enough to talk adult talk. Watching television all the time they're much better informed on world affairs than I ever was; they want to move to France. They say our name is French and they think France is a civilized country that never fights wars and where nobody kills anybody."

  "Tell them about Gilles de Rais," Jane said.

  "I never thought of him; I did say, though, that it was the French made the mess in Vietnam in the first place and that we were trying to clean it up. They wouldn't buy that. They said we were trying to create more markets for Coca-Cola."

  There was another pause. "Well," Jane said. "Have you seen her?" "Who?"

  "Her. Jeanne d'Arc. Madame Curie. How does she look?"

  "Jane, you're amazing. How did you know? That I saw her downtown."

  "Sweetie, it's obvious from your voice. And why else would you be calling me? How was the little pet?"

  "Very pleasant, actually. It was rather embarrass­ing. She said she and Darryl have been missing us so much and wish we'd just drop around some time informally, they don't like to think they have to extend a formal invitation, which they will do soon, she prom­ised; it's just they've been terribly busy lately, what with some very hopeful developments in the lab and some legal affairs that keep taking Darryl to New York. Then she went on about how much she loves New York, compared with Chicago, which is windy and tough and where she never felt safe, even right in the hospital. Whereas New York is just a set of cozy little villages, all heaped one on top of the other. Etcetera, et cetera."

  "I'll never set foot in that house again," Jane Smart vehemently, needlessly vowed.

  "She really did seem unaware," Sukie said, "that we might be offended by her stealing Darryl right out from under our noses that way."

  "Once you've established in your own mind that you're innocent," Jane said, "you can get away with anything. How did she look?"

  Now the pause was on Sukie's side. In the old days their conversations had bubbled along, their sentences braiding, flowing one on top of the other, each antic­ipating what the other was going to say and delighting in it nonetheless, as confirmation of a pooled identity.

  "Not great," Sukie pronounced at last. "Her skin seemed ... transparent, somehow."

  "She was always pale," Jane said.

  "But this wasn't just pale. Anyway, baby, it's May. Everybody should have a little color by now. We went down to Moonstone last Sunday and just soaked in the dunes. My nose looks like a strawberry; Toby kids me about it."

  "Toby?"

  "You know, Toby Bergman: he took over at the Word after poor Clyde and broke his leg on the ice this winter? His leg is all healed now, though it's smaller than the other. He never does these exercises with a lead shoe you're supposed to do."

  "I thought you hated him."

  "That was before I got to know him, when I was still all hysterical about Clyde. Toby's a lot of fun, actually. He makes me laugh."

  "Isn't he a lot... younger?"

  "We talk about that. He'll be two whole years out of Brown this June. He says I'm the youngest person at heart he's ever met, he kids me about how I'm always eating junk food and wanting to do crazy things like stay up all night listening to talk shows. I guess he's very typical of his generation, they don't have all the hangups about age and race and all that that we were brought up on. Believe me, darling, he's a big improvement on Ed and Clyde in a number of ways, including some I won't go into. It's not com­plicated, we just have fun."

  "Super," Jane said in dismissal, droppi
ng the r. "Did her... spirit seem the same?"

  "She came on a little less shy," Sukie said thought­fully. "You know, the married woman and all. Pale, like I said, but maybe it was the time of day. We had a cup of coffee in Nemo's, only she had cocoa because she hasn't been sleeping well and is trying to do with­out caffeine. Rebecca was all over her, insisted we try these blueberry muffins that are part of Nemo's cam­paign to get some of the nice-people luncheon busi­ness back from the Bakery. She hardly gave me the time of day. Rebecca. She just took one bite of hers, Jenny this is, and asked if I could finish it for her, she didn't want to hurt Rebecca's feelings. Actually, 1 was happy to, I've been ravenous lately, I can't imagine what it is, I can't be pregnant, can I? These Jews are real potent. She said she didn't know why, but she just hadn't had much of an appetite lately. Jenny. I wondered if she was fishing, to see if I knew why by any chance. She may know in her tones about the... the thing we did, I don't know. I felt sorry for her, the way she seemed so apologetic, about not having an appetite."

  "It really is true, isn't it?" Jane observed. "You pay for every sin."

  There were so many sins in the world it took Sukie a second to figure out that Jane meant Jenny's sin of marrying Darryl.

  Joe had been there that morning and they had had their worst scene yet. Gina was in her fourth month by now and it was starting to show; the whole town could see. And Alexandra's children were about to be let out of school and would make these weekday trysts in her home impossible. Which was a relief to her; it would be a great relief, frankly, for her not to have to listen any more to his irresponsible and really rather presumptuous talk of leaving Gina. She was sick of hearing it, it meant nothing, and she wouldn't want it to mean anything, the whole idea upset and insulted her. He was her lover, wasn't that enough? Had been her lover, after today. Things end. Things begin, and things end. All grown-ups know that, why didn't he? Caught as he was so severely, rotated on the point of her tongue as on a spit, Joe became hot, and walloped her shoulder a few times with a fist kept loose enough not to hurt, and ran around the room naked, his body stocky and white and two dark swirls of hair on his back suggesting to her eyes butterfly wings (his spine its body) or a veneer of thin marble slices set so the molten splash of grain within made a symmetrical pattern. There was something delicate and organic about the hair on Joe's body, whereas Darryl's had been a rough mat. Joe wept; he took off his hat to beat his head on a doorframe: it was parody and yet real grief, actual loss. The room, the Williamsburg-green of its old woodwork and the big peonies of its curtains with their concealed clown faces and the cracked ceiling that had mutely and conspiratorially watched over their naked couplings, was part of their grief, for little is more precious in an affair for a man than being welcomed into a house he has done noth­ing to support, or more momentous for the woman than this welcoming, this considered largesse, her house his, his on the strength of his cock alone, his cock and company, the smell and amusement and weight of him—no buying you with mortgage pay­ments, no blackmailing you with shared children, but welcomed simply, into the walls of yourself, an admis­sion dignified by freedom and equality. Joe couldn't stop thinking of teams and marriage; he wanted his own penates to preside. He had demeaned with "good" intentions her gracious gift. In his anguish he sur­prised Alexandra by getting erect again, and since his time was short now, their morning wasted in words, she let him take her his favorite way, from behind, she on her knees. What a force of nature his pounding was! How he convulsed, shooting off! The whole epi­sode left her feeling tumbled and cleansed, like a towel from the dryer needing to be folded and stacked on some airy shelf of her sunny, empty home.

  The house, too, seemed happier for his visit, in this interval before the eternity of their parting sank in. The beams and floorboards of this windy, moistening time of the year chatted among themselves, creaking, and a window sash when her back was turned would give a swift rattle like a sudden bird cry.

  She lunched on last night's salad, the lettuce limp in its chilled bath of oil. She must lose weight or she couldn't wear a bathing suit all summer. Another fail­ing of Joe's was his forgivingness of her fat—like those primitive men who turn their wives into captives of obesity, mountains of black flesh waiting in their thatched huts. Already Alexandra felt slimmer, light­ened of her lover. Her intuition told her the phone would ring. It did. It would be Jane or Sukie, lively with malice. But from the grid pressed against her ear emerged a younger, lighter voice, with a tension of timidity in it, a pocket of fear over which a mem­brane pulsed as at a frog's throat.

  "Alexandra, you're all avoiding me." It was the voice Alexandra least in the world wanted to hear.

  "Well, Jenny, we want to give you and Darryl pri­vacy. Also we hear you have other friends."

  "Yes, we do, Darryl loves what he calls input. But it's not like... we were."

  "Nothing's ever quite the same," Alexandra told her. "The stream flows; the little bird hatches and breaks the egg. Anyway. You're doing fine."

  "But I'm not, Lexa. Something's very wrong."

  Her voice in the older woman's mind's eye lifted toward her like a face holding itself up to be scrubbed, a grit of hoarseness upon its cheeks. "What's very wrong?" Her own voice was like a tarpaulin or great dropcloth which in being spread out on the earth catches some air under it and lifts in a bubble, a soft wave of hollowness.

  "I'm tired all the time," Jenny said, "and not much appetite. I'm subconsciously so hungry I keep having these dreams of food, but when I sit down to the reality I can't make myself eat. And other things. Pains in the night that come and go. My nose runs all the time. It's embarrassing; Darryl says I snore at night, which I never did before in my whole life. Remember those lumps I tried to show you and you couldn't find?"

  "Yes. Vaguely." The sensations of that casual hunt rushed horribly into her fingertips.

  "Well, there are more. In the, in the groin, and up under my ears. Isn't that where the lymph nodes are?"

  Jenny's ears had never been pierced, and she was always losing little childish clip-on earrings in the tub room, on the black slates, among the cushions. "I really don't know, honey. You should see a doctor if you're worried."

  "Oh I did. Doc Pat. He sent me to the Westwick Hospital to have tests."

  "And did the tests show anything?"

  "They said not really; but then they want me to have more tests. They're all so cagey and grave and talk in this funny voice, as though I'm a naughty child who might pee on their shoes if they don't keep me at a distance. They're scared of me. By being sick at all I'm showing them up somehow. They say things like my white-cell count is 'just a bit out of the high normal range.' They know I worked at a big city hos­pital and that puts them on the defensive, but I don't know anything about systemic disorders, I saw frac­tures and gallstones mostly. It would all be silly except at night when I lie down I can feel something's not right, something's working at me. They keep asking me if I'd been exposed to much radiation. Well of course I'd worked with it at Michael Reese but they're so careful, draping you in lead and putting you in this thick glass booth when you throw the switch, all I could think of was, in my early teens just before we moved to Eastwick and were still in Warwick, I had an awful lot of dental X-rays when they were straight­ening my teeth; my mouth was a mess as a girl."

  "Your teeth look lovely now."

  "Thank you. It cost Daddy money he didn't really have, but he was determined to have me beautiful. He loved me, Lexa."

  "I'm sure he did, darling," Alexandra said, pressing down on her voice; the air caught under the tarpaulin was growing, struggling like a wild animal made of wind.

  "He loved me so much," Jenny was blurting. "How could he do that to me, hang himself? How could he leave me and Chris so alone? Even if he were in jail for murder, it would be better than this. They wouldn't have given him too much, the awful way he did it couldn't have been premeditated."

  "You have Darryl," Alexandra told her.

 
"I do and I don't. You know how he is. You know him better than I do; I should have talked to you before I went ahead with it. You might have been better for him, I don't know. He's courteous and attentive and all that but he's not there for me some­how. His mind is always elsewhere, with his projects I guess. Alexandra, please let me come and see you. I won't stay long, I really won't. I just need to be... touched," she concluded, her voice retracted, curling under almost sardonically while voicing this last, naked plea.

  "My dear, I don't know what you want from me,"

  Alexandra lied flatly, needing to flatten all this, to erase the smeared face rising in her mind's eye, rising so close she could see flecks of grit, "but I don't have it to give. Honestly. You made your choice and I wasn't part of it. That's fine. No reason I should have been part of it. But I can't be part of your life now. I just can't. There isn't that much of me."

  "Sukie and Jane wouldn't like it, your seeing me," Jenny suggested, to give Alexandra's hard-heartedness a rationale.

  "I'm speaking for myself. I don't want to get re-involved with you and Darryl now. I wish you both well but for my sake I don't want to see you. It would just be too painful, frankly. As to this illness, it sounds to me as if you're letting your imagination torment you. At any rate you're in the hands of doctors who can do more for you than I can."

  "Oh." The distant voice had shrunk itself to the size of a dot, to something mechanical like a dial tone. "I'm not sure that's true."

  When she hung up, Alexandra's hands were trem­bling. All the familiar angles and furniture of her house looked askew, as if wrenched by the disparity between their moral distance from her—things, immune from sin—and their physical closeness. She went into her workroom and took one of the chairs there, an old arrow-back Windsor whose seat was spat­tered with paint and dried plaster and paste, and brought it into the kitchen. She set it below the high kitchen shelf and stood on it and reached up to retrieve the foil-wrapped object she had hidden up there on returning from Jane's house this April. The thing startled her by feeling warm to her fingers: warm air collects up near a ceiling, she thought to herself in vague explanation. Hearing her stirring about, Coal padded out from his nap corner, and she had to lock him in the kitchen behind her, lest he follow her out­doors and think what she was about to do was a game of toss and fetch.