The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

  Alexandra was looking out the kitchen window, wondering how it had become so smeared and splotched with dust—could rain itself be dirty?—and therefore saw Sukie park and come in along the brick walk through the grape arbor, ducking her sleek orange head in avoidance of the empty birdfeeder and the low-hanging vines with their ripening green clusters. It had been a wet August so far and today looked like more rain. The women kissed inside the screen door. "You're so nice to come," Alexandra said. "I don't know why it should scare me to look for it alone. In my own bog."

  "It is scary, sweet," Sukie said. "For it to have been so effective. She's back in the hospital."

  "Of course we don't really know that it was it."

  "We do, though," Sukie said, not smiling and her lips therefore looking strange, bunchy. "We know. It was it." She seemed subdued, a girl reporter again in her raincoat. She had been rehired at the Word. Selling real estate, she had told Alexandra more than once over the telephone, was just too chancy, too ulcer-producing, waiting for things to click, wondering if you might have said something more subliminally per­suasive in that crucial moment when the clients first see the house, or when they're standing around in the basement with the husband trying to look sage about the pipes and the wife terrified of rats. And then when a deal does go through the fee usually has to be split three or four ways. It really was giving her ulcers: a little dry pain just under the ribs, higher than you'd imagine, and worst at night.

  "Want a drink?"

  "Afterwards. It's early. Arthur says I shouldn't drink a drop until my stomach gets back in shape. Have you ever tried Maalox? God, you taste chalk every time you burp. Anyway"—she smiled, a flash of her old self, the fat upper lip stretched so its unpainted inner side showed above her bright, big, outcurved teeth— "I'd feel guilty having a drink without Jane here."

  "Poor Jane."

  Sukie knew what she meant, though it had hap­pened a week before. That dreadful Doberman pinscher had chewed Jane's cello to pieces one night when she didn't put it back in its case.

  "Do they think it's for good this time?" Alexandra asked.

  Sukie intuited that Alexandra meant Jenny in the hospital. "Oh, you know how they are, they would never say that. More tests is all they ever say. How're your own complaints?"

  "I'm trying to stop complaining. They come and go. Maybe it's premenopausal. Or post-Joe. You know about Joe?—he really has given up on me."

  Sukie nodded, letting her smile sink down slowly over her teeth. "Jane blames them. For all our aches and pains. She even blames them for the cello tragedy. You'd think she could blame herself for that."

  At the mention of them, Alexandra was momentar­ily distracted from the sore of guilt she carried some­times in the left ovary, sometimes in the small of her back, and lately under her armpits, where Jenny had once asked her to investigate. Once it gets to the lymph glands, according to something Alexandra remem­bered reading or seeing on television, it's too late. "Who of them does she blame specifically?"

  "Well for some reason she's fastened on that grubby little Dawn. I don't think myself a kid like that has it in her yet. Greta is pretty potent, and so would Brenda be if she could stop putting on airs. From what Arthur lets slip, for that matter. Rose is no bargain to tangle with: he finds her a very tough cookie, otherwise I guess they'd have been divorced long ago. She doesn't want it."

  "I do hope he doesn't go after her with a poker."

  "Listen, darling. That was never my idea of the way to solve the wife problem. I was once a wife myself, you know."

  "Who wasn't? I wasn't thinking of you at all, dear heart, it was the house I'd blame if it happened again. Certain spiritual grooves get worn into a place, don't you believe?"

  "I don't know. Mine needs paint."

  "So does mine."

  "Maybe we should go look for that thing before it rains."

  "You are nice to help me."

  "Well, I feel badly too. In a way. Up to a point. And I spend all my time chasing around in the Corvair on wild-goose chases anyway. It keeps skidding and getting out of control, I wonder if it's the car or me. Ralph Nader hates that model." They passed through the kitchen into Alexandra's workroom. "What on earth is that?"

  "I wish 1 knew. It began as an enormous something for a public square, visions of Calder and Moore I suppose. I thought if it came out wonderfully I could get it cast in bronze; after all the papier-maché I want to do something permanent. And the carpentry and banging around are good for sexual deprivation. But the arms won't stay up. Pieces keep falling off in the night."

  "They've hexed it."

  "Maybe. I certainly cut myself a lot handling all the wire; don't you just hate the way wire coils and snarls? So I'm trying now to make it more life-size. Don't look so doubtful. It might take off. I'm not totally dis­couraged."

  "How about your little ceramic bathing beauties, the bubbies?"

  "I can't do them any more, after that. I get phys­ically nauseated, thinking of her face melting, and the wax, and the tacks."

  "You ought to try an ulcer some time. I never knew where the duodenum was before."

  "Yes, but the bubbies were my bread and butter. I thought some fresh clay might inspire me so I drove over to Coventry last week and this house where I used to buy my lovely kaolin was all in this tacky new aluminum siding. Puke green. The widow who had owned it had died over the winter, of a heart attack hauling wood the woman of the family that has it now said, and her husband doesn't want to be both­ered with selling clay; he wants a swimming pool and a patio in the back yard. So that ends that."

  "You look great, though. I think you're losing weight."

  "Isn't that another of the symptoms?"

  They made their way through the old potting shed and stepped into the back yard, which needed a mow­ing. First the dandelions had been rampant, now the crabgrass. Fungi—blobs of brown loaded by nature with simples and banes and palliatives—had materi­alized in the low damp spots of this neglected lawn during this moist summer. Even now, the mantle of clouds in the distance had developed those downward tails, travelling wisps, which mean rain is falling some­where. The wild area beyond the tumbled stone wall was itself a wall of weeds and wild raspberry canes. Alexandra knew about the briars and had put on rug­ged men's jeans; Sukie however was wearing under her raincoat a russet seersucker skirt and frilly maroon blouse, and on her feet open-toed heels oxblood in color.

  "You're too pretty," Alexandra said. "Go back to the potting shed and put on those muddy Wellingtons somewhere around where the pitchfork is. That'll save your shoes and ankles at least. And bring the long-handled clippers, the one with the extra hinge in the jaw. In fact, why don't you just fetch the clippers and stay here in the yard? You've never been that much into nature and your sweet seersucker skin will get torn."

  "No, no," Sukie said loyally. "I'm curious now. It's like an Easter-egg hunt."

  When Sukie returned, Alexandra stood on the exact spot of grass, as best she remembered, and demon­strated how she had thrown the evil charm to be rid of it forever. The two friends then waded, clipping and wincing as they went, out into this little wilderness where a hundred species of plants were competing for sunlight and water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The area seemed limited and homogeneous—a smear of green—from the vantage of the back yard, but once they were immersed in it, it became a variegated jungle, a feverish clash of styles of leaf and stem, an implacable festering of protein chains as nature sought not only to thrust itself outward with root and runner and shoot but to attract insects and birds to its pollen and seeds. Some footsteps sank into mud; others tripped over hummocks that grass had over time built up of its own accumulated roots. Thorns threatened eyes and hands; a thatch of dead leaves and stalks masked the earth. Reaching the area where Alexan­dra guessed the tinfoil-wrapped poppet had landed, she and Sukie stooped low into a strange vegetable heat. The space low to the ground swarmed with a prickliness, an air of congestion, as twigs and tendrils pr
obed the shadows for crumbs of sun and space.

  Sukie cried out with the pleasure of discovery; but what she gouged up from where it had long rested embedded in the earth was an ancient golf ball, stip­pled in an obsolete checkered pattern. Some chemical it had absorbed had turned the lower half rust color.

  "Shit," Sukie said. "I wonder how it ever got out here, we're miles from any golf course." Monty Rougemont, of course, had been a devoted golfer, who had resented the presence of women, with their spontaneous laughter and pastel outfits, on the fair­way in front of him or indeed anywhere in his clubby paradise; it was as if in discovering this ball Sukie had come upon a small segment of her former husband, a message from the other world. She slipped the remembrance into a pocket of her rain coat.

  "Maybe dropped from an airplane," Alexandra suggested.

  Gnats had discovered them, and pattered and nipped at their faces. Sukie flapped a hand back and forth in front of her mouth and protested, "Even if we do find it, baby, what makes you think we can undo anything?"

  "There must be a form. I've been doing some read­ing. You do everything backwards. We'd take the pins out and remelt the wax and turn Jenny back into a candle. We'd try to remember what we said that night and say it backwards."

  "All those sacred names, impossible. I can't remem­ber half of what we said."

  "At the crucial moment Jane said 'Die' and you said 'Take that' and giggled."

  "Did we really? We must have got carried away."

  Crouching low, guarding their eyes, they explored the tangle step by step, looking for a glitter of alu­minum foil. Sukie was getting her legs scratched above the Wellingtons and her handsome new London Fog was being tugged and its tiny waterproofed threads torn. She said, "I bet it's caught halfway up some one of these fucking damn prickerbushes."

  The more querulous Sukie sounded, the more maternal Alexandra became. "It could well be," she said. "It felt eerily light when I threw it. It sailed."

  "Why'd you ever chuck it out here anyway? What a hysterical thing to do."

  "I told you, I'd just had a phone conversation with Jenny in which she'd asked me to save her. I felt guilty. I was afraid."

  "Afraid of what, honey?"

  "You know. Death."

  "But it isn't your death."

  "Any death is your death, in a way. These last weeks I've been getting the same symptoms Jenny had."

  "You've always been that way about cancer." In exasperation Sukie flailed with the long-handled clip­pers at the thorny round-leafed canes importuning her, pulling at her raincoat, raking her wrists. "Fuck. Here's a dead squirrel all shrivelled up. This is a real dump out here. Couldn't you have found the damn thing with second sight? Couldn't you have made it, what's the word, levitate?"

  "I tried but couldn't get a signal. Maybe the alu­minum foil bottled up the emanations."

  "Maybe your powers aren't what they used to be."

  "That could be. Several times lately I tried to will some sun, I was feeling like such a maggot with all this dampness; but it rained anyway."

  Sukie's thrashing grew more and more irritable. "Jane levitated her whole self."

  "That's Jane. She's getting very strong. But you heard her, she doesn't want any part of reversing this spell, she likes the way things are going."

  "I wonder if you've overestimated how far you can throw. Monty used to complain about golfers looking for their balls, how they'd always walk miles past where it could possibly be."

  "To me it feels like we've underestimated. As I said, it really flew."

  "You work out that way then, and I'll retrace a little. God, these fucking prickers. They're hateful. What good are they, anyway?"

  "They feed the birds. And rodents and skunks."

  "Oh, great."

  "Some aren't raspberries, I was noticing, they're wild roses. When we first moved to Eastwick, Ozzie and me, every fall I'd make jelly out of the rose hips."

  "You and Oz were just too dear."

  "It was pathetic, I was such a housewife. You're a saint," she told Sukie, "to be doing this. I know you're bored. You can quit any time."

  "Not such a saint, really. Maybe I'm scared too. Here it is, anyway." She sounded nowhere near as excited as when she had found the golf ball Fifteen minutes earlier. Alexandra, scratched and impeded by (her sensation was) some essential and unappeas­able rudeness in the universe, pushed her way to where the other woman stood. Sukie had not touched the thing. It lay in a relatively open spot, a brackish patch supporting on its edges some sea milkwort; a few frail white flowers put forth their attractions in the jungle shadows. Stooping to touch the crumpled Reynolds Wrap, not rusted but dulled by its months in the weather, Alexandra noticed the damp dark earth around it crawling with mites of some kind, reddish specks collected like Filings around a magnet, scur­rying in their tiny world several orders lower, on the terraces of life, than her own. She forced herself to touch the evil charm, this hellishly baked potato. When she picked it up, it weighed nothing, and rattled: the pins inside it. She gently pried open the hollow alu­minum foil. The pins inside had rusted. The wax substance of the little imitation of Jenny had quite disappeared.

  "Animal fat," Sukie at last said, having waited for Alexandra to speak first. "Some little bunch of jiggers out here thought it was yummy and ate it all up or fed it to their babies. Look: they left the little hairs. Remember those little hairs? You'd think they would have rotted or something. That's why hair clogs up sinks, it's indestructible. Like Clorox botdes. Some day, honey, there will be nothing in the world but hair and Clorox bottles."

  Nothing. Jenny's tallow surrogate had become nothing.

  Raindrops like pinpricks touched their faces, now that the two women were standing erect amid the brambles. Such dry microscopic first drops foretell a serious rain, a soaker. The sky was solid gray but for a thin bar of blue above the low horizon to the west, so far away it might be altogether out of Rhode Island, this fair sky. "Nature is a hungry old thing," Alex­andra said, letting the foil and pins drop back into the weeds.

  "And thirsty," Sukie said. "Didn't you promise me a drink?"

  Sukie wanted to be consoling and flirtatious, sens­ing Alexandra's sick terror, and did look rather stun­ning, with her red hair and monkeyish lips, standing up to her breasts in brambles, in her smart raincoat. But Alexandra had a desolate sensation of distance, as if her dear friend, fetching yet jaded, were another receding image, an advertisement, say, on the rear of a truck pulling rapidly away from a stoplight.

  One of Brenda's several innovations was to have members of the church give an occasional sermon; today Darryl Van Home was preaching. The well-thumbed big book he opened upon the lectern was not the Bible but a red-jacketed Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. "Centipede," he read aloud in that strangely resonant, as it were pre-amplified voice of his. "Any of a class (Chilopoda) of long flattened many-segmented predaceous arthropods with each segment bearing one pair of legs of which the foremost pair is modified into poison fangs."

  Darryl looked up; he was wearing a pair of half-moon reading glasses and these added to the slippage of his face, its appearance of having been assembled of parts, with the seams not quite smooth. "You didn't know that about the poisonous fangs, did you? You've never had to look a centipede right in the eye, have you? Have you, you lucky people!" He was boomingly addressing perhaps a dozen heads, scattered through the pews on this muggy day late in August, the sky in the tall windows the sullen no-color of recycled paper. "Think," Darryl entreated, "think of the evo­lution of those fangs over the aeons, the infinity— don't you hate that word, 'infinity,' it's like you're supposed to get down on your knees whenever some dumb bastard says it—the infinity—and I guess my saying it makes me one more dumb bastard, but what the hell else can you say?—think of all those little wrig­gling struggles behind the sink and down in the cellar and the jungle that ended in this predaceous arthro­pod's—isn't that a beautiful phrase?—this preda­ceous ardiropod's mouth, if you wa
nt to call it a mouth, it isn't like any of our ruby lips, I tell you, before those two front legs somehow got the idea of being poison­ous and the trusty old strings of DNA took up the theme and the centipedes kept humping away making more centipedes and finally they got modified into fangs. Poisonous fangs. Hoo boy." He wiped his lips with forefinger and thumb. "And they call this a Creation, this mess of torture." The sermon title announced in movable white letters on the signboard outside the church was "This Is a Terrible Cre­ation."

  The scattered listening heads were silent. Even the woodwork of the old structure failed to creak. Brenda herself sat mute in profile beside the lectern, half hidden by a giant spray of gladioli and ferns in a plaster urn, given in memory this Sunday of a stillborn son Franny Lovecraft had once produced, fifty years ago. Brenda looked pale and listless; she had been indisposed off and on for much of the summer. It had been an unhealthy wet summer in Eastwick.

  "You know what they used to do to witches in Ger­many?" Darryl asked loudly from the pulpit, but as though it had just occurred to him, which probably it had. "They used to sit them on an iron chair and light a fire underneath. They used to tear their flesh with red-hot pincers. Thumbscrews. The rack. The boot. Strappado. You name it, they did it. To simple-minded old ladies, mosdy." Franny Lovecraft leaned toward Rose Hallybread and whispered something in a loud but unintelligible rasp. Van Home sensed the disturbance and in his vulnerable shambling way went defensive. "O.K.," he shouted toward the congrega­tion. "So what? Well, you're going to say, this is human nature. This is human history. What does this have to do with Creation? What's this crazy guy trying to tell me? We could go on and on till nightfall with tortures human beings have used against each other under the sacred flag of one form of faith or another. The Chinese used to tear the skin off a body inch by inch, in the Middle Ages they'd disembowel a guy in front of his own eyes and cut his cock off and stuff it in his mouth for good measure. Sorry to spell it out like that, I get excited. The point is, all this stacked end to end multiplied by a zillion doesn't amount to a hill of beans compared with the cruelty natural organic friendly Creation has inflicted on its creatures since the first poor befuddled set of amino acids strug­gled up out of the galvanized slime. Women never accused of being witches, pretty little blonde dollies who never laid an evil eye on even a centipede, the every day in pain probably just as bad as and certainly more prolonged than any inflicted by the good old Hexestuhl. It had big blunt studs all over it, I don't know what the thermodynamic principle was. I don't want to think about it any more and 1 bet you don't either. You get the idea. It was terrible, terrible; Jesus it was terrible." His glasses fell forward on his nose and in readjusting them he seemed to press his whole face back together. His cheeks looked wet to some in the congregation.